Gavin Smith: Crysis: Escalation

He rolled the mercenary off and got back in the game. He wiped his blade on the corpse and sheathed it. Kneeling down he brought the M4 CQB carbine up, accidentally smearing the blood of his victim on the underslung 40mm M203 grenade launcher. He checked it quickly to make sure it hadn’t been damaged in the struggle, but as far as he could tell it hadn’t.

Chavez appeared out of the treeline. She had her Mk 23 held steady in both hands, the suppressor attached to the barrel. Judging from where she had emerged it had been her shots Barnes had heard. Chavez was probably average size for a woman but to Barnes she looked tiny. She looked too small for her load-out but she never seemed to have any problems keeping up. She was one of the few women in the special forces community. Barnes knew that she would have had to work hard for acceptance, both as a woman and as a USAF combat air-controller. Combat Air Controllers were attached to special forces units like Delta and the Navy’s SEALs to coordinate air support for their operations. In Afghanistan and Iraq there had been grouching from special forces units about whether or not the Combat Air Controllers were trained to their standards and could keep up. Chavez, from what Barnes had seen, was completely accepted by D Squadron’s recce/sniper troop, certainly more so than he was, judging by his current performance.

‘What’s up LT? I think you nearly cut his head off.’ T, short for Thomas, never Tom or Tommy, appeared next to Barnes. Barnes glanced at the sergeant, but there was no reproach or judgement in the SAW gunner/medic’s eyes. Maybe some concern. He was the oldest of the four operators, in theory Barnes’s 2IC, but Barnes was happy to defer to the senior NCO on operational matters whilst he played catch-up. Barnes had found the sergeant both friendly, which was sometimes unusual in the SF community, and a consummate professional. T had originally served with 1st Special Forces before transferring to Delta. He never talked about his mother, but Barnes knew his father still worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in Montana’s Oxbow Quadrangle near the Idaho/Canadian border.

‘Chavez and I took down another two in the trees. Earl got that one,’ T nodded at the second dead gunman in the clearing, ‘and he’s covering us on overwatch back there,’ T nodded at some higher ground back in the treeline. Barnes just nodded. T was unscrewing his Mk 23’s suppressor and holstering the weapon. He readied his M249 Special Purpose Weapon, the special forces variant of the army’s M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.

T knelt down by the mercenary that Barnes had killed. He opened the man’s mouth with his gloved fingers and inspected his teeth.

‘Yep, definitely Eastern European, you can tell by the dental work.’ He glanced down at Barnes’s bloodstained arm. ‘You’ll need to wash that off or the flies’ll gather.’

They were on the edge of a steep cliff some four hundred feet up, overlooking the narrow, cliff-lined, Ferranto valley. The whole area was home to the Antioquia Cartel, the heirs of the Medellin Cartel’s territory and violent legacy. They operated in northern Columbia’s Antioquia Department, an area that was largely controlled by FARC guerrillas since their 2011 offensive. This made it difficult for the Columbian government to police the area.

The cartel, however, had overextended itself when it blew up an airliner to kill the new Columbian Minister for Defence. The Minister had been in the pocket of the Norte del Valle cartel and their right-wing AUC guerrilla allies further to the south. The airliner had been American and had been in British airspace, en route to London from Bogotá, when it had exploded. The US and UK governments had exerted pressure on the Columbian government to allow boots on the ground in Northern Columbia to “assist” the Columbian Military’s efforts to deal with the cartel and FARC. Conspiracy theorists were already blaming the CIA for the bombing of the airliner, claiming that they wanted to use it as an excuse to eliminate a left-wing threat on America’s doorstep. Barnes had heard the theory, and felt that the theorists vastly underestimated how much the US government didn’t want to be involved in a South American Vietnam-style fiasco.

Barnes moved towards a small stream on the edge of the clearing to wash the blood off. T grabbed his arm.

‘Someone might see the blood in the water downstream. Use the water in your canteen and then refill it in the stream.’

Barnes nodded and followed T’s suggestion, adding a couple of water purification tablets to his canteen. He also decided that he’d made his last mistake of the day and, if he had his way, the last mistake on Operation Scarface.

Barnes crawled to the cliff edge. Chavez had established contact with the USAF liaison at Joint Special Operations Command in Medellin City. T was watching their back.

‘Do you want to lase and I’ll call it in, LT?’ Chavez asked during a lull in her radio conversation. Barnes nodded. He used the scope on the M4 to look down into the valley at their target. Their target had once been a ranch house. Now it was a heavily fortified compound belonging to Diego Ramiraz, the Antioquia Cartel’s chief enforcer and thought to be the mastermind behind the airliner bombing. He was also believed to be directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of over five thousand people in gang violence, bombings and assassinations worldwide.

‘This is going to be fun. Just like fucking Afghanistan.’ Chavez was always angry and pretty foul-mouthed. She talked street but Barnes knew that she came from a respectable middle-class family who lived in Harlem. He could, however, see her problem. When Barnes had first looked at maps and satellite imagery of the area he had thought that the Ferranto Valley was a suicidal place for Ramiraz to use as a base. He thought that the cartel enforcer and his people had basically trapped themselves in there. However, the compound was all but built under a rocky outcrop in the valley’s opposite cliff wall. That and the narrowness of the valley meant that it was going to very difficult to hit with airstrikes. It would be even more difficult if the rumours that intel had picked up on, about a bunker complex within the cliff side itself, were true.

Barnes removed the boxy laser designator from his webbing and got ready to “paint” the compound. The compound itself was a hive of activity, with trucks and four-by-fours laden with heavily armed mercenaries coming and going. The Ferranto Valley might have seemed like a trap for Ramiraz but if this didn’t work then the American, British and Columbian forces would have to go in there the hard way, and then it was going to be a vicious fight.

‘Two fast movers inbound,’ Chavez told him. Barnes just nodded. ‘This is Venom two-four to Vulture leader: okay stud, listen to me carefully,’ She was talking to the pilot of the lead FB-22 Wyvern fighter-bombers. New in service, they were derived from F22 Raptor air superiority fighters. ‘You got to come in low and slow, you hear me? Get tight in on the deck or this shit just isn’t going to work, over.’ Barnes couldn’t hear the response but he had heard that a lot of the alpha-male jet jockeys didn’t appreciate Chavez’s style of forward observation. Chavez couldn’t care less. After all, they weren’t down here in the shit with them.

They heard the fighter-bombers before they saw them. The thunder of their approach echoed down the valley. Barnes caught a glimpse of them banking hard and then dropping altitude as they headed down into the valley. He turned his attention back to lasing the compound. The beam from the designator was mostly invisible except for where it touched the compound’s main building

‘Too fast,’ Chavez muttered under her breath. ‘Attack run aborted.’