Zachary had looked at McAllister, wanting to say the same thing, sorry he had not used the line first. “Same here, bud. I want you on my flank.” The two warriors had stared at each other in a moment of martial kinship, an intangible combat multiplier understood by few.
And there it was. McAllister would not let him down. He knew that much if he knew nothing else. It was a good feeling.
“Cardinal, over.”
Cardinal was the code word for commencing the attack. Zachary was to initiate the fires with the Javelin antitank weapons, then lay down a base of small-arms fire to mask the battalion’s movement across an essentially open field. Zachary had recommended against going across the airfield, but Buck believed it to be the best route.
As Zachary was about to signal his unit, he heard the unique sound of an M4 weapon falling to the ground. It rattled loudly off the lava rock with the distinctive sounds of plastic and metal crunching. It was a foolish mistake. One of the small, uncon-trollable things that happen when there are 115 young men gathered together. Everybody makes mistakes.
Zachary felt his stomach tighten as he saw a Japanese soldier guarding the fence only a hundred meters to his front look up and ready his weapon. Too late, Zachary said to himself, radioing his platoons to commence firing. The word spread quickly to the Javelin antitank gunners, who squeezed the triggers of their command launch units, sending twenty-nine bright flashes arching through the night toward their preplanned targets. Zachary had identified ten tanks for each platoon to destroy to avoid overkill.
The platoon leaders had then divided the tanks by squad for the same reason. The squad leaders had done likewise.
Zachary had grabbed his M4 and leveled it at the Japanese guard who had reacted to the falling weapon. Looking through his goggles and following the infrared aiming light onto the man’s chest, he squeezed the trigger three times and watched him kick backward with each impact. It made him feel good, but he wanted more.
Seconds later, many of the tanks exploded into bright fireballs, some with turrets tipping loose. In the confusion, it was difficult to determine how many they had destroyed, but they suddenly found themselves under fire from somewhere. Large-caliber bullets were impacting all around them.
The sound of helicopter blades in the distance sent a chill up Zachary’s spine. Japanese attack helicopters were engaging them at night. The very technology that the United States had developed and employed in their state-of-the-art equipment had been cloned to the Japanese, who were at the moment using it to kill American soldiers.
That was no Abu Sayyaf unit with rented small arms.
“Net call, get your men down, engage all heli-copters if you can acquire,” Zachary said into the company radio net. Then he switched to the battalion net.
“Knight six, this is Bravo six,” he said loudly into the radio handset. Bullets were raining down on his position with heightened ferocity, streaming from behind the white huts with precision.
“This is Knight six,” Buck’s nervous voice came back over the radio.
“Roger. We have destroyed over twenty enemy vehicles, but are receiving helicopter small-arms fire from the barracks vicinity, over.”
“Roger, good job, over.”
Dirt kicked into Zachary’s eyes as a 30mm chain-gun round impacted less than two feet away.
Zachary, crouching low in a ravine, looked at his microphone and rolled his eyes. He was not looking for praise, but wanted to warn the battalion commander that they needed to wait until he could engage the helicopters and the rest of the tanks before he moved the battalion.
Too late.
Through his goggles, the green landscape showed hundreds of small black dots moving rapidly on foot across the airfield.
The suppressive fires lessened on Zachary’s position, and to his disgust, he saw orange tracers, enemy orange tracers, raking the airfield, causing the black dots to fall to the ground.
“Engage all helicopters!” Zachary screamed into the microphone, reissuing his earlier order.
On that order, he saw no less than fifteen missiles soar through the air, resulting in a fireball at the end of each smoke-filled path. The trails of spent gunpowder etched white lines in the darkness of the night, crisscrossing and merging like some crazy traffic pattern.
Then Zachary heard helicopters behind him.
They’re everywhere!
He turned and saw four to his right flank and noticed his antitank gunners whipping around to engage them.
He could make out two hellfire missile racks on either side and the two Hydra 70 rocket pods balancing the stubbed wings. Beneath the belly of the ship was the 30mm chain gun, hanging low. He watched as a hellfire let loose from its rack and scorched a hot path into an enemy tank that had turned on his position. The two turbines rode high in the back near the tail rotor, making the craft look like a hovering wasp.
They’re friendlies!
Too late.
He watched in horror as a young private first class gunner followed his commander’s orders to “engage all helicopters.”
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Zachary yelled into the radio to no avail.
The Javelin missile screamed upward in a flash and impacted with a silent thud into the Apache helicopter, jarring it from its aerial fighting position. The helicopter shuddered once, then began to lose altitude rapidly. He heard the engines quit and watched as the pilot turned his head frantically to see what had hit him.
Fortunately, the gunner that had fired was within the sixty-five-meter arming zone for the missile. Outside of sixty-five meters, and the missile would have armed and exploded into the helicopter, vaporizing the two-man crew.
The pilot auto-rotated the main blade and achieved what his aviator buddies called a “hard landing.” The tail boom split in two, sending the tail rotor whipping through the Japanese positions like a circular saw blade. Eventually the fuselage of the helicopter stopped spinning and Zachary sent a squad from Kurtz’s platoon — SSG Quinones, who had acted so brilliantly during the defense of the pier — to gather up the copter crew, if they survived, and reel them back to safety.
“Bravo six, this is Alpha six, over!” came McAllister’s voice.
“This is Bravo six, go, over,” Zachary replied.
“The old man’s gone to yellow brick. I’m in charge of the maneuver element now until I can talk to his second-in-command.”
Buck’s dead? This can’t be happening!
Zachary had no great affection for Buck, but he was a nice guy. The man had a wife and four sons. Now what?
“This is Knight five, copied last message, moving into position now.”
Knight five was the battalion executive officer, who was second-in-command during the maneuver phase. The battalion operations officer was positioned with Zachary’s unit and was responsible for controlling the supporting fires. With Buck dead, Major Kooseman stepped into the saddle to gather in the reins of a horse that could quickly get out of control.
Zachary watched through his goggles as the remainder of the battalion performed fire and maneuver across the airfield, through the high brush and into the Quonset hut area, where his company had defended only days earlier. He thought he could see McAllister with three radio operators hovering around him and wanted to tell him to be careful, that someone might come surging from the water with a pistol in hand trying to kill him. He rubbed the clotted scar above his left ear as he gave the order for his men to lift their fires.