Mike Maden - River of Gods

“And you are American military?” Mossa asked. He was translating for one of his men.

“No.”

“CIA?” Mossa asked. A wave of murmuring swept through the group. None of them apparently spoke any English, but the dreaded three-letter word was universally recognized.

“No.” Technically, true. Pearce had been out of the service for a decade.

“Then how do you come by such weapons?” another man asked through Mossa.

“I own a company that develops these weapons. We train others for money, and sometimes we sell the drones, too.”

Drones! The Tuaregs muttered the hated word to themselves over and over. Another American word understood and feared the world over. Some of them were clearly agitated. Pearce knew that the American government had sent drones to help the Libyan rebels. Tuareg soldiers in the Libyan army must have died because of that decision.

“You’ve come to fight for us?” a man called out in Tamasheq. Mossa translated.

“No. I came to help my friend.” He patted Early on the back. “Now he is safe. Now I must leave,” Pearce said.

Pearce saw the disappointment in their eyes. A few even glared at him. Did they think he was a coward?

“Come. We need to make plans for your departure,” Mossa said. He clapped an arm around Pearce’s shoulder, a sign of his favor to the dissemblers, and led the way.

“Mossa!” A man high up on the rocks pointed just moments before Pearce heard the whump-whump-whump of rotor blades hammering the air.

An attack helicopter roared in the distance, a thousand feet off the deck, barreling straight for their position. Pearce had to shield his eyes to see it. The chopper was framed by the blinding circle of the sun, but its huge, ugly frame was familiar. He’d seen them before, up close and personal, but he also knew their history. In the 1980s, the Soviets hunted Afghan mujahideen with the big armored Hinds to great effect until the CIA smuggled Stinger missiles into the country. The mujahideen feared and hated the big ugly air machines. Ironically, the modern Afghan air force flew them, too. It pissed Pearce off that Afghans were allowed to buy military equipment from their former enemies instead of from the allies who saved their asses. And they bought them with U.S. taxpayer dollars, too.

Down on the plain, four of Mossa’s trucks sped four abreast, bouncing and slewing in the sand, racing back for the mountain.

“Where’s the fifth truck?” Early asked, then cursed himself. In the far distance he saw a black, oily smudge.

“The Devil’s Chariot,” Mossa said, binoculars to his eyes. “Mali air force.”

That’s what the mujahideen had called them, too, Pearce remembered. At least when the Hinds were hunting them.

Mossa kept his eyes glued to his binoculars. Spoke an order to Balla. His lieutenant turned and disappeared behind the towering rocks behind them.

The trucks were three, maybe four miles from the mountain, the big chopper half that distance behind them. Didn’t have to be an air force general to figure out the math wasn’t good for the slower-running Toyotas. Sparks flashed from the nose of the Hind, and a second later, the air cracked with echoes of machine-gun fire from the Russian four-barrel Gatling gun.

Geysers of sand spit up around the trucks.

“They’re fucked,” Early whispered.

“Not yet, Mr. Early,” Mossa said, eyes still glued to his binoculars.

The four trucks suddenly split up, the two on the far ends turning at forty-five-degree angles, the middle two at twenty-seven degrees. Now the pilot had to focus, pick a target.

Balla thundered up with a shoulder-fired SA-24 missile launcher, pulling it onto his shoulder, putting his eye to the scope. He asked Mossa a question with a single word. Pearce could guess the meaning.

“Five kilometers and closing,” Mossa said in English, for the Americans’ sake.

Early and Pearce exchanged a glance. That missile launcher was a Soviet weapon, nicknamed Grinch in military circles. It was the functional equivalent of the American Stinger missile.

The Hind banked hard left to chase one of the trucks on the far end. The gimbaled machine gun roared again. Sand sprayed around the truck. The other Toyotas turned, chasing the Hind, firing their machine guns. Bullets sparked on the helicopter’s heavy armor. No effect.

“Now,” Mossa said.

The Grinch puffed, blowing the missile out of the tube, then the missile engine kicked in with a roar. It raced toward the turning Hind, a trail of crooked white smoke marking its path.

The Hind knew a missile had locked on it. The pilot juked hard just as the Grinch missile launched, and dropped antimissile flares.

Too late.

The Hind erupted in a fireball as the finger of smoke slammed into the hull. The top rotor separated from the chopper, pinwheeling away as the rest of the wreckage rained toward the sand.

The Tuaregs cheered and clapped Balla on the back.

“Built in Russia, killed by Russians,” Early joked.

“Serves them right,” Pearce said.

Mossa turned to Pearce. “That should buy us some time.”

Adrar des Ifoghas

Kidal Region, Northeastern Mali

7 May

Mossa lead the way.

The boy hovered close to the Tuareg chief. Cella was next, shepherding the four women. Pearce and Early were behind them. Moctar, Balla, and the rest of the fighters took up positions among the rocks, hidden from view. Pearce assumed they were left behind to watch for signs of Mali troops.

Mossa wended his way between two tall pillars of granite split like a V, opening a dark chasm in the mountain. He stepped over the inverted apex of the V and disappeared. The others followed suit. Pearce found himself in a broad, low-ceilinged passageway. He had to duck several inches in order to avoid hitting his head, but the dark air felt like a cool water bath compared to the heat outside. Mossa’s LED flashlight washed on the path in front of him. Enough light bounced off the ground that Pearce could make out dim scratchings on the rock walls. An alphabet he didn’t recognize. Pearce couldn’t tell if they were a hundred years old or a hundred thousand. Didn’t care. His pulse was quickening and his legs ached. He was grateful that Moctar and Balla had volunteered to carry his cases.

Pearce wasn’t part of the 2001 assault on Tora Bora or Operation Anaconda in 2002, but he’d seen some of the classified after-action photos when he was at The Farm. Al-Qaeda made great use of natural caves like this one in Afghanistan. The Russians had bombed the hell out of the underground sanctuaries but never did the damage that American B-52s were able to inflict. The idea of being buried under tons of rock had never appealed to him, especially after the stories his dad told him about the North Vietnamese and their tunnel complexes. His dad had volunteered a few times to crawl down those holes with nothing but a Smith & Wesson revolver and a flashlight. And those tunnels were made only of dirt. His dad was a helluva storyteller, even when he was drunk, which was most of the time. But the way he’d describe slithering on his belly through the dark underground, twisting around ninety-degree bends, waiting for bayonets or grenades or poisonous snakes to strike out at him from the dark, had made him cry as a child. As a small boy, they sounded like monster stories, but they were true—and they had happened to his father. Crying, of course, meant an ugly sneer from his old man and the back of his thick, gnarly hand, but young Troy was as scared for his father inside of those tunnels as if he had been there himself.