Blood Memory (Mongol Moon), page 39
As the LMTVs behind him passed by, Frey watched the one carrying his family. He didn’t like not being between them and the danger, but this was where he needed to be.
He thought about the name Niemba, the town they were driving towards, and couldn’t shake the suspicion he had heard it somewhere before. African names were always so unique; it was rare you ever found two alike. Racking his brain, he found it. The Niemba Ambush. Something about Irish peacekeepers and the Katanga rebels back in the 1960s.
Well, Frey thought, the Irish were never great at war.
As the two lead scout gun trucks approached about a hundred yards from the town, they started to slow.
Strange, Frey thought, why would they be—
He never got to finish the thought.
As if on cue, every window and ditch facing the road the Americans were traveling down erupted in bright orange fireballs. Dirt and bush kicked up around the two vehicles which were now desperately weaving, trapped in the open ground.
“Drive, drive, drive!” Frey screamed into the radio. “Gunners, engage.”
The machine guns of the American vehicles came to life, trying to outgun the massive amount of firepower being thrown at them. Three streams of light and fire poured back into the village, and Frey could see them impact the cement walls and thatch of the buildings.
“I can’t see, I can’t see, get me clear!” Lopez screamed from the turret. The gun truck was still behind the last LMTV and couldn’t see the danger clearly. Lopez charged the giant machine gun above them, a sound Frey could hear over the engine and the gunfire.
It was a holy sound. The fifty caliber to him was a symbol of America. It had fought in almost all of America’s wars in the 20th century, and every one since. These guns were likely old, maybe recovered from a battleship in the 1950s, refurbished, and sent to Africa. It was a monster to carry and maintain, and now they needed the old girl to be a monster one more time.
“Harris, get around to where Lopez can engage,” Frey said, trying to see around the vehicles in front of him.
As the creaky HMMWV swung out from behind the LMTVs, a pair of smoke trails appeared from the village.
“Oh fuck!” Lopez said, seeing them too. The first rocket glanced off the hood of Sergeant Major Sweeney’s gun truck, ricocheting up into the African sky before disappearing in the heavens.
The second streaked in and impacted on the tail end of Lieutenant Betz’s truck and exploded into a massive fireball.
“Head right, break brush towards the river.” John’s voice on the radio was calm, but demanding.
Frey thought for a moment, Lopez screaming obscenities, half in English, half in Spanish, above him as he fired the fifty-caliber machine gun into the town. We can skirt the village to the right, but there’s a creek there we won’t be able to get across before we get to the river.
He keyed his handset. “Negative, there is a tributary creek to the right, there is no bridge here.”
“Denis says it isn’t that deep here, we can ford it. We have to go,” cracked the curt reply across the radio.
Frey saw the burning HMMWV and its wingman, still engaging the town as the convoy drew closer. They were all within range now. If the unarmored LMTVs came to a stop and tried to turn around here and head back, it would be a slaughter.
“Fuck it—go, throw some smoke. One, you lead us out, I’ll stop and see if anyone is left in Eight. Five, get your gun between the convoy and the village,” Frey told them, his heart racing faster and faster. He had rarely, if ever, been this outgunned. There had to be at least a hundred rifles and machine guns spewing fire at them, more firepower than they could hope to suppress.
The convoy broke right, a hundred yards behind the burning American vehicle, and drove towards the creek and hopefully the safety of the river on their right.
In the back, Barsamian handed another box of ammo to Lopez as they tried desperately to keep the big machine gun in the fight. They had two options: pour enough hate and discontent back into the village to keep their attacker’s heads down long enough for them to turn and get away, or die here in this African field.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” Lopez screamed, pressing the dual thumb triggers and firing the gun at a rate Frey was certain would melt and fuse the barrel to the receiver. But it didn’t matter. If they didn’t get clear of this, they wouldn’t need a gun in hell anyway.
Ahead of him, the drivers kept their intervals. After weeks of Frey scolding them, they had either learned their lesson or simply grown too tired of hearing Frey’s voice remind them to quit slinkying. The vehicles maintained their own gaps now, and Frey watched as a pair of RPGs, trailing white death smoke, passed between two of the LMTVs and landed in the field.
John’s gun truck broke hard right, skirting the outside of the village. His gunner, Marine Lance Corporal Jackson, had thrown out a half dozen smoke grenades of every color and was hammering his machine gun into the village from his turret, trying to cover the LMTVs. Frey could see holes being ripped in their canvas sides. Not many, but enough.
Two men were hanging out of the back of the last LMTV. Both were firing rifles towards the enemy-infested village. Their small rifles, firing at targets that were impossible to see and even harder to hit from a moving vehicle weren’t doing much, but it was something. Frey and Harris both peered through the thick dirty glass of their truck to see who it was. There weren’t any Marines or soldiers in that truck, but someone was still firing. It was the chef, and one of the men from the embassy staff. Frey racked his brain to remember what that man did at the embassy, but couldn’t remember. He was a soldier now anyway.
“Get some, buddy,” Corporal Harris muttered across the open channel inside the gun truck, nodding approvingly.
Sergeant Major Sweeney’s gun truck started to pull away from its burning wingman, but suddenly a door opened and a figure jumped out into the blur and the smoke. The vehicle rode on without him while the man ran up to Betz’s burning vehicle and tugged at the front right door where the lieutenant would have been sitting.
Frey didn’t recognize the shape through the haze, but as they pulled up to the burning vehicle, he saw it was Thomas, the ambassador’s teenage son. Frey prayed quickly that Lieutenant Betz had failed to combat lock his door, just this one time. The door flew open, and Thomas Brown began pulling a semi-conscious Lieutenant Betz out of the burning vehicle. Screaming with all his might, the young man, with his rifle still slung, freed the officer and started dragging him towards rescue.
Smoke billowed out through every available escape of the burning vehicle. It would only be a few moments before the fire reached the fuel and ammo stored inside, and they needed to not be next to it when it happened. Up in the vehicle’s turret, Corporal Adams was slumped over, his face pressed against the turret’s ballistic glass. The young man Frey had carried out of the jungle just the day before lay lifeless in the turret, eyes open, staring at nothing. Frey knew that look. He had seen it. The young Marine was gone.
“Stop stop stop! Get them in right now,” Frey shouted at Barsamian. The private jumped out from behind the protection of the HMMWV’s armor and sprinted over to the teenager shielding himself and the unconscious lieutenant behind the burning wreckage of the vehicle. Barsamian knelt next to the boy who was beginning to realize the implications of what he had done and found himself unable to move. The Marine was only a few years older than the fifteen-year-old Thomas, but he got the boy moving again, and together they dragged the wounded officer into the truck. The boy and the lieutenant made six passengers, one more than the vehicle could handle, but Frey reached back and dragged the wounded officer into the vehicle’s middle. Spent brass and Lopez’s boots rained down on the wounded man, but this was the only chance they had.
Ahead of them a giant cloud of dust kicked up in a fireball. Then a second followed. Mortars, Frey thought. They had mortars in the village. They had stayed still too long. Barsamian turned back to the wreck, then crossed himself and jumped into the gun truck. Frey knew what it meant. Lieutenant Betz was the only one they were pulling out. Both the CIA analyst driving and Corpsman Bagley in the back were not coming with them.
“Let’s fucking go!” Barsamian screamed, climbing into the vehicle, tears in his eyes.
“Stay behind the smoke, catch us up,” Frey told Harris behind the wheel. The convoy was barely 200 yards away. Sergeant Major Sweeney’s vehicle had caught up, putting itself between the lumbering LMTVs and the village. Drawing what fire he could with his armored sides while he fired back towards the obscured village. Bullets flew wildly through the smoke. Whoever had been waiting in the village could no longer see the American vehicles clearly through the rainbow of smoke, and now just filled the air with bullets. Accuracy through volume. A few impacted the thick armor on the sides of Frey’s gun truck. One shattered Corporal Harris’s window, but they drove on. They would not stop.
“What the fuck is that!” a voice, Frey couldn’t tell whose, screamed over the radio. “There are fucking tanks in the water.”
What the hell?
In the front, John’s vehicle continued to pop smoke grenades to his left towards the village, obscuring them from the men inside the buildings to the north, but now, a new threat emerged on the east.
“Sir, there are fucking tanks in the water,” Private Lopez called down from the turret, and out over the river, Frey spied a half dozen armored vehicles swimming the wide creek about 700 yards to his right.
“What the fuck is happening?” Barsamian said, on the verge of exploding as he and Thomas tried to tend to Lieutenant Betz’s wounds.
“Armor right, push push push!” Frey told the convoy. The infantry fighting vehicles, a half dozen mixed BMPs, BMDs, and BTR-Ds, all Soviet-style tracked vehicles, were floating across the creek to their right. Frey watched them push the water aside, forming long menacing V’s in their wake like alligators swimming across the muddy creek.
There was no way they could fight their way through those heavily armed and armored behemoths, they had to outrun them. Frey quickly studied the terrain, and instantly pieced together what was happening.
It had been infantry in the village, and they had assumed the Americans would retreat and take up a defensive position in the brush by the creek. That is where they had put their armor. It had been waiting across the creek by the river for them to walk right into their trap. Had Denis not been with them, they would have done just that. Now the hidden armored vehicles had to move, to try to chase the fleeing Americans, and it was a game they were not prepared for.
He thought back to an old instructor he once had. If you feel the jaws closing in, attack one and break it.
A pair of 30mm autocannons erupted from the two rightmost floating vehicles, trying to find the elevation needed to hit the American vehicles. The path the Americans were on was on a slight rise over the creek, and a dirt wall shielded them from direct fire.
The creek was small enough, but the Russian vehicles still had needed to quickly seal their vehicles to get across the deeper parts. This meant firing on the move would be dangerous and inaccurate. They had to turn the entire hull to move the gun, and the American vehicles were moving too fast.
Tracers and bullets the size of beer bottles flew over the convoy. One gun jammed, but another kept firing, even as the recoil stopped the momentum of the armored behemoth and it started to founder in the water. Small flashes of light flickered on the ground, followed by giant clouds of dirt.
Grenades. The BTR-Ds had automatic grenade launchers, and they were trying to find the range. Shooting moving vehicles with subpar optics was difficult, but doing so while floating on a river was next to impossible. But it didn’t matter. If one of those rounds, or one of the 100mm cannon rounds from the other armored vehicles, hit one of them, it was all over.
Frey spotted the sole BTR-D. Not only were its grenades the only weapon that could arc its rounds over the small berm that shouldered the creek, their weapon was mounted on a pintle. They alone could also aim, even in the water.
He tried to recall the numbers in his head… a BTR-D had, what… eleven millimeters of side armor, they were about four hundred yards away, the penetration of a fifty cal with armor-piercing incendiary was…
He gave up. Now was the time to just send it.
“Lopez, hammer that BTR!” he screamed to his gunner. “Aim for the engine, pour it in.”
“Which one is a fucking BTR!” Lopez screamed into the radio.
“The one without a turret shooting grenades at us—fucking hit it right fucking now, pour it into them!”
Lopez turned the turret. Harris hadn’t slowed a bit as the young Marine above them pointed the heavy machine gun at the Russian vehicle.
“Fuck you, fuck you, motherfucker!” the young Marine screamed, pouring fire from the machine gun that generations of Americans had stood behind from the Second World War on.
Frey watched the tracers dance over the water as Lopez tried to keep the heavy gun on target. A tracer skipped off the rear armor of the BTR-D, and then the monster shuddered, white smoke pouring out of the vehicle’s rear.
“Sir, Vic One is pulling over!” Harris screamed through the noise.
Frey watched in disbelief as two men climbed out of the stopped lead vehicle and opened the trunk. They pulled a long green tube and a big green box out.
“Is that a…” Harris asked, puzzled.
“Where did they get a fucking Javelin?” Frey asked, but that was a question for later.
The armored vehicles were turning towards their escaping prey. The jaws of the bear were closing too slowly. The game had been too quick to react, and now they were getting away. If the armored tracks could get to dry land before the Americans crossed the creek, they could fire directly into them. If not, the Americans would be able to cross here and follow the road back into town closer to the bridge. They would escape. Had the Russian armor simply stayed where it had been, they would have had a free, albeit long-range, shot at the Americans as they crossed the creek. But in their aggression, they had moved, and in crossing the river themselves, they had put themselves in a worse position.
But despite their mistake, the Russian vehicles were close. The infantry in the town had not stopped them as planned, but that didn’t matter now. The tracks of the armored vehicles began to grind against the soft, silty creek bed when a stream of flame and smoke came crashing down from the heavens like the finger of God and blew apart the closest BMP to the Americans’ escape. Black smoke billowed around the pyre of twisted metal and flame.
Frey rode by and out his window saw Sergeant Patrick get up from beside the guidance system and toss the Javelin back into the HMMWV’s trunk. Both Patrick and John climbed back into the vehicle and the doors slammed shut. The chasing armored vehicles stopped, white smoke pouring from their engines. Through the clouds of rolling smoke, Frey could make out that they were turning to run. Chasing lightly armored vehicles was one thing; driving into American Anti-Tank Guided Missiles was another.
Frey’s vehicle crossed the creek. Looking back he could see the burning chaos behind him. What had to be a Russian BMP, an American HMMWV, and who knows how many dead and wounded, both enemy and civilian in the village. The entire thing, from beginning to end, had lasted maybe five minutes. Five minutes of panic and pure hell.
The HMMWV hit dry land again, and then followed the convoy back across the creek past the village. They reached the bridge in a blur, all standard radio communications gone in the chaos of the battle. As the vehicles flew across the bridge and the Lukunga River, he also wondered how many dead and wounded were in the convoy ahead of him.
“This is Two. All vehicles, status report,” he said into the radio, and waited.
The colonel threw the phone in disgust. He had expected the rest of his unit to destroy the Americans, or at least block them, but they had failed him. They had been in place, waiting for days on end for the Americans to come. The voice on the phone continued speaking but the colonel had heard enough. He had separated from the slower half of his unit a week before and told them to follow him. Instead they went to the mine they had been guarding. Like dogs returning home.
While normally this would have filled the colonel with fury, it had been fortuitous. It put them in the perfect position to block the Americans. He had sent a spy to Kalemi and his other unit to Niemba. The Americans hadn’t crossed the river. His plan was to sit on one crossing of the river while the other half of his force sat on the other. The Americans would have to meet one of his forces, and then the other could swoop in. The news a few days before about a group of Americans and a local militia clashing somewhere south of them had reinvigorated his resolve, so they had waited for the Americans to come. And come they had, right into the arms of the colonel’s ambush.
But his men had failed. While they had managed to destroy one American vehicle, they lost one of their own precious armored BMPs in return, plus the one BTR that had been damaged, and over a dozen men. With the war raging outside of this tiny corner of the globe, who knew how long it would be before they could get replacements.
The colonel had made one of the men go inspect the destroyed American vehicle to try to identify the bodies, but everything in the American vehicle had burned down to the metal.
He hoped, but knew his man wasn’t in that vehicle.
The colonel looked at the map. He was south of Kalemie on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and the Americans were to his north-west. They had set up a defensive position here along the N5 where they would be out of sight, but now it would take time to pack up and move north. He could see by now their destination was Rwanda. It had to be. North of them was the rebellion, and then the hell of South Sudan. The only available place for them to run was north-east to friendly Rwanda.
His finger traced south from the Rwandan border along the narrow coast road and reached a gap in the mountains through which the Americans would have to cross. He peered at the map closer. The town was called Lulimba. The Americans would have to pass through here, and once they were on this road, there could be no escape. He either had to beat them to the pass, or catch them from behind on the road. He still had options.
