Kingdom Come Read online

Mazool, Farib and Taymullah clambered from the vehicle as ISIS fighters conducted a hurried but thorough search. “There are weapons, but they are not ours,” Mazool protested.

  “I do not believe you,” replied the fat guard with the foreign accent.

  “Abdullah Abdullah!” exclaimed one of the men holding up an AK and rocket launcher pulled from the back of the ambulance. “There’s more.”

  “Take them,” said the fat man – Abdullah Abdullah.

  “You are mistaken, Amir,” said Farib, reaching inside his shirt.

  “Stop!” Abdullah shouted and shoved the muzzle of his AK in Farib’s face.

  “We are Ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah, like you,” Farib stammered. “We fight for the caliph and the glory of Allah the merciful.”

  “Open your mouth, dog fucker,” said Abdullah in English.

  Farib opened and closed his mouth.

  “I said open your fuckin’ mouth an’ keep it fuckin’ open!”

  Farib did as he was ordered.

  “You understand the Queen’s fuckin’ English, right? Well eat this.” He shoved the muzzle in Farib’s mouth, whose eyes were wide with terror. “Don’t you fuckin’ move. Now what do we ‘ave ‘ere? Better fuckin’ hope it’s not a shooter.” Abdullah reached into Farib’s shirt and extracted a black standard. The sight of it gave Abdullah pause. He looked at Farib slyly. “Where’d you learn to speak the Queen’s fuckin’ English?”

  Farib mumbled, unable to speak with the muzzle in his mouth and his heart filled with terror.

  “What? I can’t hear you?” said Abdullah and pulled his rifle away.

  “American…American movies. I, I learn little bit.”

  “What if I said you was an American spy?”

  Farib’s eyes went wider still. “No, no, Amir. No spy! No spy!”

  “Hmm…” Abdullah seemed vaguely convinced. “American movies are shite, except for Iron Man. You want to learn English, watch movies made in England. Stands to reason, doesn' it?” He shook the flag in Farib’s face. “’ow do I know this is not just some trophy you picked up along the way? Maybe you killed someone to nick it?”

  “No, no, Amir,” said Farib urgently, switching to Arabic. “Most of our brothers were killed by those dogs, the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.”

  “Where are you from? What’s your accent?”

  “Syrian. My brothers also.” He tilted his head at Taymullah and Mazool.

  Abdullah grunted. “Don't have many of you Syrians fighting for the caliph.” The Jabhat Fatah al-Sham – the Conquest of Syria Front – had been active in these parts recently and those apostates had wiped out several displaced units of Ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah that had been separated from larger groups.

  “Where are you going now?” Abdullah demanded.

  “We have more brothers nearby. We hurry to join them and continue the fight.”

  “Well it’s everyone for themselves now, innit? On yer fuckin’ way, and count yourselves lucky. I’ll be keeping this.” He held up the flag. “And this.” He motioned at the ambulance.

  “Amir, please, we need transport,” Mazool protested as Abdullah’s men climbed into the battered vehicle and drove off.

  “That’s why Allah the merciful gave you those fings,” he said gesturing at Mazool’s legs, “wif feet on the end of ‘em.” Abdullah added with a sneer. “Now, fuck off.”

  Mazool insisted, “We can’t fight without weapons.”

  “Didn’t Abdullah Abdullah make himself fuckin’ clear?” Abdullah cocked his AK and pointed it at Mazool. “On second thoughts, we’ve got foreign soldiers nearby, up on that hill. Could be American Crusaders for all we know. Maybe you’d like to go and take a peek for us.”

  Mazool saw a dozen men over by the warehouse, checking each other for weapons, getting ready for a fight. If he was not careful, he, Taymullah and Farib could end up being used as human shields. “We must rejoin our unit. If you need reinforcements, I will return with them.”

  Abdullah looked at the three Syrians, all of them sallow cheeked and under nourished. “No wonder we’re losing this war. Count yourselves lucky. Now fuck off all of you.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  Mazool knew they might not get another opportunity to leave, so he turned and walked toward the column of refugees.

  “We should go back to the city,” said Farib, hurrying to catch up and put as much distance between himself and Abdullah as possible.

  Taymullah agreed. “We can’t get very far without a vehicle, Mazool.”

  “We don't give up that easily.”

  “Sometimes I wish we did,” Taymullah muttered.

  “I heard that,” Mazool said over his shoulder.

  Six

  Ronald V. Small @realSmall

  It’s time for us to appreciate everything Russia has done for the world in Syria while the rest of the world stood back. Very brave.

  “Show me,” I said.

  Bo shared the plasticized map. There was a red grease pencil circle around the hill, our current position, and a red cross on our new destination, the secondary around eight klicks to the east-northeast. No additional intelligence had miraculously appeared on the map. For all we knew, it might be hosting a jihadist convention.

  So, the good news? First light was hours away. The bad news? Almost all of the ground we had to cross was open with little cover and more fundamentalists to the square yard than a public stoning in Raqqa. Also, there was the time issue. Our TACAN was supposed to have been transmitting by - well, by now.

  “Boss, more tangos inbound,” Alvin, having reassumed the observation point overlooking the warehouse, announced in my earpiece. “They got their Nikes on this time.”

  “Bo, Jimmy, on me,” was my response to that. There was no need to brief the situation as our headset comms were open. We all knew the score. “Alvin, quickest way off this rock avoiding tracks and paths.”

  “Reckon it’s here, boss. The north face.”

  I figured as much. North was not the easiest way down, but on the plus side it was headed in our desired direction. We would, however, be descending directly adjacent to our increasingly nervous Daesh internationals at the warehouse. But maybe that could be helpful; at least we’d be keeping an eye on them. “North it is. Jimmy, let’s leave some best wishes from Uncle Sam.”

  Jimmy reached for a Claymore strapped to his ruck.

  “And here’s something personal from the former owners of a white Beemer,” Bo said, offering the sergeant a second Claymore.

  “You’ve got sixty seconds,” I told Jimmy. “RZ at the rock shelf.”

  A short while later, standing with Alvin and Bo on edge of the sheer bluff that overlooked the road several hundred feet below, the reality of our tactical position revealed itself. The Daesh fighters remaining at the warehouse had set up a checkpoint and were confiscating vehicles and harassing any refugees in the column who looked likely to be carrying loot. The road had become a choke point, one we were going to have to cross. The orange light provided by the oil-drumfires was potentially to our advantage, robbing the jihadists of their night vision. The shadows looked gratifyingly deep, but US combat assets had distinctive and well-known profiles, especially because of the helmet and NVGs. “Alvin, after you,” I told him as Jimmy rejoined us.

  The sergeant traversed to the right of the bluff and disappeared down a narrow chute, using outward pressure on his arms and feet to lower himself down. I went next, the weight of my rucksack not making the descent easy. The chute was at least seventy feet straight down and a little over three feet wide. We assembled on a ledge and Alvin found the crack in the next sheer face that angled downwards at around fifty degrees. It wasn’t an easy task, but that’s why they pay us so much money, right? We assembled again at the base of the rock, which was shrouded in scrubby bushes and stinging nettles of the type we were all familiar with. From there it was a relatively simple climb down to the road.

  Two loud explosions somewhere above us on top of the hill punc
tuated the night, and a ripple of fear went through the refugees on the road. The anti-personnel Claymores had been tripped and sprays of 700 steel balls apiece, lethal up to a range of about 100 yards, had ripped into anyone within an arc of around sixty degrees. “Sorry,” I said, looking back up over my shoulder. “Not.”

  The explosions activated the jihadists at the warehouse and yet another bunch of them ran across the road, checking that their AKs were locked and loaded, and launched themselves at the path up the hill.

  “A suggestion,” I said. “Take off your helmets, clip ‘em to your rucks. Got a scarf, wrap it around your head.” I explained my thought about our distinctive silhouettes. “Won’t stop a bullet, but might stop a second look. We’ll separate and RZ in the shadows a hundred yards east of the warehouse, beyond the firelight.” I indicated the general direction two hundred yards up the road.

  Cunningly disguised thus, we joined the sad parade of the unfortunate dispossessed. I shuffled along beside a family group, a toddler with a bloody bandage covered in flies around her head and another around her arm, riding on her father’s shoulders. She was bawling her eyes out, her mother limping beneath a full niqab while she herded three young girls in front of her. They were all covered in filth, one of the kids wearing only one shoe. I kept waiting for someone to call out “Amriki!” but there was too much misery around for anyone to notice a man hunched over like all the rest, dragging his feet. It was the same for Sergeants McVeigh, Baker and Leaphart, and the next RZ was reached without incident.

  Helmets back on, we double-timed it because the Air Force does like to keep to its schedules. There were plenty of shadows about and very little ambient light to speak of - no streetlights, no starlight, and even the firelight from the city reflected off the cloud base was diminishing. After several uneventful klicks jogging through the scrub away from the road, we took a breather behind a deserted shed. The road had forked some way back, the refugees taking the other fork. Up ahead, it appeared that the two roads merged again into one, which was once more clogged with fleeing humanity.

  “Boss,” said McVeigh, motioning down the road with the tube attached to his Camelbak. A single headlight approached. “Motorcycle.”

  It wasn’t. The NVGs revealed a beat-up van flying black flags from the passenger window, one of its headlights smashed. The flapping flags said it was ISIS.

  “More of our favorite peeps,” said Bo.

  “Gonna ask nicely if there’s room for four more,” I said and opened fire on the driver. Three more silenced M4s joined in, clattering like muffled castanets, and the van slowed and most helpfully rolled to a halt near us.

  “Shit,” said Alvin, when the red crescent daubed on the side of the van became apparent. “That’s gonna be bad karma.”

  “Yeah,” I gestured at the ISIS flag hanging from a well-punctured door. “And we delivered it.”

  There were five deceased in the vehicle, plus a bonus - a twelve-pack of bottled water, six of which hadn’t been shot up. We kept the water, ditched the bodies and hit the road. The ambulance itself, though, was badly wounded with no hood to speak of and no windshield. The bodywork was riddled with bullet holes and the interior smelt of blood, shit, urine and gun oil.

  “Shotgun,” I said, and slipped into the passenger seat. The blood on the vinyl and the cloth inserts was already sticky. Jimmy took the wheel, Alvin and Bo climbing in back.

  “Any tunes available?” Bo asked, doing his bit to keep it light.

  There was a radio, but it had been blasted into its component pieces. I pulled out some wires and broken plastic from the hole in the dash. “I can sing,” I said.

  “Best not, boss, I’m armed and dangerous,” Bo replied with a grin.

  “So we’re heading east, but we gotta go north. Where’s the turnoff?”

  “Coming up in a klick or so,” he said.

  Alvin emptied a water bottle into his Camelbak. “Maybe we’ll come across a Russian helo on the way.”

  That was a point. The Hind we saw flying away with a hole blown in its side was headed in the general direction of our secondary, and would be a magnet for jihadists of all persuasions. “Maybe,” I said. We had to ignore the additional risk of running into tangos. The mission – planting that TACAN – was all that mattered. Our orders were clear. Check.

  So I sat back, swung the NVGs into place, and kept an eye out for assholes who might attempt to commandeer our ride, as we had done.

  But no sooner did I get comfortable than the engine died. No warning. Not even a splutter. We’d covered maybe half a klick, no more.

  “What’s up?” I asked Jimmy.

  He shone a flashlight across the instruments. “We got gas, unless the gauge is Tango Uniform.” He tapped the Perspex. “Oil temp’s in the red. Something vital took a bullet.”

  “Like I said, karma,” Alvin pointed out.

  I reached back, took one of the bottles of water and passed the remaining one to Jimmy. “We should stay off the road anyway,” I said. “Avoid the checkpoints.”

  ***

  “Fuck me,” said Abdullah as he poked through the darkness on the hilltop with the flashlight. There were deceased everywhere, some shot, some stabbed, others ripped apart by mines. It was the scene of a major skirmish, or several minor ones, and his men had come off second best. There had either been no enemy casualties or they’d been carried away.

  Abdullah had already dispatched men on a thorough search of the area, as the Scorpion would have commanded. The jihadists’ anger was sky high.

  Several men approached him, one wearing NVGs flipped up on his head. “Amir, the area is secured,” he said. “There are no more traps. We found flattened grass on the northern end of this rise. We think this is where the enemy retreated.”

  “You mean snuck away like dogs,” said Abdullah. “How many?”

  The jihadist shrugged. ”Three or four at the most.”

  “No, I don't believe it.” There had to be more – Abdullah was certain of it. “We have lost fourteen men. There are no wounded.” The eyes of one of the dead stared at him. “Verily we belong to Allah, and truly to Him shall we return.” He pointed to one of his fighters. “Take four men. Cover each martyr with a clean sheet, say the Dua, and bury them. They have gone to Paradise and are welcomed into Allah’s presence.” He shifted his frown to the jihadist with the NVGs. “Gather the men. We must find these godless criminals and take our revenge.

  Seven

  Ronald V. Small @realSmall

  Daesh, ISIS, IS, ISIL. They can’t even settle on a name, but they want to run a country? BIG JOKE!

  All but one checkpoint, intimidated by the many Daesh black standards, waved the Scorpion’s column through. The one that did not, a barricade recently overrun by Syrian Army troops not ten minutes before the Scorpion arrived, had audaciously, foolishly, opened fire on them. The Toyota technical with the ZPU had performed an immediate 180, pulled to the side of the road and the four, .50 caliber barrels were unleashed, annihilating the checkpoint. A ZPU-4 was not the sort of weapon that took kindly to resistance, especially when the range was point blank.

  The roads were congested with fleeing traffic, but they cleared readily enough ahead of the ZPU and the column behind it honking horns, its fighters firing bursts at the sky from AKs.

  But now the column had left the highway behind, the road becoming dirt as it climbed through dusty abandoned farms overrun by poison ivy and scrubby thicket. With no clear picture of where the Russians had come down, the Scorpion was beginning to think they may not locate the helicopter. “How many kilometers have we been driving?” he asked Ortsa.

  “Five, Lord.”

  The Scorpion peered out the window at the darkness. They had seen the damaged Hind fly off in this direction, barely under control. It was impossible to imagine that the pilots had nursed the helicopter to safety. The terrain had changed markedly with the steady climb. Ahead were towering hills and ridges, and the slopes were planted with either
olive trees or ragged copses of pines.

  “Shall I slow down?” Ortsa asked.

  The Scorpion gestured with a claw to keep going. “Where are you from, boy?” he asked to pass the time.

  “From Aldy in Grozny, Amir.”

  “I have been there. I have heard a rumor that your father was among the brave hearts that raided Beslan. Is that true?”

  “Yes, Amir. Spetsnaz killed him. They burned him alive.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Seven, Amir.”

  “Seven. Around the same age as the children in the school.”

  Ortsa remained silent.

  Many died in the school: children, Chechens, Russians. Allah had willed it, thought the Scorpion. And more than likely it was the Russians who had also willed it. The attack on the hostage-takers was merely an excuse to shoot Muslims and wage war against the faithful in Chechnya and elsewhere on Russian soil. “The Russians made your father a criminal. But the truth is that he was a hero with very large balls.”

  Ortsa appreciated the compliment. “The Russians got what they wanted, Lord.”

  “I am sure when you get to Paradise, Chechen, that you will see your Pappa sitting close to Allah, on his right, a beautiful new bride on his lap.”

  “They would not return his body. I was happy when the Russians announced that they would be joining the fight to stop our liberation of Syria. I dreamt that I would one day have the opportunity to take an eye for an eye.”

  The Scorpion saw the smile flicker on the young driver’s lips. Yes, few emotions are as self-sustaining as revenge.

  Ahead, the Toyota with the ZPU had pulled off the road and stopped. The doors flew open and men jumped from the cabin with their AKs and pointed excitedly up the hill, into the trees.

  “Stop!” the Scorpion pressed the switch on the door that lowered the window. It was only then that he heard the crackle of small arms fire. The soundproofing of the BMW was excellent, the Scorpion noted, perhaps a little too excellent. The column of vehicles had also pulled over and his men were gathering, keen for orders, the sound of gunfire exciting them. Battle, fighting, pain, misery and adrenaline sustained them. Al-Aleaqarab opened the door and removed himself from the seat’s embrace. He stood in the cool of the night, many pairs of headlights blazing in the dust cloud raised by their arrival. The sounds of familiar and distinctive gunfire told the Scorpion much - a fight was going on between no less than ten AK-47s and other rifles which brought back memories of battlefields in Georgia: specifically AK-9s, the assault rifle favored by Spetsnaz. He called to Ortsa, “That day you have been wishing for, Chechen, I think it has come.” Mostly, the Scorpion felt little, his senses dulled by so many years of war, but at that moment he felt joy. His men had already spilled from the vehicles. “Dawar,” he called out, pointing to the Amriki jihadist with the blond beard.