“Hey, boss, we got movement,” Adams said.
Mike lifted his head out of the bunker and looked down the hill. Sure enough, there were figures moving on the hilltop below.
“Guess they got done with their little colloquy,” Mike said, pressing his throat mike. “Gonna get hot soon. Tell the guys as soon as they push back this attack we’ve got fresh food.”
“Now that’s motivation,” the former SEAL replied. “It’s cold as hell out here. And I are hungry.”
The clouds were clearing off rapidly and the sky was turning a beautiful blue. Mike stopped as he saw some movement in the sky, wondering if the Chechens had gotten air support. But it was only birds. Ravens.
“How do they know?” Mike asked, slipping back into the bunker.
“The ravens fly?” Olga asked, smiling. “The eyes of the Father of All are upon us this day.”
“The bird of wisdom,” Mike said, frowning. “You know, I think it finally makes sense.”
“What?” Vanner asked, not looking up from his pad.
“The bird of wisdom,” Mike said. “You can just see it. There was some shaman who was teaching a kid the different animals. He gives them all attributes, just cause their easier to remember that way, right? So the kid sees a raven. ‘Hey, shaman dude, what’s that?’ ‘That’s a raven. He’s the bird of wisdom.’ ‘Why’s that?’ ‘Cause he never lands until after the battle is over.’ ”
“Sort of like lawyers,” Vanner said. “The ambulance chasers of the animal world.”
“They just turn up to pick the dead,” Mike said, frowning. “Be damned if any lawyers are going to pick over my dead. What’s the intel on this group?”
“I get a count of about one kay, boss,” Vanner replied. “That’s based on prior intel on the different groups that have arrived. There’s about six. The main group is a guy with the codename of Commander Bukara. Former Soviet lieutenant went over to the Chechen resistance quite a ways back. Was in on the battle of Grozny and a couple of other major actions. Had about five hundred. According to the ladies he’s been bitching on open channel about casualties in the pursuit.”
“He don’t know for casualties, yet,” Mike said.
Chapter Fourty-One
Salah El Ezam was seventeen, born on a small farm in the mountains above Grozny.
Salah could write, barely, and read a bit. He had been taught some words of writing by the mullahs in the town’s madrassa. But he knew the words of the Koran, and especially of the Hadiths, by heart.
From the time he was born he could remember men talking about the Great Jihad. To die in battle in the jihad was the highest honor a Muslim could attain. Such a martyr was guaranteed a place in heaven at the Prophet’s side.
The Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, had spoken Allah’s will, that the entire world must be in submission to the will of Allah. All Muslims were slaves to Allah: the common name Abdullah simply meant Slave of Allah and Islam, in Arabic, meant submission. Men were in submission to Allah and women in submission to men. It was through the men in their lives, their fathers when they were growing up and their husbands when they married, that women worshipped the True God.
Any who were not in submission to Allah were infidels. The only true submission was through the laws of shariah being the highest law of the land, the laws of submission to Allah.
This was the Jihad, the will of Allah, to place the world under submission. Some were called to preach but Salah had never been a great speaker. His calling was to place the world under submission through the gun, as the Prophet also had decreed in the Hadiths.
There was no fear in his heart as he crossed the hilltop and first saw the small cluster of boulders on the ridge above that protected the pagan Keldara. Allah had decreed that the world would be in submission to his will. They could not fail; Allah, the Victorious, the Beneficient, would not permit it.
“Okay, now that is an A-Number-One cluster fuck,” Adams said with a sigh. The Chechens were coming, oh, yeah. Lots of the motherfuckers. But they were just straggling over the hill that the snipers had been trying to use for cover and heading up the ridge any old way. It was almost sad. He hoped they’d cluster up a bit towards the end or the Keldara weren’t going to get enough of them.
“Teams,” Adams said, touching his throat mike. “Let them get in close. Do not open fire until I initiate. Keep under cover during their approach then bugger the bastards when I give the signal.”
There were two reasons for that order. The first was that it was the best way to break an attack. Letting a group close on you and then hitting them, hard, at the last minute, tended to break their will. Especially if you waited until they thought they weren’t going to be fired on at all.
The second reason, though, sucked. The SPRs and M4s that many of the Keldara carried had a problem. They were great weapons out to 250 meters. Beyond 250 meters, though, the muzzle velocity fell off, sharply. The SPRs were a bit worse while having better accuracy and stopping power inside of about two hundred meters. One reason to use them over M4s most of the time. However, in a situation like this he could wish they were all carrying German G-3s using NATO 7.62 rounds. Those fuckers were killers out to about a thousand meters. Hell, the Keldara could start picking them off from here.
But what they had were the M4s and SPRs.
“Vanner,” he said, after switching frequencies.
“Go, Tiger Three.”
“Make a note for me to talk to Mike about our weapon choice when we get back.”
“Will do,” Vanner said, a note of humor in his voice. For sure he knew the reason, but what he was probably finding funny was the “after we got back.”
Well, fuck that. Adams had been in some nasty clusterfucks in his time and walked out of every one. This one wasn’t going to be any different. He did not intend to die on a ridge in fucking Chechnya.
The Islamics wanted to be martyrs and go meet Allah. He was here to give them their wish.
This wasn’t Kiril’s first battle by any stretch. He had had a small piece of the last Chechen attack to cross the mountains and threaten the Keldara. But, more, he had been on the teams that had assaulted the Albanian town of Lunaria and fought four times their number of Albanian defenders to a bloody standstill. He bore scars from that, as well, and the memory of an interesting encounter shortly after the extraction birds landed with not only the Keldara but a several dozen former sex-slaves many of whom were very happy to be out of Albania.
He wasn’t planning on getting laid right after this battle, not given the ambiguous situation with Gretchen, not to mention not being married to her, yet. But he fully intended to survive it. While the Keldara felt that there was no higher honor than dying in battle -being a hero was, after all, the only way to get to the Halls of Feasting — they believed just as deeply that your status in the halls depended on how many had preceded you. One of the DVDs that was played over and over was an American movie about one of the greatest of their generals, a man named Patton. It was one of the ways they practiced their English. There was one part where he was making a speech, presumably to some of his troops, and said in it: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other poor bastard die for his!” Whenver that part of the movie came around the roars in the barracks were deafening.