Task Force Desperate (30 page)

I got out as Jim killed the engine, leaving us in relative silence, aside from the noises of the cooling engine and what sounds we made moving around. I didn’t dally, but slung my rifle, checked my radio, and headed over to the hood of the HiLux, where Alek and Hank were already on a knee, facing the river.

I came up and sank to one knee beside Hank. “You ready?” I whispered. He just reached out and tapped my shoulder with a fist. I tapped Alek in turn, and led out. Hank rose smoothly to follow me, and we headed down toward the riverbank.

We moved carefully and smoothly, hands on our rifles, but not up and in the red. At least, not until we heard the grunting down by the water.

Unless you’ve ever heard a crocodile grunt close to you in the dark, you don’t really know what fear is. I’d face a twenty-to-one firefight happily long before I want to hear that sound again. When I realized what it was, I damn near shit myself. Nobody in their right mind wants to go fucking around with crocs in the daytime, much less at night, when you can’t see the scaly fuckers.

I immediately turned on the thermal feature on my NVGs, only to remember that the crocs are cold-blooded, and probably wouldn’t show up very well. “Fuck!” I hissed under my breath, as I sank to a knee in the sand. Hank came up next to me and took a knee at my shoulder.

“What’s up?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

“Crocs,” I replied, and I heard muffled swearing.

“We’ve got to get across somewhere,” he said after a moment.

“I know,” I whispered in reply. “And there isn’t likely to be anyplace else on this fucking river that doesn’t have crocs, too.” I gnawed at it in my head, but couldn’t see any way around it. We were going to have to ford in the face of crocodiles, and to do that, we’d have to go in and check that the river was fordable before we tried to drive vehicles into it. Damn it.

I didn’t turn to look at Hank, but kept my eyes out, watching the only faintly visible long shapes down by the shore moving around. “We still have to do this, but I’m going to call the rest of the team up to cover while we do. I am
not
going into that water with all those fucking dinosaurs in there, with just the two of us.” Without waiting for his reply, which turned out to be little more than a fist thumped lightly on a shoulder in agreement, I keyed my radio. “Coconut, Hillbilly. At the river. Be advised, there are crocodiles on the banks at the least. Request you bring up the rest of the team to cover while we conduct Fordrep.”

“Roger, Hillbilly,” Alek called back at once. I breathed a little easier. It was still going to be risky as hell, but I felt a little better about checking out the river crossing when there were other guys with thermals and guns ready to kill any ancient reptilian predators that wanted to make me or Hank into midnight snacks.

The two vehicles growled up to us, starlight glinting off the windshields, and came to a stop about fifty meters from the riverbank. The rest of the guys got out, weapons ready, and spread out, while Alek came over to where we were kneeling.

“What’s the matter, gunfighter? Some lizards got you shaky?” Alek whispered. I couldn’t see his grin, because I was still watching the crocs, but I could hear it.

“Fuck you, Alek,” I replied. “You go down there and wrestle with those fuckers.”

He clapped me on the shoulder with a plate-sized hand. “I’m just fucking with you, brother, good call. I wouldn’t want to chance that shit, either, and there’s no good reason to. Damn it,” he continued. “We should have thought of this during planning.”

“Too long out here, and no real place to go firm and get some rest,” Hank pointed out. “We’re going to have to watch that, or we might miss something even worse.”

“Amen, brother,” Alek agreed. “Hopefully we can stand down for a day or two whenever we link up with this contact, though the way the rest of this clusterfuck has been going, I’m not counting on it.” He blew a huge breath out. “Now, has anybody got any ideas as to how to scare away crocs without waking every nomad, farmer, or local militia within thirty miles?”

“Anybody here from gator country?” I asked. “I knew one weird Cajun back during my time in Recon who might have had an answer, but I don’t, aside from driving the trucks right up to the shore.”

“Which kind of defeats the purpose of doing a ford recon, but I see your point,” Alek said. “And no, we don’t have any swamp runners on the team, but you knew that.”

I heard the rasp of his hand rubbing his stubble. “I guess we go ahead and try to ford, one vic at a time, and if we start running into trouble, either back up, or get pulled out. We’ll just have to take it slow, so that we don’t get stuck. I still don’t know what this riverbed is made of, and for some strange reason, there’s next to no information on it in any of the intel we’ve got.”

“Figures.” I took my eyes off the crocs long enough to look back at him, even though he wasn’t much more than a looming shadow at my shoulder. “Call the play, boss.”

He reached back to key his radio. “All pax, back on the trucks. Due to reptile hazards, we’re going to wing this one. HiLux goes first, with tow lines ready in case we’ve got to yank it out. We’ll be fording blind, so we’ll take it slow. Go ahead and hook up the tow lines first, just keep them slack until they’re needed.” We had managed to find some very long ropes, almost 120 lines. They were a lot longer than the tow straps that we’d used in the military, which were twenty feet long, if you were lucky. Of course, there was the question of how well they’d hold up to the vehicles’ weight, but then again, they were all we had.

It took a few minutes to get the lines out and tied securely. Most of us were out around the vehicles, on a knee in the sand, on security but mostly handling croc watch. Nobody wanted to tangle with those things, which made me feel a little better about borderline freaking out about them.

Finally, the murmured command, “Mount up,” came over the radio, and I piled back into the right seat of the Land Cruiser. The HiLux was already moving; we had lost enough time here already.

Jim moved the Land Cruiser close behind the other truck, and only stopped at the edge of the bank, which was steeper than I’d anticipated. It still wasn’t bad, and really was nothing to these vehicles, but it wasn’t as shallow as I might have expected a ford to be. The HiLux’ nose dipped down to almost a forty-five degree angle, as Nick eased it toward the water. I couldn’t see a lot of detail aside from the thermal signatures, but Bob looked to be holding on to the PKM in the back for dear life.

The truck nosed into the water…and kept going. Fortunately it was a HiLux with a snorkel. I’d been pleasantly surprised to see that, though I realized that it was unlikely that the pirates had known what it was for, or cared. The water was up to the hood, and was threatening to go higher, but then the truck leveled out, and continued to push across the river.

About halfway across, the left front corner suddenly dipped, almost throwing Bob out of the bed and into the water. The truck stopped almost as abruptly, and then started to ease backward, as Nick worked to get them out of the hole in the riverbed. Jim had his hand on the gearshift, ready to throw the Land Cruiser into reverse to pull them back out if Nick couldn’t recover.

But the HiLux eased backward, righted itself, then turned about forty-five degrees to the right and forged on ahead, pushing around the hole. The rest of the riverbed failed to produce any similar nasty surprises, and soon the HiLux was clawing up onto higher ground. Jim threw the Land Cruiser in gear and started forward, before the tow line could go taut.

I wasn’t sure how well the Toyota SUV was going to handle the river. It didn’t have the fording kit that the HiLux did, and I was more than a little concerned that we’d wind up flooding the engine as well as the exhaust. Jim was similarly concerned, so he floored the engine, driving as hard as he could to get across the river before the water could do too much damage.

Water flowed in the door, the current and sheer volume of the river forcing it past the battered weatherstripping. Everybody lifted their weapons to chest level to keep them out of the muddy flood, though my pistol was getting a good bath. I’d have to strip and clean it as soon as I could; even with the Slipstream treatment, I didn’t want that crap in my beloved 1911.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding, as we surged up out of the river, fishtailing a little on the muddy bank. The water started flowing out of the cab. We were all soaked to the waist, and it was going to be chilly until the sun came up. Nothing unfamiliar, there wasn’t a one of us hadn’t spent the most part of the last ten years or more either wet, gritty, too cold, too hot, or some combination thereof. Didn’t mean we wouldn’t bitch about it. The grumbling from the back was starting already, until Jim growled, “Shut the fuck up,” and the complaints subsided. For the moment.

The land began to rise as we came out of the Shabelle River floodplain, though it never turned into highlands. More desert went by in the dark, a little rougher perhaps than to the northeast where we’d started, but we were still able to maintain about a forty kph rate of march. By the time the sun came up, we were fifty miles south of Baidoa. We could be on the outskirts of Baardheere by noon.

Chapter 21

W
e didn’t make it that far before the HiLux slowed and stopped. We were in the middle of nowhere, nothing but flat, scrub-dotted plains as far as the eye could see. We’d seen some camel-driving nomads earlier, but now, with the sun rising higher in the sky and the horizon already starting to shimmer with heat, there was no sign of life.

Alek got out of the HiLux’ cab, looked back at us, and circled his hand over his head. Assemble. Something was up.

Except for the two drivers and two on security, we all piled out and huddled around Alek on the ground between the trucks, rifles carefully held muzzle-down across knees, except for Imad, who kept his muzzle-up, I think largely as a fuck-you to the “Rambo” comments that had been made the first time he did it, on one of our border jobs.

“What’s up?” I asked, as I lowered myself to a knee. Like everyone else, I was still keeping one eye on the horizon.

Alek jerked a thumb at Danny. “He just got a phone call from Langley. Seems things have potentially gotten more complicated.”

Danny launched in without much preamble. “The final push to force the Kenyans and the Ethiopians out of the country has apparently started. We have gotten reports from Baird that Malouf Ali Awale’s Lashkar al-Barbar is advancing on Baardheere. They’re moving relatively slowly; they’re a lot like the Janjaweed militias up in Sudan, and are terrorizing villages on the way, particularly any that have helped the African Union or the Kenyans in the last few years, but they are on their way, and in force. Langley sent me some satellite imagery that backs all this up, as well.”

Hank raised a finger. “Question; who the fuck is Lashkar al-Barbar? I’ve heard of Shabaab, obviously, and AQEA. Who are these fuckers?”

“Lashkar al-Barbar is a relative newcomer,” Danny explained. “They grew out of the cooperation between Shabaab and AQ, and we have some indicators that Al Masri was closely involved in its founding. It is essentially the Somali version of the Taliban’s old Brigade 055 or Lashkar al-Zil. It’s a semi-autonomous, multinational army of hard-core jihadi shock troops. They only come around when there’s serious resistance to Islamic Emirate forces, or they just want to send a message. Or if there’s some really good booty to be had. They aren’t nearly in the class of Saddam’s old Republican Guard or the IRGC. They are primarily an instrument of terror, but they’ve apparently had enough training and have enough numbers and equipment to be a serious challenge to anybody they’re likely to face in Somalia.

“Now, the Kenyans would have been able to take them down without even breathing hard a couple years ago, but, largely since Al Masri came on the scene, their stance in Somalia has been deeply eroded, largely because of the increasing AQEA activity in their own country. They already got pushed out of Kismayo, and the Ethiopians have been driven out of Baidoa. If the jihadis manage to push the Kenyans out of Baardheere, it’ll be the end of resistance to Islamist rule in southern Somalia. They’ll be able to turn to Galmudug, Puntland, and Somaliland next.”

“None of which is our concern,” Alek put in. “We’re not here to liberate Somalia or ensure the stability of however many kleptocracies are crammed into this Godforsaken patch of dirt. We’re here to get those hostages out.”

“Just setting the stage, brother,” Danny said. “If we’re trying to operate in an area where Awale’s set up shop, it’s going to make things dicey. These guys are known for being sharia enforcers wherever they operate, and anything that looks out of place is likely to attract their attention. And once engaged, they tend to dog pile. We get in it with a squad of ‘em, they’ll probably have a battalion on us in less than an hour.”

“Which is why we stay clandestine,” Larry pointed out. “Unless I’m missing something, we’re supposed to just be the recon element here.” He looked around. “Did I hear that wrong?”

“No, you didn’t,” I replied. “But nothing else on this op has gone according to plan, and we haven’t exactly stayed soft the whole time. Makes sense to know what we’re up against if things go to hell again.” I paused a moment, then fulfilled my chosen role of doomsayer. “Which they will.”

“Now, Langley is telling me that Baird has some undocumented assets of his own,” Danny continued with a frown. “I have no idea what they are, or what he’s doing with them. Like I said, the guy is a little questionable. The seventh floor thinks he’s dangerous, but he’s got enough friends in Operations and provides enough actionable information that he hasn’t been shut down or pulled out.”

“You said you had some personal experience with him?” Hank asked.

“Briefly,” was the reply. “We had some contact a few years ago, trying to hunt down some AQEA bad boys, but nothing extended.” Danny shrugged. “He struck me as a little loose in his procedures, and his reputation is pretty shady, but that could be either earned or unearned. Could be he’s just unorthodox, and has made enemies for purely political reasons.” He grinned suddenly. “Which is a possibility that actually makes me somewhat predisposed to like the guy a little, given how things are going.”