Chapter Forty-Six
Tim squinted and tried to focus his eyes.
He wanted to make sure they weren’t playing tricks on him.
It was the time of day when the sun was coming up and visibility was tricky.
Don’t sleep beyond dawn. Dawn’s when the French and Indians attack.
That was the fifteenth Standing Order of Robert Rogers, the leader of Rogers’s Rangers during the French and Indian War.
Tim had memorized them all when he was in Ranger School, and still remembered them to this day.
Normally units would “stand-to” during this period when attacks were usually expected.
And while there were some who considered the practice outdated, Tim’s team had used this tactic in Afghanistan, where the Taliban often planned attacks at a similar hour.
They weren’t in a war zone and so had not followed that protocol, but as Tim stared off into the distance, he was beginning to think that maybe they should have.
He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled to catch the attention of those below, and they all started trudging their way up the dune to his position. Nate was the last to join, making his way over from the opposing sand dune. When they were all gathered, Tim explained the situation.
“We’ve got company. A truck full of mal hombres coming from the north. And they don’t look like local army.” Nate lifted the Vortex binoculars to observe.
“I agree,” he said. “Looks like trouble.”
“We can try to shoot it out, but they’ve got us outnumbered two to one and there’s not a lot of cover out here,” Tim said.
“I concur,” Wally agreed. “We’d probably mallet them, but we’re not going to get out unscathed.”
“What are our options?” Shane asked. None of them had expected any serious opposition to come from their direction of travel, and it presented a unique problem.
“Head south,” Nate said. “Outrun them while we can. Head south and then hit the road that runs east to the border with Oman and follow it as fast as we can. There are Saudi border guards there. Hopefully it’s enough to make them back off before we get there.”
Tim turned the plan over in his head, not at all surprised that his friend already had a rough idea of what to do.
Contingency planning had always been Nate’s specialty, with his ten-pound brain continuously churning things over.
It made sense, as they couldn’t go north, and couldn’t go south into Yemen toward the terrorists they had just killed.
Going west would lead them to a Saudi town where they were likely to encounter military or police much sooner, but heading east might just cause them to lose their tail.
“I like it,” he said. “We can always cut back north later.”
“It’s settled, then,” Shane said. “Let’s load up in the trucks and haul ass.”
“Wait!” Tim shouted. They couldn’t be certain that the truck that was steadily approaching wouldn’t catch up to them in short order, and then they would be in trouble. They needed a phased withdrawal. Nate may have had the smarts, but in the domain of tactics, Tim was master.
“We need to keep them at bay and give ourselves the best chance for getting out of here in one piece,” he said. Nate nodded in agreement, trusting his friend’s keen tactical sense.
“What’s the plan?” he asked.
“Nate, you and Shane head down and cross-load some ammo. Stick as much in the rear truck as you can, then start driving south in the other. The rest of us will post up here. When they get into firing range, we’ll put their heads down and make them approach with caution.
The Mosin-Nagants will give us some standoff, and we may even knock a few of them off in the process. ”
The Mosin-Nagant first saw service in the Russian Empire in 1891.
The result of a design competition between a Russian army captain and a Belgian mechanical engineer, the bolt-action rifle fired a 7.
62x54mmR cartridge from a built-in five-round magazine.
The rifles were mass-produced by Russia for WWII, with many never being put into service.
Today they were prevalent all over the world, and even in the U.S.
it was possible to buy one for less than $200 that was manufactured in the 1930s and still came in the original packing grease.
To say they were durable and reliable weapons was an understatement.
“I’m not going to just leave you guys here,” Nate protested.
“I know you won’t, brother. Get a few dunes away to a good vantage point. When we get their heads down, we’ll hightail it to your position while you cover us. Ana will get the truck running for us. When we get to your location, we’ll repeat the process until we get to the road.”
“A modified Aussie Peel,” Nate said, catching on to the plan.
“You got it, buddy.” They bumped fists.
“See you on the beach,” Nate said, before turning and heading down to the trucks.
The rest followed and Tim kept watch. He already had a Mosin-Nagant with him and several extra rounds in the bandolier.
With the near-century-old weapon they would be able to reach out and touch their foe from a distance.
The Aussie Peel was a tactic used when a small force needed to withdraw after making contact with a larger force.
It involved the man closest to contact firing at the enemy before peeling back at an angle and alerting the next man, who picked up the rate of fire and repeated the movement.
In this way, the retreating element could keep the enemies’ heads down and still move out of the area in an expeditious manner without turning their backs.
Tim glanced down and saw Nate say something quickly to Ana before hopping in the truck with Shane.
As the two sped off to the south, Tim decided that he liked Ana.
He had seen her as an unnecessary burden at first and didn’t really appreciate having a woman tag along.
But she had endured the hardships with them and sat through the ambush at the checkpoint without saying a word.
Women like Ana never saw just how violent the world really was, which made it hard to understand people like the four Muldoons she was currently traveling with. Still, she was proving herself to be a real trooper, and had slowly earned his respect.
“Right, then,” Wally said, returning to the top of the dune with a rifle of his own and plenty of ammo. “Let’s slot these wankers.”
Tim, still lying in the prone, turned his head toward the British man. “You know, Wally, you still talk funny, but I love your attitude.”
“Sod off,” Wally retorted with a smile.
The two waited as Ana sat in the truck below.
They didn’t want to waste fuel by keeping the engine running, so she would start it when they yelled for her to.
The time for engagement was drawing near as the enemy truck crested a dune that Tim estimated to be roughly 450 meters away, well within range.
“Fire,” he yelled as he squeezed the trigger. Wally fired at nearly the same time, and they observed as one of the men in the truck bed fell off and landed in the sand.
“You know that was my kill, right?” Wally said.
“Fuck you, that was all me,” Tim said as they worked the bolt-action rifles to chamber new rounds.
They took aim again, but the jig was up, and men were jumping out of the truck to seek cover behind it.
Tim counted five, plus two or three in the cab.
They fired off the remaining four shots from the internal magazines of the rifles before quickly stuffing them with fresh rounds.
He turned toward Ana at the bottom of the dune.
“Fire it up!” he hollered, and heard the engine roar to life.
Tim fired off one more shot and then he and Wally slunk back behind the peak of the dune so as not to give away their position or the fact that they were leaving, and then half-ran, half-fell down the sand hill.
They tossed their rifles in the back, grabbed AK-47s, and Wally jumped in the passenger seat and Tim in the bed as Ana floored it and they sped away to the south.
It wasn’t long before they could make out the figure of Shane waving his oversized gorilla arms and they headed toward him.
Tim peered back and saw that the truck was catching up again, although slower this time.
Bullets cracked through the air, deadly accurate rounds coming from one direction fired by the two former Green Berets with long-distance rifles, and wild, off-the-mark shots from the other direction coming from the untrained terrorists with clunky assault rifles.
Eventually, they made their way to the rally point.
“So far, so good,” Tim said as he and Wally swapped positions with Nate and Shane, who returned to their truck and sped off. They repeated the process several times as they slowly crawled back to the road. With any luck, they would be there by midday.
Shane gunned the engine to gain momentum that would carry them up the next dune.
They had made four bounds so far and Nate assumed they had to be getting close to the road.
Once they did, they would turn east and it would be a straight shot, and at that point, a race.
Perhaps they would encounter a Saudi patrol, which would not be great, but could at least be a much-needed distraction.
They simply needed to lose their tail so that they could hook north and get back on course.
As they crested the next peak, any thoughts of making a break for the Omani border faded.
At the bottom of the hill were two pickup trucks full of armed men.
As soon as Shane maneuvered the vehicle over the edge, the men opened fire on them.
Rounds impacted the engine block and pierced the windshield, forcing Nate and Shane to duck below the dashboard.
“Gun it,” Nate yelled. “Ram them!”
It was their only chance. They couldn’t go back the way they had come; inertia saw to that.
They also couldn’t turn left or right as the weight would shift off-center, and the vehicle would roll over.
That left them with the options of stopping in place or going full speed ahead, which maybe would offer them a chance at survival.
“Fuck me!” Shane yelled as he slammed on the accelerator and the truck lurched forward.
They went careening down the dune as another hail of bullets came their way. This time, they hit the tires, which instantly deflated, and the truck listed heavily to the passenger side. It slid for several feet before beginning to tip.
“We’re going over!” Shane shouted.
The world was instantly flipped upside down, and then right side up, and then a blur of the two as they rolled down the sand dune.
Nate was thankful he had fastened his seat belt, and was using his hands and legs to brace against the body of the vehicle as they went.
Eventually, they came to rest upside down.
Nate had been jostled around pretty good and his mind was foggy.
“Shane? You okay?”
He looked over at his friend, who appeared to be unconscious and was bleeding from the side of his head. Nate fumbled around and pushed the button to release his seat belt, but it was stuck. He tried harder and it finally gave way, collapsing him into a heap on the ceiling of the truck.
He slowly crawled out the window, intent on going around to Shane’s side and pulling him out.
In the chaos of the crash he had forgotten the catalyst for it but was instantly reminded as a sandaled foot slammed down on his shoulder.
He tried to look up, but more feet began stomping on him, and he instinctively curled up to protect his head and midsection with his arms and legs.
A round from a rifle cracked through the air and the beating stopped.
Nate looked up feebly just in time to see the butt of an AK-47 come crashing down on his temple.