Hello boys 'n' girls. Here's chapter #2. I changed to the title because the FF profanity filters thought the prior title was much too indecent. "Holly Roller Novocaine" is the title of a song by the Kings of Leon. It's okay if you don't know who the heck they are, no one seems to do and yet I dig them nonetheless.
I don't own nobody but itdoesn't stop me from borrowing them to write about them. Let me know if you like it peoples!
Pvt. King heard the shot fired and found himself halfway up the stairs before his brain had any say on what movement came next. Tariq patted down the man on the floor and removed the rusty semi-automatic Makarov held in place by the waistband of his underpants. He popped the eight round magazine, removed two live rounds noting the disparity in firepower and helped SSgt. Silas, who was already on the radio with Murphy; bring the man to his feet.
"Rawhide four this is Rawhide one, come in, over." Silas hung back letting King and Nassiri drag their prisoner downstairs.
"Rawhide one this is Rawhide four, over."
"Four we got a lookout at the mosque. Repeat lookout apprehended trying to warn hotel. Over."
"Roger that Rawhide one. Rawhide four is en route. Out." SSgt. Silas heard the muffled relay of orders before Murphy clicked off.
He fished a map from his pocket. The streets of Qadiya were ten tenuous lines spread between the figure-eight shaped main road. He had a school, a mosque and ninety foot wide crater where a Ministry of the Interior office had been leveled a year earlier by a car packed with C-4 but no hotel. SSgt. Silas looked at the two UAV photos Lt. Hunter had discarded as useless after the briefing and again, hated that he would have to agree with the man. Taken a day earlier with six hours between each shot, they showed no activity, no difference or sign of traffic, no sign of life at all except the goats. He counted eight smaller worm-like shapes in front of the mosque and a longer one, the cow.
"Eight," he muttered never once slowing down. The second photo came back on top and he counted ten animals again. His radio whined and crackled.
"Come in Rawhide four, over." Silas scanned the first picture looking for the missing animal and found it, after squinting, tethered to a stripped BMW they'd passed on the way in. It was the buck.
"Come in Rawhide four, I got a mosque and a school but I don't got a hotel."
"Rawhide four this is Rawhide one, it's half a klick southeast at the end of the first bend. Over."
"Copy that Rawhide one. Out" SSgt. Silas pocketed his map.
"Get him on the floor Dim," he ordered referring to the bound prisoner as he passed the parked Humvees. Dumphy held the man's arms as he pushed him to a kneeling position with one foot. He lowered him onto his stomach, wiped his hand on the seat of his pants and joined the armed conga line moving down the street. Del Rio and Mitchell each took one end of the cuffed lookout neither woman wanting to speak as the tension mounted and the chances of leaving Qadiya in one piece took a nosedive. Rawhide one joined Sgt. Murphy's men in front of a dilapidated, two story building with half its second floor gone. Hunter was the only one to notice, with disgust he had enough sense not to make public, the goat droppings he flattened in the split second pause every man gathered in the street.
"Sergeant…," Lt. Hunter managed before a glaring Murphy almost covered his mouth with a gloved hand. In brief respite from the stomach cramps, Alexander Hunter had managed to see the glowing upside of the entire mission, ecstatic at the prospect of bringing back results when none had been expected.
SSgt. Silas whispered his orders and split the squad with a brief hand signal. His and Sgt. Murphy's ability to communicate so well on so little made Dumphy think of geishas serving tea before he ducked behind a tall stack of concrete slabs to cover Williams and Nassiri both flattened against the wall beside a back service door. Across the street SSgt. Silas posted Walters, Quintana, Tolliver, Hill and O'Hara, all Murphy's men, at the alleys on each side of the building and at opposite sides of the road where a couple of stripped cars provided reasonable protection from enemy fire. He dropped down and dug in next to Pvt. King inside a shop in front of the hotel. They were Sgt. Murphy's primary line of defense on that side. For all his fearlessness, Lt. Hunter was slightly behind Murphy and Torres the third of five men going in.
Sgt. Murphy was praying in his head. For an Irishman, he wasn't a good Catholic. He was religious on airplanes. He talked to God during the hurricane season since he'd moved to Louisiana but in Iraq he'd found himself talking to God whenever his eleven pound flak jacket felt inadequate for the task at hand and this was daily. He was sure of Torres and Parker and Chang though the three were green virgins. The prayer he finished storming into the first room on the right was not for protection from the enemy but so his life at least for the next five minutes, wouldn't come to depend on Lt. Hunter even once.
"Clear," Torres yelled in one end of the room.
"Clear," Murphy agreed by the door and they followed Chang and Parker into the next.
"Clear," Parker called out.
Hunter took a chance caught up in the momentum. He kicked down the door and went in first. He approached desk inside with caution, breathing through his mouth. The little hairs in the back of his neck were stiff enough to play a violin concerto He fired randomly into the flimsy wood. It was poor cover. The desk skidded back propelled by the bullets then forth when the man behind it returned fire.
The cadence of the two AKM's in his grasp cycling fresh bullets into the chambers ended quickly, less than a second though Hunter fired for three emptying his magazine. The man on the floor with his face concealed by a dirty white rag looked like a magician's assistant sawed in half. Hunter walked out into the hallway and stepped back into the dead man's office just as fast. Bullets whizzed at eye level in both directions outside. Lost in the chaotic noise of his own making he had failed to distinguish clashing songs of Russian made assault rifles and the faster, steadier prattle of American M4s.
Across the street, Pvt. King had his scope trained on the first floor. SSgt. Silas pointed at the shadow on the second as it moved closer to the front of the building unaware of the surveillance and reflected cut in two, on a support beam. Silas didn't have a clean shot but King did and he picked off the man with a single bullet thinking grimly about the high school trigonometry that made the moment possible.
Pfc. Walters looked up from his post in the alley as an AK-47 tumbled ownerless from the second floor. He fired up, at nothing, too pumped to realize the imminent threat was dead. Further down, Williams had joined Dumphy behind the concrete planks and Nassiri spotted for them while they returned fire five times faster than the shooters holed up within. Inside, in the room across from Hunter, Torres recognized the sound of a pump action shotgun being reloaded. He fired into the skinny wall as the spent shell hit the floor and missed.
The wood wall shattered no match for a shotgun's power and Torres' vest took the worst hit. The impact threw him back then on his ass. Chang fired through the hole into the naked chest and watched the shooter go down. He bent over Torres to appraise the damage. He looked where the most blood was gushing; Torres' left arm where shot from the slug had lodged in his buddy's his forearm and then the neck where more pellets had just grazed the skin. He secured a tourniquet in the arm, going over the steps that he'd learned in the first aid classes like a mantra.
Dumphy felt the safest he'd felt in ages behind all that concrete limiting his exposure. He would have doubted his eyes when he noticed the man running out onto the patio if Williams had not seen him too. They weren't surprised by the man as much as by the Russian Dragunov sniper rifle slung across his back like an ordinary backpack while he went at them firing a much more insignificant Makarov pistol. Williams peppered the man with his saw and he danced two full circles like a rag doll before he finally went down.
It was quiet again in the street. It was quiet for a full minute before Sgt. Murphy peered out of the room where he'd taken cover with Pfc. Parker and they walked the length of the hall flat against the wall. Nassiri ran inside as Tolliver and O'Hare closed in from the front. SSgt. Silas signaled to King to stay put and did the same with Quintana and Hill clearly yearning to get closer than their posts by the stripped cars. He saw Sgt. Murphy come out of the building. The engine noise of the approaching Humvees closed in. Chang helped Torres walk out as much for the moral support as for lending a hand. The medic jumped out of the Humvee and went to work immediately.
Everyone but Hunter still holed up with the dead body, Dumphy and Williams covering the back and Pvt. King across the street gathered before the shot up hotel for a headcount. Murphy and Silas did the first walk through, inspecting every room as the men behind them checked the dead faces against the 'Wanted' photocopies each of them carried. Nothing turned up.
SSgt. Silas took the stairs to the bombed out second floor. Sgt. Murphy followed. They covered each other picking through the rubble. Silas saw the man King had taken out from the first floor. The shot had gone in through his back piercing a lung. Like the others downstairs, he was dressed in western clothing. It'd been a slow death. They moved methodically towards the right though no more shots had been fired, clearing each enclosed though roofless space like before. Murphy was the first to see the woman.
She was standing against the wall, hands up with the palms out. Her skin was leathery and her clothes crusty. Her dark eyes followed every motion eagerly without moving an inch.
"On the floor, now," Silas yelled menacingly pointing in case his instructions were not clear enough. Murphy covered him.
Footsteps bounded up the stairs at the sound of Silas' voice. She remained motionless against the wall and he pushed his M4 aside, taking instead his sidearm while Murphy stepped to his right to keep her in his sights. She stood still. Silas took her right wrist in his free hand and pulled her off the wall intending to get her on the floor to secure her with Flex Cuffs. In a movement so fluid it could have been choreographed, she slipped her left hand in her pocket and stabbed his right thigh screaming something Tariq could only determine was spoken in Farsi. She was worse off with a round from Silas' M9 in her chest and another from Murphy's M4 through her neck.
Silas stepped back too pumped full of adrenaline to feel more than mere annoyance at the stabbing pain in his leg. Blood gurgled in the woman's throat as she slid down the wall making a sound that Pvt. Williams downstairs might have described as a bubbling, homemade bong. He looked down at his thigh and tried to assess the damage through the rip in the fabric. Sgt. Murphy walked around the dead woman and knelt beside her. He retrieved a crude shiv from her pocket, wiped it clean on her dress and held it up, handle first for Silas to take.
He closed his hand around the dirty taped handle and looked into green, glassy eyes fixed somewhere in the distance. He saw Jamila. Silas blinked back the sweat dripping into his eyes and the dead woman was old and dark eyed again. He felt dizzy. The tan, leathery skin turned pale and young a second time. He shook his head and took a step back.
"Hey man, are you okay?" Sgt. Murphy asked.
"Yeah. Let's go."
I have no idea what the hell people say to each other on a radio so I just assumed it probably wouldn't sound much like phone sex and made up the rest. I deduced this Rawhide thing was a company nickname like I've read in the news one of the profiled Marines call his company Killer Company and that the number after the Rawhide referenced the squad number. If I got that wrong please let me know so I can fix it.
The rate of fire was figured out mathematically from the M4 specs given in the encyclopedia, I don't know the calculations' feasibility in practice. The only way I have of putting a bullet in someone would involve burrowing a hole first and manually inserting it later.
Thy Author
