The team formed up again without prompting, and they moved down the western face of the headquarters building, rapidly approaching the front corner. The point man paused briefly at the edge of the building, scanning the area for movement. The dirt and debris cloud caused by the Excalibur rounds hung in the air, obscuring their view across the parade field. Nobody on the team carried any thermal imaging equipment that could see through the haze and night vision would be utterly useless in this situation. He decided that speed would be their best ally here.
"Bobby, you got anything?" he whispered.
"Negative. But I can't see shit," his point man replied.
He held up a closed fist long enough for the team to see. The fist changed to a flat hand, which he moved rapidly back and forth.
"Go. Fast," he said and slapped the point man on the shoulder.
The point man took off, and the team dashed toward the small concrete stoop in front of the entrance door, which stood less than twenty feet away. They left one operator at the corner to cover the approach to the front door. He had closed three-quarters of the short distance to the door when Staff Sergeant Robert Chamberlain appeared to stumble. The sound of a suppressed weapon from his rear and a double tap gunshot from the parade field immediately followed. Chamberlain collapsed and tumbled forward under his own momentum, colliding clumsily with the side of the building. McDonald could see a dark stain on the wall where he had hit.
"Man down," he hissed into his headset.
It didn't take Paul Thomas long to figure out that they were seriously fucked. An incredible explosion had rocked the top of the barracks building, showering the parade field with debris. A large, twisted chunk of smoldering timber had fallen several feet in front of him, stopping his sprint toward the rear fence. Engulfed in dirt and smoke, it took him a few seconds to realize that the machine-gun position located on top of the building across the parade field had been simultaneously hit by a separate explosion.
The Road Warrior had been disabled by a third explosion that landed less than fifty meters away, in the southeast corner of the parade field, but the impact had been close enough to the other that it never registered to him as a separate hit. Thomas had defied the statistics of battlefield artillery. Located just outside of the fifty-meter kill radius, he had been saved by the fact that the Excalibur round had landed on the opposite side of the Road Warrior, which had absorbed most of the shrapnel sent in his direction. It didn't register with Thomas that he had been spared by the very vehicle he had secretly deemed as one of Bishop's more asinine ideas.
Thomas dove to the ground behind the smoldering timber and assessed the situation. He could hear short bursts of machine-gun fire from every direction, competing with the sound of one of their .50 cals at the front gate. The heavy-caliber gun continued to pound away at something. So much for short, controlled bursts of fire. He knew it was a stupid idea to put that crazy bitch on the gun, but Bishop had insisted. Equal opportunity or something like that. None of that mattered now. They were in a fight for their lives.
The sound of small-arms fire intensified from every direction, and he could tell that the compound was putting up a spirited defense. The .50-caliber machine gun stopped firing, which unmasked something he hadn't been able to hear. Repeated, single booms echoing throughout the compound. He knew that sound very well from Iraq. He lifted his head above the thick piece of blackened wood and watched a body sail horizontally into the parade field from the top of the armory, still spinning as it struck the ground. One of their snipers had been hit by a .50-caliber sniper bullet, which had imparted enough kinetic energy to toss his body off the roof like a rag doll. Thomas stayed low, not wanting to tempt the snipers firing with impunity from hidden positions in the valley.
The second salvo of Excalibur shells landed just as he pressed his body flat against the ground. Thomas once again defied the odds, avoiding the shower of steel fragments released from the artillery round landing near the Road Warrior. He remained in a prone position, scrambling to process his options. He considered running into one of the buildings, but figured that the doors were under observation. They'd send a Hellfire missile right through one of the windows, instantly vaporizing him. This could be the only explanation for the accuracy of the strikes he had witnessed. Drones overhead.
This thought spurred a separate line of thinking. Predator drones were equipped with thermal imaging equipment for nighttime strikes. Sitting here would have the same result. He might have a better chance in one of the structures. If he could get inside the command building, he could send a warning to Brown before they overran the camp. He had to act fast. The cloud of debris would clear up soon, making him an easy target for snipers. He raised his head slowly, along with his AR-15 rifle, scanning for threats near the command building. He started to rise up on one knee, when he detected movement down the side of the command structure.
A small team of soldiers moved briskly along the wall, approaching the front corner. He recognized their fluid tactical movements immediately. Special Forces. There was no way he was going to make it into that building. He lowered his head and glanced behind him, in the direction of the front gate. He could see that the forward machine-gun positions had suffered the same devastating fate as the rooftop emplacements. Fuck. He wasn't going to make it through this one. His luck had finally run out. He closed his eyes for a second and paused before peeking at the soldiers. They had already started to move toward the front door. Without thinking, he quickly raised his head and sighted in on the lead soldier. He placed the illuminated green crosshairs of the C79A2 3.4X combat optic at center mass and fired two rounds, shifting the sight picture to the next soldier in the line.
Sergeant Gabriel Castillo searched for movement. He stared past the parade field at different points in the distance, never fully focusing. He allowed his mid-peripheral vision to do most of the work, knowing that the light-sensitive rod cells responsible for peripheral vision could detect motion better than the cone cells that dominated center vision. Several dark clumps of oddly shaped wreckage littered the field, presenting a considerable challenge for one man.
Something moved in the pile of glowing rubble on the far left side of the field. He sighted in on top of the debris heap through his night-vision scope and fired a round instinctively. As the rifle recoiled into his shoulder, he still hadn't formed a detailed picture of the target. All he knew was that the round shape he had identified didn't belong to the debris.
His night vision flared bright green, which meant that the target had probably fired a round at the same time. He didn't have much time to process any of this before hearing the words "man down" in his headset. He flipped the night-vision scope down and fired three rounds at the hazy silhouette of a human head still poking above the top of the pile. Overkill, but he had to be sure. The target had been quick enough to acquire and hit one of his teammates before he could react…and there had been no problem with Castillo's reaction time. He wondered if there were more like this one in the compound.
"Stinger lead, this is Overlord. We have a man down near the LZ. Recommend Stinger two-one deploy medical team with the assault group. Prepare for immediate cas-evac, over," Carroll said.