Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

Moments later, pickup trucks rumbled along the top of the dry riverbed, running along both sides. Several other Toyotas rolled up, stopped, and took on passengers. Then all of them sped off. Jack supposed they went in chase of his Marines, following their tracks.

“Cotton!” Jack said above a whisper, gambling that no one waited behind.

“You’re alive!” Staff Sergeant Martin answered, breathless, still shouldering Chico Powell as he ran hard.

“Yeah,” Valentine responded. “They’re mounted in trucks, hot on your six.”

“We’re a hundred yards out of our rally point,” Cotton said. “We’ll set up defensive positions in those rocks and fight it out there.”

“I can hear Ospreys,” the gunny said, to give his brother hope.

Cotton stopped and listened, and he did in fact hear the beating propellers of the V-22 tiltrotor planes growing louder, approaching him.

“I hear them, too!” Martin came back, and Jack was surprised, because in truth he had not heard a thing.

“Take cover, bro. Kill as many as you can,” Jack said, just as he heard gunfire open up to the south.

“Fuck! Those guys are fast!” Cotton said, taking fire from several dozen pursuing al-Sunnah gunmen riding in the fleet of pickup trucks.

“Gunny!” Cochise Quinlan shouted on the intercom. “Soon as we get these guys killed out, we’re coming to get you. Sit your ass tight.”

“No can do,” Jack said, pulling himself out of his hide. “I got to move out while I have the chance. All you guys hear me?”

“Yup. All of us hear you loud and clear,” Cotton said, helping feed ammo to Sammy LaSage’s light machine gun, chopping away at the Hajis that had now leaped from the trucks and scattered behind rocks and mounds.

“I’m heading west, back up this wadi about twenty kilometers, maybe thirty,” Valentine told them as he gathered up Petey’s discarded meals and water. He left the backpack because his own was enough to haul. But he did grab Cochise Quinlan’s entrenching tool.

“Then I’m going to make a big-ass circle north, arc back around east, and I’ll head to Haditha Dam, following parallel to MSR Bronze,” Jack told them as he did a quick look around the area and headed out. “You copy that?”

“That’s one big-ass circle,” Cochise said. “Why not go straight east from where you are? We’ll have people out looking for you, air and ground. Be where we can find you.”

“Hajis will be looking for me to go east, direct to friendly lines, or south toward Wolf. If they know I’m left behind,” Jack explained. “I’m hoping they don’t figure that out. But if they do, they’ll be turning over every rock searching for me. I want them where I’m not. The long way is the best way. I got food and water. I’ll be fine.”

“Roger that,” Cotton said, talking and shooting.

“Make sure that no one says anything on the command net about me out here,” Jack said.

“Why’s that?” Martin asked.

“I think the Hajis captured some crypto radios and have our command frequencies monitored. That guy calling me Ghost One. A dead giveaway,” Jack said.

“You know,” Cotton said. “I did a double take on that, too. They had to be listening. Think they have this net?”

“No,” Jack answered. “They would have killed Chico if they’d heard us talking to him playing dead.”

“Makes sense,” Cotton said.

“But keep word of me off the net,” Jack said. “If they don’t know I’m here, that’s best.”

“They’ll figure that out pretty quick, though, after you kill a few of them,” Cotton said. “I don’t see how you can go that distance without running into a Haji or ten.”

“I don’t plan on their seeing me,” Jack said, jogging west with the pack on his back, his M40A3 rifle slung across one shoulder and the Vigilance rifle in his hands.

“Well, Gunny, you know how that always seems to work out,” Cochise said.

“Yeah, unfortunately, I do,” Jack said, huffing along, his signal getting scratchy and weak.

“We get in the Ospreys, what’s to keep us from swinging out where you are and grabbing you?” Cotton said.

“That’d be great if I didn’t have my world crawling with Hajis, and if I had a working GPS so I could give out coordinates,” Jack said. “It’s dead as a mackerel along with my command radio. Fried like bacon. Don’t know what did it, but they’re toast. All I got is this weak-ass intercom, and it’s about out of range. So good luck finding me.”

“We can give it a try anyway. Take a run or two up the wadi,” Martin said.

“Oh, definitely do it,” Jack said. “If you can get them to swing out here. I’m beating feet west, fast as I can haul ass. But I also have to keep off the skyline, and that makes me a little difficult to spot from the air.”

A few minutes later, he had run out of range. All he heard now was static, so he shut off the intercom radio to save his battery.

More than a hundred of Abu Omar’s Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah jihadi fighters converged on Cotton Martin and the six MARSOC Marines huddled in the cluster of rocks at the alternate rally point they called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Plan B.

“I’m down to my last magazine,” Jaws said, now working his Vigilance support rifle, having already depleted his .50 calibers and set aside the Barrett Mark-82.

Sergeant Sammy LaSage went to work with his bolt-action sniper rifle, after setting aside the SAW, having spent its last can.

Bronco had run out of all his rounds and huddled next to Jaws with his pistol out, and two .45 magazines handy to reload. Chico Powell and Petey Preston had nothing but short guns left, either.

Cotton Martin tossed his next-to-last rifle magazine to Jaws and kept the last one for himself. That’s when he looked up and saw the first of two Super Cobras swing low and open fire on the jihadis, putting two rockets and several acres of 20-millimeter gunfire into their midst. Hajis scattered in every direction, running for their lives.

Hot on the attack helicopters’ tails, three Ospreys set down and dropped their ramps. Sixty strike-force Marines poured out of the aircrafts’ bellies, shooting and snarling, with Alvin Barkley at the lead, his big knife on his leg, charging out of the first bird to set down, Sergeant Jorge Padilla and Rattler hot on his heels. Staff Sergeant Marcellus Jupiter brought the last twenty men out of the third V-22 aircraft, the Mob Squad among them.

It didn’t take long, and they had the Hajis scattered and mostly dead. Anything that even remotely resembled a Toyota truck got blown to pieces. Toyota wreckage and enemy bodies littered the desert.

After loading the seven Marines and the strike force, the trio of Ospreys launched to the north and turned west, following the dry wadi where Jack had fled. They made three low passes, going well beyond a distance any human on foot could have run.

Jack had to hug the ground in a clump of rocks and dirt. As the planes flew overhead three times, he could do nothing. He couldn’t breathe a word. Just yards ahead of him, he watched a dozen al-Sunnah gunmen also hiding from the aircraft.

He had no clue whether the Hajis had come in search of him or just happened to be crossing the desert plains. Regardless, he decided to hold tight a few hours until full nightfall. They’d be gone by then, and he could move out.

While he waited, well hidden, he checked his gear. Curious about the dead radios, and hoping he might revive them, Valentine carefully and quietly slipped them out of his operator’s vest.

As he looked closely at both radios, he saw the trouble. A shred of copper bullet fragment had somehow gone down his Kevlar vest, ripped through the back of the command radio, and struck the top of the GPS, where it lodged.