Choke Point

FORTY-THREE

They emerged from the walls of dust like Celtic warriors on an early-morning battlefield –

Six men pairing off, one pair on each flank, with another dropping to cover behind a sedan whose windows had been blown apart by the mortar shell.

‘You know what they’re doing, don’t you?’ cried Naseem, pounding his foot once more on the brake pedal. ‘They’re shelling the city so they can blame it on the Republican Guard!’

After Pepper and the others were thrown forward, he shifted his aim back out the rear window and shouted again, ‘Contacts to the rear! Two on each flank. Two more behind the car!’

With that, he opened fire, pinning down the two troops behind the car while their comrades on the flanks began to move up, shouldering the walls between alcoves and then dropping to their haunches –

To open fire.

Pepper could not scream any louder for Naseem to roll the wheel and get them around the debris as rounds popped and began punching into the van’s tailgate.

At the same time, 30K braced his legs between the seat and hung out the open window, resting on his stomach so he could roll sideways and open fire, striking both troops to their right while Kozak had set down his remote and was delivering volleys of suppressing fire to the men on their left, his AK spitting out three-round bursts that sewed a jagged line in the wall above their heads, rounds ricocheting to strike a few more of the parked cars.

The van jerked hard to the right, hitting what felt like back-to-back speed bumps before the road leveled off and they cleared the debris, the piles of stone now shielding them from more incoming fire.

Pepper watched as Kozak gaped at the drone’s remote, now piping in a wide view of the city. The rapid-fire thunder of mortars was increasing. ‘Hey, boss, mortars have hit the bank, police station, even the clock tower, which is now blown to shit,’ he reported. ‘They’re starting shift fires to the north, while the troops down near the bank are engaging rebels at the roadblocks. If they keep shelling Queen Arwa Road, they’ll tear it up so much that nothing will get through. We’ll be hiking over the mountain, and we’ll never reach the port in time. Not on foot anyway.’

‘Naseem?’ called Ross. ‘Slight detour. We need to take out those mortars. Get us down to the cemetery.’

Between the dust caked on the driver’s side window and the shattered passenger’s side, Ross wondered how Naseem could see anything at all. Ross shoved himself forward, balancing his elbow on the dashboard, and reached out through the hole in the glass to begin wiping it off with his sleeve, but then Naseem cut the wheel hard left, throwing Ross back and taking them down another alley. Naseem cursed and bit his lip.

Two more buildings up the road had been shelled, the rubble blocking their path, the air filled with the scent of leaking natural gas and shattered concrete while women and children were evacuating the buildings, screaming and crying, running along the sidewalk.

Naseem threw the truck in reverse –

Just as another explosion erupted from the ground ahead and Ross didn’t need an engineering degree to know that the leaking gas had ignited.

His ears rang as Naseem swung around, rolling the wheel like a stunt driver, the van listing badly, tires squealing and burning as he hung a right at the next corner.

Allowing the man to drive had been a calculated risk — and a test. Naseem knew the city better than any of them, and if he wanted to prove his loyalty, he could do it right now, and the rebels provided plenty of opportunities to do that.

Ross shifted his attention to his Cross-Com, where the drone’s feed had been updated to show a wider overhead image of the cemetery, the mortar teams hard at work, dropping shells into the launch tubes and rolling back, the tubes flashing brilliantly like a formation of lightning bugs as the rounds arced skyward. It was an indirect fire operation as deadly as they came, turning corners of the city into piles of debris and half-buried corpses. Typical fire missions included forwarded observers who made calls for and adjusted fire on the enemy, and Ross realized now that all those ‘snipers’ they’d seen on the rooftops were actually serving double duty as FOs. There was usually a fire direction center that computed range, trajectory, and shell use info to the gunners, but Ross suspected that the teams were speaking directly to their FOs and putting fires on grid coordinates northeast, directly north, and northwest of their positions.

‘I want to come in behind them, so take us west of the mosque, get around it, then get us as close to the wall as possible. After that, we’ll move in on foot,’ Ross told Naseem.

Naseem shook his head in disbelief. ‘How will you take out ten mortar positions with just four men?’

‘What do you mean four?’ asked Ross. ‘I’m going to do it with just one.’ Ross glanced to the back seat. ‘30K? You in?’

30K grinned like a werewolf.