Dead Six

From Sea to Shining Sea

VALENTINE

Ash Shamal District

April 1

2005

“Xbox, this is Shafter,” Hudson said over the radio, breathing hard. “We’re in position.”

Tailor looked over at me. I nodded, and he spoke into his radio. “Copy that. Stand by. Control, Xbox, we’re standing by.”

“Xbox, Control,” Sarah said, sounding as calm and distant as ever. “Execute. Be careful,” she added, her voice softening just a bit.

I smiled to myself. “This is going to be a turkey shoot,” I said, observing our target building through binoculars one last time. “You think they’d have beefed up security after we snatched the Al Falah kid out here.”

“They did,” Tailor corrected. “Look. That guy right there, he’s got a rifle.”

“What is that, a G3?” I asked absentmindedly. “Look, another guy in the doorway. Looks like he’s got a sub- gun.”

“I think they’re wearing vests,” Tailor said. He patted the driver on the shoulder. “Let’s go. Shafter, Ginger, stand by to execute. When you hear shooting, enter and clear. Watch for friendlies—we’ll be coming in from the other side.”

Hudson acknowledged. Our driver, a guy from another chalk that everyone called Animal, flipped on the headlights and stomped on the gas. Our up-armored van roared down the narrow street toward the social club.

The little side street had several cars parked on either side. Tonight was the most popular night, and it seemed that the disappearance of Al Falah hadn’t deterred the enemy from using the place. The two armed clowns outside wouldn’t pose a problem. Our plan was laughably simple: take out the two armed guards outside, then enter and kill every son of a bitch in the place. Tailor and I would enter from the front, while Hudson and Wheeler would enter from the rear. The rear door led down into a basement, where we believed there might be a weapons cache. Animal was going to stay with the van. He was from Singer’s chalk; he’d been hurt and couldn’t run, but he could still drive.

The terrorist with the G3 rifle was meandering up the street, checking the parked cars when he was illuminated by our headlights. I saw him clearly; he was wearing black fatigues, a ski mask, a blue body-armor vest, and a chest rig for spare magazines. He looked pretty squared away, and our van’s windshield probably wouldn’t stop direct hits from a 7.62x51mm weapon.

That didn’t deter Animal. He swerved the van right at the terrorist. I braced myself. The man in the black fatigues dodged to the left. He wasn’t fast enough. Our heavy, armored van came to a stop with a crunch of twisting metal and shattering glass. The little Toyota sedan we hit crumpled and was pushed up onto the curb. The man in black was pinned between our van and the Toyota, his legs and hips crushed.

“Move, move!” Tailor shouted, pulling the van’s right-side door open. I shouldered the paratrooper SAW I was carrying and headed for the door. I heard two quick shots as Animal leaned out the window and blasted the pinned terrorist with his .45. I ignored it as I ripped off a short burst at the man guarding the door, my machine gun roaring loudly in the narrow alley. The 5.56 mm bullets punched through him, splattering blood on the wall behind. He was so surprised he hadn’t even gotten his weapon ready.

I came up to the door. Tailor was right behind me. Stepping over the body, I reached forward and yanked the door open just as a long rattle of automatic fire could be heard from behind the building. I held the door open, and Tailor tossed in a pyrotechnic distraction device. We would’ve used grenades, but we didn’t know where Hudson and Wheeler were. A couple seconds later the device detonated, blasting the room with a head-splitting concussion.

Tailor and I stormed inside, weapons at the ready. The doorway dog-legged around into a main room. We rounded the corner. The social club was in chaos. Men were running in every direction, shouting and screaming in Arabic. Billiards tables lined one wall, and couches lined the other. The air stank of smoke from cigarettes, hookahs, and our flash-bang. Terrorist propaganda and Islamic flags were plastered all over the walls.

Men ran toward us, trying to get out of the building. They were either too confused and didn’t realize we were there, or thought we were their own armed guys. It didn’t really matter. I leveled my machine gun and squeezed the trigger.

It was a massacre. Tailor and I moved laterally across the main room, firing at anything that moved. A door burst open and a pair of men came running in, armed with assault rifles, but we cut them down before they even realized what was happening. The crowd of terrorist recruits turned, trying to escape down the stairs, tripping over overturned chairs, bodies, and each other as they fled. It didn’t do them any good.

“We’re in the basement,” Wheeler said over the radio. The men trying to flee out the back entrance were gunned down as they came upon Wheeler and Hudson.

The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. I stood amongst the carnage in the social club, pulling a fresh belt of ammunition onto my weapon’s feed tray. The machine gun in my hands was hot to the touch; I’d gone through a hundred-round belt in less than two minutes. Probably two dozen bodies lay on the floor, ripped apart by gunfire. The air stank of powder, smoke, and death.

Tailor lit a cigarette, his carbine dangling from its sling. “April fool, motherfuckers,” he said, snapping his Zippo lighter shut. My hands started to shake. The Calm was wearing off, and soon I’d be hit with a flood of emotions as adrenaline dump shocked my system.

The only people we’d let out of the building alive were three Indonesian girls Hudson and Wheeler found in the basement. They were drugged up and had been used as playthings by the terrorist recruits. We found a weapons cache also. AK-103 assault rifles and GP-30 grenade launchers from Russia. G3 rifles from Iran and Pakistan. Rocket-propelled grenades and launchers from China. Thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition. So we dumped some gas, popped a thermite grenade, and burned it all.

As we hurried outside, we noticed that the air reeked of gasoline. In the few minutes we were inside, Animal had kept himself busy by dousing all of the cars parked on the street with gas. As we backed down the street, Hudson tossed a road flare out of the van, igniting the gas and setting the whole row of cars ablaze, just like the building.

The fire quickly spread to the neighboring warehouses. Before long, the entire block was engulfed in flames. It took the city firefighters all night to put the inferno out. In the morning, they found an Ace of Spades playing card stuck to a light pole at the end of the street. Our little calling card been Colonel Hunter’s idea. I liked it.

LORENZO

April 10

I stood on the balcony of our apartment. It was part of a complex at the south end of the city, near the intersection of old world and new money, oil-rich and third world poor. The compound itself was relatively modern, but more importantly, it was landscaped in such a way that we had quite a bit of privacy. We had some university students sharing one wall, and an old couple below us, but they all kept to themselves. We entered only through the attached garage, and that was in a van with tinted windows. The ID I had used to set up the lease was a top-of- the-line forgery of a Zubaran Oil Ministry employee who worked weird hours, and our only paleface, Reaper, never went outside anyway. We might as well have been invisible.