AMERICA ONE (2 page)

“Roger that,”
texted VIN, shutting his communicator’s protective lid and working his way back into the coolness of the cave to get some sleep.

By midnight, the team of six had moved closer to the outskirts of the town; they were now dressed in their usual U.S. military desert camouflage with backpacks full of the explosives and ammo the camel had been happy to be relieved of a couple of hours earlier.

The night was dark, and a sliver of a crescent moon gave them just enough light on the rocks and sand to backtrack their way into town without night goggles. The goggles narrowed their surrounding vision too much. The buildings were dark, and there was only the noise of a couple of barking dogs in the distance as they neared. Then they waited for the confirmation that the trucks had left.

Being several feet higher than the nearest buildings half a mile away, they could just hear the trucks grind gears as, they slowly moved down the streets towards the east. The echoes of the moving vehicles could be faintly heard over the chorus of the dozen or more dogs which now heralded their departure. On time, the message arrived from the drone looking down at them.

With the dogs now alert and noisy, they quickly entered town as the trucks left, set up position behind the car repair shop, and crowded into a dark shadow behind a small outer building. The men realized by the smell that it was an outhouse and the area in front of the small building lit up as someone stepped outside from the car repair shop’s back door to use it.

With the door still slightly ajar, the last thing the user of the outhouse saw was a dark shape and the “sput” and flash of a silenced Glock as it blew his head off. In an awkward and embarrassing position, the remains of the dead man slumped over.

Lieutenant Noble waited behind the rear wall of the outhouse for a few minutes to allow the trucks to get away from the town and then over the first brow of the terrain a mile away. Even though it was not the most pleasant of places, the outhouse kept their human smells masked from any dogs around them. Gradually the noise of the animals decreased to just one or two barking in the distance.

After several minutes, a second man exited, maybe to use the outhouse, or find out where his colleague was. This was the man VIN Noble hoped would be easy prey to take with them. As the man opened the door to the dark interior of the smelly wooden room, he felt a severe and sharp pain atop his head; and then nothing more.

“Joey, Pete, you guys get this guy back to the cave. The four of us will take care of the rest,” whispered the lieutenant to two of his men. “If we aren’t back by midday call up transport and get back to base.”

The two men nodded, one lifting the unconscious man up over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and they silently headed out of town.

Ten minutes later, and with no more men coming out of the still slightly ajar door, VIN silently went forward. He tried to peer through the small slit, and even opened it a few inches only to see that his view of the interior of the badly-lit building was interrupted by a solid four-foot “wall” of old boxes and pieces of wood haphazardly thrown near the rear door. The “wall” was about to fall over, it looked so bad. What he managed to read on the pieces of wood and the odd carton interested him; it was in what looked like Russian.

On the other side of the boxes he could hear several voices talking to each other, and he motioned for the men to ready their pistols with silencers; three of them crept through the door while the fourth man was ordered to stay outside and cover their backs.

Slowly the lieutenant rose to a semi-upright position, but kept his upper body below the line of trash so that he wouldn’t be seen. There was laughter from the other side, and so far he had heard several different voices.

Inch by inch he rose until a slit between two wooden planks gave him a view. He could see more than half a dozen men working at tables with piles of what looked like white plastic explosives and detonators. All of the men wore the local dress, but one man sounded and looked different. He was in the middle, taller than the rest, and was showing one of the locals how to put together a suicide vest: a belt of explosives to be worn under garments. The lieutenant couldn’t see more, but he already realized that with the most recent shipment, if the drone had taken out this building, there were enough explosives to blow up half the town.

He made the easy decision not to harm the surrounding civilians and knelt down to signal the two men on his left. With hand signals he motioned that when he rose to fire, the smallest man in the group, Sergeant Bradley, was to roll out from behind the “wall” into the open room and shoot to kill. Corporal Gibbs, his third-in-command would stand up with VIN and shoot from the left side inwards. He showed them with more signs that a tall man in the middle would be his target and that VIN wanted him alive. VIN would wound the man and then work from him across the right side of the group. They nodded and he counted down with three of his fingers.

VIN and Gibbs stood up, their tall six-foot frames visible a couple of feet above the wall; Sergeant Bradley rolled out on the side.

The taller man in the middle of the group, noticing movement from the back door area, looked up as a silenced bullet sliced through his right arm. For a split second Noble noticed the man’s piercing pale blue eyes as his own eyes moved along the line of men, his silenced Glock searching and hitting new targets next to the man with the blue eyes.

Suddenly there were loud screams as silenced bullets erupted from all three Glocks. Bradley, who had rolled out, shouted a warning, “Three hostages sitting in front of you! ” as he fired at anybody able to move. One of his shots hit the tall man in the left arm as he was trying to grab a machine pistol lying on the table in front of him; his arm went limp.

Lieutenant Noble, suddenly hearing shouts from an office at the front of the building, looked further into the building and saw more bodies moving. He shot three of them, and his side was complete as he turned his Glock turned towards the office window, shot, and the last man in a line of three slumped to the floor as the glass exploded into millions of pieces.

Within seconds it was all over, and the two tall marines ran around the debris and into the large open room, about a thousand square feet.

“Men escaping out the front door! Gibbs, guard this room! Bradley, move towards the front! I want those men!”

VIN and Sergeant Bradley reached the office within seconds; not one shot had been fired by the enemy. The smaller side door to the building was open as they entered the office. Bradley, a few feet in front of VIN, swiftly delivered a round into the groaning man’s leg, and rolled out the outer door into the night. There was no retaliation, but he saw two dark shapes heading down the road towards the east and out of range.

“The drone should keep them in sight; they are out of range,” he explained to VIN as the lieutenant caught up with him a second later.

“Text the drone a message” replied VIN “we should get back inside. I don’t think we have awakened many people yet. Let’s take stock.” And they re-entered the building through the brightly lit door, pulling it closed behind them.

Within minutes of the beginning of the attack, the drone directed its thermal-imaging camera onto the eastern edge of the town and found what it was looking for: two human shapes running quickly in the direction the trucks had gone earlier towards the border.

Inside was a mess. There was blood everywhere as both men reloaded with fresh magazines. Corporal Gibbs had already done so and was crouched in a corner, ready to shoot anybody that moved. He was told to cover the room while they frisked the injured man in the office. He wore the robes of a local and had died by the time they finished checking him over. Both men then looked around the small office, saw nothing of interest, and headed back to the main room.

Bradley had shot well; the three men to the left of the tall man had most of their skulls in pieces on the bloody floor. So did the three men the lieutenant had shot. There were another two bodies on the floor on the other side of the table, near the back door where Gibbs rolled and hit them the same way. The tall man was lying on the ground groaning, probably in shock and, apart from three bound and hooded people still fidgeting on chairs close to the pile of bodies, the room was still.

Lastly, VIN took stock of the three hooded and tied individuals sitting in front of him. One was dressed in bloody U.S. camouflage and looked female. The other two wore local dress and also looked female. He walked over and undid the black cloth covering the camouflaged girl and expected what he saw when he removed the hood.

The poor girl’s face was badly beaten, she was semi-conscious, her head drooped, but she was alive.

“
Victor November (VIN Noble) to base, we have an American captive injured here, request immediate medi-vac and backup. The cat is out of the bag and the factory secure apart from two males heading east. Town is quiet so far,”
he texted into his communicator.
“Have three females and one prisoner, our job is done. Request transportation from our base location for two men and one prisoner, and immediate transport here in town for eight.”

“Incoming to both locations; 30 minutes,”
appeared as a reply on his handheld, and he looked at the girl. Half of her uniform was missing, and the rest was darkened by dried blood. Sergeant Bradley was kneeling in front of her and giving her medication.

Lieutenant Noble then removed the hoods from the other two girls and found two local teenagers: fully dressed, unmarked, alive, and very scared.

A few seconds later and three miles away, the two trucks exploded and lit up the surrounding desert as missiles from the drone ended their useful lives. The two men running as fast as they could two miles behind the trucks had several seconds more, seeing the eastern horizon light up with pretty colors as a third missile turned them into nothing more than a hot drizzle in the desert breeze.

If the townsfolk heard any noises from the building or the explosions to the east of the city, nobody came out to see what was happening. The dogs suddenly went quiet, as if on orders, and everybody stayed where they were. The Americans were in town.

As promised, thirty seconds later rotor blades could be heard approaching from the west, and three large twin-Rotors Sea Knights came in a few hundred yards away. Sergeant Gibbs let off a flare above the building to show where they were. It wasn’t necessary because the incoming chopper pilots already had plans of the town from the drone with the actual building marked.

VIN continued to medicate and bandage his prisoner; the man was now unconscious and had lost a lot of blood. Within minutes a platoon of marines met up with the fourth team member still outside the back door and entered followed by medics and stretcher bearers.

“Wow!” stated the marine captain in charge of the incoming troops. “Lieutenant, you have enough stuff here to start a good Fourth of July firework show.”

“You are right there, Sir,” replied Noble standing up and quickly saluting. “Medics, the American girl and this tall guy here first! They need immediate treatment. Get them aboard ASAP. Captain, you are taking over, I hope?”

“Roger. You are all heading back to base, Lieutenant. Get your men out of here, onto the choppers. You’ve done your job. Well done!”

Three hours later, and with a hot mug of strong coffee, VIN entered the debriefing room back at their forward desert base 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Major Roberts, his company commander, would be in charge of the team’s debriefing, reporting directly to Colonel Jackson in Baghdad.

For an hour each man in the team gave a report on what happened, what they observed, and any possible losses of civilians due to their actions. The reports were good, the lieutenant had done well; no losses, military or civilian were due to any of his actions and the report was then added to, from other areas, where the three hostages were being interrogated.

The American girl, a sergeant from a U.S. military transport company, had disappeared from an attacked convoy heading north on the main Basra-Baghdad highway several days earlier. She was in good shape, apart from her beatings. No bones were broken and she had already reported that the intentions of the bomb-makers were to strap a suicide device on her, under her combat fatigues, and then drop her close to the Green Area in Baghdad. A timer on the explosive device would trigger it to explode after she was released. It looked like the bad guys were hoping she would be picked up and taken into the densely populated area where they would detonate her device.

The two girls had been kidnapped from the neighboring village and were to be dropped off in other parts of Baghdad with suicide bombs under their clothing; the plan was for all three bombs to cause big problems for the exiting army. The bomb-makers didn’t seem to care about the lives of the local girls, or whether they actually wanted to participate.

The report on the tall captive was that he was of Russian origin. He had several Russian prison tattoos on his body and his facial portrait had already been wired to the CIA, Interpol and the FBI. It came back as a positive match to a Gregory Sanototovich, a master bomb-maker who was on loan from a branch of the Russian military to terrorist agencies. He had been connected to the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and one of the underground train bombings in London a couple of years earlier. He was a good catch and would be taken back to Baghdad and finally sent to the U.S.

Unfortunately, the individual they caught in the outhouse was Iraqi, not Iranian, and the interrogators believed him to be a member of the new Iraqi Baghdad police force. He would also be escorted back to Baghdad. Papers found scattered around the two missile attack sites did produce badly burnt Iranian cigarettes packs, coins, and part of an Iranian military fuel ID card; but the names and any other important information were demolished in the blasts.

“Noble, your current tour is coming to an end. The Russian is flying back by chopper tonight, they want him back immediately. The second prisoner’s return trip can be put off for a day or two. If you want, you can escort the prisoner back to Baghdad and then head stateside. What do you think?”