True Faith and Allegiance

42

This Iraqi village hadn’t been much, probably just a few thousand had lived here before the war, but now it was nothing more than a battle-scarred wound built into the hills. A wasteland of destruction, just a dozen kilometers northeast of Mosul, it had been abandoned by ISIS the day before, and now twenty-two-year-old commander Beritan Nerway led her all-female platoon carefully through the streets on the northern side of the town, their wire- or wooden-stocked Kalashnikovs at their shoulders They slowly picked their way through the broken stones in their boots and tennis shoes.

These women were Kurds from the YPJ, an abbreviation in Kurdish for Women’s Protection Unit. They were a rebel force, not part of the Peshmerga, although they fought the same foe.

Beritan was a nom de guerre; her real name was Daria. She gave herself the war name of Beritan in honor of Kurdish female battalion commander Beritan, who led seven hundred male and female troops during the Kurdish civil war in 1992 and threw herself off a cliff when she ran out of ammunition.

Kurdish women had a long history of fighting, but never more so than over the past three years fighting ISIS. They’d helped push them back out of this town the afternoon before: over a wide canal they’d watched from their forward positions as trucks and tanks and technicals escaped, heading back into the suburbs of Mosul, fewer than twenty kilometers south.

But by the time of the enemy pullout it was too dark to cross the canal to move into the town, so the YPJ waited till daylight to send in troops to check through what was left. Now several platoons like Beritan’s, male and female alike, were picking through the rubble to make certain ISIS had not booby-trapped the buildings or the roads, or even left forces behind to slow the YPJ’s advance in this small section of the war.

Beritan knew there could be danger around any corner, a tank tucked into any alley or a machine gun emplacement hidden in any crater or darkened window.

Her radio chirped where it was attached to her shoulder strap. One of her snipers on the far side of the canal reported possible movement in a window two blocks ahead of the YPJ position.

Beritan and her fighters all tucked behind cover on the broken street, but not before the crack of a rifle echoed in the rubble of the town and the first woman fell dead to a sniper’s bullet.

Then the gunfire seemed to come from every nook and cranny of the broken buildings.

Beritan and her unit of forty were cut off from other forces and supported only by mortars and DShK machine guns back at the YPJ lines. Serious firepower, but firepower that needed good targeting information.

Targeting information they weren’t getting through their binoculars.

Beritan realized she and her women would have to climb up from their cover and expose themselves to press the fight to the ISIS snipers.

Fifteen kilometers to the north and five thousand feet in the air, Pyro 1–1 and Pyro 1–2, two Apache helicopters, circled in a wide racetrack pattern. They were in the area in support of a nearby coordinated attack by Peshmerga forces supported by U.S. Special Forces and a JTAC, a Joint Terminal Attack Controller, a soldier on the ground with the ability to call in support from artillery fires and rotary-wing and fixed-wing assets in the area.

So far the Peshmerga advance had not been met with any resistance; they’d walked into a town picked clean and abandoned by ISIS, so the pair of Apaches circling in the desert had had little to do but listen in on the four radio frequencies in their ears as they flew around.

Both of the Apache AH-64E Guardian aircraft had plenty of fuel today. Right now they circled at endurance speed, seventy knots, giving them more time in the air in case they were needed to the south.

Captain Carrie Ann Davenport mentally tuned out the four radio frequencies broadcasting in her ears and spoke to CWO Troy Oakley through the permanently open intercom between the two of them, negating the need to push any buttons to transmit to each other. He was seated only six feet behind and above her in the cockpit, but out of her view except through a small mirror over her head on the door frame.

She glanced at it and said, “I remember learning at Fort Rucker that each flight hour of the Apache, even if we’re just hanging out like this, costs thirty grand.”

Oakley said, “Thirty-two thousand, five hundred fifty dollars, ma’am.”

She laughed over her mic. “Then this is an expensive sightseeing flight.”

“If you see any sights, do let me know. Just looks like undulating dirt as far as the eye can see.”

The captain replied, “Don’t worry. At the rate things are going, the fighting will be in Mosul in another month. My guess is we’ll have plenty to see there.”

“Yeah, like SAMs corkscrewing right up at us. I imagine that will be a lively time for us both.”

“And then when we win,” she said, “we just hand the city over to the Iraqi government.”

“Do you want it, ma’am?”

“Ha, no, thanks. I just mean I bet the Iraqis will run it like crooks.”

Oakley chuckled into his mic. “If history is any guide, yes. But good ol’ corruption like you see in the rest of the world, around here anyway, is a major step up from the current conditions.”

Carrie Ann Davenport replied, “Roger that. Stealing money from the state coffer is a shit thing to do, but the local government is choppin’ off people’s heads now. We aren’t helping to turn the place into a bastion of truth and justice, but we are making it a little better, I guess.”

The young woman had become something of a cynic regarding the fighting here. She had no illusions Iraq would turn into a democratic nation, but she certainly did see the logic in uprooting ISIS as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And there was something else she was feeling today. The excitement of going home. This was her last flight before two weeks’ leave, and while she would spend roughly thirty percent of her leave either getting home or traveling back to Iraq, she’d have more than a week of family, friends, and whatever the hell she wanted to do, wear, eat, drink, or say.

After three months of life at a forward operating base, she couldn’t wait.

Carrie Ann spoke through the intercom. “I don’t know about you, Oak, I’m kinda looking forward to getting a little break from flying these unfriendly skies.”

“Just thinking the same thing. Seventy-two hours from now I’m going to be in my backyard with a beer, two kids crawling all over me, and a wife who isn’t sick of me being home just yet. That’s as close to paradise as it gets for an old dude like me. How ’bout you? Any big plans for your leave, ma’am?”

The undulating landscape raced by below at seventy-five knots while Oakley and Davenport both thought about home.

“I’ll just hang out in Cleveland most of the time with my folks, but I’m going to D.C. for the weekend to see some friends and go to a party. Should be fun. And then, just about the time I finally get the smell of JP8 out of my skin, I’ll turn around and head back here.”

Oak said, “I’ve got to build a swing set. And according to Carla, the kids already took some of the pieces out of the box the thing came in, so you can guaran-damn-tee I’ll be scrounging through my junk drawer to find—”

Just then their headsets came alive. It was the JOC, the Joint Operations Center, far behind the action back in Turkey. The call was a TIC alert, which meant troops were in contact, and then a set of coordinates. The tasking officer spoke to Pyro flight directly.

“Pyro One-One, how copy?”

“Solid copy,” said Davenport.

“We are going to hold One-Two where it is and send you to this grid. We got a call from YPJ. It’s a small unit of them pinned down by multiple snipers. That’s pretty much all we know. There is no JTAC embedded with them, so you’ll just have to evaluate the situation from above and see if you can intercede without endangering friendlies.”

Nobody liked flying into an unknown area without contact with friendlies on the ground. Carrie acknowledged the order and Oakley turned toward the location, already saved on his screen.

The captain said, “Great. Any idea what YPJ look like? I mean, I’ve seen their flag, but can you tell them apart at one hundred knots and five kilometers away?”

“Not really,” Oak confirmed.

As they approached the town from the north, they raced over the front lines of the YPJ on the north side of a wide culvert, flying at five thousand feet. Carrie Ann knew the sniper positions were somewhere a mile to the south, right inside a very congested-looking conglomeration of broken buildings that had once been a small town. She slaved the thirty-millimeter cannon to her right eye for now. With friendlies down in the area, she probably wouldn’t use rockets, and her load-out of six Hellfires meant she’d have to be choosy about using a missile on an individual with a rifle, although she wouldn’t hesitate to do so as long as there were TICs, or troops-in-contact.

The cannon was accurate to within three meters, good but not perfect, but she could fire ten or twenty rounds at a burst and nail anything she could see with its dual-purpose shells— armor-piercing for light-armor targets, and high explosive as an area weapon.

There was a five-inch-square multipurpose display screen on each side of the central control bank. On these she could choose the TADS, the target acquisition and designation sight, or she could text message with other helos, bring up comms, fuel, and load-out information, or access any of more than 1,500 pages of info in all. A keyboard on the left side of the control bank allowed her to type messages, and even though she wore gloves, she’d gotten as adept at using it as she was at texting on her own cell phone.

Her hands rested on the two video game — like console handholds on either side of her center console, giving her quick access to all her most important controls. She’d been told there were 443 different positions to all the dials, switches, and knobs, and she knew every one of them.

On top of this, she had all the flight controls Oakley had behind her; the cyclic between her knees, the collective by her left knee.

By slaving the weapon to her right eye and looking at the target, she only had to reach down to the cyclic and squeeze the weapon’s release trigger to fire the cannon at whatever she was looking at.

She looked down at the multipurpose screen displaying her target acquisition and designation sight by her right knee, desperately searching for any danger. This gave her access to several cameras in a mobile turret below her. Through the 127-times magnification of the TV camera, she saw an enhanced black-and-white view of whatever she was looking at. Also on the screen she could see crosshairs that showed her where Oakley’s right eye was pointed.

She looked through her thermal view, hoping to pick up human forms in the dark recesses of the bombed-out buildings, but the heat of the day on twisted metal made this a futile task. Sure, they could sit there over the town and she could take her time, but Oak wanted to keep them moving at speed to make it difficult to nail them from below with an RPG, so Carrie Ann just had seconds to scan on any one building, street, or bomb crater.

“Ma’am,” Oakley said, “I’ve got troops, on the road just off our nose. Tucked into the east and west side of the street.”

Davenport looked on the TADS to see Oakley’s crosshairs. She moved her own eye to it and it showed her the 127-times magnification of the street.

There, at least two dozen figures, all with rifles, were shooting at something in a row of buildings to the south.

Oakley increased the magnification. “Chicks. Those are chicks. I didn’t think the Kurdish female soldiers ever got in the fight.”

Davenport said, “The Peshmerga don’t let their females get on the front lines. But YPJ have female units that see combat.”

Oakley asked, “Are we supposed to be helping the YPJ?”

The captain in the front seat just shrugged and said, “We’re helping ourselves if we kill an ISIS sniper. If the Kurdish rebels happen to benefit from our fight, then lucky them.”

“That’s what I like about you, Captain. You can simplify the unsimplifiable.”

“And I like how you make up words, Oak.”

They flew high over the YPJ fighters, who seemed completely pinned down, but even when Oakley circled the entire engagement below counterclockwise, neither he nor Captain Davenport was able to discern any targets. The broken buildings had too many positions from which a sniper could fire, and the recesses were so deep, it would take incredible luck for the Apache above to see anything, even with its TADS.

Oak said, “How about we go down to two thousand. We might get lucky and see somebody popping out to take a shot at us.”

“As low as you need,” came the response.

A minute later they were at 1,200 feet, directly above the YPJ fighters. It appeared even the female rebel unit had stopped receiving fire now, because they just remained hunkered down in groups of three or four along the street.

Oakley said, “Nobody’s shooting at us, or them. Hopefully the YPJ will take the hint and use our presence to back out of here.”

Carrie Ann replied, “Wish we could scare away the bad guys with our presence, but usually they just shoot—”

Just then, a flash came from the third-floor window of a ruined building up the street. While Carrie Ann couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a YPJ fighter, the indicators were good that it was not when the YPJ began firing back and dust kicked up around the concrete window frame.

She slaved her crosshairs to the window. “I’m identifying that as a sniper position. Engaging with cannon.”

A twenty-round burst from the cannon below Carrie Ann’s feet ripped into the window and sent high-explosive thirty-millimeter shells into the sniper’s hide.

The YPJ below cheered, she could see them on her screen, and then they began engaging another dark recess, this one on a building on the east side of the street. Oakley and Davenport both could see the dust and concrete kicking off the hole in the side of the wall.

Oakley said, “They are marking targets for you, ma’am.”

“Got it,” she said. “Engaging.”

She pressed the fire button on her cyclic and sent ten more rounds into the hole. Again the women 1,200 feet below raised their hands and waved at the helo above.

“They’ve got the idea!” Oakley said.

Carrie Ann had trouble getting her shells into a third target, a wrecked building under a collapsed rooftop parking lot. She could even see flashes of sniper fire coming out through the darkness, but whoever was shooting in there must have been a hundred feet or more back under the building, and from her elevation she hadn’t been able to reach the sniper.

She had Oakley descend at the north end of the street, and they set up a rocket run just above rooftop level. He slaved her crosshairs to his, flew a steady heading on her target designation, and picked up speed.

Only five hundred yards from the target, Carrie Ann launched rockets right into the deep, cavelike hide of the sniper. The rockets broke apart a couple hundred yards in front of the Apache, and released 650 flechette rounds, tungsten darts that raced forward into the wreckage and destroyed everything in their path, creating a shock wave that collapsed the rest of the structure.

“Good hit,” Oakley said, and then he pulled the nose of his Apache up and began climbing over the town.

Just on the other side of the buildings to the south of the YPJ, they flew over a medium-sized town-square area, with a mosque at its southern end. Oakley was just about to turn to head back to continue the cover for the YPJ, when Captain Davenport’s voice came over the intercom.

“Shit!” Carrie Ann said. “ZPU!” The ZPU was a 14.5-millimeter Soviet-era antiaircraft weapon that could fire six hundred rounds a minute.

As soon as the words left her mouth, big fast-moving tracer rounds painted the sky in front of them, just over the square.

“Hang on!” Oakley pulled Pyro 1–1 over his right shoulder, lifting it and flipping it, turning the armored belly into the threat. Carrie Ann grabbed the handles above her but still her body was pulled tight in her harness.

While their seats were all but bulletproof from below, anything that hit above shoulder height might get through if it was more powerful than a fifty-caliber round, and both Oakley and Davenport were always aware that a lucky shot on the tail rotor, forty feet behind where Davenport sat over the nose of the aircraft, could send them both spinning to their deaths.

He jinked left and right while he increased speed to 185 knots, and they raced out of the line of sight on the weapon.

They headed north back over the street, and saw the YPJ women were on their feet for the first time since the Apache arrived. They were slowly moving to the south.

Davenport said, “Holy crap, Oak. That was close.”

Oakley confirmed: “Yeah, did you see the gun emplacement?”

“Affirmative. The way it was positioned in that square between all those high buildings around means we’d have to get right on top of it again to take it out. Better we call for a fast mover.”

Carrie Ann radioed the JOC and requested an aircraft with Hellfires or bombs be sent to destroy the enemy gun emplacement. An F/A-18 could launch from twenty thousand feet, well above the range of the ZPU, while Pyro 1–1 had to fly a few thousand feet directly overhead to see it in the rubble of the town.

While they waited for an answer, Carrie Ann found another two-man ISIS sniper team in her TADS. It was half a block beyond where the YPJ were moving, and Oakley set up a run-in on her targeting point. She fired four rockets, launching thousands of flechette rounds at a half-collapsed building with three levels of dark recesses. This time they banked as soon as they fired, keeping themselves far away from the mosque and the square with the Russian antiair weapon.

On their next pass the camera showed the sniper position, and it was obvious that the two men there had been torn into tiny pieces.

“Delta Hotel,” Oakley said. Direct Hit.

Just then the JOC came back over the net. “Negative on the fast movers, Pyro One-One. No resources available.”

Carrie Ann acknowledged the transmission, then spoke just for the benefit of her cockpit intercom. “These YPJ below us aren’t getting much help.”

“They’re getting us. You know we can leave that ZPU, but that weapon can be fired down a street just as easily as it can be fired at us. Those women will walk into that square within twenty minutes from now, and they will get nailed.”

Carrie Ann thought it over. “Let’s do a run-in from the south, circle the whole town at low level so no spotters can figure out what we’re doing. We can try to hit that gun from behind.”

“Hellfire?”

“Affirm, but we’ll have to get closer than I’d like because I have to laze the weapon.”

“Copy all. It’s going to take four mikes to circle the city. Let’s just hope the YPJ stay put.”

Carrie Ann said, “That’s why I’m not using rockets. Hitting that square from the south will throw flechettes northward up those streets and through any breaks in the buildings. Too much chance of blue on blue.”

They rounded the small town of rubble at an altitude of just two hundred feet, flying as fast as Oak could get his aircraft to go, and with both sets of eyes scanning the sky and the TADS looking for other dangers.

She set up her fire-control system to choose a Hellfire on her right pylon, and she slaved its camera to her MPD by her right knee. For now she just saw the buildings passing by below, but once they got line of sight on the gun, she’d be able to fly it via the camera, right into the target.

Four minutes later they shot at 185 knots over the town from the south. They’d seen the smoke from a couple of rifles shooting at them on their way, but nothing like the ZPU ahead. While Oakley was focused on flying straight and level and fast, Davenport was flashing her eyes between her Hellfire cam and her TADS, looking ahead through the town for the mosque.

Finally she said, “Do you see the minaret?”

“Got it,” Oakley replied with confidence. “Taking you up, then down.”

They climbed quickly, getting more altitude and allowing the Hellfire to fire down into the square, hopefully hitting the ZPU still facing to the north.

Oakley added, “You are going to have to make this work. We’re not going to get another shot at this because they’ll figure out what we’re trying to do.”

“I need six hundred fifty meters’ line of sight to laze the target and put the Hellfire on my tag. Give me six-fifty.”

Oakley climbed to five thousand feet, and then pushed the cyclic forward, sending the nose down. Carrie Ann went weightless, lifting up into her straps, but she kept her finger on her fire button and her eyes on the TADS.

When she saw the square below her she looked to the point where they’d stumbled onto the ZPU fifteen minutes earlier. It was still there, but in the process of turning around.

Oakley said, “They’ve seen us.”

Carrie Ann kept her voice calm. “Press the attack. I’m lazing.” An invisible beam left Pyro 1–1 and shot forward, striking the Russian 14.5-millimeter gun. She pressed the trigger on the cyclic, and a Hellfire dropped off the pylon and launched forward. “Missile away.”

Oakley kept his ship aimed at the wrecked town below, and shot lower and lower, flying behind the much faster Hellfire missile. Davenport had to keep the laser locked on the weapon until the moment of impact, lest the missile lose its acquisition of the target.

The problem was the Apache was flying right into the potential blast radius of the explosion. Oakley would have to wrench the helo hard to keep them from hitting debris once the Hellfire struck.

“Three seconds,” Carrie Ann said. And then, “Impact!”

Oak pulled hard on the collective and banked to the left, all but spinning the fifty-foot-long machine sideways above the square.

The ZPU exploded into thousands of pieces, killing the entire gun crew in the process, Carrie Ann’s gun camera footage would later confirm.

For now, however, the two hot, sweaty, and exhausted helicopter crew left the town, heading back to the north, hoping they’d done enough for the group of female fighters climbing over the broken rubble toward the south and, eventually, toward Mosul.