Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

He put the helmet on his head, and pushed the on-off switch on the little transceiver. In a second, he heard a faint hum in the helmet’s ear pads.

“She still works.” He smiled, then turned the little radio off. “Better save the battery until we get close enough to my boys to use it.”

Then he rummaged through every drawer and box, threw things on the floor, searching. “Ah, here’s my watch,” he said, finding the timepiece, bubble compass still intact, in the bottom of Omar’s dresser.

When the gunny dumped the last drawer on the floor he sighed, frustrated. “Where’s my Lippard?”

“What is a Lippard?” Giti asked, standing behind him.

“My handgun,” Jack said. “A Lippard 1911A2, MARSOC Close Quarters Battle Pistol. A .45 pistol effective out to six hundred yards.”

“This?” Sabeen said, and reached under her dress and withdrew the camouflage-painted firearm.

“Yes!” Gunny Valentine laughed.

“You will want this, too,” Sabeen said, and reached again under her dress and unbuckled Jack’s rigger’s belt and long-drop holster she had strapped to her thigh and waist.

“What were you planning to do with that?” Jack asked.

“In case I had to shoot one of them, I could,” Sabeen said, and smiled like a child.

“You are a gem, Sabeen.” Jack laughed, and Giti hugged the large girl.

Jack glanced around the room. “I need my boots and some socks.”

“Over here,” Miriam said, pulling back the door. In the corner behind it stood Jack’s RAT combat boots and his tan-wool socks draped over their tops. “They did not fit Abu Omar. Nor even Yasir. Much too big. Like everything, you Americans have large feet.”

Jack smiled as he laced them up. “Not everything’s as big as you think, young lady.”

Miriam blushed and ran out of the room. Giti didn’t have a clue.

Jack put on his pistol, zipped his AO vest, and secured his helmet, shouldered his pack, slung the A3 sniper gun over the top, and took the Vigilance semiautomatic in hand.

“You girls grab those guns outside,” he said, heading for the door. “Make sure you take the ammo vests, too. We may need every full magazine they got stuffed in them.”

Outside, the three small-size girls, none of them a hair over five feet tall, took the rifles in their little hands and put on the man-size Russian ammunition vests surrounded with pouches stuffed with full AK magazines. Jack looked at the trio of smiling sad-sack solja girls, swallowed up by the big gear, and let out a chuckle. “I guess it’s just gonna have to work.”

He held up the keys for the motley trio to see. “Which truck do these fit?”

Jack hoped for the blue rig with the PKM mounted on the headache rack. However, Giti pointed to the rusted-out white Nissan hunk of junk with the dented door.

“That one Yasir uses,” she said, as if either truck was perfectly fine.

“I hope it runs,” Jack said, going to it. “You don’t think we could find the keys to the other one?”

“I do not want to look for them,” Giti answered, following Jack, with Miriam and Amira tight with her.

“It’ll do,” Jack said as he pulled the handle.

The door popped loud as he opened it, and the seats had worn through the upholstery into the springs. Dirt covered the floors, and all the rubber was worn off the clutch and brake pedals. Instead of a regular throttle pad, it had a silver bar where one used to go.

“Oh, this is dandy,” Jack said, his butt falling through the seat. “Jump in, girls, and don’t let a spring stab you in the ass.”

Amira cuddled next to Jack and smiled up at him, batting her eyes, then came Miriam. Both teenagers so tiny that they still had ample room for Giti. However, large-body Sabeen might be a problem.

“What about Sabeen?” Giti said, wondering which one of their quartet would ride in the back.

“Where is she?” Miriam cried out, looking around and not seeing her. “We cannot leave without our sister!”

“I will get her,” Giti said, and bolted to the house.

Jack pounded the steering wheel, impatient to get going as he waited. When Giti did not return in a few minutes he ran to the house with his .45 drawn.

“She will not come!” Giti howled downstairs. “Make her come, Jack. Omar will kill her! He will kill Yasir, too!”

“Come on, Sabeen,” Jack said, exasperated. “Giti’s right. You stay here, you’ll die. You can’t save ’em all.”

“I must stay with Yasir!” she said. “He is hurt, and I must care for him. I’m the one that hit him!”

“They will kill you! Yasir will kill you!” Giti said.

“No. He cares for me,” Sabeen said, cradling Yasir in her lap. He began to moan, and she stroked his face.

“I will get him awake, and we will find the keys to the other truck and escape,” Sabeen said. “I have family in Jordan. We can leave here, Yasir and me, and go to them.”

“Why?” Giti pled.

“He finds me attractive. He loves me.” Sabeen smiled. “No man ever saw me the way Yasir does.”

“That old man?” Giti said, incredulous.

“He is not that old. You saw for yourself,” Sabeen retorted. “You said that day that Yasir is a good man.”

“Yes,” Giti said, and looked at how Sabeen cared for the old goatherd. Maybe it was for the best.

“We gotta go!” Jack growled, taking Giti by the arm and pulling her up the stairs and through the living room.

The one live gunman moaned on the floor as they went by him, regaining some level of consciousness. As Jack and Giti stepped outside, the Marine started to go back and shoot the culprit but Giti grabbed Gunny Valentine by the arm.

“Leave him. Please. We must go,” Giti said.

He gave a last look at the man on the floor. He wasn’t going anyplace soon. So Jack nodded okay and ran with the little girl in the big ammo vest out to the jalopy, slammed the doors, and hit the ignition.

As he left, he pulled to the side of the other truck, drew his pistol and put two flat-nose hardballs through the sidewalls of the front and rear tires.

“That ought to slow them down,” Jack said, taking a reading off the bubble compass on his watchband.

“But what about Sabeen?” Giti cried, seeing the ruined tires.

Jack looked at her. “Their changing flats will buy us time, should Yasir and that live one on the floor decide to come after us.”

Giti looked at the house, biting her lip, worried about Sabeen. She knew Jack was right. They needed as much time to escape as they could buy. Giti painfully realized that the Syrian girl had made her choice for Yasir and would have to live with whatever happened now.

Engine sputtering out headers with no exhaust pipes, Gunny V pulled Yasir’s old junker in gear and hit the gas. It died.

“Shit,” Jack said, and gave the engine another crank. It coughed, then caught hold. “I hope this rust bucket can make it.”

Spinning dirt with its one pulling wheel, the four escapees sputtered off, into the desert, rattling cross-country, due northeast.

Elmore Snow had waited with Alvin Barkley and his Marines for nearly two hours before the troops finally arrived to take charge of cleaning the arms and munitions from the subterranean jihadi barracks and taking charge of the four Rattler-ravaged bandage-wrapped Hezbollah martyrs.

A US Army lieutenant showed up with a dozen soldiers under his command and two platoons of Iraqi troops with a captain in charge. Slowly but surely the Iraqis went to work hauling out enemy guns and ammo, stacking them in the backs of the six-by-six trucks they drove. The twelve American grunts took up defensive posts, relieving the Marines of their watch.

While Colonel Snow and company got ready to roll, First Sergeant Barkley got a call from Captain Crenshaw on the command radio. He had deployed a force to Rawa, per the intel, to intercept Abu Omar Bakr there.