Chapter Two
It was late when Wilde walked out of the tent, and the humidity hung thick in the dark night sky.
The lack of artificial illumination from the adjacent city resulted in a majestic display of stars above him, bisected by the silhouette of the Milky Way.
He once again reflected on the beauty of this land and the secrets it held.
McBride was surely done with the gym by now. Even someone as motivated as he couldn’t spend four hours in there. Wilde would have to get up early and do leg day to save himself from his friend’s harassment, making tomorrow a two-a-day workout.
He had completed the KMZ file and written up the additional report on the trails, their historical significance, and the relevance to their current counterterrorism operations.
While he worked, he turned over in his mind the unusual encounter with Ahmed.
Wilde was both a born and trained skeptic, and yet something about the intensity with which the Saudi officer conveyed his tribal heritage stuck with him.
The gold coin only added to the story’s credibility, which for all intents and purposes appeared authentic.
But while Wilde had no reason to doubt Ahmed’s sincerity, the idea that it was passed down through generations as an artifact from a lost city seemed almost too fantastical to believe.
He held his breath and strained to listen through the silence.
It was possible that the tower had fired at a ghost, or that it had been a negligent discharge by a member of their partner force, which happened occasionally.
The Yemeni forces guarded the outer perimeter of the base, with the Saudi-led coalition soldiers overseeing them.
The American and British teams had a small section of the compound in the inner cordon, and remained at twenty-five-percent alert status at any given time, with no more than three-quarters of the men sleeping at once.
While they had to trust their partners with their lives, they didn’t need to take needless risks either.
It’s why he knew that others on the team would be awake and investigating.
The tower opened fire again, followed by a second tower, with each putting sustained bursts downrange on an unseen target.
Wilde knew immediately that it was no accident.
Deforest came bolting out of the JOC, the tent flap flying wildly.
He snapped his head around and looked at Wilde. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“No idea,” Wilde responded. “It sounds real, though. We’d better get to the war room.” Deforest nodded in agreement and the two set off.
The war room was a plywood shack reinforced with sandbags that contained a series of wooden cubbies that housed the team’s combat equipment. The soldiers carried their pistols with them at all times, and often their rifles, but the majority of their gear remained locked up when it wasn’t in use.
Wilde ran across the camp, the sound of gunfire becoming increasingly louder, with opposing weapons joining the cacophony from the other side of the wall.
A proper battle was raging between the outer cordon and whoever was attacking them.
He arrived at the war room to find that McBride already had it open, had thrown on his kit, and was now assisting other members of the team.
“What’s up, buddy?” McBride grinned, his white teeth shining above his dark-red beard. He loved a good gunfight.
“Sounds real this time,” Wilde said, smacking his friend on the shoulder as he passed.
Inside, Wilde went immediately to his cubby and began throwing on his gear while the rest of the team did the same.
He donned his coyote-brown Crye Precision Cage ballistic plate carrier and matching Low Profile Blast Belt, more commonly called a war belt.
Next, he turned on his Harris AN/PRC-163 multi-channel handheld radio that connected to the Peltor headset on his helmet.
He then snatched up his M4A1 SOPMOD carbine, slapped in a magazine, and chambered a round.
Wilde touched the up arrow on the side of his EOTech holographic sight, and a red dot framed by a circle sprang to life inside the optic.
Finally, he donned his Ops-Core helmet and pulled his AN/PVS-31A night vision goggles from a pouch on his kit and clicked them into the mount on his helmet.
While doing so he could hear his friend and team sergeant, Kendall, barking out orders.
“Tim, make sure the jundees are under control and shooting in the right direction,” Kendall said, referring to the Yemeni soldiers. “Josh, get the mortar tubes prepped. Pete will call them out as he sees them.”
The orders continued, although everyone already knew their job in the event that the base defense plan was activated.
McBride had created it and run them through multiple drills over the months.
On several occasions they had conducted it for real, though the threats generally turned out to be minor, individual potshots or light probing attacks.
This was something else. Something much bigger.
Wilde knew his role. He was to be a floater, acting as Kendall’s second-in-command, and shoring up defenses as necessary, filling gaps as they arose.
He immediately headed toward the front gate, when suddenly the rear towers began firing at a cyclic rate.
Seeing that most of the force was focused on the main gate, he turned on his heels and ran toward the newly erupting gunfire.
McBride was descending the steps from one of the rear guard towers when he arrived. “What do we got?” Wilde asked him.
“Definitely a complex attack,” McBride shouted coolly over the gunfire. “At least a dozen on this side!”
Wilde nodded to the tower above them. “You take this tower, I’ll take that one.” He motioned to the tower twenty-five meters behind him.
McBride nodded and put out a coyote-brown Mechanix-gloved fist. Wilde bumped it with a mirrored fist and McBride turned to climb the stairs as Wilde ran to the next tower.
Arriving, he sprinted up the stairs to the top and found a Yemeni guard frantically attempting to load a new ammo belt into the PKM machine gun.
“Marhaban,” Wilde greeted him with a smile, trying to put the guard at ease.
The man muttered something in return without looking up from his work.
He was clearly scared, and Wilde didn’t blame him.
If the terrorists on the other side of the wall managed to overrun the camp, the Americans and British would be killed, but the locals who sided with the infidels would be treated much worse.
The veteran Green Beret ignored him and posted up along the edge of the tower.
He flipped his night optical device, or NODs, down in front of his face and the landscape instantly lit up, the white phosphorous image presenting a crisp picture complete with depth perception.
He could see several terrorists amid the terrain in front of him, some running, some crawling, and some hiding in a dried-out streambed.
He used his left thumb to press a button attached to the side of his M4 and an infrared laser shot from the Advanced Target Pointer Illuminator Aiming Laser, or ATPIAL, known as the PEQ-15, strapped to the Picatinny rail on the side of the barrel.
It had been previously sighted, along with the EOTech optic, and confirmed regularly so that he knew how to adjust his point of aim to account for varying distances.
Wilde settled the laser on the closest target, a man less than twenty meters from the wall crawling on his stomach.
He used his right thumb to rotate the selector switch on his rifle from safe to semiautomatic and depressed the trigger several times, putting three rounds into the man’s torso.
With the SureFire flash suppressor attached to the end of his 10.
5-inch barrel, it would take time for the attackers on the ground to locate his position in the darkness.
He scanned downfield and noticed a head popping out from within a draw, a shallow channel carved into the terrain.
The man shouldered an AK-47 and fired a burst, the actions lighting up under Wilde’s optics but not washing them out as would have happened with older-generation night vision technology.
He painted the attacker’s head with the laser and fired once.
The man dropped instantly. To his left, the Yemeni on the machine gun was firing wildly, proving inaccurate but managing to keep the terrorists’ heads down.
But as a result, rounds were beginning to find their way toward his direction, some cracking through the air above his head, others slamming into the sandbags surrounding the tower.
The radio in Wilde’s ear chirped with calm voices explaining the various situations around the camp.
There was light activity on the flanks, with the majority of the attack manifesting at the main gate and rear of the compound.
The junior communications sergeant Pete Morrison was acting as a forward observer for the junior weapons sergeant Josh Sales, who was hanging mortar rounds and lobbing them at what appeared to be an enemy staging area.
A few Yemeni soldiers had been wounded, and the medics had already begun getting to work in the medical tent, which also served as the casualty collection point, or CCP.
Wilde gave a quick SITREP between shots and Deforest asked if he and McBride needed assistance, but Wilde waved him off.
They could handle the current situation, and if things got worse, he promised the team leader he would be the first to know.