And the machine guns on the roof of the factory had Barzani’s company pinned down in little holes like rats, so the armored cars could come and methodically clean them out.
Three unarmored technicals came out behind the scout cars, hauling more weapons and fighters his way. They were led by a white Toyota Hilux with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the bed.
Barzani spoke as calmly as he could into his radio. He knew if he ordered a retreat now, whoever was left would be shot in the back, because there was nearly a kilometer of open ground behind them. “Brothers, do not waste your fire on the armored vehicles. Kill the technicals. Shoot the drivers, the gunners. We will martyr ourselves today, and we will do it fighting, not hiding!”
The chattering of AKs from the dirt to his left and right lifted his spirits, emboldened him, but only until the two BRDM-2s opened up with their KPV 14.5s and their coaxial 7.62s, raking back and forth, keeping heads down, increasing the carnage.
Barzani knew he and his men would all die in the dirt, and then Kalak would fall by dawn.
The closest BRDM-2 was just one hundred meters away from him now, churning up the hard earth to Barzani’s left with its machine guns. He tried to put it out of his mind so he could focus the blade sight of his rifle on the front windshield of the white Hilux barreling right down toward his foxhole, its own machine gun thumping loud in the air as the truck bounced across on the brown and barren landscape.
But just as Barzani readied to fire on the truck, an ungodly sound ripped through the sky over his head. He turned to look, and his eyes blinked hard at the sight of the nearest BRDM-2 disappearing in a cloud of dust.
It stopped rolling forward, stopped firing. The dust settled while the Peshmerga captain looked on, confused by whatever the hell had just happened.
And then it happened again.
The sound of ripping metal, the strikes of high-powered cannon rounds, sparks and flames erupting out of the armored car, and then, out of the dustup from the dirt around the vehicle, an explosion and a fireball.
Barzani looked left and right at his men, but there was no reason to do so. He knew better than anyone in the company that there existed no weapon in his arsenal that could have done what he’d just witnessed.
A private far to his left pointed to the blue sky to the north. It took Barzani a second to focus on a speck there, but the speck grew quickly. It was a helicopter gunship, American, and within seconds, the sparkle of light from its nose told him it was firing its chain gun.
Barzani shifted his eyes to the second BRDM-2 just as it, too, was enveloped by the brown dust of these flat lands.
High above and just behind the first helicopter, a second helo dotted the sky.
They were American Apaches from the U.S. Army, and they’d just thrown Barzani and his men a lifeline.
Peshmerga captain Xozan Barzani couldn’t hear the radio broadcast coming from the helicopter racing over the landscape a thousand meters to his north, but if he could, he might have been surprised by the sound of a calm female voice on the net. “Pyro One-Two, Pyro One-One. Target bravo is toast. That’s all the light armor. I’m goin’ after the soft-skinned vehicles.”
A male voice responded instantly. This was the helo far above and just behind the helo firing. “Pyro One-Two, roger. Smoke those technicals.”
“Pyro One-One is engaging.”
Captain Carrie Ann Davenport was the copilot-gunner of an AH-64E Apache attack helicopter, call sign Pyro 1–1, hovering north 1,500 yards from the ceramics factory, barely outside effective range of the ISIS machine guns, but well within range of her M230 chain gun.
Behind and just above Davenport in the cockpit of the helo was her pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Troy Oakley. Oakley spoke into his headset now. “Nail that bastard!”
Carrie Ann squeezed off a ten-round burst, watched the camera image of the technical on the multifunction display on her console, and realized her rounds had missed, striking the ground just behind the moving Hilux.
“Damn, adjusting.”
“You got ’em,” Oak encouraged from the pilot’s seat.
Davenport led the technical and pressed the trigger again. As the chain gun fired, it belched puffs of gray smoke fifty feet down in angles off the port and starboard sides of the nose of the aircraft. Thirty-millimeter rounds sprayed out of the M230, and the Hilux 1,500 yards away flipped over at speed, skidded on its roof, and immediately burst into flames.
“Oh, shit!” Oakley exclaimed. “There’s one for the highlight reel.”
Davenport was already looking for her next target. “Seventy rounds remaining. Wish we had a few Hydras left. I could use them on the techs and the thirty mike-mike on these troops in the open.”
The Hydra-70 were 2.75-inch FFAR, or folding-fin aerial rockets. Both Pyro 1–1 and Pyro 1–2 had left their forward operating base near Erbil with a full close-support role complement of thirty-eight of the unguided rockets, but they had used them all in an attack on an ISIS armory and fuel depot just north of Mosul.
“Just do what you can. We’re bingo in five.”
Davenport said, “Roger. I’ll deal with the trucks and then we’re outta here. The Pesh will have to clean up the squirters.”
This flight of two AH-64Es had been heading back to base after annihilating their primary targets when they were notified of the heavy fighting west of Kalak. In the scheme of things, with engagements up and down a semicircular front line a hundred miles in length, the fighting at Kalak wasn’t seen as strategically important. Yes, ISIS threatened to take control of the bridge there, but the Kurdish and Iraqi attack westward wasn’t planning on using this road, and the strategic objective had been all along to encircle and cut off these ISIS troops.
Still, when the Pyro flight heard reports of multiple technicals and light armor approaching a company of Peshmerga caught in open ground, they checked their moving map displays, their fuel levels, and their weapons loadouts, and decided they had enough gas and guns to divert and make a couple passes on their way back to their base.
Pyro 1–2 wasn’t involved in this fight, because they were down to zero rockets, and had only fifty rounds left in their M230. They flew high-cover, ready to provide support in an emergency and to help with target acquisition, while Pyro 1–1, Davenport and Oakley’s aircraft, took on the targets of opportunity below.
The last of the technicals turned around and began racing back to the ceramics factory, but Pyro 1–1 didn’t care that the Islamic State fighters were disengaging. The men in the truck were still alive, and their equipment was still operational.
Oakley said, “You gonna frag that last one?”
Davenport’s answer was given with a rumble of the M230 below the cockpit. Sixteen hundred yards away the ground behind the technical turned to dust and fire, and then the vehicle itself exploded.
Oakley came over the radio now. “Pyro Two, Pyro One-One, that’s all the big stuff we see from here. You have eyes on anything else before we RTB?”
Pyro 1–2 was piloted by a CWO-4 named Wheaton, and his authoritative voice came over Davenport and Oakley’s headsets. “Pyro One-One. I’m, uh… I’m seeing emplacements on the roof of that rectangular building… Uh, one-point-five klicks southeast of you. The taller structure. You see ’em?”
Davenport looked at the FLIR camera view on her multifunction display. Oakley increased altitude a little, and Davenport panned the camera across the top of the building. The sandbagged positions came into view, and the one in the middle flashed, causing black-hot blooms on the infrared screen.
Davenport said, “Roger that, One-Two. Looks like three gun positions. A couple PKs and… uh… That’s a twelve-point-seven in the middle there.”