February 10th, 2010
Niamey, Niger, Central Africa
“Okay, there are probably worse places to die. But please don’t tell me about them.”
“Deal,” Smith offered one of her typically verbose responses, then glanced at her watch.
Gerrard Carson tried to resist, but couldn’t, and checked his own watch as he frantically applied another bandage. He wasn’t even looking at whose limb it was anymore.
Nine of them with their backs against a building. A low adobe-brick wall to their left and their flipped and shattered pickup truck angled across the rest of the opening. Triage was long gone out the window—except their truck no longer had windows.
Graveyard humor. The God-given right of every Army grunt about to go down hard. Hooah!
He saw blood and did his best to staunch it. That was all he could do in the short time. A streaming scalp wound through blond hair? Yeah, he knew who that was but didn’t have time to think of their name.
The prayer call from the minaret of the local mosque had been going on for three minutes and thirty seconds. It was Asr in the capital city of Niger—when the length of his afternoon shadow matched his own height, and everyone in Niamey stopped to pray.
A strange hiatus in the midst of a pitched battle.
Max of ninety seconds left before prayer ended and the battle resumed. And that’s only if they were lucky and the attackers took the full five minutes to thank God for the chance to kill their team.
Officially only a hundred and nine degrees today, the hottest major city in the world felt like one-twenty and rising fast.
“We’re cookin’ here.” Of course that could also be because the south-facing wall at their backs was the burnt-orange-dulled-under-brown-dust front of the corporate offices for fat-cat-people-he-didn’t-give-a-damn-about. American contractors in the middle of Niamey—not the military type, the money type.
“Meat,” Smith offered the ultimate insult to an infantryman. Meat. Not worth anything else. Just part of the military machine.
About right.
They were being cooked and chewed up. Not that many more minutes until they’d be spit out for good, but he had to try. He unsnapped a rifle sling, and tied it around someone’s thigh. He slid an empty twenty-round magazine through it as a turning stick and spun it tight. At least the leg stopped pumping blood. Grabbing the soldier’s hand, he put it on the jury-rigged tourniquet and shouted in his face, “Do not let go of this.”
He didn’t wait for any acknowledgement, or let himself focus to see who it was. Just let go of the guy’s hand on the magazine and hoped for the best.
They’d been in the city doing training with the Presidential guards. Until suddenly Nigerien President Tandja was getting his ass coup d’étated.
“Coup is probably over,” Smith scanned outside their hide between a low wall and the chassis of their flipped pickup truck. “Not that we’ll ever know.”
Also right.
Their staff sergeant had done good. He’d extricated his eight shooters from the situation as it wasn’t an American battle. Once clear of the battle at the Presidential palace, they were tasked to set up protection on a cluster of offices used by US corporations in case the whole city went bad. He’d pulled it off, and they’d fallen all the way back clean.
Should have been fine. Back street several blocks back from the palace.
Except some Nigerien yay-hoo had decided that the American team were actually escaping Presidential guards.
Just as they’d pulled up at what was supposed to be a quiet guard detail, someone had RPG’d their pickup—probably shouldn’t have lifted it from the President’s guards when they’d needed to be gone fast.
Real useful thought in hindsight.
Then they’d offered the staff sergeant a bullet to his brainpan before anyone could even blink—which put them down to eight and no leader between one heartbeat and the next.
Smith had taken out the shooter—just too late for the staff sergeant. She was so damned good that it was like having a real countersniper, which would never happen in an eight-grunt squad. He’d set his M4 carbine to three-rounds burst and counted himself lucky if he got a hit. She fired semi-auto singles and never missed.
“Thirty seconds, Doc,” Smith saved him checking his watch again.
That actually gave him a moment’s pause. Usually he was “Low Gear” because apparently Gerrard was too complex a name for most grunts. He’d rather be “High Gear” but a grunt never got any say in his tag. He’d always been the steady one in the squad, so maybe Low Gear fit.
But “Doc”?
He was simply the guy who still remembered his dinnertime training. Mom was an operating room nurse and Dad an ER doc. Even his big sister was interning by the time he graduated high school. Dinner conversations were predictably bloody. When he’d gone grunt instead of med school—major parental disappointment—he’d been the one guy wholly unabashed by blood and guts. It was also the best way he’d been able to think of for escaping family peer pressure. Five years on? He was thinking going Army grunt rather than college was a pretty dumb-ass idea.
He could wrap a bandage with the best of them, but that was all. He was just a gun on a squad, and nowhere near the kind of shooter that Smith was. Not that either skill meant a whole lot at the moment. They weren’t a big enough team to warrant a trained EMT, and Niamey was a peaceful place—until today. They needed a whole team of top shooters even more than the medico.
The squad was getting pretty light on the ground. Two were past lifting their weapons—ever again. A glance showed that the tourniquet had slid loose from a grip gone lax, and so they were down a third. Three others were still in it only because they weren’t going to the big discharge in the sky without a fight. And the staff sergeant was long past caring about that bullet in the brainpan.
That left him and Smith as the only fully able shooters.
Tags never stuck to Smith. She was just…Smith. She’d been knocked back in rank a couple times—no one knew why—but Sergeant Smith was a hell-bitch in a firefight.
At four minutes-fifty after the call to five minutes of prayer had begun, he grabbed his rifle to protect what was left of his squad.
The dusty street looked impossibly serene. Ten meters wide and about five blocks long in either direction before it jogged or twisted out of sight among the one- and two-story structures.
Pale red-brown sand. Buildings in a dozen shades of beige because the dust and sand washed out all colors.
“I’m gonna die in beige.”
“No,” Smith blew the dust off her scope. Kicked up by every muzzle blast, the stuff just hung in the air until it found some optics to blur. “We’re gonna die bright red.”
Gerrard carefully didn’t look behind him at the seeping bandages he’d managed to put on the remainder of the team.