This is a free-to-read, pre-publication draft of the first chapter of my upcoming novel. It is subject to changes in later editing, but has cleared Proofreading and two Editing passes.
I hope you enjoy it, and comment. Let the hype for the novel commence!
UPDATE: We had one of those great moments of "Hey, wait a minute! We could..."
A determined effort and a quick quality edit later, Please find a revised Chapter One, below.
Changes from the original release all in the first 2 "pages", and most all organizational. No real content change. Hurrah for Improvements!!!
SECOND UPDATE: As the final manuscript is in for publication (as of 28.October, 2019), this post has been updated to match the post-editing version that appears in the published book.
CHAPTER 1
Prelude: Footprints
In
the Spring of 1984, it was also a place of brutal conflict.
The whole territory was contested land. The Spanish used to run
the place but gave it up as a colonial possession in 1975. The Madrid Accords
were signed, supposedly dividing up the territory between Morocco and
Mauritania, guaranteeing Spanish property rights after the decolonization. It
didn’t work out that way. The
Algerians were cut out of the deal completely, and they then armed and assisted
the Polisario Front’s insurgency. Rightly or wrongly for the Sahrawi indigenous
population, the game was on.
Our side was playing the game, too.
Algeria had a lot of 1960’s
era Soviet-made equipment, and a lot of very personal grudges against the
Moroccans. They even fought a battle or two, Algerians on the losing side,
before the weight of the Arab bloc in the international community landed on
them for fighting each other rather than “the Imperialists”. This meant the
Algerians could no longer afford to be caught actually intervening inside
Western Sahara, but it also meant they gave hearty encouragement and a lot of
munitions to the Polisario to get in there and actually fight. The result was a
whole lot of motivated insurgents with plenty of trucks of all sizes laden with
everything from machineguns to artillery. They roamed far and wide, wrecking
everything they could reach, and then roared off into the wasteland again. By
1979, they’d pushed Mauritania to the point of abandoning their claim on the
place entirely. But the Moroccans weren’t so easily chased away.
In fact, we’d
made arrangements with the Moroccans.
While the Moroccans weren’t
capable of running down a threat that could jump across the Algerian border at
will, they could do something else. Dig. They committed to a massive plan to
wall off whole areas of the territory with immense sand berms, trenches, and a
chain of fortifications, firebases of a sort, all along the wall. By 1982, the
Useful Triangle was safely secured. The bulldozers and garrisons then moved on,
the area of control extended by the construction of a second and then a third
segment of the barriers by early 1984. Work was underway on a fourth wall, up
in the northeast, that would secure more land and close the easiest border
crossings into Algeria.
That is, if they could finish. The Polisario weren't fighting them
alone any more.
The berms rose ten feet above the natural ridgeline that they
followed, backed by an anti-vehicle trench, and faced with what would be
eventually be considered the longest continuous minefield in the world. Every
three miles of berm had its own firebase for a platoon of infantry built atop
it. The established segments were getting fire control radar stations as well,
to direct distant artillery against any attack.
Out where our men were heading, building berms had just begun.
There were only twelve men tasked to the mission, an ad hoc
detachment of the same model practiced and perfected in the four years that The
Project had been operational. Clean battledress, no name or nationality tape,
borrowed Spanish Army issue of an outdated pattern. Steel helmets, useless as
they usually were, more often clipped to the load-bearing gear than worn. The
Moroccan host formation was told they were Operational Reconnaissance
Detachment (ORD) 01C, which was almost correct. And that they were a contracted
Security Assistance Organization provided by the U.S. Defense Security
Assistance Agency. Supposedly, they were there to teach about the specialized
gear they were carrying, which wasn’t
true at all.
The detachment needed to be out in a place that was likely to be
attacked.
The actual Project elements were Ops-5 and 6, two four-man teams
of shooters and lookers, and Int-3, four experts in Intelligence, Assessment,
Support and Communications, respectively. All twelve men had massively
overburdened rucks and kit bags with them, although precious little in the way
of heavy firepower. Each Ops element had a MG3 as their light machinegun and
the other three shooters had G3 battle rifles. All rather ordinary, Spanish
license-made, like the ones the West Germans sold to several NATO armies. There
were MP5s for the Ints, lighter weight and lighter ammo, but those
submachineguns were really only for personal defense. Any day where Ints had to
be shooting someone was likely a very bad day.
We had something very specific for them to do, out there in the
desolation.
What
The Project had in mind was to find who was currently providing the technical
and quality support to one of the more active Polisario formations. The
Polisario personnel themselves were unimportant. They were a problem for the
Moroccans to deal with on a long-term basis. Someone was out with the Polisario,
making them better, smarter, and a lot more accurate. Sources unnamed, strongly
implied to have been either strategic Signals Intelligence or Human
Intelligence, had provided enough information that it was certain that wasn’t
any Algerian activity. It had to be someone tied to the logistical chain
feeding the Polisario war machine the means to be more effective, but the easy
answer of “some Soviets” didn’t hold up to close examination. Algeria had
greatly reduced their relationship with the Soviet Union after the end of the
Boumédiène government in 1979. The following government, that of Chadli
Bendjedid, was a compromise choice over pro-Western and Communist elements in
the ruling party. It was more Statist, much more Arab Nationalist, and without
the willingness to be a tool for those with Cold War agendas.
Turning
inward was looking to be a good choice for Algeria, considering that the
Soviets had shown how little they cared for their tools in Afghanistan
recently. The Soviet presence in Algeria was presently smaller, more
constrained, and much more carefully monitored than it was in years before.
Whoever it was that was out with the Polisario had gotten there cross-country
from somewhere else, and wasn’t answering
to control from Algiers or any Embassy there. What few indications were found
all pointed to the subject in question having come north, across the
Mauritanian or Malian routes, from somewhere else. A very sneaky Soviet
operation could have come up that way, but there were other possibilities as well.
ORD-01C was going to try to get their hands on something that would prove who
it was. If they could do that by actually grabbing the subject himself and
convincing the Moroccans to let them keep him, that would be a bonus.
Both
the personnel and extra kit carried by ORD-01C had been tailored to the task at
hand. The Team as a whole had a lot of capabilities built into it from the
concept phase of The Project. A mission in Africa was a new way of
demonstrating those capabilities. The full 42-man Team was still more suited
for Latin America, as that was where they had worked up. As individuals, they
had a tremendous potential to be great at their jobs in a wide variety of
locations around the world. Some of them had even gotten the invitation to sign
on because they were already comfortable and informed about places that
military Area Specialists struggled to get up to speed on.
Ops-6
had a shooter nicknamed “Boode” who
was the proud son of two immigrants, his father a Montpelier Frenchman with a
family business trading across the Western Mediterranean and his mother a
Moroccan expatriate who tried not to let her religious differences interfere
with her sense of still being Moroccan. Even though Boode was born in Maryland,
he had travelled a lot in his youth. With four languages besides English on his
fluency list, he was no ordinary trigger-puller. The other men brought similar
but different capabilities. The closest thing to a leader in the detachment was
“Swift”, the Assessment slot in Int-3. He was the old man of the bunch at 36, a
Texan with both uniformed service time in Southeast Asia and a four-year jaunt
across the French-influenced parts of West and Central Africa in someone else’s
employment. He never said Legionnaire, but he always celebrated Camerone Day
with a drink.
Ops-5
brought more capabilities, and the duplication of skills needed to replace the
Intelligence and Assessment slots in Int-3 if those were lost or disabled.
Thomas Andernach, more commonly called “Andy”, had
joined the U.S. Army wanting to be a photographer. They told him he could be a “squint”,
a photointerpretation expert. Then they decided he needed to be an Infantryman
instead. Typical. He got to be very good at both, although he never completely
escaped being a gun bunny. When The Project pulled him out of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, he at least got
to cross-train into the ancient arts of crate-ology and location identification
while things were getting organized. He was also very good with all the optical
equipment that was making the kit bags of the detachment so damn heavy. All
twelve men in ORD-01C were very good at something, and better at everything
together. The problem was, no one has ever figured out how to train men to be
lucky.
Three
times so far that week, they had rolled up to some patch of dirt that might or
might not have any prepared positions besides the laager of some light trucks
and heavy bulldozers assigned to the construction of the berm around there. A
laager was the barest of defenses, a circle of vehicles with their weapons
pointed outward. Three times, they’d done the
handshakes with the group of Royal Moroccan Army troops that had drawn duty in
that sector. Three times they’d reviewed the patrol reports and any information
as to contact with or trace of the Polisario, which were mostly nothing as
those RMA platoons had little more than binoculars and eyeballs as observation
tools.
Some
of those eyeballs were better than others, and once it became clear that those
particular pairs of eyes belonged to some of the guides who were along with the
RMA regulars, there were some very-off-the-record negotiations to get one of
them to ride along with ORD-01C. The guide was a dusty old veteran of the Army
of Liberation days who walked around a camp like a prince in the presence of
commoners. He didn’t walk that way on patrol, though. Out
there, he was half bent-over, eyes searching everything from the horizon to the
sand beside his feet or the ground passing by if he was a passenger in one of
the four-wheel drives. When he was asked, he politely stated that he should be
called Abdu’llah.
There
were some wise guidelines to follow when adding an irregular to any military
formation. In an ordinary military unit, when adding on local interpreters or
guides, there would have been the time for some basic vetting and some
limitations on what they were allowed to do or see. More likely, they’d
have already spent time with a Host Country military unit that had trainers or
advisors from “our” military, American or some major ally. Odds were fair,
especially with the ingrained suspicions still remembered from Viet Nam, that
someone would figure out if this incarnation of “Marvin” was about to shoot a
friendly in the back before he had much of a chance to do so. Special Forces,
Special Activities, and The Project usually had no good options about that. If
adding an irregular was determined to be of benefit, it was a decision made by
the personnel deployed. Then it was up to them to live with it, to presume a
bit of trust but never ever let the new face near the communications gear,
anything sensitive, or to wander off unaccounted for. The primary cause of
death for a local irregular was enemy action, but shot while sneaking in or out
of camp was pretty close behind that.
With
their new friend riding along, ORD-01C moved along the planned line of
construction, stopover by stopover, ever closer to the Algerian border. There
were more handshakes, more report assessments, and a couple of possible
contacts. There were brief reported sightings of reflections or other clues
that the Polisario had some spotters watching the construction sites, but the
RMA patrols hadn’t come to grips with anyone out in the
sweeping wasteland. Everyone in the detachment had to suppress the sarcastic
urge to shake their heads when one RMA officer proudly announced that there
were scheduled aircraft patrols observing all the suspected routes nearby.
Scheduled. That meant useless.
The
closest thing to action or an objective ORD-01C encountered up to that point
was also high up on the useless list. The routine when approaching each
construction location was to radio in on a VHF channel. Short range stuff, and
almost limited to line of sight, so fairly secure if the transmission was brief.
Worked great, except when no one was manning the communications on the
receiving end. That resulted in a lot of very surprised RMA infantry in the
next cantonment visited pointing every gun they had in the direction of the
approaching vehicles that carried ORD-01C along with a load of resupply and
mail. A whole lot of sudden stop happened, with the drivers and some of the
other RMA logistics guys all leaping out of their rides. Some even bothered to
wave their arms and a genius among them even yelled the words equivalent to “FRIENDLIES”,
and that somehow prevented bullets from flying around. After that encounter,
the stop at that location was another case of review, report, and get nothing
in the way of new information. They mounted back up after barely an hour and
went back on route, having decided to get one more station along the route
before nightfall.
As
the little convoy rolled away, the appropriately chagrined signals guy who had
missed the call-in earlier tried to do something to show he was a thoughtful
and hardworking radioman. He got on the medium-range set that could reliably
reach the network of cantonment-site radios and called ahead to the next
location ORD-01C was to visit. He made sure to tell them the little convoy was
bringing them new observation gear and foreign instructors who were to be
treated politely. As for all station-to-station communications by the RMA, that
call was made on a usual voice channel with no encryption. The presumption was
that the Polisario didn’t have any
radio interception gear.
It
was about an hour before the sun would go down, the little convoy most of the
way to the next cantonment along the chain of construction sites, when Abdu’llah
and Swift both spotted a glint of reflected light ahead and to the east of the
so-called road. Abdu’llah claimed there were in fact two watchers out there,
spread out from each other on opposite ends of a sandy rise. Right or wrong,
Swift was always quick with his decisions and this one was no different. As
soon as the vehicles of the convoy were all down in the next defilade along the
path of the road, he got the Logistics leader to stop the caravan for a moment.
A strongly-worded discussion in English, French and Moroccan Arabic ensued,
with Swift not taking no for an answer to his demand for one of the four-wheel
drives that ran the lead and trail positions in the convoy.
Ops-6
dropped all their gear that wasn’t for
fighting, leaving it to be carried ahead for them by the remaining members of
the detachment, and so did Swift. A hasty order was passed, leaving Hancock,
the Support slot in Int-3 as Detachment Lead, and then Swift, Abdu’llah and the
four men of Ops-6 piled into the four-by-four. The rest, and the gear, would go
on to the construction site and the laager there, and Swift’s group would slip
off-road and see if they couldn’t pick out and isolate some opposition spotter
who was too busy watching the convoy’s continued progress. Not the worst of
plans, but one dependent in part on the dust from the lead vehicles concealing
the absence of the previously-trailing four wheel drive. From the perspective
of the convoy, it even seemed to work like planned as they rolled on toward
their destination.
Swift’s
group got to experience all the joys of riding in an overcrowded European
version of a half-ton Jeep taking a circuitous backtrack and re-approach route
that depended on staying on the reverse side of every significant bump in the
landscape at a speed that limited the amount of dust they threw up behind them.
No maps could help them do this. It was all a combination of Swift’s experience
in places like Niger chasing “rebels and Tuaregs” combined with Abdu’llah’s
suggestions as to which way to go. Boode was driving and everyone else had
their weapons pointed outboard, making the vehicle a porcupine with long range
spines. They took nearly a half an hour to get all the way around their
three-quarters of a circle path to where they planned to dismount and try the
sneaky part of the plan. About the same length of time it took the convoy to
get to the construction site, for the members of ORD-01C there to get things
off the trucks, secured, and maybe be able to support Swift’s group.
The
cantonment at the construction site was even more primitive than the ones they
visited previously. This one still depended on tents for the infantry assigned
there, the vehicles all laagered up in circles to provide some limited physical
barriers, and no real defensive arrangements at all. The infantry had barely
had time to dig out some slit trenches that weren’t even three
feet deep, with the piled sand and earth in rows next to them on only one side.
The convoy riders thought it was strange when the assigned infantry and the
construction engineers fell into formation to welcome their arrival like it had
been prearranged or something. Everyone un-assed from the trucks in a bit more
hurry than before. They started a relay of kit bags and rucks to be stacked
somewhere they’d be a little more secure. The RMA guys were all busy saluting
each other, at least until someone standing over on the West side of the
grounds pointed up in the air to the East and howled a warning.
A
BM-21 multiple rocket launcher was a six-by-six Ural truck laden with forty
tubes of 122mm unguided rockets. There were upgraded versions of that weapons
system in Warsaw Pact service, but even a refurbished 1960’s
model like the Algerians gave to the Polisario could deliver an astounding
amount of death in a short period of time. The maximum range was about twelve
miles when used as Field Artillery. In practice, they were used without a
proper fire control set-up in parts of the world like Western Sahara. The
Polisario would preferentially roll one up three to five miles from where they
wanted to cause mayhem and deploy the system with the panoramic telescope
peeking over terrain. At that range, the beaten zone for over half the rockets
to land in was fairly tight and predictable, maybe a hundred yards in width and
slightly more than that in length.
This
particular BM-21 was loaded with new-made rockets that supposedly belonged to
someone other than either the Algerians or the Polisario. Each rocket delivered
over fifty pounds of high explosives and fragmentary materials as the warhead
of what looked like a flaming garbage bin in flight. All forty rockets could be
launched in less than half a minute, and two minutes after that the truck could
be in motion, running away from any retaliation. This BM-21 started to fire its
entire load toward the construction site where the convoy with ORD-01C had
arrived.
Combat
Arms soldiers are taught over and over to react immediately if they are caught
in the open in the beaten zone of an artillery strike. If six tubes of mortars
are coming at you, it is possible but not always wise to simply try to dash far
enough from the center of where you think the beaten zone will be and pile into
some cover at the end of the dash. For anything with more death arriving,
especially a time-on-target strike with a lot of rounds in it, all you could do
was to get down into any hole or enclosed cover available. Heaven help you if
there weren’t any holes around.
The
men in ORD-01C that were inside the construction site made record time into
nearby slit trenches, and some of them even got their steel helmets on in the
time it took the incoming rounds to arrive. Some of the RMA troops weren’t
quick enough, and the result of over 30 exploding warheads inside the beaten
zone the Polisario were aiming for was horrific. Some of the vehicles, all of
the tents, and a dozen of the RMA stationed at the site were torn to shreds.
Two vehicles with gasoline fuel tanks would burn shortly thereafter. Everyone
took a ton of concussion damage, even if they made it to a slit trench or were
miraculously in the shadow of something that stopped the hail of shrapnel.
Nothing
about the circumstances warranted any display of curiosity; in fact, it
punished such ruthlessly. Thomas Andernach had, for no explainable reason,
lifted his head while face down in one of the slit trenches. A flat piece of
shrapnel the size of the palm of one’s hand went
under the front lip of his helmet, slashed through the place where his nose
bridged between his eyes, and corkscrewed into a spiral roughly the shape of a
fountain pen as it rendered his brains into a liquefied mess. It barely threw
him backwards at all, so he collapsed on top of his best friend in Ops-6 who
had dived into the same trench. His buddy wouldn’t understand what all the
wetness on his neck and back was until a couple of minutes after the explosions
had stopped.
Swift’s
group hadn’t even dismounted from their four-by-four when the BM-21 in its
hiding spot started to pound away at the construction site. The launch sound,
and vast amount of smoke, revealed its location less than a mile away from the
group. Boode had watched an American television show call The Rat Patrol when
he was a kid, World War II stuff about G.I.’s in North Africa with Jeeps and
machineguns. He got to live it then, at the onset of night and driving without
lights. It was glorious, a headlong rush, and no small amount of foolish to
attempt. He loved it.
The
four Polisario men securing the BM-21 were all focused on threats coming from
the direction of the construction site. Their two other outposts, the spotters
who had seen and confirmed the convoy approach, were still making their return
to a rally point where they would have been picked up during the scoot part of
their Shoot and Scoot plan. The BM-21 itself, and a one ton utility vehicle
held two more Polisario drivers and the Artillery crew of three men: Two
Algerian-trained BM-21 specialists and one guy calling the shots who was from
somewhere else. That guest was dressed just as the others were, but under his
wraps was a visage far more Caribbean than Rif Berber in appearance.
The
lot of them had just finished stowing the launcher for movement and pulling up
the stabilizers that made the truck suspension stable during a firing sequence
and looked around in surprise as the sound of the engine from Boode’s
half-ton penetrated the aftereffect of having been next to forty rockets being
launched only a couple of minutes earlier. Of the nine men in the zone when the
engagement started, three were taken under aimed fire as soon as the half-ton
crested above the hide, and the four on the BM-21 were all suppressed and or
wounded by an entire assault drum’s worth of MG3 fire hosing down their
position. No part of a BM-21 was particularly armored, so unless those big
7.62mm rounds flattened on a structural part or lodged in a tire, they rattled
around to great effect even if they didn’t hit anyone on the way in.
The
initiative was firmly in the hands of Swift’s group then,
with the Ops-6 men all piling out of their ride and assaulting the position
while they still could gain ground. Boode was last man dismounted and hadn’t
even fired his rifle yet. The target he’d mentally marked as his when they came
in sight of the BM-21 had already been on the receiving end of three or four
rounds from the other shooters. The lightshow of tracers seemed to fan out on
all sides of him, specks darting at individual targets and the stream of the
machinegun splashing fiery fragments all around the BM-21.
Swift
was out ahead of the rush, looking for someone to tear apart at close range,
and the Moroccan Abdu’llah had gone to one side to get a better
shot at the driver of the utility vehicle. Seventeen seconds into the assault,
no more than four of the Polisario side were still able to fight, and none so
far had lived through trying to fire back. Swift tried yelling “Abandonner” but the guy
closest to him showed no sign of understanding a French demand for surrender.
That was when Swift first realized he had someone who might be worth keeping
alive in front of him. Split seconds matter in decisions like that, and Swift
used his part of the moment to try and aim lower with his MP5 and keep closing
the distance.
Unfortunately
for both Swift and the Polisario’s guest,
this was the same split second that one of the BM-21 crew stuck the barrel of
his AK-47 around the front of the truck’s bumper and let loose with all thirty
rounds in the magazine in Swift’s general direction. Only two hit him, grazing
his right leg and left arm, mostly because about ten of the rounds stopped in
the backside of the guest who was directly between the Polisario guy and Swift.
Two streams of death converged on the crewman, with Swift adding rounds under
the front of the truck as he slid face-first in his fall.
Things
ended quickly after that. The Ops-6 man on the MG3 hadn’t
even finished fitting a new saddle drum of ammo in place when no further shots
were needed. Swift’s group had traded one wounded man and a lost capture
attempt for nine dead or dying enemies. When the Moroccans took charge of the
site in the morning, there was a wealth of evidence as to who was supplying the
Polisario with improved weapons and the leadership to use them effectively.
Abdu’llah switched back to working with the RMA and spent the day guiding and
tracking for their effort to find the two unaccounted for spotters. They didn’t
find them, but they did find enough recent tracks to allow the presumption that
there were at least ten more Polisario vehicles out there during the night and
Swift had been damn lucky nobody showed up to try and rescue the BM-21 and
crew.
ORD-01C
even got to take the body of the guest with them, as they’d
loaded his body bag into their truck at the first opportunity next to the one
holding the remains of Andy. The RMA weren’t exactly in much condition to know
why that mattered after most of their local leadership had been wounded or
killed in the rocket attack. They also didn’t get to be part of any discussion
about ORD-01C stripping pieces or photographing every possible identifying
thing about the new ammo and specialized equipment that the Polisario had used.
The RMA guys were given the Moroccan-issue medium-range radio set found in the
utility vehicle, still tuned to their current station-to-station net. When
their Area Commander figured out that was how the Polisario knew to set the
rocket artillery ambush, there was going to be one very unhappy RMA signals guy
out there.
Thomas
Andernach’s family was told by the U.S. Army that he
died in an ordinance accident in training. The funeral was closed casket.
