For those who don't want to check the dates, this is about a month after the last chapter.
I've built up a bit of a buffer again, so hopefully we'll get some chunks double-checked and uploaded in relatively rapid succession. That's my excuse for not updating for a bit - edit stuff to make it legible enough to post or write new stuff? I did some new stuff. Now time for posting that stuff!
This chapter is a bit more action oriented, and the next chapter will be pretty action-packed too. Once again, I hope it's comprehensible for everyone! Let me know!
April 27, 2009, Safi Landmark Hotel, Kabul, Afghanistan
Jon's hotel room was covered with maps and building diagrams. When his radio went off, he lifted a building diagram to root around for the wayward object.
"Yeah, Mick?"
"Prime is heading home now. We're taking route three. Green Zone arrival should be twenty minutes. Hotel arrival five after."
"Acknowledged. Route three. Green Zone in twenty. Home in twenty five."
"Confirmed. See you soon."
Jon checked the city map for Kabul, confirming that his memory of route three was correct. It was. He went back to the building map he had been checking before.
Klause Holtz was a VP setting up business in Afghanistan. Mostly textiles, but other manufacturing was also possible from what Jon had overheard. Afghanistan as the next India - tons of low-cost labor available.
Jon shook his head. If they wanted to waste their money on the effort, that was their business, but the country had never been particularly stable, and was even more phenomenally unstable because there was a freaking war going on!
He shook his head. He didn't have to solve the country's problems. He just had to keep his prime safe. Well, the prime and his mistress. Officially she was just an administrative aide, but Blackbriar's contract had specifically included her to receive round-the-clock protection as well. She rarely left the hotel's corporate headquarters area, though, so he usually only needed one person on her at a time.
Klause though - he was running all over the place talking with community leaders and mayors all over the country. Jon traced out several routes away from their next meeting location.
The team had been here for two weeks, and the Prime had arrived four days ago, immediately jumping into a flurry of meetings. Jon was getting worn out keeping up with the sudden changes and additions to plans. There hadn't been any attacks aimed at their Prime yet, but there had been several attacks in the vicinity, and the entire team was at high alert.
Routes. Alternate routes. Intel on recent attacks. Roadside bomb intel. Local informants to groom. Payoffs for information from locals. Building schematics where they were available. Pre-scouting locations.
Jon felt more alive than he had in years.
Some of the others in his team were a little miffed that a new guy to the company had gotten a commanding position in a high-profile security job, but Jon was bringing them around. He had done this sort of thing for decades even if they didn't know it. He could feel the team congealing.
Mickey was his driver, and Jon had felt pleased when he had gotten the guy who had driven them to safety back in Somalia - a savant with any vehicle, and just as importantly thought quickly and reacted well.
Jiminez called Jimmy, 'Jock', and Brock were one of his teams - Aztec Team. Jimmy was ex-special forces and all whipcord lean hispanic at forty something. He was still skeptical of Jon's ability, constantly alert to catch mistakes, but wasn't resentful. He seemed to be coming to trust Jon's decisions more quickly, and ran Jock and Brock like a machine. Jock and Brock were twin brothers, both massive ex-college football players, and Jon would swear they were telepathic.
Mark, Jason, and Trisha formed his other team - Eagle Team. Jon had grimaced when he heard the name 'Trisha', remembering his brief attempt at high school, but she was ex-army and a tank of a woman with light ebony skin that was darkening quickly in the Afghani sun. He liked her - she had a cunning, dry humor that Jon appreciated. Mark, a jarhead and another long-time employee of Blackbriar, was leading Eagle Team, and had Jason and Trisha well. Mark was the biggest point of conflict. He clearly resented a newbie to the company getting the command of this operation. They had butted heads a few times, but Jon had dealt with these sorts of egos for long enough that he was able to handle the man's antagonistic attitude and redirect it into a job well done.
Mary and 'Trixie' were the security for the Prime's mistress. A less unlikely pair Jon would have never picked. Mary was military to her toes, hard-core, hard-ass, and a hell of a marksman. Roxanne, though she went by Trixie, was the complete opposite: brightly colored hair, constantly chewing and popping gum, and had a punk, bubblehead persona perfected. She was sharp as a razor blade, though, and carried more knives on her than he could count. Jon was pretty sure they were lovers, though he didn't poke his nose in. They were like Jock and Brock - a long-time team that seemed to read each others minds.
Now, if their Prime would slow down his hectic pace of travel and meetings, Jon might get some sleep. He had stayed up most of the night gathering intel on tomorrow's meeting location - a small town northeast of Jalalabad that already had a small textiles factory.
Roads. Reported hostile activity in the area. The town was rumored to be pretty sympathetic to the remnants of the Taliban. Also a central location of a dozen small poppy fields. The meeting building was a warren of small office rooms that would have made a great maze. Literally. Jon was pretty sure the blueprints weren't completely accurate either.
It was a chaotic mess of a situation. In a fight, that was his preferred situation, at least if he couldn't have overwhelming firepower on his side. This was protection, though - a different sort of challenge. He had some good ideas, though. He had the trip plan mostly put together.
His door opened. "Sir? Aztec is in. Prime is settled in his office. Miss Annabelle is currently with him. They'll have dinner in. She's probably getting a snack now, though."
Jon looked up with a smirk. Trisha was at his door, holding a cup of coffee. She rarely passed a chance to make fun of the Prime and mistress, though never in their hearing.
At five feet eleven inches, she was as tall as most of the guys, and a solid hundred and sixty pounds. She'd served a tour with the Army, done three years in professional MMA, and then gone into protection work. Hand to hand, she was brutal, able to take him three out of four times if she could clinch with him, despite his greater strength and weight. He could have prefered that she were a better shot, but she was good enough. He'd see about suggesting that she improve her marksmanship at some point. Make sure your subordinates leave you better than when they met you.
"Gotta admit, it's nice when both primes stick so close together. They're probably thinking of us, trying to make our lives easier."
Trisha snorted and took a sip of coffee.
"We're going to grab dinner together after Aztec gets cleaned up. You coming?"
Jon nodded. He was specifically working on building bonds with them, and meals together were part of that, even if it squeezed his schedule. "Definitely. Tomorrow is all set. We'll meet after dinner for the briefing on tomorrow's trip and the trip up to the base on the day after."
"Great," she said. "You need the food."
In response, his stomach growled and she laughed. "Yeah, I checked. You didn't even get room service and I'm pretty sure you didn't have more than a protein bar for breakfast, if that."
Jon leaned back in his chair, hands in the air. "You got me. I could indeed use some food."
She smiled, "See you in twenty, Sir." She left, closing the door behind her.
Ok. Twenty minutes to wrap this up for the briefing after dinner.
He started putting together the map images into a presentation and typing up the op plans. He was going up with them, but then continuing on to scout the route that was for the day after. In two days they were heading up to an American Command Outpost to speak with some cultural liaison officers up there. He wasn't worried about safety at the COP, but the route to and from was a prime target for roadside bombs. The military watched the road too, but a determined enemy was almost always able to sneak in somewhere. He wanted to scout it himself.
The next morning, Jon rolled north on an old Harley motorcycle; it looked like every other piece of trash on the road but he had made sure the engine was in prime shape.
He was dressed in typical Afghani garb and sporting a pasted-on beard. There had been a few razzing comments from Eagle team, but it had been pretty good natured. The fact that he was personally scouting their route probably had something to do with it - you don't give too hard of a time to the person who's going out by himself to scout for bombs that might blow you up.
The bike puttered along slowly heading north along the road toward the base, and Jack kept his eyes scanning. Turned over dirt. Concealed people. Metal or plastic that looked suspicious. Wires. Anything out of the ordinary.
The road was relatively well-paved, the Army's engineers had re-built the road from the foundation up to support the load of military vehicles regularly passing over it. One had already passed Jon, heading the other direction. Quite a few Afghanis were also taking advantage of the road; Jon had seen several other motorcycles and a few dilapidated trucks hauling farm produce. Though in this area, it was likely that the trucks were carrying drugs with crops piled over to hide the drugs.
Nothing had caught his attention, and he was only a few klicks from the COP. The traffic had almost entirely faded away, with not much out this way other than the military base.
Something was bothering Jon, though. He reached under his tunic and switched the safety off his M70. Under the tunic and loose pants, he wore his regular body armor, weapons, and several grenades.
He started juggling the gas feed to the bike, making the engine sputter and cough. He kept it up, letting the bike slow to a crawl while he tried to figure out what was setting his senses on edge.
Nothing was apparent, and so he allowed the bike to speed back up, and was almost to the base when it finally dawned on him. The fields had all been empty. The fields were hardly more than single family plots of an acre or two, and they had become more widely spaced as he had continued. The COP was placed for strategic and defensive reasons, not for agricultural reasons - the base was in a rocky and barren area with several roads connecting it for fast movement into the surrounding area.
They didn't want a lot of civilians around. Well, at the moment there were exactly zero civilians visible, even when there should have been.
A hundred yards from the fence surrounding the base, the south entrance had gatehouses, a machine gun emplacement on the west side of the road, concrete barriers in place, and a dozen military personnel at full alert.
As he rolled up, the machine tun was trained on him. A humvee with a .50 caliber turret was parked on the far side of the guardhouse.
He made sure his hands didn't leave the handles of the bike.
"What is your purpose here?"
The translator called in Arabic from inside the guardhouse. Jon knew he looked like a prime suspect for a suicide bomber - a single young male, apparently a native, all on his own.
"It's such a lovely day. I wanted to get some fresh air and see the lovely countryside."
He spoke in English, and smirked as the soldiers all gawked at him.
"Is this a joke?"
Geez. Way too uptight. He sighed.
"No joke soldier. As I was coming here, I noticed all the fields are empty for the last four or five klicks. I suggest you pass that bit of info along."
"Sir. Get off the bike and keep your hands in the air."
"Aw fer cryin' out loud!" He raised his hands just the same. "Lieutenant, I suggest you do what I say - get on the horn to your commander. The farms are all empty. Nobody farming."
There were a couple quick words passed back and forth inside the booth.
"Sir, step away from the bike and open your tunic and shirt."
Jon grumbled, "Stupid stick up their butt Lieutenants," but complied. There was a machine gun trained on him from the emplacement and he didn't feel like testing a jumpy trigger finger just yet.
He pulled off his beard and lifted up his tunic, displaying the black body armor and the M70 strapped across his chest.
"See this," he yelled up. "Do I look like a damn bomber? Get your head out of your butt, Lieutenant, and put in the call to your commander. Something is going to happen. Soon!"
It didn't do any good. The kid ignored the fake beard and focused on the gun. "Get down on the ground! Hands on your head!"
Jon had had enough. "Attention!" His voice barked out and all of them jumped at least a little, some of them all the way to attention for a brief second. It was enough to shut them up, though. "I am Staff Sergeant Jonathan J. O'Neill, Special Forces, and you will put your useless mouth to work doing what you're supposed to be doing Lieutenant - specifically, calling your commander and giving him intel of an imminent attack on this base! Do you understand me soldier?!"
By this point the Lieutenant had come to attention; Jon's voice carried the ring of command.
"Sir! Yes Sir!"
The kid, well he was probably twenty, but Jon still figured he qualified as a kid, grabbed a radio and started talking. Jon picked up his beard and waited, arms crossed as the call was completed. The young lieutenant stepped out of the guard house.
"Sir?"
Jon fixed the kid with a glare and the boy paused for a second before continuing, "Sir, Captain Hastings would like to speak with you."
"Ya' think?" The sarcasm was heavy in Jon's voice and the Lieutenant went ramrod straight with his eyes six inches above Jon's head, saying nothing.
After a second Jon relented. "At ease, Lieutenant. You boys keep an extra good lookout. Every farm for the last five klicks was empty. Something either scared them off or is holding them tight so we don't get any …"
A roar massed gunfire and several explosions came from the east side of the base. The base was nearly a mile across, large enough that the sound wasn't deafening, but it was obvious what it was. Jon guessed there were at least fifty weapons sounding there, mostly AK-47s. And if the notoriously uncoordinated Afghan fighters managed to get that many people shooting at once, then there were at least twice that many actual fighters in the area.
Shit.
Jon spun with the rest of the soldiers toward the sound. A large plume of smoke was rising, probably from a large car bomb. The fence blocked most of the sight, but Jon thought he saw a couple people running toward the base fence across the cleared surrounding. Several more explosions went off. Sapping charges to take down the fence?
A thought crossed his mind - distraction or pincer. He spun and crouched down. His instincts had been correct. From the edge of the cleared area fifty yards away, what seemed like a hundred men were charging forward. They'd obviously been told to be quiet for as long as possible because they weren't yelling like Jon remembered Afghani charges of twenty five years ago.
"Hostiles incoming!"
Jon dropped to a knee and pulled his M70 out from under his tunic. He heard the first shout of alarm from the soldiers behind him and hoped they were reacting well. His second estimate of the attackers had only gone up. A hundred and fifty or so. A hundred and fifty versus a dozen.
He started letting off short bursts. Each burst dropping a target. They were closing too quickly, though.
A couple started shooting as they fired, their bullets flying wide. He dropped two more, and then the machine gun in the guard house opened up. The first stream of bullets was wide, but the gunner brought it under control and began moving the stream of bullets across the oncoming people.
However the attackers had planned for this and over a dozen of them pulled grenades out and flung them forward. Jon scrambled to the outside of the guardhouse on his side just in time as a dozen grenades went off. The blasts left him with ringing ears, but he rolled back to his feet and looked up. They were still charging and the machine gun was silent.
He could hear some of the soldiers inside the guardhouse shouting, presumably into a radio, calling for help.
The men were spread into a line, and it was apparent that they were mostly intending to run past the guardhouses to gain access to the main base. Only thirty or so were aimed straight at the guardhouses.
Jon pulled out two grenades and counted. They were only fifty feet away, and there were way too many to take them all out before they arrived. Time to add some confusion.
His two grenades arced out in easy lobs, decades of experience put them right in the middle of the group that had jumped onto the road for faster running since the machine gun had been taken out. One was still in the air when it exploded. The fragmentation grenades scythed through the dozen men, dropping them all.
This took care of the immediate threat, but it had attracted plenty of attention. The entire wing on the east side of the ground along the road were turning toward him. Bullets began to pepper the ground around him.
He stood up and ran, firing one-handed, not caring about hitting so much as to slow the enemy down. He felt something tug at his calf as he reached the edge of the guardhouse and rolled around, hugging the wall for protection. He could make out the sound of guns firing from the guardhouses, but in seconds the guardhouses were getting covered with bullets as what seemed over half of the attackers began laying down cover fire, keeping the inhabitants down. And letting the rest of the attacks past toward the fence surrounding the base proper.
He could hear the bulletproof glass shattering above him as the amount of fire finally broke through.
Jon swore and pulled out his last two grenades.
"If I'da known it was gonna be a party," he grunted as he sent a grenade arcing far out toward the attackers. The second followed it a split second later. "I would have brought more party favors." They were too spread out for the grenades to catch large groups of them any more, but grenades were great at convincing people to keep their heads down. And hopefully not shooting.
He could hear and feel the bullets hitting the side of the guardhouse next to him. At a pause, he picked off one of the attackers who was beginning to get far enough forward that he would get around Jon's cover. As long as he could keep the people laying cover fire from surrounding the place …
He took a chance and darted across to the machine gun emplacement. The fifty feet of open pavement feeling like fifty miles as the bullets peppered about him. He could feel the wicked hum of bullets going past him.
Something smacked his chest, but he knew it was just a glancing hit on his chest plate. Half way across. Then something burned in his side and he knew he'd taken a hit, but he kept going. He dove into the emplacement, landing on a mostly headless body of a soldier.
Jon scrambled to the machine gun and pulled the trigger. If it was still operational …
It bucked in his hands with a roar!
He spun it around and began sweeping it across the field. The first pass swept across the entire side of the field in a second, far too fast to be effective - it was just to get their heads down. The second pass took nearly ten seconds as he carefully walked the tracers across the field, leaving behind a trail of chewed up dirt and corpses where the stream of bullets met a person.
He cursed when he reached the edge of its rotation - it couldn't rotate far enough to potentially hit the fence, and a score of fighters on this side was already past the gun's firing arc. He could see them hurling satchels of explosives at the base's fence.
A baseball bat slammed against his back and hurled him forward against the gun. His breath was driven out of him and he was pretty sure that he had more cracked ribs. In fact … he was having a hard time moving. The plate … didn't stop … everything this time. Another one hit at an angle and his back blazed in agony.
There were still at least eighty attackers here, mostly behind him as he was now facing. As much to get a bit of cover as to bring the gun on the enemy, he lunged into the gun, and it pivoted around dumping him on the ground with a searing pain.
It took him several seconds to gather himself together to attempt to get up, and it vaguely registered that he could hear gunfire from the guardhouse on this side. Good. Now that they weren't being pinned down maybe they'd be able to fight back a bit more.
However the weight of fire from the other side was still as heavy as ever and he thought it was getting closer. They were probably moving up on the guardhouses to throw in some grenades or something. There was enough fire on that side that he was pretty sure they would be able to pull it off, too.
A tiny whine came out of his lips as he pulled himself up. It felt like his entire chest was on fire. Pierced lung. Broken ribs. Damaged heart maybe, but probably not since I'm not dead. The impact had been fairly high on his back. He didn't even try to see if he was frothing blood from his mouth. In fact he realized he wasn't breathing.
Instead he pulled himself to his knees and grabbed the machine gun's base to pull himself up the rest of the way. He couldn't breathe.
'Yup. Lungs. I guess that's it for me.' These kids were going to die though unless they got a bit more help. Might as well push a bit longer.
He nearly passed out as he got himself to his feet. The machine gun couldn't fire onto the guardhouse itself, so many of the attackers were safe from his fire, but there were at least a dozen who were still in its arc of fire. Or maybe more. His vision was getting funny.
His hands found the grips and trigger and latched on with a death grip. The vibrations rocked his body and the gun swung wildly at first, but he didn't let go. He leaned his body against the jerking gun to force it back down, and began working it across the field. He couldn't really tell what he was hitting. The world was blurry, and he was pretty sure that he was seeing twice as many blurry objects out there moving as there really were, but he kept moving the stream of bullets around until it suddenly stopped.
He didn't know if it was jammed or out of ammo. And he slumped down, relaxing his grip. Things were getting sort of … grey … dark.
Ha! Got'cha all! I didn't tell you guys this was a death fic, did I?!
( It's not really :-) )