Adam Baker - Juggernaut

A second baton round. Ali threw down his jacket and tried to smother the gas plume. His eyes streamed tears. He drooled snot.

He kicked open the rear doors. They tumbled into the road. More purple smoke.

Ali knelt and squinted through tears. Figures in the smoke. Pig-snout gas masks looming out of purple haze like monstrous, hybrid creatures.

He choked. He vomited. He raised his pistol and fired blind. The weapon was snatched from his hand. A punch to the jaw put him on his back.

He was dragged to the kerb. His hands were cuffed behind his back with plastic tuff-ties.

He spat. He blinked away tears. The street was deserted. The locals had fled inside and locked their doors. He could see the soldiers at work inside the van. They cut the prisoners loose. They bit through ankle chain with bolt cutters. They dragged hooded prisoners from the van.

The big guy made a run for it. He sprinted down the street, hands still chained behind his back.

One of the mercs, a tall man with hair tied in a ponytail, casually shouldered a pump action shotgun. He took aim and blew off the prisoner’s foot. The injured man collapsed and lay screaming.

They lined the prisoners along the kerb and pulled off their hoods. Terrified men blinked at sudden sunlight.

A merc walked the line and checked faces. Short and slight. A woman. Her comrades deferred to her, like she was boss.

Her voice muffled by a gas mask:

‘Him.’

They unshackled Jabril and dragged him to the Suburban. They drove away.

Ali sat by the side of the road, dumb with shock. The street was still fogged with purple vapour. He could hear sirens get closer.

Najjar climbed through the shattered windshield. He fell into the street.

‘Hey,’ shouted Ali. ‘Over here.’

Najjar got up. His head was bleeding. He walked to the kerb, opened a penknife and cut Ali free.

He fetched a discarded AK from the back of the van. He checked it was loaded. He handed it to one of the boys.

‘Finish it, before we have company.’

The kid looked down at the assault rifle in his hand, and the prisoners sat at the kerb. The convicts sobbed and begged for mercy.

‘They are trash,’ advised Najjar. ‘Worse than dogs. You know what has to be done.’

The kid shouldered the rifle, closed his eyes and opened fire.

The Suburban sped down the expressway. They left Baghdad. Lucy and her crew peeled off gas masks. They opened the windows and cranked up Cypress Hill.

Voss drove the 4x4. Lucy sat on the back seat with Jabril, released his shackles with a universal key. She told him to hold his head back while she flushed his eyes with mineral water.

‘Thank you,’ said Jabril. ‘You saved my life.’

Lucy tapped his forehead with the muzzle of her pistol.

‘You’re not free yet, Jabril. Consider this parole.’

Two choppers flew out of a golden dawn.

Raphael flew Talon . The webbed bench seats had been removed. The cargo compartment was stacked with equipment. The payload was draped with tarp, lashed with rope.

Gaunt flew Bad Moon . Lucy and her team were strapped in the rear.

They watched sunrise over Baghdad. Traders heading to market, skirting acres of airstrike rubble. Horse carts, wheeled fruit stalls, painted trucks. The morning haze would soon burn off and be replaced by a brilliant blue sky.

‘Got to make the journey before the noonday heat,’ said Gaunt. ‘Hotter the air, the lower our lift. We’ll burn a heck of a lot more fuel.’

The metal-planked floor of the Huey was lagged with sandbags. Coalition choppers regularly took AK hits as they flew downtown. Crew listened for the tick of bullets striking the airframe. Sometimes RPGs streaked from rooftops, militia hoping to knock out a tail rotor. Most Blackhawks were reinforced with Kevlar. Pilots knew to fly high, fly fast, vary their route. Gaunt had to improvise.

They passed the city limits. Cinder-block dwellings and tin-roof shanties replaced by scrubland.

Lucy breathed slow and steady, tried to get her heart rate under control. Adrenalin rush. ‘Don’t worry,’ Jabril had assured her. ‘It will be a short trip. You won’t see another living soul.’

She checked the 40mm grenade launcher bolted to the barrel-rail of her assault rifle, made sure it was locked tight.

Gaunt broadcast a final clearance request to the Regional Air Movement Control Centre in Qatar.

‘ Roger that, Q-TAC. Confirm your last: we are clear all sectors north. You have our heading November, echo, echo, six three… ’

They had filed a flight plan north to Mosul. They told Air Command they were shipping medical supplies.

Gaunt checked the laminated map-pocket on the leg of his flight suit. He nudged the cyclic. The helos banked west in tight formation.

They dropped off radar and skimmed the desert parallel to the Fallujah Expressway, a ragged ribbon of blacktop bisecting a boundless vista of dust. They flew fifty metres above the deck, skimmed the dunes at a hundred knots. They left Baghdad city limits and passed into the unmanaged airspace of Al Anbar Governate.

Lucy passed round a packet of salt tablets. They knocked them back with a swig of mineral water.

She took a tube of high-factor sun cream from her pack and smoothed lotion on her face and neck. She threw the tube to Toon. He squeezed a white worm of cream down each arm and massaged it into tattooed skin.

Toon had tattoos down both arms, Yakuza-style. Lucy asked him about it one night as they sat drinking in the Riviera Bar.

‘Momento mori,’ explained Toon, pointing at his arm. ‘The lion. Leo Fowler. Blackhawk developed gear trouble over Kuwait City. He was the only guy to walk away. Dropped dead of an embolism three months later. The thistle. Jimmy McDougal. Immigrant from Scotland. His wife left him. Locked himself in a barrack toilet cubicle and blew his brains out. My personal memorial wall. Nobody else remembers these guys. They aren’t listed among the fallen. But they were my friends.’

Lucy had no friends, no family, beyond the team. Better that way. During her days in Special Recon, she spent tense pre-mission hours slamming her knife into a dartboard while other squad members filled out next-of-kin and wrote goodbye letters to wives and kids. Every soldier she met could tell the story of some Dear John suicide, some beloved buddy that ate a bullet or drove into an abutment. She knew one guy with ‘Linda Forever’ tattooed on his forearm. Linda ran off with his brother so one night he sat in the barracks, poured caustic soda on his arm and sweated through the pain as flesh blistered and burned.

Better to travel light.

The Riv.

A low-ceiling dive favoured by security contractors. Part of the old presidential palace. A social club for the secret police converted to a coalition drinking den as a big Fuck You to the Ba’ath Party.

Blackwater guys considered themselves elite and stayed at the Rasheed, content to drink malted Astra near-beer with CPA staffers and Agency analysts. Everyone else, mercenaries from Fiji, Indonesia, El Salvador, the rootless Ronin of the world’s war zones, found their way to the Riv.

Jukebox. Constant cigar fug. A guy with a biker beard manned the doorway metal detector.

There was usually grief.

Toon rolled down his sleeves and hid his tattoos. Amanda fed coins into the jukebox. Sheryl Crow. She and Lucy slow-danced while barstool drunks threw insults and beer caps.

A couple of Air Cav officers entered the club. They shouldered a space at the bar and ordered orange juice. The barman served them, looking doubtful, wondering if they were trouble. No reason regular troops should hang out at the Riv unless they wanted to pick a fight.