“Jacobson, I need your team to go clear that signal van and then the buildings here,” Pollard whispered harshly.
“On it, Sergeant,” his friend answered, gesturing to the three people who made up his fire team to follow him.
Pollard did a quick count and came up with fifteen. They’d captured fifteen of the fuckers in one go. It’d been a massive stroke of luck that they didn’t have to get in a firefight with them because they were outnumbered almost two-to-one. Those odds increased when you factored in that only five of his men, including himself, were infantrymen.
One of the Iranians began speaking loudly to get his attention. “Do you speak English?” he asked.
The man stared daggers at him before shaking his head. “I bet you do,” Pollard countered. “A lot of you people do because America is the best nation on the planet.”
“No longer,” a different man said in heavily accented English. Pollard’s eyes shifted to him as he spoke again, this time in whatever gibberish the Iranians spoke. His words elicited a few chuckles from the men surrounding him.
“Oh, you think that’s funny?” Will hissed. “It’s awful funny that we caught you with your pants down.”
A single shot rang out from the direction of the signal van, followed by several others. Pollard jumped in spite of himself and turned to see what was going on. That’s when things went sideways.
One of the Iranians pulled a grenade from somewhere and tossed it behind Pollard as they all dove to the ground. “Grenade!” he shouted, falling forward. He hoped his guys heard him and followed suit.
The explosion was massive. His hearing was blown almost instantly as thousands of pellets of sand pelted him mercilessly. The exposed skin on his hands and neck felt as if a cheese grater had been dragged across it. His head swam and he couldn’t focus, but he knew he had to or else he was dead.
A cloud of dust obscured everything around him as the wind blew the smoke and dirt lazily across the open space in front of the building. Pollard rolled awkwardly, bringing his rifle with him to aim where he thought the captives had been. There was movement in the dust cloud and then a flash of olive drab as an Iranian charged toward him. The man’s face was contorted in rage and his murderous scream sounded to Will like he was underwater listening to someone yell like they’d done as kids at the pool.
The M-4 bucked slightly in his hands as a maroon spot blossomed on the Iranian’s thigh, one on his stomach, and another on his chest. The man continued to careen wildly beyond Will as he pushed himself to his feet. He staggered drunkenly toward the place where the men had knelt in prayer. He had to stop them from getting to their weapons. If they did…
The thought stopped as another figure burst from the gloom, bowling into him and knocking him backward. The man’s iron grip fastened around his throat, cutting off the oxygen that he desperately needed. Pollard realized in a panic that he’d dropped his rifle in the scuffle. He struggled to pull the fingers from his neck with one hand while punching repeatedly into his attacker’s rib cage with the other. The blows were rewarded with grunts, but little else.
His vision started to go dark at the edges and his mind screamed for him to do something else, that the punching wasn’t working. He brought both hands up, gouging at the Iranian’s eyes. His finger sank deep into a gooey substance that dripped down on him, but the man wouldn’t relent. The end was near for Pollard.
Another explosion, this one wasn’t as loud, but it was so close that he felt the flash of heat across his face. The Iranian stopped struggling and the man’s dead weight bore down on Will. He pulled the fingers away and gulped air as the body was pushed off of him.
The slightly smoking flash suppressor of a blurry M-4 materialized above him as he took in more oxygen and the face of Private Valencia, the electronic warfare nerd he’d been saddled with, came into view. “You okay, Sergeant?”
He gestured weakly at the Iranian with a hole in the side of his head. “Thank you,” he croaked, his vocal cords strained from the struggle.
“You’d’ve done the same for me.” The private bent over and handed Pollard his weapon. “Here.”
The battle was over by the time Will had recovered enough to stand. Airman Cooper, the JTAC, had rallied the fire team in Pollard’s absence. The Iranians, unarmed except for that one grenade, had charged into a wall of lead. It had been a bloodbath. Fourteen bodies lay strewn about, including several who appeared to have taken the brunt of the grenade blast when it wasn’t thrown far enough
Pollard did a quick count of his men. All three were up and miraculously unharmed. He looked back to the mass of bodies and saw one man still alive. He cowered on the ground behind the corpses of two of his comrades. Pollard staggered toward him, his equilibrium still off due to the explosion. He nudged the Iranian with the barrel of his M-4. “Which one are you?” he demanded. “You speak English?”
The guy looked up at him, shaking his head violently. It wasn’t the officer who’d spoken earlier, that man lay to the side in a muddy puddle of blood-red sand with a gaping wound in his neck.
“Fuck!” Will exclaimed. “What the fuck, man? That was the dumbest shit ever.” He fished around in his pocket for a moment and came out with a pack of cigarettes. He lit one with a shaky
