John Ringo: Choosers of the Slain

The Keldara spun in place, raising his SPR to his shoulder and crouching to sweep behind him.

Mike, who was within arm’s reach, simply grabbed the barrel of the weapon and yanked it out of his hands.

“You’ve got lousy situational awareness, Yevgenii,” he hissed. The name of the Keldara was embroidered in glow-letters on the back of his boonie-cap. “Stand down.”

“Kildar!” the boy whispered. “I never saw you!”

“That’s why I’m the instructor and you’re the trainee, boy,” Mike said, quietly.

The Keldara forward of the trail had heard the byplay and slapped the shoulder of the Keldara in front of him, sending the signal up the line of troopers to halt for something to the rear.

Mike handed the weapon back and stepped up along the line of crouched troopers, tapping them on the shoudler as he passed.

“Piatras, how’s it going. Ionis, ready to do a man’s job tonight? Sergejus, keep your barrel down this time. Stephan, how’s the baby?

“McKenzie,” Mike said when he got to the command group in the middle of the patrol. “Sawn. Let’s get moving; they haven’t stopped.”

Sawn nodded and tapped forward and back. He waited until he’d gotten responses from either direction, then got the team moving.

They continued down the trail until they got to the stream and then moved off to the right through the woods, weaving in and out among the trees.

As they approached the trail that was being used by the Chechens, Sawn gathered the group into a cigar-shaped perimeter and had them drop their rucksacks. Leaving two personnel behind to keep an eye on the rucks, he brought the team forward to the trail.

He detailed two of the Keldara to move up the trail in the direction the Chechens should approach from, then laid out the rest of the team along the trail, about five meters into the woodline. At the far end he laid in a group across the trail, closing it in an “L” shape.

The ambush was set up on the downhill side from the trail, which wasn’t perfect, but it would probably do. They also didn’t have any claymores with them, which wasn’t great. Nor did they have heavy weapons; this training had been based on recon and light ambushes so the machine guns were back at the base. They did, however, have frag grenades. And the Chechens probably wouldn’t have NODs.

With no signal from the observers along the trail the Keldara started working on their positions. There was no time to dig real fighting positions but the Keldara rapidly scraped out shallow trenches, pushing the dirt up in small breastworks in front of them. The leaves they scraped off to the side. When they lay down in the trench they wrapped themselves in a ponchos lined with thermal blankets, then pulled the leaves back over themselves, covering themselves completely.

Sawn’s second, Dimant Ferani, followed behind, touching up the positions and ensuring that each position had minimal thermal output. The Chechens rarely used thermal imagery devices but it never hurt to be sure.

Mike had scraped out his own hasty fighting position, wrapped and covered. Under the cover he slipped out a frag grenade and held it in his right hand with his weapon by his right side. Then he settled down to wait.

The Keldara were as perfect as any group he’d ever met. From years of farming and hunting they had enormous patience and the ability to simply sit, or lie down in this case, for hours. They also tended to keep awake, which was a major benefit with ambushes; most ambushers tended to drift off and start snoring. But the Keldara just… waited, like expert hunters. He was again amazed by the absolute perfection of the group of rural farmers.

The Chechens, however, were not nearly as good. He could hear them coming long before the signal from the overwatch position that the target was entering the zone. He could also smell them: a tinge of woodsmoke, BO and harsh cigarettes. The latter was so strong he was sure one or more of them was actually smoking.

There was a series of clicks over the radio as Sawn signalled the team to prepare to engage. Mike could hear the sound of the mules’ hooves on rocks and couldn’t imagine that the normally vigilant animals didn’t know the Keldara were there. However, Sawn had obviously chosen the downhill side for more than one reason. There was a current of air coming down the mountainside and it blew from the trail to the ambushers. That was keeping their scent from reaching the mules. As long as everyone was silent, they were golden.

There was another series of faint clicks in his earphones and then a series of beeps. One, two, three…

Mike pulled the pin from the grenade and lifted himself to his knees, the leaves and poncho cascading away from him, then threw the grenade uphill into the mass of men and mules in front of him. With that done he ducked down into the hasty fighting position and flattened himself into the ground, as a series of sharp cracks filled the air with a hail of shrapnel.

As soon as the last grenade had detonated he slid his SPR over the side of the small mound in front of him and began picking out targets. The Chechens had gone to ground fast, but they didn’t have good cover along this section of the trail and if he couldn’t directly target someone, one of the Keldara to the side could. AK rounds cracked overhead but he ignored them, sweeping his weapon back and forth in a search for targets.

The mules complicated things, slightly. Some of them were down, kicking in pain from the riddling shrapnel. Others, however, had broken free and were running loose. One came barreling right over his position, stamping hard on his thigh as it passed.

He’d picked out three targets and downed them when he heard Sawn’s whistle for the team to sweep across the objective.

He lifted himself up and kept the weapon at present as he stepped forward. There was a wounded tango on the ground, hit by shrapnel or a round in the leg, he wasn’t sure which, with an AK on the ground next to him. Mike swept the UV light from his rifle flash on the tango, made an assessment that he wasn’t a leader, and put a round through his head.

He continued across the objective, checking the dead and wounded carefully, until he was well into the woods on the far side. He flipped the sight on the rifle to thermal imagery and swept it up the hillside, looking for hiding tangoes but didn’t find any.

Sawn’s whistle signalled recall and Mike headed back down the hill to the trail, checking his sector for recovery items. Besides the mules, the surviving ones of which the Keldara were gathering up, he was looking for any intel items such as paperwork. There didn’t seem to be much immediately obvious and he left off the search to go find Sawn and McKenzie.

“We’ve got three prisoners and two somethings,” McKenzie said as he approached.

“Somethings?” Mike asked.

“Two bints with the Chechens,” the Scottish former SAS sergeant said in his thick brogue. “One with a grenade fragment in her side. Ivan’s talking with them at the moment. I get the impression they weren’t wives or such like.”

“Slaves,” Ivan said, stepping up to the trainer’s side. “They were picked up on farms over towards the Pankisi Gorge. That and the food on the mules. They weren’t bought, the fucking black-asses raided and burned the farms.”

“Bloody hell,” Mike muttered. “Orphans and damaged goods.”

“More lassies for your harem, lad,” McKenzie grunted, humorously.

“Raped and abused ladies make difficult harem girls,” Mike pointed out, sighing. “What about the other prisoners?”

“One looks like the leader of the convoy,” McKenzie said. “The other two were hiding in the woods and put their hands up so fast nobody had the heart to shoot them.”