The stack had passed the first sergeant and he watched as they cleared the next room. As the first two members of the stack entered the room, a tango darted out of one of the rooms down the corridor. He headed for the far end, though, where there were presumably more stairs, rather than trying to fight the American troops in the hallway.
Cady had too many bodies between him and the tango to target the ambusher, but Privates Jones and Mahoney from the stack engaged him, tossing the terrorist to the floor. He was only wounded, though, and still tried to crawl to the doorway at the end.
Cady moved forward as the stack entered the room, dropping to one knee on the far side of the door to cover the hallway. He’d barely taken a knee when the bulbous round of an RPG peeked around the corner of the third door down.
Now, body armor will stop a lot, but it’s not going to stop an RPG. And the grenadier wasn’t in sight. That didn’t stop Cady, though — he just laid the sights of the SAW on the round itself and fired, throwing himself to the floor immediately afterwards.
The 5.56 rounds from the SAW impacted on the casing of the grenade, throwing it upwards just as the grenadier pulled the trigger. The round fired, frying the grenadier with backblast from the floor and filling the room beyond him with more blast and flame. The round itself impacted with the ceiling and, being within its minimum safe-arming distance, bounced off the ceiling and skittered down the hallway with a whistling sound.
Cady rolled into the doorway, tripping a member of the squad who was on his way out. He grabbed the troop, who turned out to be Sergeant Gregory, and threw him into the room, toppling two more members of the squad in the process.
The RPG slithered down the walls of the corridor until it impacted on the far end. Herr had just stepped out of the first cleared room when it passed and he caught fragments in his legs and right arm while the explosion blew him off his feet.
“I’m hit!” Herr called, rolling back into the room. “Medic!”
“Stay there!” Cady called, rolling back into the corridor. He ignored the intervening doors, pounded down the hallway to the door where the RPG gunner had been and tossed another grenade into the room. As soon as it was out of his hand, he jumped back, throwing himself to the floor with his back to the left-hand wall opposite the previous room.
The grenade went off with a crack followed by a massive secondary explosion; he’d managed to roll it right into the ready ammo for the RPG gunners. The purple-orange explosion blew out the interior walls of the room, filling the corridor with smoke and dust and momentarily deafening the first sergeant. He rolled over backwards, coming to his feet and spinning to the previous room. He peeked around the door but there wasn’t anything to worry about there; the explosion had blown in the walls to that room as well and the terrorists were lying on the ground, writhing in pain.
Stepping into the room, he could see into the one that had held the RPG gunner and through holes into the last room in the hallway. He dropped to one knee and scanned the opening, looking for targets. A tango was just getting to his feet and the first sergeant brought him to the floor with a short burst before springing to his feet and darting through the hole in the wall into the RPG room. There was a massive hole in the floor near the corridor wall that he had to negotiate around carefully. There were also two or more bodies, bits really, scattered around the room.
He passed through, staying away from the windows where occasional “friendly” rounds continued to crack, to the far hole. There wasn’t any definitive movement, just the one tango he’d targeted on the floor. He tossed a grenade through, anyway, backing away to avoid the fragments, then exploding through the hole as soon as the grenade went off.
There had been one tango by the windows on the near wall, but he was riddled with fragments and coughing blood, his AK on the floor by his hand. Cady kicked it away, then made his way across the creaking floor to the door, peeking into the corridor and ducking back as rounds cracked from the far end.
“You shoot me, Gibson, and I’ll put you on vehicle painting duty for the rest of your natural life!” the first sergeant bellowed.
“Sorry, Top!” the private called back.
“Coming out!” the first sergeant yelled. “Somebody come through and tag these tangos! And somebody else get Herr’s ammo!”
Specialist Nelms sighted the building that first squad was taking rear cover positions on. He could see and hear a lot of action taking place on the second floor. And a lot of shouting; the first sergeant’s accent was clear even through the bellows.
The second room that he came to on the fifth floor had a jagged hole, a remnant from previous street fighting, down near the floor. He set the Barrett down and peeked through, careful to keep his silhouette away from the window. The hole was wide enough that he could cover the entire roof of the building across the way and get an angle into the side street.
Sure about his snipe point, he slid the Barrett forward and snuggled it into his shoulder, peering through the BORS sniper scope and tracking for targets. He scanned the street and the side buildings until an RPG or a grenade going off in the building across the street caught his attention. The walls around the explosion were being pockmarked by fire from somewhere to the side. And it was increasing.
Nelms calmly but hurriedly scanned in the direction of the sound of the AK fire; there they were. Seven insurgents had dug in on the third floor of the building, or what was left of it, and were zeroing in on Top and the stack as they tried to move from the interior hallway to the exterior rooms where the other insurgents were taking cover.
Breathe in… out one, two, three, squeeze. The trigger on the Barrett depressed, and Specialist Nelms tracked the round. The rifle used the venerable .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun round or “50 BMG.” Developed during the First World War, the round was extremely powerful with massive overkill on “soft” targets like Iraqi insurgents. When the target was hit, the bullet, quite literally, blew the tango apart. The upper torso of the Iraqi insurgent blew upwards and to the left, trailing unidentifiable pieces, while the severed legs and pelvis dropped out of sight.
The Barrett had pushed Nelms back at least three inches, despite the fact that he was stretched out on the ground, but he brought it back into battery automatically and retargeted. Breathe… squeeze!
This time he’d hit high and the round punched through the terrorist’s upper chest, spreading a red stain across the wall behind the muj and covering his buddies with blood. The impact tore away the connective tissue and bone on the right side of the Arab’s throat and upper chest and when he fell backwards his head flopped off to the side.
Nelms contemplated the sight for about an eighth of a second with dispassion. It was an interesting example of ballistics and he wanted to make sure he’d seen it correctly. With the exception of casual professional interest, he had no other feelings about the shot. He sometimes wondered if that was because of all the hunting he’d done or because of the nature of the enemy. He, like most of his fellow soldiers, really did not like the Iraqi insurgents. They had no particular honor in their fighting methods, most of them weren’t even from Iraq and, in general, they were incompetent at anything but setting roadside bombs. To Nelms the man that he had just shot was less than a human, and killing him felt more like stepping on a cockroach than murder.
Nelms pulled the sniper rifle in and up and rolled to the right and then bear crawled to the window at the far end of the room; the signature from a Barrett could sometimes be very noticeable so the experienced snipers had called for no more than two shots from a single position. Quickly he dropped the bipod of the rifle on the windowsill, targeted, and fired twice.