Blood Memory (Mongol Moon), page 27
“That’ll be the fucking day, sir,” Lynch responded, the bass returning to his shaking voice.
“He better not, or I’ll tell Gunny Harmon to have one of the USAID nerds give you remedial marksmanship instructions.”
Lynch and Bagley both laughed, and Frey gave both a reassuring pat on the thigh before heading back to his position.
“You two make sure you are here when I come back,” he offered in parting.
“The planet will break before the Marines do,” Lynch responded to Frey’s back.
The words stopped the major in his tracks. He had heard them before, and knew the reference.
He turned his head back towards the Marine and sailor. “Blood for the blood god.”
“Skulls for the skull throne!” they both responded in unison, elbowing one another giddily.
“I knew the major was one of us,” Bagley laughed, as Frey continued his crawl back to his position. Every man along the line waited for the enemy to show their faces again. They did not have long to wait. The screams of the burning wounded barely had time to cease their ghastly chorus before a chant arose anew from the far tree line. Again the waves of men advanced. This time faster, with a greater sense of urgency. The first wave sprinted, while the second and third tried to keep up. This time, however, flashes erupted from the tree line, trying to cover the advancing waves of Congolese. The waves of men advanced over the bodies of their tribesmen, firing wildly at their hidden foes as they ran. But despite their increased speed, they did not fare any better. The hidden rifle fire from the top of the hill was accurate and deadly. Loud explosions punctuated the sharp cracks of the rifles, and the waves faltered.
Frey had little to do other than shoot. He checked the flanks to make sure the slaughter to his front was not a diversion, then went back to firing. It was simply murder. Blink to rest and wet the eyes, find target, put red dot on target, lead the target a little, he’s running, exhale, squeeze. Over, and over again. He had lost count. A dozen, two, maybe more. He fired again, and again—then came three tracers in a row. The last rounds in his magazines were always tracers, a visual reminder amidst the chaos that he would need to act soon.
He felt the first magazine run empty as the bolt locked back. He switched it out for a full one and slammed the bolt home with a thunk. Everything around him went dark. His heartbeat thumped in his ears. His mouth tasted like metal. His universe narrowed to one tiny piece of glass on top of his rifle and the red dot it projected. There was nothing else. No pain, no fear, no past or present. Just this rifle pressed against his cheek and the red dot
There was only death. It was natural. Men at war had felt this emotion for centuries.
But Frey knew he was in command, and shook himself out of it, remembering a lesson an instructor had taught him about how one man without a rifle could kill more than one with a rifle: if the man without one commanded twenty armed men.
“Pick it up!” Frey yelled to the line of men, sensing that an increased volume of death from their rifles could break the Congolese again. The men responded, pouring bullets into the advancing hordes. It did the trick, and the second attack met the same fate as the first.
But as the second attack fell back, small groups of men took cover in the clumps of trees that dotted the field, shielding them from the death that found their comrades. One by one, they began to return fire. It created an annoyance, but one that could not be dealt with. The supply of grenades was limited and dwindling fast. Further, one of the Uruguayans had been killed by the Congolese fire. A head shot as the man was reloading. It was quick and death had come fast for the man, but it stung the group. Sergeant Franklin had also been wounded. A bullet had torn through a tree, shooting splinters into his arm. Long skinny pieces of wood protruded from the man’s arm like he was a wooden hedgehog. One had passed close enough to an artery for concern, and Corpsman Bagley busied himself treating the wound.
Frey’s watch chimed. It was time.
“First group, back to the LMTV and the ferry, go. Make sure Bagley and Franklin are on it.”
The half dozen Americans, led by Sergeant Black, peeled off, leaving their extra magazines with the men staying behind. Frey watched them make the long run, gather one of the two remaining LMTVs, then board the ferry. He reset his watch timer and started the count again. Artigas and De Rossi both gathered around him, each taking a seat behind Frey’s log. A small group of Uruguayans slipped over to the American side, taking the places of the men who had fallen back to the boat.
“How do they keep coming like that?” De Rossi asked, bewilderment on his face. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“He drugs them,” Frey replied.
“It is true, many of the rebels in this area still believe in witchcraft,” Artigas shared. “No doubt he gave them some drugs, or maybe even just water, and told them it would make them invincible to bullets.”
“Well, they fucking aren’t.” De Rossi smiled.
“I bet you wish you had my Chaffees now, don’t you, my friend?” Artigas chided Frey over the decade-and-a-half-old joke Frey had once made over Uruguay’s use of the Second World War vintage American tank.
Frey shook his head, pushing more bullets into a half empty magazine. “Could be useful. Seeing it, they’d laugh so hard they’d die.”
“You know, we upgraded them. We use the Bulldog now.” A mischievous smile crept across the Uruguayan’s face, his pride clearly undiminished by his country replacing a 1940s’ tank with one built in 1951.
De Rossi, panting from the extended exertion of keeping the heavy machine gun in place without a tripod, shook his head. “I will never understand officers.”
Popping the last bullet in the magazine, Major Frey saw the ferry slip clear of the dock and hit the open water of the river. “What’s your story, Staff Sergeant? How does a guy go from the Second Ranger Battalion to the fucking Montana National Guard?”
“Came home from my third trip to the Pech Valley. She’d said she loved me, that the baby was mine, and that her dad wanted me to run his business. All three turned out to be untrue.” De Rossi shrugged, as if the memory of the event was something that had changed someone else’s life and not his.
Frey turned again, watching the field. It had been almost ten minutes and no attack had materialized. The intermittent fire from the Congolese hiding in the trees had slackened off, as rifles either jammed, ran out of ammunition, or the men firing them lost interest.
“They are either going to give up, try to go around our flanks, or try to rush us with vehicles,” Frey concluded, turning around to watch for any signal from the other side. He decided not to wait to find out. “De Rossi, put a couple of bursts of fifty into the trees to our flanks. See what happens.”
De Rossi moved off without another question, and Artigas gave Frey a puzzled look.
“If these dudes get shot at, they are going to fire back. If he puts a couple of bursts in either flank, and no one shoots back, we know they aren’t coming that way.”
The fifty caliber barked alive once again, and the tracers shot into the trees on either side of the field. Nothing came. It wasn’t a shock. A man like Mutombo could not trust untrained, undisciplined men outside of his direct control, and from what information he had gathered on the man, it seemed unlikely he would lead any charges.
“How are you liking your first war?” Major Frey asked his friend. “Not what you expected, is it?”
“What is ever what we expect?” Artigas answered, pushing fresh bullets down into a magazine. “I imagined, after watching all of you, and listening to you talk about your experiences, I imagined to… feel something.”
“Something, like what?”
“I imagined—to feel ashamed, to feel guilty for killing men like this.”
“What do you feel?”
“I feel proud,” the Uruguayan answered. “Not proud to kill these men. Proud that I am here, with you. Proud that you, a man who has seen war, knows he can rely on me and my men. I am proud to be doing what my entire life has been spent preparing to do. Fight an enemy. Not only fighting an enemy, but fighting an enemy so my friend’s family can escape to safety. To me, there is no greater honor.”
Frey felt a thickness in his throat that he could not contain. He sat silently with his friend. No words were needed. Both men knew the truth. As surely as Alex knew Juan-Pablo would have done anything to take part in this battle, Juan-Pablo knew that his sardonic American friend did not have the words to thank him. His friend was thanking him, by treating his inexperienced men like he would members of his own vaunted US Army.
On the far bank of the river, the ferry began its slow, lazy turn, and from the thick woods before them came the growl of engines. Sergeant Emmet was on Frey’s left with Staff Sergeant De Rossi on the end and a handful of Uruguayans to the right. He could sense their trepidation. He felt it too. If the Congolese could get their vehicles into the field, they could cross the open space faster than on foot. They would lose the majority of their men, but those that survived the slaughter would be close enough to negate the superior skill of the defenders.
The sun was about halfway down on the horizon by now, and an orange glow settled over the battlefield. Dark shadows stretched long beckoning fingers from the trees over the avenues of death, and Frey summoned his strength once more.
“De Rossi, I want that fifty on the biggest vehicles we see. Stop the vehicles first. Aim for the drivers, don’t try and fuck around with the engine blocks. Kill the drivers. Stop the ones with the most troops first, then work your way down. Grenades on the groups of stopped men. Let’s kick them in the dick, caballeros!”
The first vehicles appeared in the tree line. A handful of motorbikes and Toyota pickup trucks came first, followed by the occasional larger flatbed truck. The fifty caliber opened fire as the first truck appeared, shattering the window and turning the cab into a charnel house of bone and flesh. The truck stopped. The men in the back clambered off and sprinted forward.
Frey took aim at the cab of another truck emerging from the tree line, as a puff of white smoke caught his eye. He hesitated, trying to register the familiar sight in the recesses of his memory.
“RPG!” he screamed, as the first rocket flew towards them. It impacted well short of their position on the hill, but it was soon followed by a volley from the safety of the far trees. Like the Congolese rifle fire, the firing of the RPGs, as well as the weapons themselves, was wildly inaccurate. Some rounds whizzed over the hill, some thunked into the ground well short of the target. One even glanced off one of the advancing trucks and exploded next to a pair of fighters on the ground, killing both. But a second volley followed the first, and a third the second, and rockets began impacting too close for comfort.
One hit a few feet in front of Artigas’s position, spraying dirt everywhere. The small Uruguayan cursed, and fired towards the tree line, hoping to hit one of the missileers.
The vehicles rushed closer. The Uruguayan grenadiers, having run out of the high explosive grenades, had resorted to using the crate of riot control tear gas rounds. Congolese fighters advanced through the white clouds of gas, and emerged coughing and vomiting on the other side. Some sprinted away from the clouds of gas billowing across the field, but the remaining vehicles pressed on.
Frey fired into one, hitting the driver. The truck juked sideways, rolling over and flinging its human cargo across the grass. Continuing its roll, the truck crushed some of its former occupants before coming to a rest in the grass. It wasn’t enough.
About a dozen vehicles had survived the trip across the field, which gave them a two-hundred-yard head start on their comrades who were trying to cross it on foot in the fight up the hill. But the field, which had been a death sentence just a few minutes before, was now the safest place on the battlefield as the defenders were forced to target the Congolese running up the hill towards them.
“De Rossi, get that fifty up, push them towards the middle!” Frey screamed. He knew he had to do something, to make some move to give his woefully outnumbered and now outgunned men in the fight. RPGs continued to screech in, trailing their white contrails and slamming into the hill. Mutombo apparently did not care that he was killing his own men in the process. The vehicles that had made it across the field hadn’t been able to bring enough men with them, and the survivors of the butchery huddled together at the bottom of the hill. But if the defenders switched to target the men coming across the field, the men near the hill would be able to cover the distance to their line quickly. The line held, but as soon as the masses of men running through the field met up with their comrades at the bottom of the hill, it would become untenable.
A fury of bullets tore through the air, and a scream erupted from his left. He turned quickly, his eyes burning with sweat and gunpowder. Sergeant Emmet was slumped over behind a stump, holding his face in his hands. Blood poured in torrential gushes from between his fingers.
Frey crawled over to the writhing man, pinning him to the ground before his panic caused him to stand amidst the hail of bullets.
“Move your hands, let me see!” he shouted.
“I’m fucking blind, I can’t see!” Emmet replied in a panic.
“Let me fucking see!” Frey wouldn’t be stopped. The wounded had to be assessed, and the man’s panic had to be calmed. He grabbed Emmet’s wrists and, fighting through the man’s adrenaline, pulled them away from the wound.
It was a ghastly sight. A deep trench of flesh and blood rested above the man’s eyebrows across the entirety of his forehead. Blood poured from the wound like a river, flooding his eyes.
“You aren’t blind, you have blood in your eyes.”
“I’m blind, oh fuck.”
“You aren’t blind.” Frey reached into the man’s equipment vest and opened his first aid kit. Frey had never been a believer like Sergeant Major Sweeney that everyone’s equipment had to be set up the same way, but the sergeant major had requested that every man’s first aid kit at least be in the same place. Frey had conceded in Lusaka, and on this tiny ridge south of the Luvua River, that decision may have saved Sergeant Emmet’s life. He pulled the bandage out of the man’s kit and started to wrap it across his forehead. Reaching under, he pressed the lower part of Emmet’s skin up, trying to close the wound as much as possible underneath the gauze. He poured some water into the man’s bloody eyes, which blinked back to life.
“Here, Jesus, you whine like a baby. I thought the National Guard was supposed to be tough.”
“Not tougher, just smarter,” Emmet replied, panting.
Sliding back behind his stump, Frey fired a few rounds into a group of Congolese, and turned back towards the ferry. It was a few minutes from the nearside dock. They had to get down there, but if they all ran now, the Congolese at the bottom of the hill would be on them in moments.
“Juan-Pablo!” Frey screamed to his friend. “Get to the ferry, I’ll cover you—we’re all going across together!”
Across the dirt road where his friend knelt, was an entirely separate battle altogether. The log in front of the man was riddled with bullets of all types, but if the short nobleman felt any fear, he did not show it.
“I am a colonel, Major,” he yelled over, forcing a grin towards his friend. “You go, that is an order.”
“Fuck you! I got you into this, get your guys out of here.”
Someone tugged his boot. He turned towards it and met the gaze of one of the Uruguayans who had joined the American side of the road. The man, who was barely out of his teens, was bleeding from the shoulder, and Frey could detect the slightest trickle of blood from the man’s mouth. His eyes conveyed an immense sadness, and Frey wondered if he was thinking of a mother or a girlfriend back home. The eyes closed, and a moment later opened again with a steely resolve. The boy just nodded, and spit up blood as he spoke to Frey in Spanish.
“Ve. Diles que Uruguay te salvó.”
Frey stared into the dying man’s eyes and nodded. He repeated the words, memorizing them. He would ask Lopez what the man had said after.
“Emmet, De Rossi, let’s go! Emmet, you get the LMTV on the ferry!” he shouted, patting the man on the shoulder as he slid down the hill. The Uruguayan used every ounce of the strength remaining in his fading body to crawl behind the log Frey had previously occupied, and rose to his knees to fire into the Congolese massing at the bottom of the hill. De Rossi had stripped his uniform top and T-shirt, and wrapped it around the machine gun’s hot barrel. He slung the eighty-pound machine gun over his shoulder and hustled down the hill.
“Juan-Pablo!” Alex called out one last time to his friend.
The man only smiled. “Destroy our vehicles, and tell the curly girl I said hello!” he shouted back, finally mastering the pronunciation of “curly.”
Tears pricked Frey’s eyes, and he began to run. He caught up to De Rossi, the man heaving for breath as he lugged the massive gun.
“Here, give it to me!” Frey shouted. The firing from only a few feet behind them still not slackening. “I’ll carry it.”
“Fuck you!” De Rossi shouted back. “I’d rather… let those fucking cannibals eat me… than have an officer say he… carried my fucking machine gun.”
They covered the remaining two hundred yards together, running past a group of Congolese civilians who were desperately trying to take what they could from their huts and flee. Had any tried to get on the ferry, Frey doubted he would stop them, but in their panic they fled off into the forest. They found Emmet had already driven the truck onto the ferry by himself. The two Uruguayan ferry operators stared at him wide-eyed, shocked that this toothless man with a bloody bandage wrapped around his head had done alone what had taken the previous vehicles a team of five to accomplish.
“Let’s go!” Emmet shouted from the ferry, as the last rays of sun started to set on the river. Frey ran back to the Uruguayan vehicles and found what he was looking for. In the back were canisters of fuel and boxes of ammunition they had carefully packed to make a quick escape. He grabbed two of each from the vehicle and poured the gas inside the Land Rover and the Unimog. He pulled the lighter that he kept tied to a piece of parachute cord in his pocket out and did his friend one last favor. To be killed by the enemy was one thing. To have your equipment captured and paraded was an indignity Frey would not allow to befall his friend.
