To get out on the east side, they had to climb the berm.
That was not a fast exercise. It was fifteen feet high and steeply sloped. And there was, mostly, an open area before it.
And they glowed.
Under thermal imagery, good thermal imagery and the scopes were sixth generation, a person glows white-hot. Their footprints glow white for as much as twenty minutes depending on conditions. When they move through concealed areas, the heat of their body rises, as it did this night, and you can see a faint trace like a ghost moving overhead.
And if you're a sniper with an assigned area you wait for that trace to come into view and you shoot the guy in the chest. If he's still moving, then, you shoot him again in the head.
The base wasn't a box. It was a long oval, more or less, curved a bit like a kidney. It was seven hundred meters across most of the base, berm to berm. Long shot for a sniper. But they'd gotten settled in, stacked sandbags, used laser rangefinders. There wasn't any wind. It was still as death. Except for the occasional crack of a shot, echoing off of the berms. Sometimes there'd be another. Not usually.
I didn't interfere. I just walked behind them, listening.
"Sector two-five."
"Fucker is smoking a cigarette. How fucking dumb can you be?"
Pause.
Crack.
"Hope he liked his last smoke."
A sniper works with a spotter. The spotter, well, spots the targets and gives the sniper information on distance, weather, what he should have eaten for dinner.
All the sniper has to do is dial in the information on his scope, take a good steady stance, breathe deep the gathering gloom and terminate.
Bravo company had some very good snipers. Lord Love my boys. Okay, Fillup's boys.
I also had some good guys at "Close Quarters Battle." Not that, I hoped, there would be any of that tonight.
But when the movers settled down, the guys still in the area apparently being of the correct opinion that trying to leave was suicide, the rest of the company had to get into action.
Teams spread out and moved through the park. They'd done it before and knew their way around. But it was somewhat different after a. murthering great explosions and b. said explosions having scattered unexploded ordnance around.
The teams, though, weren't there to fight. They were there to flush. They, too, were using thermal imagery and were in contact with the snipers. Very direct contact. As that part of the battle started, the snipers shifted around. Each was assigned a sector and a team. And the two talked. A lot.
"Okay, you've got me, right?"
"You're right by that fucking blown-up Humvee."
"That describes a lot of this sector. There's, like, two hundred Humvees here, all blowed the fuck up. I'm waving a chemlight over my head. You've got me, right?"
(To add clarity to this exchange: A chemlight is a plastic tube that has some chemicals that mix when you bend it and make light. Think those necklace thingies. Well, the military has chemlights that give off invisible light. I shit you not. There are both infrared and ultraviolet. If you break one, you can't see the light unless you've got thermal imagery in the first case or UV imagery in the second. This is the type of chemlight the guy was waving. The world is a very strange place when it has chemical lights that don't give off light.)
"So is . . . Second Platoon's One Alpha, I think. Yeah, man, I got you. The dumbass by the blown-up Humvee waving the UV chemlight. The other guy is by an Abrams."
"Okay, we're moving south at this time."
"Trust me, I've got you. I could smoke you and fuck your girlfriend. And there's a heat source in that next Humvee to your . . . left. So watch your ass."
Unexploded ordnance could get one of the guys. If he wasn't very damned careful. It was all over the fucking place. One thing I hadn't counted on. Also fires which fucked with the thermal imagery.
But what I was really worried about was one of the snipers taking out one of the flushers.
Seemed to be working out all right.
It took all fucking night. Snipers got rotated. You could only look through a scope so long before your eyes started getting fuzzy and we did not want fuzzy snipers. The guys doing the flushing went in then out and got some downtime, if nothing else a few minutes to not be in wracking terror between stepping over unexploded cluster munitions and not knowing if some RIF was right around the corner. The Nepos got some Zs. I forced Samad to rotate them; he thought they were just being lazy. I forced him to rack out.
Me? I kept moving around the base. There were problems, there always were. That was what I was there for. Me and Fillup who also didn't get any sleep.
By dawn's early light the broad stripes and bright stars were still gallantly waving. And, yes, there was a flagpole. Before the rest of the fucking Army pulled out, along with all the Non-Governmental Organizations and the Press, there had been, like, nine flags up. Ours, Iran's new/old one, various countries (Britain) that had something to do with the LOG base, a fucking UN one.
When everybody left we took them all down. (We burned the UN one. And the French.) Except the Stars and Stripes. And we had fucking reveille every morning with a raising and retreat in the afternoon complete with badly rendered bugle over loudspeakers.
I'd left it up that night. And there she was in the morning, Old Glory still gallantly waving.
Okay, she was sitting flat down the pole because there was, like, no fucking wind. But work with me here. Point was, the flag was still up and the enemy was toast.
Of course, our mission was also toast.
Chapter Eight
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
So it was time to report in.
I'd prepared for that pretty well. Okay, I'd been out with the some of the sweep teams. There were burning vehicles. (Not the fucking Abrams, of course!) You had to get in close to those to make sure nobody was still hiding out. Very smoky, very sooty. Fun as hell.
I'd checked myself in a mirror before calling in. Stubble check: Manly. Soot-covered face? Stopped in a line where my helmet band crossed my forehead. Quick wipe with a cloth and the soot was mostly standing out in the scars on my left cheek.
Perfect.
"I need to talk to the battalion commander. We had an incident overnight."
BLEW IT ALL UP? Bad boy! Bad boy! No biscuit! Flayed Skin! Still beating heart!
Yes, sir. Request new orders since "maintain and secure" is now inoperative.
Bad boy! No biscuit! I'll get back to you. Bad boy! Flayed skin!
So then I took a shower while Fillup and his XO and SkyGeek did some good works. They'd actually starting working on it the night before. The brigade commander was not going to be impressed by stubble and soot. He'd had plenty of stubble and soot in his time.
"Did you really have to blow it up?"
Freshly pressed uniform (thank you, Shadi, and for the quicky), cloth cap neatly placed, destubbled.
"I'd like to squirt you some video, sir. It's about ten minutes long. I'll include everything in my full report. In my professional opinion, we're lucky to be alive. Sir."