Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“What of it, Sabeen?” Yasir added.

The heavy girl blinked. “I know nothing. I only fried the meat. They made the tea and cooked the other things.”

At the top of the stairs, Haazim reached in his pocket and took out a set of keys and shook them at Yasir. “My truck is here. We can take it and capture those vermin. Those girls, we will gut like fish. But at all costs we must bring the American back before Abu Omar returns. Otherwise, we, too, must flee, or lose our heads.”

“They fled in my old truck?” Yasir smiled. “That is good! The motor has no power. We can catch them easily!”

“You will have to put two good tires on my pickup, first. They shot them flat, bullets through the sidewalls,” Haazim said. “We have a Nissan with broken axles sitting in the barn. You can take two wheels off it. They should fit.”

Yasir bowed his head, submitting. “As you say.”

Sabeen gave Yasir the stink eye. She folded arms like an angry mother and frowned. “What is this, Yasir? Abu Omar left you in command. This one should change the tires. You are his captain!”

“Quiet, woman!” Yasir hissed, and staggered up the stone steps, holding his sore head. He knew better than to argue with Haazim, a man who had used his rifle many times to kill men. The old Bedouin had never fired a shot at anyone.

“I will help, then,” Sabeen huffed, and frowned at the young gunman as she tramped up the steps past him.

“We will all do the work,” Haazim said, following Yasir and Sabeen. “It will save time. We have none to spare.”

A hand-painted light tan Shanghai Chinese-built Foton four-by-four double-cab pickup truck with broad-stroked splotches and bold stripes of dark brown down its doors and bed, driving rear guard at the tail end of Abu Omar Bakr’s parade, began honking. The peacock up front turned with a big smile and raised his riding crop triumphantly skyward, believing that his men had expressed more joy at his victory over Zarqawi. Then the self-proclaimed field marshal saw the curtain of dust rising to the north and heard the distant but fast-closing heavy machine guns opening fire.

“Go! Go!” he screamed, and slammed his fist on the roof of the truck cab.

The driver hit his brakes and stuck his head out the window. “What?”

“We are being overtaken, you fool! Go! Hurry!” Omar bellowed. And then he saw more dust rising along his left flank and screamed. “Go now!”

“What about the others?” the driver said, still hanging his head out the window, his foot on the brake.

Omar took out his pistol and pointed it at the man. “Drive this truck as fast as it can run, or I will shoot you and drive it myself!”

The man got the message, seeing the business end of the Makarov pointed at him. He hit the gas before he put the truck in gear. When he popped the clutch, the launch sent Abu Omar’s machine gun captain sidekick somersaulting over the tailgate.

The truck right behind them ran over the Haji, leaving him mangled but alive, yet no one stopped.

“Down in the wadi!” Omar yelled, slapping his hand on the roof of the truck. “We must get away!”

The driver stopped the truck once again and looked at the drop-off, a good four feet, then a steep slope.

“We will roll over,” he said, getting out to tell his master.

Omar had no patience with this fool. He jumped off the back of the truck, walked around with his pistol pulled, and shot the man without losing stride. Two other soldiers sat inside the pickup, and the boss gave them a cold look, pointing the gun as he would his finger. “Man the guns. I will drive.”

Both Hajis rolled out through the passenger door and left Omar the cab all to himself. Then the two soldiers scrambled onto the bed and took hold of the machine guns.

As Omar hit the gas, machine gun fire from two directions came hot into the dry riverbed and followed them as dirt sprayed in twin rooster tails behind them. Two other gun trucks followed Omar while the rest of the legion turned to the flank and the rear to stand and fight.

At the lead echelon of the rear guard, a tan-painted heavy-duty T-King two-ton diesel truck pulled a large trailer with a high canvas-covered square object mounted on it. As Haji home-built Hummers formed a line with the bigger vehicle, their PK machine gun crews laying down opposing fire against the Marines, who closed on them from two sides, six volunteers bailed from their small wagons, and pulled the canvas off the trailer. The two men who drove and rode in the Chinese truck took charge of the volunteer crew and a four-stack-high-by-four-rail-wide rack of Katyusha rockets.

The two men who knew what they were doing took hold of the gear cranks that maneuvered the angle and trajectory of the launching platform and eyeballed a best-guess aim at the fast-closing Marines. Then the rocket gunner and his partner knelt behind the side of the big truck, taking cover from the rockets’ back blast as well as incoming fire.

The gunner held a long control line in his hands, and before he fired, he searched around for the six volunteers who had helped rig the rockets. Finally, he saw them taking cover on the back side of the missile trailer.

“Move away!” he yelled, and waved for them to clear from behind the launcher. “Come here! You can’t stay there!”

The jihadi jefe in charge of the men pointed his rifle at the rocket man, and yelled, “Fire!”

So the man with the launch cord pushed the button.

A blowtorch of white-hot burning rocket exhaust from the sixteen missiles incinerated all six men. The pro who had pushed the launch button and his partner jumped in one of the now-empty desert-rat pickups and sped away, leaving the big, slow-moving T-King for the Marines.

Sixteen 122-millimeter Katyusha rockets rained onto empty ground, due to the firing delay. Captain Crenshaw had seen the Hajis pulling the cover off the launcher, and managed to maneuver his Marines away from the line where the gunner had aimed the missiles.

Now half of his company raced around the right flank of Abu Omar’s army while Colonel Snow closed from the left. The skipper and the other half of his company closed from the rear, hell-bent on annihilating the enemy as the pincers closed on their flanks.

“I am the Borg!” Crenshaw growled in his favorite Star Trek voice over the command radio, seeing the plan come beautifully together. “Resistance is futile.”

Part of the al-Sunnah legion tried to make a stand and fight to the man, as their general had ordered them. But most of the Hajis now tried to evaporate into the desert, following the example of their fearless leader.

As the two rocketeers fled the battlefield, churning dust, racing for the wadi where Abu Omar had escaped, Sal Principato locked on the driver with his .50 caliber Special Application Scoped Rifle gunsights. Sergeant Carlo Savoca rested his spotting scope on the ground behind his corporal on the M82A3 Barrett.

“Go ahead and fire, Pizza Man,” the Iceman said.

A hundred yards left of where the two Marines had parked their Hummer and moved forward to a nice little hill that overlooked the Haji stream of trucks, Nick the Nose Falzone had snuggled into a second .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle while Marcello Costa, the Hoboken oddity in the otherwise all — New York City Mob Squad, spotted for him.

When Sal Principato’s big gun reported, Momo barely got out, “one thousand one,” when the ADI 655-grain bullet, running just a breeze faster than three thousand feet per second, splashed through the moving pickup’s side window. It destroyed the upper half of the rocket man’s body and blew out the windshield.

“Nice lead, Pepperoni,” Corporal Costa said, watching the truck go sideways and stop. “We got another customer running from the passenger side,” he said to Corporal Falzone. “Take him, Hawk-face.”