Zero 22, p.2
Zero 22, page 2
part #8 of Danny Black Series
Danny took his position at one of the Gimpys on Jackal Two. As Jackal One advanced towards the target, Jackals Two and Three positioned themselves on either side of the road that led towards the prison, which was four hundred metres distant. The Bushmaster was thirty metres behind them. To Danny’s right was another drainage ditch leading at right angles from the road. Danny and the other three Gimpy operators rotated their weapons towards the prison compound, ready to give covering fire if necessary. Jackal One trundled towards the prison at a slow, steady rate. In his peripheral vision, Danny was aware of Chinese Mike aiming the Bushmaster’s grenade launcher towards one of the security towers. Danny raised his night sight again, looking for the three regular flashes of the torch. They didn’t come.
He switched his radio frequency to speak to the ops base. ‘Alpha, this is Zero 22. We have one vehicle approaching the target now. Over.’
A pause and a hiss. ‘Roger that. Over.’
Jackal One was ten metres from the entrance. It stopped. Through his sight, Danny saw the top-gunners making a precautionary sweep of the compound. A voice in his earpiece said, ‘Clear.’ Jackal One sustained its slow advance towards the guard house. Danny continued to watch through his sight.
It happened suddenly. One moment the Jackal was advancing. The next, there was an explosion so fierce that, even from a distance, it sent a shock wave through Danny’s body. There was a brief flash, bright enough to dazzle him. When his sight returned, he saw smoke belching from the position the Jackal had held, it was so thick that it completely obscured the vehicle.
Danny screamed into his radio. ‘Land mine! Contact! Contact! One vehicle down! Three guys!’
But it was already going noisy. Tracer fire shot through the air from positions inside the prison. It lit up the night, burning through and over the perimeter fence, at first landing only in the vicinity of the convoy vehicles and spitting up vicious explosions of desert dust. It took only seconds for the shooters to fine-tune their aim. Before any of the team could return fire, the tracer rounds – .40 and .50 cal, Danny estimated – slammed into the two remaining Jackals and the Bushmaster. Each time a tracer round hit, there was a sickening metallic crunch and a multicoloured burst of ricochet, like fireworks.
After a few seconds’ delay, the air exploded with the thunder of the SAS team returning fire. The night split with the cacophony of the four Gimpys on Jackals Two and Three pumping ordnance back towards the prison. Danny fired bursts of three to five rounds – the most effective and accurate way to operate a Gimpy. The empty rounds spat out of the weapon and the 7.62s flew through the thick plume of smoke billowing from the wrecked Jackal One. Grenades smashed through the perimeter fence and exploded in the vicinity of the prison. But sustained and relentless and brutal though the SAS’s counterattack was, it seemed to have no effect. If anything, the incoming fire increased in intensity. More lines of tracer fire sliced towards them, slamming into the Jackals and the Bushmaster, which were rocking and smouldering with the impact. Two RPGs starburst in the air, showering the area with shrapnel. Two more exploded on the ground fifteen metres behind the Bushmaster. The incoming grew heavier and heavier, high-calibre rounds drilling into the armoured panels of the vehicles.
‘Bullethead!’ Danny screamed through comms at the driver of the Bushmaster. ‘Advance, advance! We need more covering fire!’ He could feel the heat coming off the barrel of his Gimpy.
As the Bushmaster moved forwards, Danny switched frequency. Immediately he heard a stressed voice at the other end of the radio. ‘Zero 22, what is your sitrep?’
‘We’re under heavy fire! We need air support! Now!’
Even as he spoke, things got worse.
Through his night vision he saw a flare from inside the prison. In the two seconds that followed, he became aware of an anti-tank missile hurtling through the air directly at Jackal Three. The vehicle was to his three o’clock, no more than twenty metres away. Against a weapon like that, it didn’t stand a chance. The missile slammed hard into the Jackal. The extremity of the explosion punched all the air from Danny’s lungs. Jackal Three was thrown on to its side like a toy. Flames engulfed it. Within the space of ninety seconds, whoever was lying in wait at the prison had demolished two Jackals and six men, and things were only going to get worse. Danny fired more bursts from the Gimpy. The barrel was glowing faintly, and smoking. He was going to burn it out if he kept this rate of fire, but there was no chance of changing out the barrel. ‘Fast air!’ Danny shouted into comms. ‘FAST AIR!’
He didn’t hear the response, because right then the Bushmaster hit an IED in the road that the rest of the convoy had miraculously missed. The gutting crack of the explosion cut through the noise of tracer rounds and Gimpy fire. The front end of the Bushmaster crumpled horrifically and the whole vehicle tipped over on to its side with an ominous creak.
And then its problems really started.
Three anti-tank missiles slammed into the Bushmaster’s undercarriage. The noise and devastation were immense. Metal ripped. Smoke belched. Fuel ignited. It was obvious at a glance that everyone inside the vehicle was fucked. Danny quickly switched his radio to personal comms. He wished he hadn’t. All he could hear was inhuman screams from inside the Bushmaster. Macalister? Bullethead? He couldn’t tell. Danny tried to concentrate on keeping the rounds from his Gimpy raining down on the prison, but now he was aware of someone moving away from the Bushmaster. It had to be Chinese Mike, thrown from the remote weapon station. He was staggering towards Jackal Two, then he stumbled and fell perhaps fifteen metres away, Danny could hear him screaming.
Danny’s reaction was instinctive. He threw himself from the Jackal, hitting the ground with a heavy, deadened thump. Chinese Mike was in trouble. He needed help. Danny struggled to his feet, the air around him a riot of tracer fire and shrapnel. He sprinted towards Chinese Mike, who had managed to get to his knees.
He was only five metres away when the rounds hit. If the effect of the tracer rounds on the armoured shells of the convoy vehicles was brutal, their effect on a human body was obscene. They cut through Chinese Mike’s neck, abdomen and groin like he was made of warm butter. Blood and the hot mush of decimated internal organs and fragments of bone showered everywhere. Danny hit the ground, pressing himself hard on to the desert floor to avoid meeting the same grisly fate as his mate. He looked back towards Jackal Two. It was ten metres from where he was lying and only had one Gimpy operational since Danny had gone to Mike’s rescue.
He evaluated his options. Jackal Two was the only remaining vehicle. He had to get back to it.
No chance.
Less than a second later, a missile hit the Jackal. The shock wave physically threw him several metres away from the vehicle and on to Chinese Mike’s gruesome remains. There was a sudden wave of intense heat as the thermobaric warhead did its work. Danny thought he was on fire. He roared with pain, but somehow had the presence of mind to push himself back to his feet and sprint away from the conflagration. A secondary explosion from the Bushmaster threw him to the ground again. Danny was horribly aware of the stench of his scorched clothes and the constant barrage of tracer fire devouring the remains of the convoy. He was gasping, gulping for air. Still pressed into the ground, he fumbled for his radio and switched frequencies again. ‘Thirteen men down!’ he shouted. ‘Where’s that fucking fast air?’
‘Incoming from Northern Iraq. ETA five minutes.’
Danny swore and looked around. He saw four individual fires: the four vehicles, still burning, spewing black smoke. Jackal Two had fallen into the drainage ditch that led from the road. The air wavered with the heat haze and the prison was barely visible beyond the glare, although he could make out gobbets of fire rising from the perimeter fence. The incoming had subsided. There was an ominous silence. It was only when he raised his night sight, which was still hanging by a lanyard round his neck, that he could discern the movement of personnel near the prison. Enemy advancing. Was it the Kurds? Had this been a catastrophic blue on blue? Or an elaborate trick? He didn’t think so. Why would they have ditched the safe-approach signal if they wanted to ambush the troop? Would they have access to that kind of firepower? No. This was someone else. Islamic State? Perhaps. They’d have gladly butchered the Kurds that had once guarded this facility, and might have forced the intel of the SAS’s imminent arrival out of them. But even that didn’t quite ring true. Those anti-tank missiles were serious bits of kit, and the shock and awe tactics they’d used to get the better of an SAS troop smacked to Danny of special forces operators.
SF operators who had, without question, been expecting them.
He had no rifle. He’d left it in the Jackal. His Glock 17 was holstered, but it was a poor replacement, useless for long-range firing. The terrain was flat and featureless. If he ran, the enemy would see him, no question. His only hope of finding cover, he realised, was in the drainage ditch where Jackal Two had ended up. He crawled towards it, grimacing against the heat radiating from the burning Jackal. His body hurt and he moved slowly. It took twenty seconds to cover the ten metres to the ditch. He rolled down into it. It was a little cooler here, below the level of the burning Jackal. He saw the circular opening of a culvert, an underground drainage pipe perhaps a metre in diameter. It would do as a hiding place, but as he prepared to climb in, a voice came over his earpiece. ‘Zero 22, this is Alpha, patching you through to fast air.’
‘Go ahead,’ Danny said. His own voice surprised him: raw, dry and hoarse.
A new voice. ‘We’re one minute from target. Repeat, one minute from target. What is your location?’
‘Forget my location,’ Danny barked. ‘Drop everything you’ve got on the prison!’
‘Blast area’s going to be big. Are you in a position of safety?’
‘Thirteen men down and I’m next. Drop the fucking payload!’
‘Roger that. Out.’
He could hear the fast air approaching, very quiet at first, very distant, but the noise of its engines increasing by the second. He scrambled a few feet into the culvert and screwed his body up into a ball, his arms protecting his face and covering the hard kevlar of his helmet. His only hope was that the culvert, the kevlar and the burning bulk of the Jackal would protect him from the payload. It wasn’t much of a hope, but it was something.
The crescendo of the fast air became more intense. Danny screwed up his eyes as the deafening roar of the aircraft passed overhead and the vibration thrummed even here under the ground.
And then the bombs hit.
The noise was unreal. Five explosions so loud that they caused stabbing pains in Danny’s ears. But the noise was not the worst thing. The overpressures, so close to the blast site, were like nothing he had ever experienced. His mouth, his head, his lungs all felt as though they’d had the air sucked out of them. The ground shook and his body shook with it. There was a cracking sound and he knew that the concrete culvert was collapsing around him. He felt dust in his mouth and could hear, outside his hiding place, the brutal, relentless rain of shrapnel pelting the ground. There was another enormous, metallic crash and crunch nearby and several afterblasts, each of them sending a vibrating shock through Danny’s body.
And then, suddenly, silence.
Danny gasped noisily, his lungs suddenly working again. His mouth filled with grit and dust. He opened his eyes. Everything was spinning. It was dark, and he realised that the air was still so full of dust it was completely obscuring his vision. He crawled out of the culvert. As he moved, he heard the concrete collapse behind him. Out in the ditch, he coughed and retched as the thick, polluted air seemed to suck its way into his nose, mouth and ears. His right ear, where his earpiece was fitted, felt clogged. There was moistness on his left earlobe. He realised that his eardrums were bleeding.
It took a minute for the dust to settle sufficiently that it was worth Danny re-engaging his NV goggles. Astonishingly they were still working. He recced the surrounding area and immediately saw the source of the nearby metallic crash. The force of the blast had thrown the nearby Jackal into the air and out of the ditch. It lay on its back, crunched and smouldering, ten metres away. Danny raised his goggles, fumbled with trembling fingers for his night sight, and looked back towards the prison.
It barely existed. Two minutes ago there had been a strong, secure edifice. Now it was rubble. Several individual fires glowed where the prison had once been and the perimeter fence, still standing in places, was aflame. Danny knew how lucky he was to be alive. It was obvious to him that the air strike must have taken out any other person in the immediate vicinity.
‘Zero 22, this is Alpha. Do you copy? Over.’ The voice in Danny’s ear was muffled because of the blood. He removed the earpiece and tried to clear out the earhole with a thick, dirty forefinger. When he replaced the earpiece, the guy back at base was repeating his communication. ‘Zero 22, this is Alpha. Do you copy? Over.’
‘They’re gone . . .’ Danny muttered. His voice was slurred. Slow. He could barely understand himself.
‘What is your status? Over?’
‘Everyone’s gone . . .’
Danny surveyed the bleak scene again. The guys were dead. All of them. Ambushed by a force with superior fire power who had known – Danny was certain of this – that they were coming. Thirteen good guys. Thirteen friends. He felt a surge of anger boil through him. ‘Zero 22. Danny? Activate your personal tracking device. Over.’
He stared into the distance for a full ten seconds before the instruction registered. His tracking device resembled a smartphone in a tough, rugged case. He fumbled for it, his attention still on the blazing bomb site. He swiped and tapped the screen to transmit his distress beacon back to base.
‘Listen up, Danny. We need to get you out of there. Your nearest patrol is a day’s drive away, so we’re going to despatch a chopper. That blast site’s going to attract attention, so you need to get the hell away from it. Keep walking east. Don’t stop walking. Get away from that place as quickly as possible. Do you copy?’
Danny didn’t reply. He realised he was stumbling around aimlessly.
‘Danny! Do you copy?’
‘They were waiting for us,’ Danny muttered.
‘You need to calm down, Danny. You need to listen carefully. Get away from the blast site. There could be . . .’
Danny switched of his radio and the voice died.
The Bushmaster and the two remaining Jackals were mere shells. He went through the motions of checking for survivors, but he knew it was useless. He couldn’t even recognise the remains of his unit mates. Their skin was scorched away, their features melted. They stank of burned flesh and hair. Beyond the vehicles, closer to the remains of the prison, he encountered dismembered body parts among the chunks of rubble and pockmarked craters in the earth. He picked some of them up. A forearm. A lower leg. He felt he should do something with them, but he didn’t know what, so he dropped them on the ground again. None of them helped him with his objective: to identify the fighters who had been lying in wait for them, and who had killed Danny’s team. And so he started stumbling groggily in the direction of the bomb site.
He was 200 metres from ground zero when he found his first piece of evidence. To the untrained eye, it would look like nothing more than a hunk of twisted, mangled metal. But when Danny pulled out his torch and examined it more closely, he knew immediately what it was, or at least what it had once been: a metal tripod with a thick cylindrical tube atop, still warm to the touch. This was one of the anti-tank missile launchers that had made such short work of the convoy. It was a Kornet-EM. Laser-beam guidance system. Range of eight to ten kilometres.
And Russian.
Danny spat the dust from his mouth. His mind was clearing. He pulled out his camera and photographed the Kornet. He staggered on. A minute later, he came across a body. It was almost as mangled as the missile launcher, its limbs pointing at strange angles from broken bones, patches of clothing burned away and whatever skin remained on the face covered with a thick, sooty layer. Danny knelt down beside it. He took his water canteen from his ops vest and poured a little water on the dead man’s face, before scrubbing away the dirt and rinsing it again. There was no doubt about it: this was not the body of Kurd or an IS fighter. This was white skin.
He photographed the dead body then got back to his feet and stared down at the corpse. A wave of overwhelming anger rose in his gut. He drew his pistol and aimed it at the body. Discharged a full magazine into its torso and then, when it was empty, threw the weapon at its face. And then he felt stupid, he’d lost control and he had no spare magazines. Now he was without a useable weapon.
He muttered to himself. The Kornet. The white skin. They both pointed to a single fact: they’d been ambushed by Russians. How or why, he didn’t know. He bitterly turned his back on the burning bomb site and retraced his steps away from the prison. He switched his radio back on. Almost immediately, the voice was barking down the line. ‘Zero 22. Do you copy? Repeat, do you copy? Over.’
‘Yeah, I copy,’ Danny said, as he staggered towards the smouldering vehicles that contained the remnants of his mates, finally heading east like he’d been told. ‘Send that chopper in.’
‘Roger that,’ the voice said. Danny barely heard it. He had just seen something. A single light. A vehicle was approaching from a distance. A motorbike? Perhaps. The headlamp bumped over the rough terrain. It was coming from the north and advancing quickly. Danny tried to judge the distance. It was tough to do at night and with his head dazed. A mile? Maybe a little more? Who the hell was it? One of the Kurds, late to the party? No. The Kurds were dead. He’d put money on it. More likely, this was part of the hostile force. One of the guys, or maybe two, who had been coordinating the ambush from a distance and were now approaching to see what the hell had happened and if any of their men were still alive.
‘Fuck,’ Danny muttered to himself. He faced east and started to run. He didn’t get far. His ears were still bleeding, and his balance was all over the place. He tripped and fell, and the world started to spin. He was half aware of the bumping headlamp. It etched neon lines across his vision as he tried to stand up. He only managed to get as far as a kneeling position when he had to bend over to vomit. He felt an urgency to get away from there, but his body wouldn’t do what his mind demanded. He stayed there, hunched in a ball next to his own puke, resisting nausea and mustering strength. Then he managed to straighten up again. The bumping headlamp wasn’t bumping any more. It had stopped. It was twenty metres away and it dazzled him as he squinted at it.
