13.FEB.2012; Forward Operating Base [Heartland]

Posted by Jack on Feb 18, 2012 in The.Dispatches | 0 comments

[From Max] I slept through the afternoon.  Ten hours straight.  The sleeping pills keep me down despite the helos that whip overhead all day, every day.  I took my first shot of caffeine as soon as I woke.  I rolled into the Operations Center, groggy and squinting, and fumbled with the massive percolator.  Black, no sugar.  The upper deck hummed with activity behind me.

I took a look at the board.  It was scrawled from top to bottom in red marker.  SIGACTs.  The day-shift had been busy.  I checked my watch and looked up at the screens, waiting to take the hand-off for the night shift.  I took a ginger sip from my steaming styrofoam cup.

“What the fuck was that?”

Someone talking behind me.  I squinted up at the monitors.

“Tell him to go back . . . No, back . . . Right there!  In the middle of the road!”

Suddenly everyone was looking at the same thing.  Two man-sized heat signatures.

“Is he digging?”

“Fuck yes, he is . . . ” I said, feeling suddenly alert.

I set my coffee down.  I didn’t bother moving to the upper deck.  Half of the “head-shed” was there already.  My boss had one hand on the phone, and was gesturing at the screen.  He was calling for grid-coordinates.  The JTACs stood on the lower deck in front of him.  I looked at their screens and turned to their sergeant.

“What have we got on station?”

“A-10s . . . “

The operations center was suddenly thronging with life.  There is a Hollywood image of ridiculous future-tech where one man sits with his finger on a button in a NORAD bunker, waiting for a phone call to kill insurgents.  That isn’t how it works.  A dozen people plugged themselves into their computers pulling up the necessary data while a knot of officers held phones to one ear or the other.

The room was a dull roar of voices and crackling radios.  Handsets squawked with muffled static.  On the other end of one I could hear one of the pilots.  The JTAC was fixated on his screen.

The tension in the room was palpable.  We wait weeks for an opportunity like this.  We sit and we watch and we wait.  Insurgents are cunning.  They know our Rules of Engagement, and they do everything to exploit them.  They hug the villages and stay in population centers.  They hide in mosques.  They surround themselves with women and children.  Anything to avoid getting smoked by a drone, or a gunship.

Day-shift normally gets to have all the fun.  I’d seen this all before.

Hellfire strikes.  Apache strikes.  I just missed one of those.  Sixty rounds of 30 mike-mike.  Not one round hit the bastard, but they impacted within a few meters of him.  Each round is packed with three quarters of an ounce of high explosive.  Fragmentation from the volley must have caught him.  He fell to the ground and lay there a moment before rolling into a wadi.  His companion ran for help.  Half of the village showed up to collect the body.

Now I was watching in real-time.

One man was digging in the road, buried up to his shoulders.  He stopped, looked around, and went back to digging.  His companion paced the road.  Probably pacing off the wire.  He must have been learning the ropes.  I couldn’t believe our luck.  High above them a pair of A-10s circled.

Sharks in the water.

They must have heard the jets, but in the dark they had no way of knowing for sure.  Those engines would have sounded a long way off.  Everyone was glued to the televisions when the word came down.  My boss hung the phone on his shoulder and the JTAC looked up at him.

“Engage,” he said.

The room went silent.  The only sound was the crackle of the FM.  The JTAC keyed the handset.

“You are cleared hot.  North-to-South gun run, try to keep it on the road . . . “

Kkkkkkk — Rogerrr-kkkkkkkk

From where I was standing, I could see exactly what the pilots saw.  Both Hogs.  I couldn’t see the spotter’s laser, but I could see the first pilot lining up for the run.  The emplacers had no fucking clue.  They were standing on a fucking Bull’s Eye and they didn’t even know it.  The pilot lined up with the road and began a rapid descent.

By the time I saw the sparks fly across the infrared, it was already too late.  We heard the burp of the gun just as the rounds impacted.  The wire man vanished in a cloud.  The second insurgent was no more than ten or twelve meters away.  He leapt in terror and turned south down the road.

I watched on the spotter’s screen as the little heat signature pin-balled back and forth in the dark.  My boss put the phone back to his ear, spoke a few muffled words, and put the receiver down.  “Clear to re-engage.”  It took a small eternity to line up that second run.  We watched the digger bouncing down the road in terror.  On either side, as tall as a man, were walls of triple-standard concertina wire.

The obstacle was doing exactly what it was intended for.  The room erupted in laughter.

“You’re fucked now, motherfucker!”  someone shouted.

Somewhere, high above him, that unseen screaming terror was lining him up and he knew it.  He clawed desperately at the barbs, trying to find a way through.  The pilot was taking forever.  Suddenly the digger stopped.  He had located a group of pickets.  No one exhaled as we watched him clamber over the top of the wire.

He collapsed on the other side and lay still for a moment.

“Oh, shit!  He’s fucked up!”

He was down, but he was still moving.  He fought to free his legs from the barbs and tanglefoot we knew he’d fallen into.  I almost couldn’t believe it when he got back to his feet.  He was moving slower, limping slightly, but he was back up.  He shuffled into an open field and stopped.  He leaned over.  He must have been winded, or checking his wounds.  The pilot had him lined up and was just about to begin his descent.

“He’s got about five seconds to get on target or I’m aborting.  If he gets any closer to that building . . . “

My boss spoke over the excitement.  The pilot began his dive.  The digger limped desperately toward the wall of the nearby structure.  Five.  Four.  Three . . .

“Abort!  Abort!  Abort!”

“Abort!  Abort! ” the JTAC echoed.

The Warthog banked sharply and pulled off target.

“How much time do they have left on station?” asked my boss.

“How much playtime, over?” replied the JTAC, into the hand-set.  “Five minutes, sir . . . he’s almost on fumes.”

“If this guy goes back into the open he’s got one more pass . . . “

“Roger, sir . . . “

The A-10s circled.  On the spotter’s screen we watched as the little heat signature darted out from behind the building and pushed off into a field.  The bird lined him up.  Sparks poured across the camera.

We heard the burp of the gun.

We watched on the screen as the rounds impacted.  A cloud of dust and heat obscured the camera.  The little silhouette sprinted out of the cloud.  Blinded by smoke and the flash of anti-tank rounds exploding all around him, the little figure didn’t see the stone wall in front of him.  Waist height.  He struck it full speed.  His legs kicked up in the air behind him.  Several voices behind me chuckled.

No one could believe he had escaped the second run.  It hit everywhere but him.  He stumbled into the next field, battered and wounded and peppered with shrapnel.  The pilot begged on for a third pass and missed.  My boss called off the engagement.

Almost everyone left the room in a flurry of noise.  I watched the screen as the little heat signature slunk into a building and disappeared.

My buzz was gone.

All I could think about was how impotent I felt watching that man running in the dark.  It shouldn’t have happened like that.  Someone should have been there, on the ground, stomping his guts out.  The whole business was too impersonal.  My coffee was cold.

We spun up a crew for a battle damage assessment.  None of them had been in the room for the engagement.  I handed them trash bags.

“You ain’t gonna find shit,” I told them.

I took over my shift and sat down to start the paperwork on the guy we vaporized.  I watched the replay of his death several times.  He never heard it coming.  I watched the digger as he scrambled over the C-wire, cutting himself all to Hell.  I watched him run out of a hail of steel and fire.

I heard a little voice in the back of my head.

Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever tasted . . .