No Praskoviya. We cleared the whole house, ripped up carpet, beat on walls, nothing. He was in the wind.Vodka is a luxury we have. Caviar is a luxury we have.
TIME IS NOT
I threw the TV across the room cussing. I pointed to Moon Man, “Call command, tell them the target is in the wind.” I started for the back room, “And that we’re searching the house for intel.” I turned as I walked, “Everyone look for anything useful.”
I walked back into the study and stopped, wiping my forehead with the palm of my hand; we had to find some intel on the man, or this was an absolute waste. I just didn’t know where to begin. I walked over to the computer and wiggled the mouse and to my surprise, the screen came to life. There was an alert box, in Russian. I yelled into the other room, ignoring the fact that I had a radio attached to my head, “Hey, does anyone read Russian?”
After a few moments, in walked Odin, “Da, whatcha need boss.”
I smiled, “Why didn’t I think of asking you from the outset?” He shrugged and walked over to the computer. I’ve been doing special forces work for a long time since the events I’m writing about here. In that time, I’ve worked with a lot of different operators, and none have been of the quality of Odin. He and I have kept in touch over the years, and at 75 years old he was still the most lethal man I knew until a fall took him out of the game a year ago from this writing. Even though he’s now retired I still won’t give his name because there are a lot of people who would want pay back for the mayhem he’s caused over the years. Even though his legs were broken in the fall, he’s back to running and kept in shape by working his upper body. Ladies, if you’re looking for a man who likes 10 mile runs along the beach, quality time with his girl Mona (his 1911 .45), and bird watching (along with neighbor, stranger, and mailman watching) have I got a man for you.
Odin muttered to himself as he read the alert, “It’s saying it failed to shut down because outlook did not close properly.”
I looked at him, “Can you pull up outlook?”
Odin slid the mouse to ‘no’ and moved the cursor to the outlook button on the toolbar. After navigating through a few prompts, the email came up. He started reading through the most recent, “There’s one here from some government official.” He keyed his mic, “Hey Munky, report to the study, we need your expertise.”
Munky walked in, took one look at the Russian on the screen, and said, “Sorry guys, I don’t speak Russian.”
Odin waved his hand, “You don’t need to, I speak Russian so you just need to tell me what to do.”
Munky smiled, “Computers are very specific, you would need to read and speak fluent Russian to be able to make it work.”
Odin gave him a flat bone chilling look, “я действительно говорю на русском языке, Вы поднимаете отверстие”
Munky just stared at him for a moment, “Ok, I’m just going to go ahead and assume that you insulted me in Russian, and that we’re good to work on the computer.”
Odin nodded and then sat down, “So what we need is to remove pertinent intelligence from this computer. Whatever flash drives you need, we’ll just transfer the files over.”
Munky smiled slyly, “That is entirely more work than I feel like doing when we can just take the drive with us.”
Odin looked back, “Oh. Well then, let me print this email.” He hit print and a laserjet spit out the paper. Munky pulled the hard drive while Odin read over the paper.
I finally got impatient, “Odin, what’s the email say.”
He looked up from the paper like he’d been pulled out of deep thought, “Huh? Right, uh, there is a girls school about a klik northeast of here, Praskoviya was instructed to go there and await evac.”
I nodded and was moving through the house, “right, with any luck, the evac got held up and they’re still there.” I called on the com, “Team, rally at the trucks.” Moon Man came out of a side room as I passed, “Moon Man get on coms and order eyes on the school 1 K to the northeast, advise we are enroute.”
Everyone arrived at the trucks at about the same time as I stepped onto the bed of one, “Intel says Praskoviya might be at a school nearby, so that’s where we’re going.”
Moon man held up a hand as he listened to his radio, “Command says the only eyes available are on an AC-130, but it’ll be a few minutes before it can get eyes on, it’s swinging back into the AO now. Intel from Guardrail, however, does support an evac of HVTs in progress.”
I circled my hand in the air, “Let’s roll.”
Everyone loaded into their respective trucks and we pulled away from the house. I stood in the back of the lead truck keeping eyes open for hostiles. The ride was a little bumpy, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Suddenly, we turned a corner and we could see a helo lifting away from a school with a wall surrounding and a large iron gate. I bent down, “RAM IT! WE NEED TO GET IN THERE!”
Devil nodded and stepped on the gas, prompting me to sit against the tailgate and brace for impact. We screamed away from the other trucks as the engine on our little Toyota redlined. The gates loomed larger and larger as the guards finally noticed us and started shooting until it was almost too late to get out of the way, diving clear as we smashed through the gate at almost 80 miles per hour, devil locking the wheels and swinging the back end around with the truck skidding sideways.
And then I was throwing myself out of the bed of the truck on the side not facing the school and opening fire on the gate guards. Due to Munkys size, he was able to slide out of Devils side with no trouble, and the two of them joined the fray as the rest of our team rolled through the gates at a slightly more sane 40 MPH. More screeching tires, and the whole team had dismounted from the vehicles.
“Alpha 2, Alpha1, cover our advance, we’re going in the front, Bravo, flank left and enter on the side.” And with that we were charging for the front entrance as Odin, Moon Man, and Priest gathered around their truck so they could just use the ammo there and started shooting anything the popped up in the building.
If you’ve never seen a soldier charge a position while trying to stay under the line of fire, it’s funny. Not the line of fire, but the running. Picture a man with about 50 extra lbs of crap draped across his body, leaning forward so far that if he were still he would fall over, now put him at a full tilt sprint while trying to keep his weapon in play, but out of the way.
As we ran forward, I saw out of the corner of my eye Munky with his sidearm in one hand and a grenade in the other. We broke for the edges of the door and as I slammed into cover I saw the grenade fly through the door as Munky slammed into the door jamb yelling, “FLASH OUT!”
The flash went off and I was through the door as Munky swung his AC-556 back into action and followed. We entered into a lobby area, the office was off to the left, the mess was to the right, and about 10 meters down the lobby narrowed to a hallway that cut to the left. I swept the room as I cut right through the door: 5 guys, all blind and deaf, setup behind tables, in doorways, laid on the floor with supported weapons. Devil barely made it through the door, cutting right like me, when one of the MGers found his trigger and started firing through the doorway.
Since he was blind-firing I decided that he posed less threat than the man who was standing from behind a table sweeping the room. He saw me sighting down on him and tried to dive away, too late, and three rounds tore into his chest and left shoulder, at the very least incapacitating him. Munky, who’d cut left toward the office, swung right and unleashed five rounds into the prone MGer. Devil, who had his M16 on semi-auto, was sweeping from right to left squeezing the trigger at regular intervals, sighting on everything he could. 10 seconds and half a mag from each of us later and the whole ordeal was over. “CLEAR!”
BANG, BANG. Devil took two in the chest as I swept for the shooter: there, the first tango I engaged had a pistol in his right hand, a makarov, and was lying on the floor peeking around the table. Munky and I saw him and the same time and dumped the rest of our mags into him. There wasn’t much left of his head or shoulders. On reflex as I spun to Devil, I switched mags.
Munky keyed up his mic to give the ‘man down’ as I dropped to my knees next to Devil Driver. “Devil, you good?”
Devil Driver, who had stumbled back in surprised and slid down the wall, nodded, “I’m up, got the vest, Kevlar stopped it.” And with that he climbed to his feet.
I rolled back onto my heels and stood keying my mic, “We’re all up, lobby’s clear. Alpha 2, move up, bring some extra mags too, out.”
After a few moments and some flash grenades on the roof, Alpha 2 walked through the entrance. I motioned for Alpha 2 to join us and we went down the hall kicking in classroom doors along the way, all of them clear, one at the end holding a few government log books. We grabbed them and moved on. There were stairs at the end of the hall leading up to the roof. Where we heard fresh gunfire.
I keyed up my mic, “Bravo, where are you, over?”
After a moment, Big Dog came on comm with the chatter of gunfire in the background, “On the roof, east end. there’s about 16 guys up here, we’re holding them at bay, but we can’t move. Over”
“Roger that, we’re at stairs leading up on the west end. Moving to support. Over”
We walked over to the stairs and just as we entered the stairwell, we saw two Pakistani soldiers enter coming down.