State of Attack (2 page)
Authors: Gary Haynes
Peering through the gap in the barrier, he saw the lead truck entering the decimated narrow street, the heavy Browning .50 cal M2 machine gun mounted on the deck randomly spitting out high-calibre rounds at a rate of over five hundred per minute.
Within a few seconds one of the bullets hit the goat herder in the neck as it passed through a paint tin with the ease of a fine blade through gossamer. The boy fell instantly, blood oozing out of the entry wound as he twitched in the dirt. The old baker bent down to the boy, cradling the floppy head. Basilios watched as the boy’s eyes bulged and watered like those of a stranded catfish. But as the old man started to pray in Aramaic, their mother tongue and the ancient language of Christ, he knew it was a shot to the carotid artery and was lethal.
Feeling wretched, Basilios spread his feet and held the grenade in his abdomen. He removed the safety clip and placed his left index finger in the grenade’s pin. Keeping a firm grasp on both the grenade proper and the safety lever, he pulled the bent pin, straightening the soft metal as it was released.
He jumped up and heaved it towards the truck. Bobbing back down, he jerked up the AK that was hanging over his thigh and, peering through the gap in the barrier again, braced himself. He hoped the searing fragments from the grenade would pierce organs, shred muscle and sever arteries, that his enemies’ bodies would resemble the wreckage about him.
The grenade exploded in a bright orange-white flash, the sound oddly muted. But the shrieks that followed soon afterwards could have woken a coma patient.
Once he’d recovered from the disorientating effects of the shockwave, Basilios motioned to his comrades to stay low, and ensured they’d clicked off the safeties on their weapons. Then he scaled the haphazard wall, his movements so frenzied that he gashed his leg on the edge of an iron girder, and sucked up air like a sprint swimmer. He reached the top in less than three seconds, using a couple of wedged-in planks of wood that he’d positioned when the barricade had been built.
Ignoring the searing pain, he dropped down onto the hard-packed dirt on the other side of the barrier and launched himself at the paralyzed truck, firing from the hip in automatic mode. Slaloming to avoid the cratered earth, jagged masonry and smouldering timbers, he felt no fear. He felt nothing, in fact, but a crazed desire to kill.
A mackerel sky is a harbinger of a storm
, Tom Dupree’s long-dead mother used to say when he was a kid. As he turned his gaze back to the redbrick facade of a high-end shoe store on M Street, Georgetown, Washington, DC, he just hoped it would be confined to a change in the weather. He was wearing a charcoal-grey, loose-fitting suit, a matching silk tie and aviator shades. It was early morning, seven hours behind Syrian time, the half-hidden sun appearing to linger above the outskirts of the great cityscape.
Georgetown was an historic neighbourhood situated in the north-west of the capital along the banks of the Potomac. The street was clear of the majority of commuters and tourists who’d clog it up in an hour’s time. Tom was standing on the sidewalk after exiting an adapted black SUV.
He pushed his clear earpiece in a little deeper with his left forefinger and spoke briefly to his team via his push-to-talk, or PTT, radio. Adjusting his plastic hip holster, which held his standard-issue SIG Sauer P229 handgun, with his right hand, he felt edgy. He always felt edgy protecting the offspring of a foreign dignitary in DC, but today’s charge was special, at least as far as the suits on Capitol Hill were concerned.
The Russian president’s daughter stepped from an up-armoured stretched limo parked five yards away with the gracefulness of a ballerina, her slim legs sheathed in silk pantyhose. The Russians had brought their own cars, flown in on Tupolev Tu-330 transport planes. The cars had dual foot-pedal controls, just in case the driver had a heart attack or got hit in the head by a high-velocity projectile from an anti-material rifle. The hoods were reinforced for ramming, the tyres of the run-flat variety. They always had at least three with blacked-out, bulletproof glass, the other two acting as decoys.
But despite the impressiveness of the vehicles, it was the president’s daughter who caught everyone’s eye. Before Tom had seen her photo, one of his team had said that she was hotter than the Mojave Desert come midsummer. He’d told him to hush his mouth and show a little respect. But he hadn’t lied, he thought.
She walked like she knew it, too. Hips swinging, her mouth a half-petulant, half-seductive pout, as the handles of her Gucci bag rested in the V of her slender arm. The three Russian agents, who Tom took for Presidential Security Service men, or maybe FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, walked around her in a triangular formation.
They were bulky, with close-cropped hair, like Tom’s buzz cut; their faces as hard and expressionless as concrete busts. Despite his normal rising sense of paranoia in such circumstances, Tom could think of a lot worse assignments than helping to guard Pouter, as she’d been nicknamed by one of his protective detail. He’d let that one pass, but only when they weren’t in radio contact. The DS command centre had given her the pro-name the Fabergé, a form of codename, and that was just too damn clumsy.
His Bureau of Diplomatic Security team – four men and two women – flashed their blue-and-gold badges to the few rather bemused-looking pedestrians on the sidewalk before cordoning it off with their outstretched arms. There was no need for PD tape here, although a couple of counter snipers from the Support Unit of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service were on the flat roof of a three-storey brownstone row house opposite. A few million bucks’ worth of realty, for sure, Tom thought. Two more armed agents in black fatigues were positioned at the back of the store, and two more in front. There was an emergency response team sitting in two SUVs a hundred yards away, monitoring the scene on secure laptops. The president’s daughter was in a multi-layered security bubble; one that would take a platoon of hardened US Marines to burst through, and Tom reckoned she knew this, too.
The female owner of the store and her staff had been security vetted, and she’d agreed to open early, although she hadn’t been told who her only VIP customer would be. The advance detail with their magnetometers and K-9 sniffer dogs had done their job; all regular procedure. Pouter was due back at Blair House, the official state guest house for the President of the United States – POTUS – in half an hour. Located at 1651–1653 Pennsylvania Avenue, it was only a mile and a half away. Still, Tom was as vigilant as a polar bear with a newborn cub. After watching Pouter walk into the store, he scanned the immediate vicinity and assumed radio contact with the snipers, who confirmed the surrounding buildings were still clear. Satisfied, he ordered his team to let the civilians pass.
But his antennae were up.
As return fire pinged through the air about him, Basilios dived down and rolled in the stony track before raising the AK, the stock tucked into his shoulder. A man with a mangled left leg was bleeding out by the truck’s front passenger-side tyre, while another was half-crawling towards the tailgate. The Salafist was leaving a trail of blood as black as oil. Basilios knew that meant he’d been hit by a round in the liver and that he had thirty minutes tops to live. Seeing movement in his peripheral vision, he clenched his jaw and focussed.
There were just two remaining able Salafist fighters, and they were heading for the safety of the remnants of the surrounding buildings, letting off short automatic bursts as they ran. Basilios guessed they were fearful of the truck exploding. But before he had a chance to let off a burst of his own, they fell like bowling pins, cut down by scattered volleys from his comrades.
A few seconds later, he signalled for them to cease fire and, raising himself up, jogged over to the twisted hunk of metal that was the truck. Two Salafists were motionless in the front, their faces lacerated almost beyond recognition by careering shrapnel. But as he bent down to recover their superior weapons, he heard two more pickup trucks enter the street.
The men behind the barrier called out to him to get back. Straightening up, he turned towards the end of the road and saw the unmistakable outline of two shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launchers being aimed in the direction of the barricade aboard the approaching trucks, the rear tyres fishtailing with acceleration.
He darted towards a nearby doorway, using his free hand to signal to the men to disperse. As he reached the doorway, he had to duck down under a hanging lintel before spinning around and crouching in the brick dust. He guessed they were Yugoslav-made 90mm RPGs, favoured here due to their light weight, and the reinforced plastic design. Just a little over twenty-four pounds when armed, two trained men could load and fire six unguided projectiles in a minute. He knew the rocket was propelled from the launcher at a speed of two hundred and fifty yards per second. It was accurate enough to be used effectively against large armoured vehicles up to half a mile away. The barricade wouldn’t stand a chance.
The rockets hit the barricade a couple of seconds later, crippling explosions that sent up a flurry of metal shards and wooden splinters, and caused the middle section of the wall to implode. After the initial din and the devastation caused by the blast, Basilios heard the trucks skidding to a halt. Vaguely, through the dust cloud and to the left of the lintel, he glimpsed the fighters disembarking and running forwards in a jagged line, strafing the remnants of the barrier. They shouted out:
Allahu Akbar
. And he knew it was almost over.
As those men and boys who were still able returned sporadic fire, Basilios saw a fighter emerge from the subsiding dust. He was sprinting towards the doorway. Basilios scrambled back and stood up, letting the AK drop to his side from the clip. If he shot the man, he would give away his position, and by the way things were going outside, that meant he’d die before he could wreak a sufficient revenge.
He pulled out a piece of cloth from his cargo pocket and used it as a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood from his leg. Wincing, he eased further back into a dark recess, his right hand going for his combat knife. Gritting his teeth in frustration, he realized he’d dropped it in the melee. Even so, he figured he’d have to dispatch the man quickly and quietly. He squatted down, half hidden behind an overturned wooden table and waited.
The fighter ducked through the doorway to avoid the swinging lintel before pivoting around to face the street. He was bearlike, the sleeves of his combat jacket rolled up, revealing thick forearms covered in dark matted hairs. His head was wrapped in a black bandana, the hallmark of al-Qaeda-inspired militants. Basilios knew that the noise from the discharge of small-arms fire and the shouting and screams of battle would mask his steps, but thick beads of salty sweat rolled down his forehead and into his eyes as he began to move forwards.
At the last moment, the man clearly registered Basilios’s presence and, turning his head, he began to swing his assault rifle around. Basilios hit him hard in the exposed floating rib with the stock of his AK, winding him. He cracked his skull with the AK’s metal butt. Dazed, the Salafist buckled, and knelt in the dust, his head lolling to one side.
Basilios wrapped his arm around the bull-like neck and jerked him up with great force before dropping to the floor. There was a strangely intimate crack as Basilios fractured the man’s C2 vertebrae as if it was parched wood. The burly body went limp, and Basilios eased the dead man’s head to the rubble. But it had been the first time he’d killed a man so close up that he could feel his last breath leaving his body. It left him feeling both energized and shattered.
He moved to the other side of the building, careful to avoid the electricity cable that had fallen through the shattered roof and lay doglegged on the floor. The cable’s live end vibrated and popped and fizzed, evidencing that the portable generator was still intact, or at least functional.
He crouched by a shell hole, listening to the small-arms ricochets and the shrieks from the wounded. He saw two helmeted fighters dragging a boy of no more that fifteen by his hair from the remnants of the wooden shack opposite. They wore green flak jackets and wraparound shades, their postures menacing. The boy was weeping and pleading for his life. They propped him up against a concrete wall and, as he covered his face with his hands, they stepped back and raised their carbines.
Basilios knew the boy’s father, a decent man, who plied his trade as a mechanic among the surrounding towns and villages. He did his best to rationalize the situation, but as they reversed their short rifles, about to bludgeon the kid to death with the metal butts, he took aim and fired at their legs, three rounds each. As they collapsed to the floor, he saw the side of the boy’s head explode in a mass of blood and bone fragments.
Devastated, he scanned the flat roofs above and saw a sniper edging back behind a pile of plastic chairs before turning and half crawling towards the adjoining building.
Basilios glanced around the doorway, telling himself that he would mourn the boy later. Those townsmen who hadn’t fled were dead or dying. There was nothing to be done except to try to survive and then join up with the women and children in the hills. Perhaps I will be able to lead them to safety? he thought.
They couldn’t return to the town, that was for sure. In those towns and villages where the Sunni Islamists had taken control, it’d been a liberation that had turned into a religiously-motivated occupation. People received forty lashes for stealing, and teenagers were beheaded for voicing a barely inappropriate reference to the Prophet. Sharia law had been imposed with a dogmatic ferocity. He didn’t want to imagine what it would be like for a Christian town.
Move, he thought. Keep moving or die.
Twenty minutes later, Pouter emerged onto the sidewalk again, her hips still doing the swinging routine. One of the Russian security detail, a blond guy with sloppy lips and tombstone-grey eyes, who looked as if his mother had substituted breast milk for protein shakes fortified with creatine, held four meringue-coloured paper bags dotted with little lilac flowers.