Red Metal

CHAPTER 64

The woods were spotty but dense with a tangle of vines and thickets. Mostly low scrub, but plenty of moderate trees to make visibility of Ethiopia’s Highway 80 difficult from here, five hundred meters to the east.

The Kaskazi winds blew constant dry air from the Persian Gulf across the sixty-one able-bodied men of the 13th Dragoons, and the sun baked any exposed skin as they sat there in the scrub of southern Ethiopia, swatting at mosquitoes and flies for more than two hours while awaiting the Russian column. They’d shooed off a group of curious tribesmen who’d approached on foot without a shred of fear of the heavily armed men, and a herd of ibex goats ambled through their position slowly, providing a humorous distraction.

Apollo and his men had planted explosives, all they had, on the highway, but also in the gullies and under dirt paths along it. The terrain was channelizing, and unless the Russians found the explosives before they got to them, they were going to be inconvenienced with the destruction of some of their lead elements and slowed by the need to check the area carefully before proceeding with the main column.

The lead units of the southbound column arrived in early afternoon. Apollo waited until the first four vehicles were directly in his kill zone before ordering the initiation of the first of the explosives. Four more BTRs, another platoon, raced up to protect their comrades, firing wildly in all directions. The Russians dismounted and Apollo detonated the rest of the charges.

It was a cold tactic, obliterating the response force. He’d seen it used to horrific effect by the insurgents in Afghanistan. But he also knew he could expect the exact same treatment from the Russians.

The Dragoons ran to their vehicles and raced south. Right now they were the only thing standing in the way of the brigade of Russians and they weren’t going to get many more free ambushes like that one. The plan was to keep up the hit-and-run as long as they could until help arrived or they were told to quit.

He pulled out his satellite phone, first looking for a call from his father; when he saw no calls, he contacted the Hexagone Balard, the French Pentagon.

Five minutes later he disconnected the call, a little smile on his face. He’d been told to hit the Russians one more time and then contact a contingent of U.S. Marines who were now heading north through Kenya, planning their own harassing action against the Russian column.

American Marines are coming to join the fray. It’s about time.

He decided to fall back to the border city of Moyale and try to take out a few more pieces of enemy armor to slow them down before contacting his new allies in the fight.

The radio came alive in Colonel Kir’s ears, pulling him out of the most restful few minutes of sleep he’d managed in a day. It was Colonel Nishkin, commander of 1st Regiment, some two hours ahead of the headquarters element. After his spearhead elements were attacked and destroyed passing the Yabelo Wildlife Sanctuary three hours earlier, he’d managed to press on toward Moyale at the border.

And now he was unclear on his orders.

He didn’t explicitly say that over the radio, of course, but Kir inferred as much when Nishkin said he wanted to take “an operational security halt,” to let his men stretch their legs and top off their fuel tanks.

General Lazar had been standing up in the open top hatch of the BTR — he heard the call himself — and he squatted down next to Colonel Kir.

“Ah, old 1st Regiment. What do you think, Kir? Are they lost?”

Kir lowered the scarf that had been keeping dust out of his throat. “Perhaps, sir. We should give him permission to halt.”

“But if we do, we either require everyone to halt, which wastes time, or we continue driving and risk collapsing the distances between the regiments and bunching up, which will make us a juicy target for any Western friends flying around above us.”

“What do you want me to tell him, sir?”

“I want you to think, Kir. What do you think we should do?”

“Well… I would say, we tell him to push onward. Deny his request. Tell him we have no time, and if he halts, he will likely be attacked.”

“He is still lost, Dmitry. If he rushes forward now, he will only become more lost.”

Kir thought a moment. “Perhaps tell him to use his damn GPS or even his compass.”

Lazar gave a warm belly laugh at this. “Tempting, but that will do nothing but drive him off the radio. How about we just show some patience and coach him through his problem? We tell him he has only ten minutes to pause, and then remind him the sun is the correct direction of travel. He need only follow it to get out of the mountains and into Kenya.”

Kir nodded thoughtfully. “Da… da, sir. That is the better response. If we get him to slow down for a few minutes, he will find his way, and it will be good for him to know he has our trust to continue.”

“Good. Now send that transmission, but tell 1st Regiment to be more cautious. According to the map, Moyale is a tricky city to navigate. If I were a Yankee, I would confirm our routing by watching a regiment pass through Moyale; then I would hit the follow-on regiment. I would hope to spread discord by attacking the center of our advance.”

“Sir… how can you know that?”

“Just my feeling, Colonel Kir. Tell 2nd Regiment to use the ten minutes to ensure his ZSU radars are up and ready.”

“But what if we are wrong?”

“Then we are wrong and 2nd Regiment wastes a few minutes and they are more prepared for air defense. Also, when you tell Colonel Nishkin he has ten minutes, I know he will actually take thirty. Either way, we will be prepared if the regiments bunch up in Moyale.”

Colonel Kir grabbed the radio and delivered the orders to 1st Regiment. He received Colonel Nishkin’s acknowledgment immediately. Kir was about to send the transmission to 2nd Regiment when he stopped, then looked back up at his boss. Lazar stared back down at him through the hatch. He smiled and winked at Kir, then stood up high in the turret, lost to Kir’s view and into the whirling dust outside the vehicle.

The old son of a bitch. He knows the battlefield because he knows his men and he knows the enemy. Lazar has spent over forty years being both the hunted and the hunter.

Kir replaced the scarf around his mouth, choking on dust and marveling at his boss’s intuition, then pulled the scarf down and transmitted the instructions to 2nd and 1st Regiment.

Connolly’s force had been racing south, but they stopped to refuel on the highway, and the commanders took advantage of the break to check in with the Boxer. Connolly moved through the throngs of vehicles and men on the road surrounded by vast, open desert, searching for Lieutenant Colonel Eric McHale.

Dan Connolly had known the regimental operations officer for twenty years. They had been together at Marine Corps Officer Candidate School and even graduated in the same Infantry Officer course, but as was usually the case in the service, they hadn’t had much time to get together in the intervening years. Career and family got in the way, usually in that order, and though the Corps was the smallest of the four U.S. military services, the two men had lost touch until now.

He worried McHale might be thinking he was trying to steal his job. Connolly was “Nick the New Guy” with this unit, and as such it was assumed he would keep his mouth shut. But Connolly was also here on a pressing mission, so it was crucial to him that he establish an amicable relationship with McHale from the start.

“Hey, man, hope I’m not getting in your way,” said Connolly as the two men busied themselves putting up a long-range antenna.

“Hell no, brother,” said McHale. “You’re value added. Having a direct dial to the top and a shot at this mission is more than we could have asked for. If you hadn’t pieced together all this crap, we’d be cutting Gator Squares up in the Gulf.” “Gator Squares” meant Marines on a ship at sea, sailing endlessly in a tight patrol sector and awaiting action.

Every Marine’s worst nightmare.

Connolly said, “Any way I can help, I’m here for you.”

Sergeant Casillas called out from the back of the LAV now. “Lieutenant Colonel Connolly, sir? There’s a French officer on the radio for you. Says it’s an emergency.”

“French officer?” Connolly looked at the colonel, who shrugged. “Okay, put him through to my station.”

Caster and McHale came over to listen in as Connolly got up in a seat next to the radios.

Casillas hit a switch on the communications board in the LAV–C2. “Okay, sir, toss on a crew helmet, flip the switch, and you’re all set.”

“Do we have a call sign for this guy?”

“He said it was Apollo, sir. Could be a unit call sign. Dunno.”

Connolly put on the helmet as instructed, then flipped the switch. “Call sign Apollo, call sign Apollo. This is Marine Task Force Grizzly — do you receive me?”

McHale climbed in through the back hatch of the cramped vehicle and sat next to Connolly. He plugged in one of the speakers so everyone could hear the radio broadcast.

“Allo, Marines. This is French special forces captain Apollo Arc-Blanchette. We have made contact with a sizable Russian force. Do you copy?”

“Good copy, Captain.”

“Bon. My government has told me to get in touch with a man named Colonel Daniel Connolly. We have taken some casualties and request assistance. We wish to collapse into your perimeter. Can you comply?”

“Sounds like his name is Apollo,” said Connolly. McHale nodded and pulled out a notebook.

“Roger, Apollo. I receive you loud and clear. Can you give us a grid location for your casualties?” Connolly glanced at McHale, who nodded his approval. All NATO services treated one another’s casualties as if they were their own.

Apollo called in his current location, a spot just southwest of Moyale, on the Kenyan-Ethiopian border. Connolly acknowledged and said he’d get right back to him and to stay close to his radio.

“What do you think, sir?”

McHale said, “Find out how many men he’s got and we’ll spin up and go get them. We’ll have helos from the Boxer brought up.” The regimental operations officer added, “Dan, you want to lead the group to fly in? You can get intel from him on the way back. I’ve got to keep us pushing south.”

“Absolutely,” Connolly replied, and he brought the radio back to his mouth.

Captain Raymond “Shank” Vance climbed out of the truck and stumbled into a snowbank along the road, accidentally reaching out with his bad arm to arrest his fall. He was rewarded with a jolt of pain in his hand even though he landed in nothing firmer than wet snow. He was helped back to his feet by a young militia member.

The younger man brushed the snow off Shank’s coat.

“What was it like?”

“What was what like?” Shank asked.

“Getting shot down.”

Shank had been trying not to think about it all, although it came back to him every few minutes. He said, “It sucked.”

Paulina appeared in front of him with a radio in her hand. She used it to point to a faraway rolling pasture, a vista at least a mile distant and a mile wide.

She said, “Russians will be here in three hours. Only way east to stay out of city to north and not cross river to south.” Then she added, “You get planes.”

Shank shook his head. “We need to know what frequency the aircraft are operating on. I need to know what the AT is for the day and what sortie we’re on. I mean, if there are even any A-10s up.”

“No planes?” A look of disappointment crossed her otherwise emotionless face.

He sighed. “We’ll figure something out. I kind of thought you had some resources, or were dialed into the NATO AT cycle, or something.”

“What you need?” she asked, a tone of frustration in her voice. He realized she and her group of about forty militia were effectively working alone.

Well, he asked himself, what did I expect? A well-coordinated ground unit?

This was the fucking civilian militia.

“If I had a NATO or U.S. UHF radio, maybe I could raise someone on the guard net.”

Paulina turned away and walked off to one of the other vehicles. She returned a moment later and handed a wooden-stocked AK-47 to the American pilot.

Shank took it and slung it over his back. He’d fired an AK only once before, when he was goofing off in Afghanistan, and had no real training on the weapon.

“Okay, radio is coming. We make a camp here.”

Shank followed her into the woods and immediately saw why the Poles had picked this site. They were actually on an escarpment that looked over a broad and open vista. But this prominence was the only one, which told Shank that if they were going to ambush the Russians from here, the Russians would put together very quickly what piece of ground the militia was using to overwatch their movements.

He thought for a moment about suggesting they move to a lesser hill, but he didn’t see any other options. Besides, the immediate concerns were to get a radio and try to dial up someone — anyone — who might be scouting above.

Shank followed Paulina up to a position they had prepared out of a tangle of cut brush and some packed snow. There were already three Polish militia members there with a DShK, or Dushka, heavy machine gun. The barrel poked out from the brush, but otherwise it was well disguised.

The fluent English speaker who called himself Jahdek stepped up to him and handed him two different handheld radios. One was completely wrong for his needs. It looked Russian, but as Shank examined the dials, he could see from the numbers it was in the VHF range. Handy to have, but likely no one would be monitoring those nets unless instructed to do so.

The other radio was a NATO UHF. It looked like an Italian brand, but it certainly had the markings he was looking for.

“You can use?” Paulina asked.

“Yes, I think so. I doubt this thing has its encryption still encoded, but maybe I can try it.”

“What you need?” she said.

He fiddled with the dial and the knobs, and the radio came to life with the sound of static.

Jahdek stepped up to the American. “The Polish Rifles — they are another militia group. They are thirty kilometers to our west. They stopped responding on the radio. We don’t know, but maybe they were overrun by the Russians who are coming this way.”

“Shit,” Shank said, but he kept trying different radio frequencies.

“Paulina wants to set an ambush. She wants your planes to attack.”

Shank said, “I get it. I think the radio is ready, but there’s really no way to test it.”

Now Jahdek said, “She will do the ambush even if there are no planes.”

“With what? That Dushka? That’s not enough. Even for just a Russian reconnaissance unit. Their infantry carriers have heavy armor. They’ll kill you all in minutes.”

“We have more than just that Dushka.”

Paulina stepped up to the two men and pointed at the truck. “Does radio work, Mr. Shank?”

“Once we see or hear any aircraft, I will give it a try.”

“It work?” she said, not fully comprehending.

“We’ll see.”

It had to work, Shank thought to himself. This was his job. His duty. Even if he wasn’t in the cockpit himself, he could still do his part to put ordnance on targets.