Chapter 12: Ambush
Richard was checking the connections on his harness for the fifth time in the last hour, he despised High Altitude Low Opening jumps and was thankful they were rare.
"Nervous?" Roy asked.
Richard looked at him, "no way, I've been waiting to get Wilson way too long to be nervous... Just don't like jumping out of perfectly good airplanes."
"Well, the Airborn Rangers jump from planes all the time."
"Yeah, and they ain't got no goddamn brains" Richard replied smugly.
"Put on a fresh pair of panties gentlemen, thirty seconds!" Victor yelled. The men got up and lined up as the red light came on and the back of the plane opened. The section they were in was not pressurized and its climate control system only did so much, but when that rear cargo door opened the men felt the full force of the thin, frigid air at twenty thousand feet, it was a motivator of sorts to jump.
The light turned green and a loud alarm sounded, "GO GO GO!" Victor yelled as the first man jumped, followed closely by the rest one at a time, Richard was one of the last to take the plunge. The view was spectacular, even if it was terrifying, about halfway down Richard could see explosions a few miles west where the front lines were, looking down again he could see some of the SEALs had opened their parachutes and were about to land. Eventually, Richard reached the altitude where he had to open his own parachute, it deployed as expected and properly, bringing him to a safe landing, where he immediately discarded it, the harness and his oxygen canister and mask.
The men quickly moved to cover, observing their surroundings and watching for any hostile activity, the area appeared to be abandoned. "Form up" Victor said, "we got a short walk south, weapons cold, heads on a swivel."
Rachael and Karen were one mile out from their hold point cruising at fifteen thousand feet. "Ten seconds to rally point" Rachael said.
"Copy," Isiah replied over the radio, "handing you over to the SEALs."
"Master Chief, Red Five reporting" Rachael announced.
"Copy Red Five, glad you could make it, we just landed and are making our way to the target structure" Victor responded.
"We're at our rally point, holding position, awaiting your orders."
"Copy that... We'll call you if we need you" Victory said.
As the men moved towards to target building Richard caught movement out of the corner of his eye, he immediately turned and pointed his rifle at the offending object, which was a window closing. Richard kept his weapon trained on the window as he continued forward until it was out of sight.
The target building came into view. "Spread out, recon" Victor ordered.
The men scattered, taking to different spots to observe the structure, looking for any enemy soldiers, nobody spotted any. "I got no contact at all... The Supreme Leader of ISIS is in there and they don't even bother putting a guy by the door?" Roy said.
"Maybe they're just trying to be subtle" one man said.
"Or they left already" Richard suggested.
"Whatever the case we still have to clear that structure, we're going in through that door on the left" Victor said, "form up."
The men stacked up against the wall on either side of the door, Richard on the left side on point, Roy on the right. The door was a flimsy interior door like you'd find in a bedroom, causing the men to look at each other, confused. Richard took hold of the doorknob and turned, to his surprise, the door was unlocked. "What the...?" He muttered. Quickly putting his head back in the game, Richard pushed the door open and entered the building, moving off to the right side. The interior was massive, a gigantic warehouse with a large open space where the men were entering. There was an upper, open floor in a "L" shape on the opposite walls from the SEALs, the ground floor had several dozen crates scattered around as well as several forklifts of varying sizes. There was also a single MRAP parked with its nose pointing at the large garage door on the wall to the left of the door the SEALs came through.
The men began searching the area, looking around the crates and forklifts for any sign of activity, and finding none. Minutes passed without any of the SEALs finding any sign of life. "There's nothing here" one of the men said.
"We don't know that, we still have a whole other floor to search" Victor replied, "Rich, take a few guys upstairs and clear it out."
"Yes sir" Richard said, motioning to a handful of men, "let's go."
Richard's makeshift team made it about ten steps before every light in the building came on, including floodlights which made seeing upstairs from the ground floor nearly impossible. "Oh shit" one SEAL muttered, he barely got the words out of his mouth before a hurricane of gunfire erupted from the upper floor. The SEALs scrambled for cover as bullets rained down on them, it didn't even sound like machine gun fire but rather like one big, long explosion. Most of the men ducked behind the MRAP or the nearest forklift but Richard and another man got behind crates as trying to run for more solid cover meant almost definitely getting shot. To his great luck, whatever was in the crates was stopping, or at least deflecting, the bullets being fired on him.
"POP SMOKE POP SMOKE POP SMOKE!" Victor yelled as he tossed a smoke grenade, other men obliged and after a few seconds the ground floor was covered in a smokescreen.
"CALL IN AIR SUPPORT!" One of the SEALs yelled.
"Why is it every time we're supporting special forces we're just sitting on our asses?" Karen asked.
"Aw come on Karen... We got to blow up a boat last time we were with these guys" Rachael replied with a smile.
Karen rolled her eyes, "woop-ee."
The radio keyed up, "UPPER FLOOR! RED-" and cut off.
"What was that?" Karen asked.
"UPPER FLOOR! RED-" Victor was interrupted by an explosion behind him, the force of which knocked him down. He got up, uninjured, and keyed the mic again. "RED FIVE UPPER FLOOR, TAKE THEM OUT!"
"Sir the radio's out! The router is destroyed!" One of the men next to Victor said. Victor's backpack contained a radio frequency router which all of Team Eight's radio broadcasts funneled through. It provided an encrypting feature which kept their communications on the radio secure, but now that it was disabled, none of the SEAL's radios were working.
"TAG THE UPPER FLOOR!" Victor yelled.
"That was weird..." Rachael said.
"Think they were calling us?" Karen queried.
Rachael keyed her mic "Master Chief copy Red Five." She got no response. "Master Chief copy Red Five" she repeated. "Something's not right."
"They might be in trouble" Karen suggested just before her screen lit up with at least thirty red diamonds on the south and west edges of the target structure. "Scratch that, they're definitely in trouble! Take us in, south side east to west!"
Rachael pushed the collective forward as far as it would go, sending the helo into a nosedive. "Call in their extraction convoy!"
The SEALs attempted to return fire but the comparatively few shots they got off were vastly overshadowed by the volume of fire they were taking, the smokescreen also meant they were shooting blind. "I'm hit!" One man called out, he was closest to Roy, who pulled him further behind cover and examined the wound. He had been hit in the left forearm about three inches below his elbow, Roy pulled out a tourniquet and wrapped it around the man's arm.
"Where the hell is our air support?!" Another SEAL yelled.
"We're on our own!" The man who told Victor the router was destroyed said.
With all the time that passed, Richard was most amazed by the complete lack of pause or even slowdown of enemy fire, it was as if they were being shot at by several auto turrets with an unlimited supply of ammunition. He had emptied several magazines of ammo blind firing from behind cover, having no idea if he had hit anything, but knowing that somebody had hit at least two floodlights. The situation was beyond desperate, nobody could move from their cover without getting torn to shreds and nobody could even get a bead on whoever, or whatever, was shooting at them. Richard began to wonder of the possibility he wasn't going to walk out of this one. The smokescreen was beginning to lift, which was a double-edged sword at best, he loaded a fresh magazine into his rifle and prepared to peek out of cover and try to effectively shoot at the enemy, nothing else was working. He turned so he was facing directly at the crate, his left hand up again the right edge, his thumb sticking out, he rested the hand guard of his rifle on his thumb and leaned over trying to expose as little of himself as possible. He looked down his optic and spotted a handful of enemy soldiers on the second floor standing in front of a destroyed floodlight, he picked one, and shot three rounds at him, watching the man drop. That got the attention of the other enemies standing nearby, who redirected their fire in Richard's general direction, he had no choice but to duck back behind cover. "God dammit we need air support!" He yelled in frustration.
No sooner did Richard get the words out of his mouth than two massive explosions occurred in the roof of the building on the south side. Red Five strafed by, unloading their dual miniguns onto the upper floor. Once the helo got about a third of the way past the building it fired another missile at the west wall. As the helo disappeared to the west it appeared most if not all the enemy soldiers were down. Hesitantly, the SEALs emerged from their cover.
"That was too close..." Roy said. The men began to regroup, out of breath. "Well, if Wilson was here, he's not anymore, unless he's among the bodies up there."
"We got to check" Victor said, sounding dismayed. "We got to scratch the primary extraction, we can't call for them without radios, we're going to have to make our way to the secondary extraction point and hope Red Five gets the idea... Check the bodies then we go."
The men began to move towards the stairs to the upper floor when three explosions erupted in quick succession, fuel tanks in the southwest corner of the building were compromised and going off, causing the second floor to become unstable. There were more explosions, getting more violent as they went on, the corner of the building shifted in a loud, metal-twisting screech. The structure, or at least part of it, was beginning to collapse.
