Now he poked his head up, briefly, taking the chance that any sniper would get his MICH-2000 helmet, then dropped back down. The Chechens were coming in a straggling herd. Hundreds of them.
Good. The Keldara believed in making the other bastard die. They didn’t even have the bare mercy for them the American had professed. The only good target was a serviced target. And it was going to be a target rich environment.
Adams wasn’t about to poke his head up; he had a small video camera set up on his position and was watching the take on his C2 pad.
The lead Chechens, who were slowing down from their run and puffing pretty hard, were about eight hundred meters out. He briefly considered engaging them with the SAWs, which had the range. Then he shrugged.
Let them come.
Salah tried to shout in triumph. They were barely five hundred meters from the line of rocks that marked the Keldara positions and still the cowards didn’t fire. He held his weapon forward in one hand and triggered a long burst of fire from the AK, joined by dozens, hundreds, of others. They were going to completely overrun these cowards, these pagan pigs, and then they would go on to the valley that whelped them and wipe them out for all time.
Three hundred meters. As AK rounds cracked overhead Adams looked over at Oleg and winked.
“Wait til you can see the whites of their eyes, eh?” the former SEAL said, grinning.
“That one I’m not familiar with,” Oleg admitted. “Patton?”
“You guys need to watch some other movies for God’s sake,” Adams said with a sigh as a spent bullet tumbled into the position. Two hundred. “Bunker Hill. Big battle during the American Revolution.”
“I wasn’t even aware you’d had a revolution,” Oleg said. “I will study it.”
“Do,” Adams replied. One hundred. He keyed his throat mike and lifted himself up to just below the rock lip of the fighting position. “Teams. Prepare to engage.”
They were on them now! There was no way to stop them!
“Alahu Akbar!” Salah shouted with what air he could spare. “God is Great!”
“Open fire,” Adams said, straightening up and searching for a target.
That wasn’t exactly tough. As he’d expected between the rough ground to their front and the steep slope the Chechens had both tightened up and slowed down. He targeted one of the screaming horde, a young guy holding his AK at his hip and just starting a “spray and pray” burst and fired three rounds into his upper chest. Then he tracked right to the next target.
Kiril lifted himself and poked the barrel of the SAW out of the trench, opening fire before he really aimed. From his perspective he might as well; keeping the barrel down there was virtually no way to miss.
He was searching for priority targets: RPGs, other machine gunners, leadership. But while he did that with one part of his mind he was engaging lower priority targets, firing short, controlled bursts from the SAW.
He’d ganged three of the ammunition boxes together in anticipation of a hot fight. Normally the ammo box of the SAW hung on a holder on the left hand side. In this case he’d dug out a small shelf just before the opening of his fighting position and placed the boxes there. Now they emptied their linked 5.56 into the weapon without him having to worry about reloading. He had six hundred rounds and way more targets. The sky was clear, the thin air blew cold down the trench and the ravens, harbingers of battle, were in the sky; the eyes of the Father of All were upon them.
It was a good day to do battle.
The fucking Keldara bastards.
Sorrano was watching his command broken and he could not believe it possible.
The fuckers had waited until the last possible moment to fire and now they were slaughtering his men on the very edge of victory. It could not be possible. They were so close he could see their eyes, yet his men could not reach them.
To the right, though, they were getting closer. There didn’t see to be as much fire there.
“RIGHT!” he screamed, pointing and slapping some of the fedayeen in that direction. “GO TO THE RIGHT!”
“Left. Big guy with a PKM. Looks like a leader.”
Lasko tracked to the left and saw who Gena meant. The man had bandoliers of PKM ammunition crossed on his chest. Lasko automatically targeted the x point where they crossed and triggered one round.
Sorrano grunted and looked down at the red welling in his lower chest. One hand raised to it in surprise. He couldn’t figure out where the blood had come from.
Suddenly the hole began spitting crimson and he fell to his knees as his legs lost all strength. He tried to prop himself up with his weapon but that, too, fell from his hands and he slumped forward on his face.
He was looking at a boot. It was very worn. They needed to get the men some more boots… soon…
Fuckers never learned.
When an gun is fired, the barrel tends to track upwards from recoil. Depending on how cases were ejected it could be pushed to one side as well.
When an automatic weapon was fired, the barrel tracked up and up and up. So when firing on automatic, the only way to keep the weapon from tracking off the target, unless you had a very firm position, was to fire in three to five round bursts.
Professional militaries knew that and trained their people to either fire in bursts or, more often, individual rounds. But groups like the Chechens, and the Taliban who he’d fought in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda who he’d fought in Iraq and various tribal militias he’d fought in Africa, the FARCs in Colombia… Christ it was a long list… they never seemed to learn. They’d just hold weapon at their side, press the trigger and spray. Even if the first round was anywhere near the target all the rest tracked up and, in the case of the AK, generally to the right.
It gave you a great feeling to just yank the trigger and spray. He’d done it a couple of times for the fuck of it. But you didn’t hit shit.
He hadn’t even heard a medic cry from their side and the Chechens were getting slaughtered. The rushing attack was broken no more than thirty meters from their position with hundreds of bodies scattered on the ground. Most of them were wounded rather than dead, the fucking 5.56 tended to do that, but not many of them were still trying to fire.
The rest of the Chechens, though, were still charging. He dropped the spent mag out of the well, slapped another in and fired three rounds at one of the screaming horde. The guy kept coming so he put another two in his head. That dropped him.
On the right the Chechens were heavier; the slope tended to push them that way. Some of them were making their way through the fire and were nearly to the trench. That was Sawn’s sector. The Makanee kid was good; he could handle that.
Kiril fired upwards as the Chechen came over the lip of his position then dropped the empty SAW and drew his hatchet.
The Keldara practiced at throwing axes but that wasn’t the only skill they knew. As the next Chechen tumbled into the position Kiril’s axe darted forward, fast as a snake, struck the man in the side of the neck and returned to guard position. The Chechen grabbed at his throat as the carotid began spurting high-pressure arterial blood across the position. With his hands clamped on the wound it still squirted out, but now in a spray that turned to a sanguine mist in the thin air.