Higgins’ grenade released with a popping sound followed an instant later by Armitraj’s. Both men hastily ejected the spent shell casings, reloading in the seconds it took for their ordnance to sail into the sky and drop back onto the road. The task was completed before the first 40-millimeter high explosive projectile detonated.
Higgins’ grenade hit directly in front of the lead vehicle, blasting its windshield inward. The driver instinctively swerved, careening toward the edge of the road even as the left front tire blew out. The Land Cruiser abruptly pitched over on its side, sliding gracelessly into the sand, as the other grenade found its mark.
The second Land Cruiser erupted in a pillar of fiery metal.
Armitraj laid his rifle aside, dove for the machine gun, and lit up the first vehicle. Higgins and Kismet also opened fire without hesitation on the wrecked vehicle, even as the dazed occupants tried to get free. Rounds from the Minimi cut through the Land Cruiser like a chain saw, killing anyone remaining inside. A lone figure — a soldier wearing the black beret and triangular insignia of the Republican Guard — struggled through the exposed driver’s side door only to fall in the crossfire of 5.56-millimeter ammunition.
The ambush had been so quick, so decisive, that Higgins found himself doubting the certainty of their victory. He kept waiting for the real battle to begin, but the desert was plunged once more into silence.
“Sergeant!”
Higgins looked up at the American. Kismet was standing near Singh’s litter, motioning for the Gurkhas to resume their flight. Higgins nodded, hastening over to join the lieutenant, passing by the glassy-eyed Mutabe. The engagement truly was over, but how long until the next? He doubted their luck would hold now that the element of surprise was gone.
There were two more Gurkhas waiting for them near the original drop zone with all the supplies they had brought in anticipation of a forty-eight hour long deployment. Those men also guarded the radio equipment. With any luck, they had heard the sound of gunfire and already called for a quick evac. Whether or not the small group now fleeing across the desert could reach the rally point, much less even find it, remained to be seen.
Even before they started walking, a noise reached their ears: a convoy of vehicles was racing toward them. Higgins looked to Kismet. “We won’t get far.”
“And we won’t last long in a firefight. Maybe the sand will slow them down, too.”
They ran. Armitraj took a position behind the wounded Mutabe, pushing the drugged soldier along at a halting pace. If Higgins and Kismet had not been burdened by the task of bearing Corporal Singh’s remains, they would have easily outdistanced the first pair, but as it was, no one made rapid progress. Their pursuers quickly closed the gap.
After what seemed like only a few minutes of running, Higgins began to see strange patterns on the dunes; shifting figures of shadow that made the sand seem almost alive. He knew immediately what it was: the headlights of the approaching enemy convoy.
Armitraj turned and dropped to one knee, firing another grenade. Then, spread-eagled on the sand, he extended the bipod legs of the machine gun and gripped the trigger before the explosive round finished its journey, detonating harmlessly forty meters from the foremost troop carrier.
Kismet, at the front of the litter, stopped abruptly.
“Sir, we should keep moving. Armitraj will buy us some time.”
“So they can hunt us down one at a time?” He lowered his end of the makeshift stretcher to the sand. “I don’t think so. We’ll make our stand here.”
Neither man noticed Mutabe, still meandering forward in the grip of a narcotic fugue, but it would have changed nothing; Kismet and the Gurkhas knew that their lives were now measured in minutes, perhaps only seconds.
Sergeant Armitraj opened fire with the machine gun, sweeping across the approaching headlights. It was impossible to judge the strength of the advancing force, but there were two armored troop carriers, side by side, leading the charge. Higgins suspected they were only the tip of the spear.
The machine gun rounds seemed to have no effect, prompting the two Gurkhas to fire another volley of grenades. Armitraj selected a white phosphorus round, and both men fired together, point blank at the vehicles. This time there was no delay.
Higgins’ round detonated on the hood of the APC on the left, decapitating the vehicle and lighting up the night. The WP grenade from Armitraj’s launcher hit directly behind the other vehicle, and erupted in a blaze of solar intensity. The surviving personnel carrier continued to advance, now only fifty meters away, but the wreckage caused by the grenades hampered the rest of the column, forcing the other vehicles to swing wide out into the desert. Higgins now caught a glimpse of the size of the attack force: there were seven vehicles altogether. Two of that number were out of commission thanks to the grenades. Higgins had killed one of the armored personnel carriers, but there remained three more, at least a full platoon sized element. The white phosphorus grenade had showered an old military Jeep with flaming metal, forcing the surviving officers to abandon it to the flames, but there were two additional Land Cruisers, each stuffed full of combatants in black berets, charging nimbly around the wreckage toward their flanks.
Higgins quickly loaded another grenade, but the leading vehicle was already too close. Kismet meanwhile, opened fire with his CAR15, showering the driver of the APC with armor piercing rounds. The hardened tungsten and steel bullets ripped through the armor, and began ricocheting crazily inside the metal interior. The vehicle swerved and stalled.
Armitraj once more unleashed a stream of lead from the machine gun. Every tenth round was a tracer, zipping through the night like a red laser beam to mark the path of destruction as he homed in on one of the flanking APC’s. A second line of tracer fire appeared from the opposite direction however, as the gunner in turret of the armored vehicle targeted his DShK 12.7-millimeter machine gun on the Gurkha sergeant’s location. Armitraj knew what was coming but his only reaction as the incoming tracers walked across the sand toward him, was to close his eyes.
A bullet struck the Minimi gun, shattering its mechanism and exploding the unfired rounds in the feed tray. An instant later, Sergeant Taranjeet Armitraj erupted in a spray of red, his body shredded by an unrelenting torrent of enemy fire and fragments of his own weapon.
Higgins knew without looking that Armitraj had fallen; he had marked the cessation of heavy automatic fire from his fellow soldier’s location. He did not mourn for his brother, not even to the extent he had felt grief at the earlier loss of Corporal Singh. The immediacy of the current battle, and the certainty that at any moment, he too would feel the icy hand of death on his shoulder, made such grief irrelevant. He emptied his magazine at a Land Cruiser, shattering its windshield, and then rapidly loaded another HE grenade into the launcher.
Not far away, Kismet was reloading his weapon, burning through magazines rapidly, but making every shot count. The enemy convoy had ceased advancing, their vehicles now a liability. The troops inside hastened from the impossible-to-miss targets, spreading out and seeking cover. More than a dozen had fallen, picked off by Kismet as they filed through the narrow doorways of the APCs; God alone knew how many more would never leave those vehicles, yet their numbers seemed undiminished.
Higgins dropped a grenade close enough to blast the nearest Land Cruiser over on its side. The fuel tank ignited in a secondary explosion that jetted sideways away from the exposed undercarriage. The shock wave momentarily stunned the Gurkha. His vision doubled, leading him to wonder if he had taken some shrapnel to the skull, but he ignored the side-effect of the concussion and slammed another magazine into his rifle. It was his last.