“Sarge! Sarge!” the truck driver called. “Are you there?”
“I’m here, Jenson,” Goose said. “You just hold her steady for one minute longer.” He dug his elbows and knees into the canvas and straddled the supports. His knee burned with pain at every bump and lurch.
“He’s almost at the door! I see him in the mirror!”
“I’m there,” Goose said as he pulled himself to the side of the truck and thrust the assault rifle forward.
The bandit clung to the truck’s side. The man’s feet rested on the edge of the payload area through the canvas tarp, and he held on to the tarp with one hand. Balancing himself, pistol in one hand, the bandit swung forward and tried to shove his weapon through the broken window.
“Sarge!”
Goose squeezed the trigger and felt the M-4A1 thud briefly against his shoulder. A three-round burst shattered the bandit’s head, and he fell from the truck’s side.
One of the bandit vehicles racing beside the convoy on the right side immediately returned fire. Goose stayed low. The canvas didn’t offer much protection, but he was grateful for what he got. Bullets sizzled through the air over his head. A round struck one of the supports and sent a vibration singing through it. And at least one punched into his Kevlar vest.
Goose plucked an M67 fragmentation grenade from his combat webbing, flicked the clip out with his thumb, and released the spoon and pin. Arching up for a moment, he threw the spherical grenade at the jeep as it roared to within thirty feet.
The bandits fired at him immediately, but between the rough ride offered by the jeep and the bouncing of the cargo truck, they missed him. Goose pulled his helmet low and crossed an arm in front of his face.
“Fire in the hole!” he roared.
Crain hunkered down atop the cargo truck.
A thunderclap exploded beside the cargo truck, and shrapnel from the grenade peppered the vehicle’s body. Goose pulled the M-4A1 to his shoulder and peered over the side. The jeep was a smoking ruin carrying dead men. It rammed into the cargo truck’s side, then got caught up under the wheels. The truck reared like a bucking bronco as it rolled over the bandit vehicle.
The three remaining bandit vehicles hesitated, then veered away from the convoy’s side. Unable to see the Ranger Hummers on the other side of the trucks, or possibly mistaking them for their comrades, the drivers of the bandit vehicles closed in again and focused on the lead truck.
“Drifter Two,” Goose called as he scrambled to the rear of the truck.
“Reading you five by,” Donner radioed back.
“Swing around behind the convoy and let these boys know you’re here.”
“Affirmative.”
Goose caught hold of the support bar across the opening and flipped across, stepping backward into the cargo area. He’d organized the way the payload was distributed before they’d left the post. He knew where everything was.
The dead bodies of the two Rangers who’d been assigned to the payload area rocked restlessly with the sway and jar of the cargo truck. For a moment, the sight of them held Goose in his tracks. Both of the men had been young. Losing soldiers under his command hurt, and lately he’d lost a lot of them.
Get your job done. You can grieve later.
He stepped over the dead men and used a penflash from the pocket of his BDUs to make certain of the crate he wanted. When he found the equipment crate he was looking for, he slung his rifle and opened the crate. He reached inside and took out an SMAW.
Using the Israeli B-300 Shoulder-launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon as a model, the United States Marine Corps had originally fielded the SMAW MK153 Mod 0 for use against tanks and heavily fortified installations. It had proven effective time and again. During Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. Army had used some of them. Impressed with the performance of the SMAW, the army had continued to borrow the marine weapons while in the Middle East, and the Rangers had a cache of them along the border for use against the Soviet-made tanks the Syrian army fielded.
Goose slammed an 83mm rocket home in the launcher, then swung around to the rear of the truck. Crain was hanging upside down over the opening.
“Thought maybe you needed a hand,” Crain said.
“I got it.” Goose stepped through the opening and put a foot on the truck’s bumper. He slid to the side of the truck, swaying along with the vehicle’s bumping, then shouldered the weapon and aimed it back toward the jeeps in front of the Hummer.
“Weapons upgrade?” Crain asked.
Goose took aim through the scope and centered the crosshairs on the lead vehicle.
“Just a little video game humor,” Crain said.
“I’m not much into video games.”
Crain’s rifle barked again and again.
Donner led the Ranger vehicles in a close sweep behind the cargo trucks. Goose saw them edging into view. The bandits spotted them as well and pulled away from the trucks.
The rocket launcher was overkill in this situation, and Goose knew it. But he thought about the village Niyazi had attacked and all the dead victims and wounded that had been left behind, and his heart hardened.
You’re not just taking out the bad guys, he told himself. You’re sending a message tonight. And that message is, you don’t mess with United States Army Rangers.
He squeezed the trigger, and the rocket leaped into flight. It shot across the hundred yards of distance and slammed into the rear of the lead jeep. In a blink, the jeep became a fireball that bounced erratically across the broken ground. The explosion sounded loud and definite. The flash was incredibly bright in the darkness, and Goose felt the heat wave a hundred yards away.
Crain cheered his approval from on top of the cargo truck. “Hit ’em dead center, Sarge! Yeah!”
Goose lowered the weapon and shoved it back inside the payload area. The two surviving jeeps veered off and headed away from the convoy.
“Looks like they’ve decided to cut their losses and run,” Donner said.
“Let them,” Goose said.
“We can still take them.”
Goose thought of the two dead men lying in the back of the truck and knew there were probably more. Guilt over leaving the convoy weighed on him.
“Taking them out isn’t going to bring our dead back,” Goose said. “And chasing after them will only split our forces again.” He fully expected Remington to chime in with a comment then and was surprised when the captain didn’t. “We stay together and finish this run. Besides that, those men will know they were lucky to survive tonight. They’ll tell their buddies, and maybe next time they’ll think twice about trying to hit one of our convoys.”
United States 75th Army Rangers Outpost
Harran
Sanliurfa Province, Turkey
Local Time 2219 Hours
The outpost was a skeletal affair that wouldn’t stand up against an armored cavalry attack. Then again, it wasn’t meant to. If everything worked right, the outpost was only going to be backup eyes and ears for the observation satellites the 75th currently had access to. Given the nature of everything that had happened these past weeks, Goose knew Remington didn’t want to depend on GEOINT while operations around Sanliurfa were pending. Geospatial intelligence gathered from satellite reconnaissance only worked as long as the satellite links were maintained.
Harran was a small village. All of the buildings were older and cheaply made, and none of them had any height to speak of. The Rangers had settled on the ruins of the Ulu Cami for their primary spotting base. Goose didn’t know how long ago the congregational mosque had been constructed, but it looked weathered and ancient. It was the highest point in the village. Someone had told Goose that the mosque had been built by the Ayyubids. When he professed ignorance, he was told they’d been a Muslim culture that had ruled a large empire from Egypt to Iraq in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They’d been driven out of the area by the invasion of the Mongols.
As Goose swung down from the cargo truck, he reflected that wars had constantly been fought in these
