“Is this legal?”
“A, since when have you ever cared about that, and, B, I don’t know, but it’s going to be covered under a presidential directive in five minutes. It will authorize us to sweep something from the Web. We need it not to have ever existed and I need it gone yesterday.”
“No big whoop, as long as it hasn’t been hash-tagged yet.”
“I’ll make believe I know what you just said and assume you will do this. When you get to your computer, Cheryl will fill you in.”
“Hey Bill, everything okay? You sound tense, man.”
“Nah, I am having a relaxing day in the country.”
XIII. SIRROCO: THE DESERT WIND
The good shepherd Bridgestone took in the routine of the prisoners through two days of observation. He was able to identify the leader of the captives by his taking charge of the exercises. The next step was easy. All the captives were Asian. All the guards were African. He had counted seven guards. During the exercise periods, all the prisoners were together and the guards all neatly at the perimeter and very visible. Although he could have called in a small squad of SEALs from a carrier strike group one hundred twenty nautical miles off, instead he went to his pickup and dragged the manure covered top plate off. He took out a Gepard GM6 .50 caliber, heavy sniper rifle. He’d have to spot the targets himself, but the distance, terrain, direction of wind, and the towels he’d wrap around the barrel would ensure that the last guard to die wouldn’t have heard the previous six shots. ‘One shot one kill’ was the sniper’s motto, more because of the exposure of his position that a second shot would bring than any concern about ammunition.
Soon the morning exercises would begin. He used the uplink radio to notify the carrier to spin up the rescue choppers. He figured five Stallions could handle the head count. They were forty-five minutes out. That should be more than enough time.
Captain Kasogi roused his men, giving them their five-minute heads-up before the morning exercise routine. The early chill was burning off, on its way to being a scorcher of a day here in the desert. He had noticed that the supply truck, which came every three days, never showed yesterday. That meant little or no food for his men today. To that end he would cut the exercise time in half. The little award system he initiated, which the men were now calling The Captain’s Table, had about half the crew competing to earn the “culinary” prize by crisply doing their exercises and showing camaraderie.
As the men assembled in the middle of the ramshackle camp, the guards took positions around the group. Kasogi smiled as he addressed his men, “Later today, our resident poet, Yosi, has written a poem and he will honor us with a reading of his fine work. I hear this one has a very steamy verse about a woman of questionable choices.”
The men responded in half-hearted laughter. Kasogi was happy that he had Yosi. His men of the sea were not prone to poetry, but in this God-forsaken place it gave them a point of distraction, a trace of normalcy. Kasogi knew that the captors would win if his men surrendered their spirit. The guards seemed unfazed by his strategy, possibly not understanding its true value. If rescue — when rescue came, or an escape opportunity presented itself, the window of success would be narrow. Men who were fit and spirited, men who had not succumbed to their captors, stood the greatest chance of survival.
Kasogi stretched out his arms. “Okay, we start with fifty jumping jacks. Ready, begin.”
Suddenly there was gunfire. All the men hit the ground covering their heads. From the dirt, Kasogi tried to see what was happening. The head guard was laughing, lowering his gun from shooting in the air as he walked over to Kasogi and said in half-baked French, “No exercise! We unload truck!” Kasogi stood and saw the plume of dust heading toward camp. The food truck, which was supposed to have arrived yesterday afternoon, was finally coming. Kasogi addressed his men, “It’s okay, the truck is coming to be unloaded. We’ll exercise this evening.”
It really sucks when your plan goes to hell, Bridgestone thought, as he keyed his radio. “Kingmaker, this is Sirocco, abort, abort. Target parameters have changed. Will update.” The satellite radio hit the sand with the force of frustration. He watched the truck approach through his sniper scope. He watched for thirty minutes as the prisoners unloaded the truck; then something bad happened.
Yosi, the radioman/poet, was heaving an extra-heavy crate onto his slight frame when he became unbalanced and the crate smashed onto the floor. Unfortunately, it was the guards’ eggs and only a few survived. The sight of “the good food” in ruins on the dirt made one guard lash out, and he struck Yosi in the face with the butt of his rifle. Yosi’s bloody teeth immediately splattered on the egg-covered ground as he went down. An oiler from the engine room, a huge hulk of a man, hammered the guard with a punch from his fist and Kasogi heard the guard’s jaw snap. For his effort, the oiler was immediately perforated with several bullets, which he absorbed with groans and gasps until his body hit the ground with a thud. All the prisoners scrambled and the guards started screaming. One of Kasogi’s men was shot in the back when a guard decided he was running too far away.
Through his scope, Bridgestone could see the guards were all pointing their weapons toward the prisoners. Starting with the ones at the perimeter, he squeezed the trigger and the head of a guard popped and fell back. Next target, a full chest hit; next shot, center mass — a huge exit wound visible as the impact spun the man around; three rounds, three seconds, three down. He then trained his weapon on a guard beating a prisoner and caught him in the right eye just as he was about to smash in the skull of the prisoner.
Kasogi saw the guard go down. His confusion lasted a few seconds as he looked around and saw through the melee that four guards were lying dead. Someone is shooting them. From where? He quickly decided it didn’t matter; this was the moment. He ran toward the nearest dead guard and picked up his rifle. He aimed it at the first guard he saw and let out a burst that rippled across the man’s chest. He turned and found the next guard. He fired and missed and the guard turned…
Bridge could see the prisoners were starting to fight back and he realized the leader was now shooting as well. He saw the man miss and get the attention of his target. Bridge quickly re-aimed and fired, but the guard was spinning and Bridge’s round only glanced his shoulder.
Kasogi was frozen as the guard had turned and aimed his AK-47 at him. He instinctively went to crouch low, when the guard suddenly went into a spasm, sending a burst of gunfire into the air as his shoulder exploded. Kasogi took advantage and shot him again. One of the Kasogi’s men had slammed a rifle into one of the remaining guards, who was down with a broken sternum. There were only two guards and a truck driver left. Four prisoners now had rifles and the remaining captors knew they were going to be killed, so they started firing into the mass of Kasogi’s men.
Bridge couldn’t draw a bead on the shooter farthest away, but the one firing from behind a stack of crates was in the clear. Bridge took him out with a shot to his back, which went right through his heart. The prisoners were now training their fire on the one remaining armed guard, who was out of Bridge’s line of fire. He grabbed his Mac 5 and webbing with the extra magazines and grenades clipped on and started running toward the camp.
With the exception of the wounded and dead prisoners still in the open, the survivors had all found cover. The four with weapons were taking pot shots at the remaining guard’s position but getting nowhere.