“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Boon said.
“It’s the entire ISIS army,” my driver said, panicking. Thirty technicals raced toward us, while another twenty were chasing. We would be crushed.
“Get out of their way,” I said, but there was no escape. Seconds later the horde swallowed us. Technicals side-swiped each other, gunners mowed down other gunners. Vehicles blew apart and tumbled end over end. No one seemed to notice us.
“They’re shooting each other!” Wildman exclaimed.
“Whiskey tango foxtrot?!” I said. What the fuck?
“Brace!” my driver yelled, lurching the Humvee to avoid an out-of-control technical. “Civil war. Sunni ISIS versus Shia militia.”
“Battle Royale Speicher! Yee-haaaaw!” Wildman said. I really wished he’d shut up, but this was Wildman’s ecstasy.
A side window blew out, one bullet too many. Another bullet ricocheted inside the cab, my driver screamed.
Once the ISIS and Shia lines passed through each other, they turned about to face each other again. Vehicles collided, shattering into a million parts. Bodies flew through the air, run over before they hit the ground. A man with an ax leapt from one technical to another, cleaving a gunner in the skull before he was torn in half by another technical’s fifty-cal.
“What the fuck, over?” Boon said.
“Just get us out of here,” I said. Anywhere but here, I thought. The first thing they teach you in the infantry is: if you’re being ambushed, get off the X.
Then I saw the battling horde turn toward the CHU village.
Kylah, I thought. There would be no escape for them.
“About-face,” I said. “Back to the CHUs! We need to get to Marhaz and Farhan before the battle does.” The driver spun the Humvee in a J-turn and sped toward the barracks complex.
I was shooting technicals in our path with the fifty-cal, clearing a path. Those we could not hit, we destroyed. Boon was right behind us. Dust kicked up by the battle obscured vision, and we had three near misses with speeding technicals. But we could hear the heavy weapons firing, see the muzzle flashes through the dust cloud, and feel the blast shock waves rock our two-and-a-half-ton vehicles. The noise was deafening, even at fifty mph.
Kaboom. A technical in front of us blew into the air sideways, then landed and rolled another hundred meters. We fishtailed around it, nearly clipping it.
“IED!” I shouted—improvised explosive device. We were racing across a minefield.
Another technical blew ten meters high.
“It’s raining Toyotas!” Wildman said.
Yet the technicals didn’t slow. That’s the problem with fanatics; they will continue to fight no matter how futile.
Enjoy hell then, I thought.
The Humvee erupted beneath my boots, flinging me through space. My body bounced off a Hesco barrier, then the dirt. There was pain in every cell. Behind me was the burning hulk of our Humvee, destroyed by an IED. My driver’s body crumbled against the inside windshield. I could move my limbs. Things ached, but nothing was broken.
I’m exposed, I realized. Jihadists of all stripes were entering the CHU village. Some were in vehicles, some on foot like me.
In a firefight, you focus fast. The world gets small, as you search out immediate danger. Amateurs flip to full auto, empty the clip, and usually miss. The barrel superheats and bullets go wide. Better to be disciplined on semiauto. Acquire target, inhale, sight picture, exhale, squeeze. Shooting is like violent Buddhist meditation. No time to focus? Then a three-round burst center of mass. Pop. Pop. Pop. Target falls. Move on.
The best among us never fired full auto. For us it was one shot, one kill.
I brought my SCAR to firing position, finding them one by one. The air reeked, the temperature was scorching, and the smoke was so thick it was stinging my eyes. I moved quickly through the maze, dodging battling technicals, to where I had dropped off Kylah.
“Boon, Wildman,” I said over my headset. “Anyone, come in.” Static.
I heard popping, saw an ISIS fighter drawing down on me from a tight angle, and knew I wasn’t safe. I ran to a wrecked Humvee, smoking and shot to hell, but still offering good cover. I scooted around to the rear, staying low, and broke off the vehicle’s side mirror. Angling it, I could see around the corner.
Five meters away. Two ISIS, one firing, one looking for me. I slung my SCAR behind me and grabbed my Beretta pistols. I spun around the bumper and put them both down, firing both pistols at once, then crouch-ran to them as quickly as I could. The first was dead. The second was fumbling, trying to get a grenade from his bandolier with a bloody hand. I killed him with a headshot.
One more block, I thought, as I moved. Another technical exploded, the gunner coming off his perch in slow motion and slamming to the ground as if he’d already shattered all his bones.
Then I saw her. “Kylah!”
“Locke!” Kylah shouted back. “We’re trapped!”
She was ten meters away on the edge of the action, firing on ISIS with her AK-47. Behind her was the CHU where Marhaz presumably hid. Farhan was in the middle of the courtyard, bloody and holding a knife. Five jihadists lay dead around him.
“Farhan!” I yelled, but he didn’t hear me over the din of the battle. He returned to Marhaz, carrying only his blade.
A technical nearly ran me over, as I rolled out of its path. By the time I got upright, a figure walked toward me, like a ghost coming out of a wall: a tall man in a dirty white robe and a long beard, striding casually through the gunfire and smoke. He had no gun, as far as I could tell, but a long scimitar was strapped to his back. He looked so completely at ease, not looking to either side, that I hesitated for a second, and in that time he slipped up on Kylah and chopped into the wooden handguard of her AK-47 with his sword, wrenching it from her hands and knocking her to the ground.
“Kylah!” I screamed, but the man barely slowed. He didn’t care about Kylah. He had his eyes on Marhaz. I leveled my SCAR at the center of his back, two kill shots, pop, pop, easy as that, but before I could fire I felt burning in my shoulder, then a sharp pain, and I turned to face an ISIS attacker closing so fast I could see the filth in his teeth. He leapt on me and knocked me down, grasping for my throat as I fumbled for my knife.