Blood Memory (Mongol Moon), page 3
“Besides, we are taking Enoch with us,” he added, referring to one of the local translators who was coming with them.
“One man? That’s it?” she hissed at him, her anger rising. “Marvin, you can order him to take them. Our sons are here, they will see their father abandoning their own people to death.”
The ambassador’s two sons had come to Lusaka to live with their parents. That they had a private tutor while most Zambians outside of the capital still went to schools without electricity Frey had never brought up.
“Major, I think what my wife is trying to say is, why don’t we try and help these people get out?” Ambassador Brown interjected.
“Look, sir,” Frey stepped closer to the ambassador, not looking over at the group of local workers Nala had been referencing who had congregated near one of the embassy’s many buildings, “the local guards have orders to hold the wall for fifteen minutes and then they and the rest of the local staff are using the same diversion we are to get out. They are from here; they know the city and the territory. Coming with us, what does that do for them?”
Nala glared as Frey continued. “Besides, what are we offering these people? If we make it back to the United States, we are pulling them into World War III. They are better off here in Lusaka than in the United States.” The ambassador wouldn’t meet his eyes as the major let the truth sink in and turned to walk away.
“It may be easier for some of us to abandon people than others, Major,” Nala Brown cried. What she meant by that Frey had no idea, nor did he have the time to ponder it.
Seeing the Marine corporal who was driving the LMTV the ambassador and his wife would be riding in, Frey took him by the arm.
“Absolutely no one not on the roster gets on this vehicle. Do you understand me, Marine?” he said, not caring if the ambassador and his wife heard him or not. “You get me?”
The major poked the Marine in the chest for emphasis. He knew that about Marines. You get them worked up into a lather, and they would tear down the walls of Jericho with nothing but their teeth.
“Sir, yes sir,” the young Marine replied, nodding his head quickly, before looking down. “I, uh… my family used to go to Buc-ee’s in Sevierville, every Thanksgiving Day, sir.”
A quick flash of confusion rolled through the major’s brain, then vanished as he remembered he was still holding his daughter’s stuffed animal in his hand. He didn’t even realize he had been tapping the Marine’s chest with it. He met the Marine’s eyes, and saw in the young man’s eyes an intense sadness hiding behind a battle for control. A subtle reminder that of all those at the embassy, only he and the ambassador knew their immediate families were safe.
“Chow is pretty good there. Binkley, isn’t it?” Frey asked the young Marine. It was a lie; he had never been to one of the gas stations.
“Yes sir, Corporal Binkley. And it is the best brisket anywhere, sir. Outside of my Granddad’s, that is. My little brother loved their burritos. Dad used to say he was adopted.” The Marine forced a smile as he shared the intimate memories with Frey.
“He probably was,” Frey responded before tapping the Marine with the stuffed beaver again. “We are going to get out of here and we are going to have brisket together when all this is done.”
The Marine stood up a little straighter, smiled, and replied, “I’ll buy the brisket, you buy the beer, sir.”
“Deal.” Major Frey continued walking down the line of vehicles. As he walked, he checked off the list of things in his head. His training had taught him to consider the things that he knew he didn’t know, and try to come up with things he didn’t know that he didn’t know. He glanced over at the first gun truck in the column, and saw its blond commander tightening a plate carrier expertly to his body. He noticed the man had already added a new optic and a flashlight to the rifle the Marines had given him just the day before.
Sergeant Major Sweeney stood by his truck, nervously reading the service manual.
“What’s up, Sergeant Major?” Frey asked quietly, not wanting to make the senior enlisted soldier’s query public.
“I’m looking for the combat locks in the technical manual,” the short man replied, not looking up.
“They probably aren’t in there. Either way, just, like this—” Frey grabbed the door lever on the inside of the HMMWV’s heavily armored door. “Lift to open, push down hard to lock. That way no one can open it from the outside.”
The sergeant major stared at the door handle, studying it. “Got it, sir.”
Sweeney tossed the manual on the seat. Frey pictured the man trying to read through the pages of notes he had made if they ever came under fire.
“Do you really think someone could run up and open a door on one of our vehicles, sir?”
The sergeant major’s question was an honest one, without the sarcasm normally present when a senior enlisted soldier questioned a relatively young officer. It was a reminder to Major Frey that despite the sergeant major’s years of service, he was not a combat veteran. But the man was asking earnest questions; that was a start.
“I’ve seen it,” Frey replied, trying to keep his reply from conjuring the memory of the faraway battlefield in his brain.
“Roger, sir.”
“Major Frey, uh... what do you want to do with... uh... Colonel Fredericks?” came a voice from behind him, giving both him and the sergeant major the exit they needed.
The name hadn’t even crossed his mind in days. Frey turned to face the young blue-eyed woman from the embassy staff who had asked him the question. He knew she wouldn’t like the answer.
“He deserted us. We leave his body in the freezer where it is,” Frey answered, cursing the lieutenant colonel who had been Frey’s predecessor as the embassy’s defense attaché. Lieutenant Colonel Fredericks had spent his entire career on various staffs, and despite twenty years of opportunity, had never deployed closer than Kuwait to the wars Frey had spent his career fighting. Frey remembered how it had only taken days after the news of the attacks on the United States had come in for the man to suggest surrendering their compound to the Chinese.
He had been found dead the next day with a single gunshot wound to the head, with his pistol in his hand. Everyone had agreed it was suicide, and Frey had assumed command of the military contingent at the embassy.
It had been bad for morale at the time, especially among the civilians. Knowing a war existed somewhere beyond the horizon was one thing. Seeing its casualties firsthand was something else. But as shaken as they were at the time, almost everyone was secretly glad the ineffective, corpulent career logistics officer wasn’t alive to be in charge today. It had been a blessing in disguise, a stroke of luck. Frey looked back over at the tall blond man in the lead vehicle once more and wondered if it had been just that, luck.
That is a bridge too far, even for him.
Pushing the idea out of his head, he got back to work. Walking back to the LMTV that would carry his family and some of the other noncombatants, he dropped the vehicle’s large rear gate. Amanda and seven-year-old Ella were both in their seats, with his ten-year-old son, James, stubbornly sitting on the floor.
“Hey, where’s Beaver?” Frey asked, and a look of panic flashed across his daughter’s young face. It was only a moment, but it was more than he could bear. He tossed the stuffed beaver to his daughter and smiled. “I got you.”
“Thanks, Daddy,” Ella replied, hugging the beaver. Amanda shook her head disapprovingly at him. She was right; she usually was. There were enough feelings for a seven-year-old’s brain to process without him adding any. Alex just winked, and turned back to work. He rattled through the plan again.
Two gun trucks in the front, Lieutenant Betz in the rear in another, and one in the middle. That’s the sergeant major. Casualty LMTV in the middle with Gunny Harmon, and shooters in each LMTV. Move fast, don’t stop.
He took a deep breath and told himself to focus. He was a professional, and a veteran of two wars. But his family was in one of these vehicles. All of these people were relying on him. Every single one of them was putting their lives in his hands. The thought that he would in a heartbeat sacrifice each of them to save his family gnawed at him.
“Let’s do a functions check on that machine gun, Corporal Adams,” came Lieutenant Betz’s voice from the last truck. The voice pulled Frey off the ledge, and snapped him back to work. The lanky young lieutenant was on top of his gun truck, hovering over the Marine corporal who was operating the truck’s fifty-caliber machine gun.
“Aye, sir,” the Marine replied, eyebrow lifted. Clearly he wanted the young officer out of his business, even if his professionalism kept him from saying it.
“Mike, you got a second?” Frey called out, and the Marine shot him a grateful look.
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Betz answered, climbing down from the gun truck’s roof.
“You got everything?” Frey asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Marine in the turret continue on his long list of tasks.
“Yes, sir, we are good to go!” The young officer gave an eager nod that betrayed his inexperience.
Frey could see a younger version of himself in the man. Eager to be tested and nervous to fail, he had been this officer once, and he would not hold what the man couldn’t change against him.
“Just remember your role and your task. You are the back door. We need to know everyone behind us and everyone passing us that looks suspicious, got it?”
The lieutenant hesitated, as if committing the list he had heard a dozen times to memory again. “Yes, sir.”
“You have your job, they have theirs. Make sure they are doing it, but give them the space to work, alright, Mike?”
The lieutenant’s brow furrowed in a mix of understanding and embarrassment, but before he could reply, from across the compound and past the front gate came a roar of engines and shouting. A sharp staccato of gunfire cut through the pattering rain.
I’ll be damned, he did it, Frey thought... Not even looking over at the man at the front of the convoy, who he was sure had that Ivy League smirk plastered on his face.
“Alright, let’s go—asses in seats, move it! Truck commanders on the radio, give the major your REDCON,” Gunny Harmon’s voice boomed across the night, snapping people out of the paralysis that greeted a long awaited moment, finally arrived. “Damn it, Specialist Pass, turn those headlights off, we are running blacked out!”
Frey smiled. He knew Gunny Harmon hated the term REDCON. It had been a throwback Army term used to report a unit’s readiness status. REDCON One meant the unit was ready to roll. Frey didn’t intervene often in the nuts and bolts, but he loved the term he had picked up on his first deployment to Iraq, so it had stayed despite Gunny Harmon’s protests.
Betz jumped into his gun truck and Frey listened for the click of the combat lock. When it didn’t come, he rapped on the window and reminded the lieutenant. They needed all of these vehicles, and they couldn’t be sure if they would find an empty street out there or a mob outside the back gate.
Jogging back to his vehicle, he allowed himself a momentary glance into the back of his family’s LMTV. He saw Amanda, and that was enough. He reached his vehicle and folded his tall frame into the seat with a groan. He could still smell the desert in these trucks, no matter how long it had been since both he and this truck had seen the sand.
Corporal Harris, in the driver’s seat to Frey’s left, gave him a thumbs-up; their crew was ready. Frey keyed his radio microphone alive to talk to the entire convoy.
“All vehicles, this is Two. Give me your REDCON One.”
One by one the commander of each of the convoy’s eight vehicles reported in. Some voices cracked with nerves, some steely with resolve, but every soul in the convoy felt the same anticipation at what might lie beyond that gate.
Frey waited a beat, making sure any Iranians or Zambians lingering around the rear of the embassy had time to get to the front gate to reinforce their friends. Satisfied, he pushed the radio’s switch that hung from his chest. “Let’s roll.”
The convoy pulled out from the cover of the motor pool and into the rainy morning. It was early, and they were counting on both the dark of night and the fighting at the front to cover their exit. While the rear of the LTMVs were wrapped with large green tarps, the gunners standing in the HMMWV’s turrets bore the brunt of the elements.
“Damn it,” Frey heard from above him as the rain started to pelt his gunner, young Marine Private First Class Jensen Barsamian from Idaho.
Some rain made its way into the crew compartment of the HMMWVs, but the bodies of the gunners blocked most of it.
They approached the western wall of the embassy quickly. On the other side sat a large parking lot where locals who had not been given permission to drive onto US territory had parked. Years before, there had been a second gate here, but a security threat in the mid-2010s had forced its closure. For over a decade, it had been welded shut and barricaded from the inside. Barricades they had spent the last few days carefully and quietly removing.
For the past few hours, the gate had been secured by little more than a padlock. John’s truck reached the gate first. The rear door of his gun truck opened, and Enoch, the single Zambian making the trip with them, climbed out with a pair of bolt cutters. He moved through the dark rain, and the large metal gates swung open.
The first truck, armed with the smaller M240 machine gun, rolled out onto the street.
“One is pulling into their blocking position, sir,” Harris said from the driver’s seat.
“Roger. Barsamian, after we pull through the gate, truck one goes to the right, and we are in the lead, so elevate over them, and then bring your gun to the twelve o’clock,” Frey instructed his gunner. The kid knew, but in Frey’s experience young minds tended to forget the boring things when the game started.
“Aye, sir. Fucking kill, sir!” the Marine standing behind and above him answered. Frey could almost feel the excitement dripping from the young man’s voice. The young Marine was bending at the knees, nearly bouncing in the turret, trying to bleed off the excess adrenaline coursing through his veins.
Frey felt it too, but as the rain poured and the gun truck’s windshield wipers tried to keep pace, he reminded himself about Amanda and the kids in the back.
Don’t seek contact, get us out of here.
John’s truck pulled out and turned right in the opposite direction the convoy would head, headlights off, and rotated his machine gun in the direction of the riot. They couldn’t be seen, but if anyone figured it out or got curious, Frey wanted the most nimble machine gun they had pointed in that direction.
The HMMWVs gunner, Marine Lance Corporal Thomas Jackson, raised his hand from the turret as the vehicles passed, his thumb holding down his middle two fingers while his outer two extended. The old sign of the horns.
“Alright, it is right to the dead end, right again at the next dead end, left at the traffic circle at the mall, and then straight all the way to the T2,” Frey reminded Corporal Harris. “Twenty-five minutes, and we are on the highway. Don’t hit anything.”
Harris gave a “yes, sir,” as the convoy’s rear end pulled through the gate.
Frey’s HMMWV pulled through the nearly empty parking lot, and onto the small and narrow Zambian road at a crawl. He wanted them all together, moving as one through the streets. The only streetlights in this part of town surrounded the embassy, and the Iranians had long since cut the power to those.
“Two, this is Eight,” Lieutenant Betz’s voice came from the rear vehicle. “We are through the gate and…” He stopped. A long pause sat on the radio as the convoy rolled. “I’ve got two, no three…” The lieutenant’s voice quickened, “Shit, that one has an RPG!”
The last word sent a shiver down Frey’s spine. One of the Iranians must have either been asleep or enterprising enough to stay behind when his comrades had joined the fight at the front. Frey could see the rear of the convoy in his mirror, and saw a dark figure running towards Lieutenant Betz’s stopped gun truck. A second and third stood behind the vehicle’s trunk, lifting a long metallic tube.
Lieutenant Betz’s gunner, high up in his turret, could neither see nor engage the three figures who had emerged from the parked cars and were now swarming his truck.
“Fuck, they are right on top of us! Adams, shoot them.” Everyone in the convoy could hear Lieutenant Betz’s shouts. He had forgotten to switch his radio off of the external channel and back onto his internal truck intercom. Now everyone was listening to the young officer experience his first taste of combat.
“I can’t! He’s under my gun! Fuck!” Corporal Adams’s voice came across, fainter in the background.
“Son of a bitch,” Harris swore under his breath, but loud enough that Frey could hear. The fifty-caliber machine gun on Lieutenant Betz’s truck was a fearsome weapon, but mounted in a turret, if the enemy got close enough, they could find safety under the gun’s long barrel.
“Shit, they’re at the door, oh fuck,” Lieutenant Betz wailed.
Frey thought back—he had heard Lieutenant Betz combat lock his door; he had reminded him. He prayed the young officer hadn’t unlocked it again. The combat lock was the only thing keeping the enemy on the other side of the vehicle’s armor.
But the men on both sides of the door were fighting for survival. While Lieutenant Betz fought to keep the door closed, the lone Iranian man on the other side fought desperately to open it.
“Stop fucking touching it—you’ll unlock it!” Another faint voice echoed over the radio. It belonged to Lieutenant Betz’s young civilian driver, one of the embassy’s CIA analysts who had been given the task to free some of the soldiers and Marines.
“Let me engage!” Barsamian screamed from above him, but Major Frey knew that was a mistake. They were covering the front. To let this young man spin his machine gun around and shoot back the entire length of the line was extremely risky. Barsamian was just as likely to shoot one of their own trucks as he was to hit the enemy.
