fire.
The boy soldier dropped to the ground without conscious thought. He could hear the pounding thrum of the helicopter that had swept in immediately after the first one had gone down. It must have been very close, because the sound of its miniguns spewing thousands of rounds into the space where his comrades had stood, living and breathing just half a second ago, seemed to fill the world right out to its very edges. Though he couldn't see it, he thought it must have been one of the small egg-shaped helicopters from the gunfire, which sounded like the ripping of a great sail. They had warned him about those metal devils. Giving no conscious thought to his actions, Yusuf moved with animal quickness, crawling through the nearest open door and getting a couple of inches of solid brickwork between himself and the lethal rain of fire. Not that he had any illusions about the safety of hiding behind a wall should the Americans turn one of their satanic cannons on him, but by hiding at least he might escape their attention.
His skin felt as though he were on fire. He realized he had soiled his pants, but it did not matter. At least he was alive. The frightening hammering sound of the helicopter's machine guns trailed off, and with it the dull thumping beat of its rotor blades. He gave himself a minute to recover from the shock before crawling out of the room and into the corridor, where all that remained of Ali and the other man whose name he did not know were a few bloody rags and scraps of smoking meat. Yusuf kept his head down and his weapon in front of him as he belly crawled away from the horrible scene as quickly as he could. He was certain he could hear harsh flat voices shouting in English somewhere nearby, and he imagined the whole building filling up with cruel American soldiers. There was nothing for it but to get himself away from here so that he might fight another day.
Reaching the stairwell up which they had just climbed, he dragged himself back to his feet and hurried down unsteadily. He knew that to run out of the building was to invite almost immediate death from the circling helicopters, and so as soon as he reached the ground floor, he turned down another hallway and ran as fast as he could on rubbery, shaking legs and with his lungs burning as though he were drowning in blazing gasoline. He did not see any other fighters, which was probably a good thing. If they were as traumatized and unbalanced as he, they were likely to kill one another. Hurrying away from the part of the island where the rocket launchers had been parked, he found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. The noise of battle dropped away just a little, but his confusion increased. He soon found himself at the end of the hallway where a door, apparently shattered by gunfire, opened onto an area of concrete tarmac and beyond that the water. Driven by fear now, and humiliation, Yusuf threw his assault rifle away and sprinted out the door and into daylight, covering the short distance to the edge of the water in just a few seconds. A single loop played in his mind. He could not let himself be captured. None of the fedayeen were to allow themselves to be captured. Gunfire cracked somewhere behind him, and it felt as though every muscle in his back was clenched tight in anticipation of the bullet that must surely be coming for him, but he ignored it and ran on, launching himself into the air and out over the dirty green water. He did not expect to survive.
6
New York 'Incoming fire!' the Blackhawk pilot shouted.
Milosz winced as his headphones amplified the man's cry to painful levels.
Between the crackle and chatter of the headset and the hammering blades of the helicopter, Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz could not hear the distinctive and all too familiar sound of the BM-21 rockets that were pounding Castle Clinton. But he didn't need to. He could easily follow the bright arc of their flight paths as they zipped in over the river, and the results were laid out beneath him like a grotesque work of art painted in blood and fire. It greatly distressed the former Polish Army GROM operator to see his new countrymen scurrying about, trying to avoid the pepper-black bursts of high-explosive warheads. It distressed him even more to see some of them fail. Scattered around the grounds of Castle Clinton were a number of mangled bodies, some still crawling, some limping heavily, others writhing on the ground in agony. Here and there a few crimson lumps did not move at all. Fortunately, the bastards behind this atrocity were very poor artillerymen. Many of the rockets fell short into the river, throwing up plumes of dirty brown water or not exploding at all. A handful of warheads flew wide, crashing into the surrounding skyscrapers, detonating with extravagant blasts of color that rained deadly shards of glass into the concrete canyons of the city below. A largely empty city, he thought, thank the Virgin Mary.
'I have them. The island at two o'clock,' Milosz called out over the intercom, pointing at a collection of massive, aged brick structures on the island to the north of the big Liberty Lady statue. 'In the car park behind the buildings. There! See?'
He pointed out the launch plumes to the ranger fire team in the cabin. Great eruptions of smoke and flares that would not have been visible from ground level on Lower Manhattan, hidden as they were behind the buildings.
'Copy that,' the pilot said. 'Viper one-three, this is Saber six-one, approaching Ellis Island from the northwest for a visual.'
'Viper one-three copies,' Milosz's headset told him. He glanced out over the water to see if he could catch a glimpse of Viper one-three, an Apache tank killer assigned to the security detail. He found the helicopter and turned his attention back to the island. 'Approaching low from the east. ETA thirty seconds.'
'They are BM-21s!' Milosz shouted, scoping the truck-mounted launchers with his rifle. They were still too far off for a decent shot. Plumes of smoke obscured one or more multiple rocket launch systems, Katyushas. As the Blackhawk, flying high and out of reach, orbited Ellis Island, a voice in his headset crackled, 'I count six, seven… no, make that a dozen combatants and two launchers.'
'Viper, this is Saber. Did you copy last?'
'Viper copies. Stay clear of the island. It'll be rotten with RPGs,' Viper one-three said.
'No! Get us closer,' Milosz insisted, taking aim at one of the combatants, African by the look of him, clad in ragged olive drab fatigue pants and a ludicrously loud yellow and red patterned shirt. 'I can take them. Get us in there.'
'Not no, but hell no,' the pilot called back.
'But if you get us closer, I can take them out,' Milosz argued.
'Negative, Sergeant,' the pilot replied. 'They'll be waiting in there for us with RPGs.'
'Saber six-one, this is Viper one-three. I count fourteen combatants around four truck-mounted BM-21 launchers parked in the parking lot of Ellis Island on the west side. Possible combatants in the museum complex. I am not authorized to fire on a historic landmark,' Viper said.
Milosz felt as though his head was going to turn inside out.
These Americans will lose their country yet, he thought, amazed and not a little angry at their reluctance to fire on the enemy. He gauged the range at well over a thousand meters away, too far to make a decent shot with his M14 rifle. It was a good weapon, especially with the Leupold scope, but not quite what he needed for the nig nogs on the island. Now, if he had a fifty-caliber, the story would be very different. Milosz had to content himself with scoping the launchers as a furious exchange went back and forth between the pilot and somebody higher up his chain of command. Even at this distance, with the vibration of the Blackhawk shaking his view in the sight, he could tell the pirates were whooping it up down there, loving every minute of this. They danced and twirled, and a few even performed somersaults as the rockets flew away. Milosz shook his head.
Fools. He tuned out an argument between the Blackhawk's crew chief and the pilot over whether to engage with the M240 door gun. The crew chief lost the argument, fueling Milosz's frustration that much more. He lowered the scope and shook his head at the other three rangers in the bird: Wilson, Sievers, and Raab. Hollywood pussies, he had once called their sort, and his time among them had not changed his opinion entirely, even if it had made him more circumspect about expressing it. They were good men, dedicated, but not as dedicated as his former comrades in the Polish Army. When Germans and Russians have had their boots on your throat for generations, you learn to explore new whole levels of dedication to the task of defending yourself from their ilk.
'Eager to die for your new home, Fred?' Master Sergeant Wilson asked, a thin black man who served as Milosz's squad leader.
The Pole shook his head. 'No, I am eager to kill the enemies of my new home.'
'The chance will come soon enough,' Wilson said, holding a pair of binoculars up to his face. 'Looks like Africans or Arabs, do you think? Maybe Jamaicans.'
