PART TWELVE
Gabriel wheezed as his body slid to a stop against a half-broken wall. He couldn’t tell what the building was or had once been. There was so much smoke. It obscured everything and choked the air. It had been hard enough for Gabriel to breathe that day. With the sultry, gray smoke everywhere, his lungs felt like lead weights and his chest burned like a forest fire.
Gabriel blinked slowly, his eyelids feeling heavy. It was suddenly difficult to resist the urge to keep them closed. A tired and weary part of him was ready to call it in, to lay down and sleep, even if it meant forever. Maybe it would be easier that way. He didn’t know. Gabriel knew if he sat in that position much longer he would surely find out. But he was so tired.
“Gabriel!”
His eyes shot open with a frightened start. The voice that had shouted his name belonged to Isabella. There was no mistaking it. His heart skipped a beat. He had raised the rifle in his hands on pure instinct. For a fraction of a second, Gabriel swore he beheld a vision of his best friend before him. But he blinked again, seeing only the drifting, churning, gray smoke.
And then, he saw a shadow on the curling, ashy mist. Someone was running toward him. He could hear their feet in the sand and gravel. Gabriel’s heart raced. Was it friend or foe? He couldn’t tell. They were almost on him. A dozen paces and a wall of smoke were all that separated the two figures. Suddenly, gun shots sprayed through the brume. A few bullets struck the dusty bricks near Gabriel’s head. The rest pierced and punched through the collapsing man’s body. The smoke cleared around the enemy as he slumped against the remains of the blown-out wall opposite Gabriel.
The trembling, young soldier realized then he wasn’t standing outside of a building, but, instead, within. A weak, bitter cold breeze drifted into the valley moving the cloud of hovering smoke. Gabriel could see the wooden floor under his feet, the tossed and tattered remains of furniture here and there nearby. A flight of stairs led upward to a second floor that was completely.
Gabriel’s eyes lingered on the stairs, on a small family cowering less than halfway up the steps. It was three, fearfully quivering people: a father, whose thick arms were wrapped around the shoulders of his wife and very young son, keeping them close to him. Gabriel watched the father lift his head, his eyes looking worriedly toward the uneasy American. Gabriel wasn’t certain what to do. There was a noise nearby, just beyond the brick wall he was still braced against. Gabriel’s eyes focused on the father in the narrow stairwell. He wasn’t looking at Gabriel.
The gravel and debris crunched loudly under a heavy foot step immediately outside a gap in the sooty brickwork. The din of the motion was nearly muted by the disheartening sound of an automatic rifle being cocked. Gabriel saw the barrel a second later. It was one of the American rifles and it was pointed straight toward the helpless family. Gabriel blinked, his mind in chaos. Is that friend or foe, he asked himself hurriedly. His heart felt like it was about to leap out of his chest. He looked at the scratched, black rifle, then at the family. Foe, Gabriel decided.
With that, his body sprung into action like a race horse launched from the starting gate; or an attack dog let loose off its leash. The Audaz boys have strong grips, especially Gabriel Audaz, thanks to his military training. His strong hand grabbed the warm rifle, his clammy fingers wrapping around the center of the barrel as he pushed the smooth assault weapon swiftly upward. In the same motion, Gabriel pivoted his foot and shoved his weight in a furious blur against the assailant in the alley. The man shouted something arabic in surprised confusion before the wind was knocked out of him. He stumbled then crashed, with a painful crack, backwards onto the ground. A single shot leapt into the air out of the sleek barrel, squeezed by the finger of the militant man on the ground. Then the gun was on the ground, his wrist under Gabriel’s boot and the bones in his face snapping loudly under the unstoppable force of Gabriel’s fist.
A quick search of the enemy revealed little useful intelligence, other than he had raided the body of another American soldier very recently. Gabriel discovered a silenced pistol tucked into the folds of the unconscious man’s tunic. It was an officer’s weapon. The battalion c/o, thought Gabriel. He grabbed the rifle out of the man’s limp fingers. It matched the gun slung around Gabriel’s shoulder exactly. Gabriel pulled the nearly full clip free from the gun, adding it to his own supplies before tossing the empty rifle into the smoke. He stood up, turning back toward the blasted house. The father on the steps inside nodded thankfully to him. Gabriel smiled, nodding back.
He moved with quick, anxious haste toward the mouth of the alley. Pale sunlight dappled across the torn central avenue of the small village. Bodies were strewn amongst the debris, soldiers and civilians indiscriminately mixed together in the savage scene stretching away before him. There were voices up the street, words spoken proudly, but not in English. A group of al-Qaeda stood over a wounded American. He was sitting upright on his knees but slumped slightly forward. They were laughing at and taunting him. They waved their weapons around in front of him, tapping his cheeks with the barrels of their rifles. Gabriel wanted to save his peer right there, but he had no clear or viable shot. He could have used his rifle, but he wasn’t ready to alert every radical fighter in the village of his presence. Gabriel would use the silenced pistol for as long as possible, but he first needed a better line of sight.
He doubled back up the alley, rounding a corner into another. He crept hurriedly under broken windows of dark, eerily quiet buildings. The echo of the taunting men bounced between the war-riddled structures. Gabriel scaled a ladder propped against a mostly intact house. He climbed to the roof as quickly as possible, worried the rickety rungs would not support him. Wafts of smoke rolled past in the cold wind. Gabriel kept low as he moved with haste toward the front of the building. The roof under his feet creaked softly with each step. He didn’t have time to worry about it then. He had to save his fellow soldier.
Gabriel reached the edge of the roof, peering carefully down toward the street. The smoke was thinner in this part of the village, barely cloaking the scene below. His eyes glanced past the group to the blasted windows and walls across the roadway. Gabriel thought he could see his objective: the radio and its operator sitting against a wall in a partially gutted market.
The wind howled and then faded. Gabriel felt the first shot rattle through the chamber of the silenced pistol. He shifted his aim quickly then fired, the second bullet launching through the hazy air right behind the first. The third was only a heartbeat later. The fourth took an extra second, the gunman closer to the building Gabriel was standing on. Three of the four men were collapsing as Gabriel squeezed the trigger again, the slender bullet rocketing downward as the enemy soldier was trying to react.
The shot had just hit its target when the sound of rotting hinges cried out over the rooftop. Gabriel turned around, spotting a bearded man with an old Russian rifle standing in a small hatchway. He shouted something in Arabic as he raised his weapon. The silenced pistol was still raised at the end of Gabriel’s arms, the man halfway across the rooftop in the sight. Fingers on opposing guns began to move in tandem.
Gabriel inhaled sharply, but not because of a stray shot that took him by surprise. The wooden planks under his feet groaned and cracked. He felt the burn of new, bleeding cuts and scrapes on his arms and face as he sank past jagged ends of freshly broken boards. The interior of the building rushed by, remaining a dizzy blur for a few moments, even after he had landed. The cloud of serrated, shattered roof surrounding him sank like a lead mist when Gabriel’s body hit the floor. It was a painful, graceless landing against cold, dirty concrete.
Gabriel barely had time to push the debris off his back and shoulders, or collect his wits as he sat up straighter against a hard, plaster wall. The Arabic man from the roof shouted again, closer this time. A shadow raced across a milky band of sunlight above Gabriel’s head. Gabriel’s right hand was empty. The butt of the silenced pistol lay amongst the debris, centimeters from his fingertips. He sensed it and grabbed it as the man from the hatch appeared from around a corner across the room.
Gabriel fired once, the furiously shouting man with spit in his beard, letting loose a storm of noisy gunfire. Gabriel ducked, pushing himself off and away from the wall. Bullets peppered the crumbling plaster, tracing an uneven line up the ceiling until the enemy sank lifelessly backwards. Gabriel breathed quickly, his chest and side burning madly. There was no rest for the weary soldier laying on the floor. Somewhere out of sight, a door was kicked open. More shouts rang through the dim interior of the building. Gabriel knew that was his cue to move. He did not hesitate. He was up with a pained gasp and hurrying unsteadily over the littered floor. He was steps away from the front door when his ears retched under the bloodthirsty hail of gunfire that suddenly tore into the walls and floor around him.
Gabriel leaned forward, his weight bombarding the locked door in front of him. He crashed through to stumble down the sandy steps instantly beyond the threshold. Despite the pain that shot outward from his ribs, Gabriel never lost his balance. He pivoted slightly to release another shot from the silenced pistol. The spring in the empty chamber clicked. Damn, thought Gabriel quickly, tossing the spent weapon into the dirt. There was no sense in holding onto what he didn’t need to carry.
It was a dozen paces from the base of the steps to the beaten soldier swaying on his knees in the wide street. Gabriel slid to a stop, this time unable to stay on his feet. Bullets zinged over his head and bit at the ground as he fell and then quickly sat upright. In the same motion, he swung his own rifle off his shoulder, cocking it quickly. With hands almost perfectly steady, his nerves tingling with surging adrenaline, Gabriel raised the sleek, American assault rifle and returned fire. He wasn’t aiming to kill, just to send the enemy hiding long enough to get out of the street. Gabriel was surprised when one of the combatants fell backwards with a gurgled cry.
“Can you move,” Gabriel shouted, looking sidelong at the bruised soldier.
“I...I think so. I don’t know!”
Gabriel squeezed the trigger again, the rifle kicking back as he painted the entryway of the building with another round of steady violence. “We’re going to have to find out,” Gabriel shouted, shouldering his weapon again, the barrel still smoking.
He hoisted the soldier up off his knees. Gabriel gritted his teeth, trying not to cry out from the near-blinding pain that clawed out of his chest as he helped the soldier stand up. He felt wet blood on the man’s uniform. There was a small tear in the side, near his back. It was a stab wound, but Gabriel couldn’t tell how deep it went. He leaned his woozy peer against him, wincing from the added weight on his tender torso. A matter of seconds had gone by since Gabriel had ceased fire. It may have been several seconds too many.
The clattering rattle of the older Russian assault weapons filled the air. Bullets struck the dirt at the their heels or zipped past at breathtakingly close range. Gabriel moved, undeterred, with as much speed as he could muster, ever forward. A shadow appeared in the corner of his vision. The soldier limping along with him saw it too.
“Grenade!”
Gabriel saw it bounce against the remaining section of the storefront. “Go! Jump,” he yelled at the soldier before flinging him through the blown out window. Gabriel dove to the side in the racing second before the palm-sized bomb detonated. A cloud of hot dust and shrapnel exploded outward against the scarred building. Gabriel held his breath, trying to feel any new points of pain in and around the length of his body. He had dove through a narrow gap in the brick wall blackened by a previous explosion.
He stood up, the echo of probing gun fire still resonating from outside. The brief ringing in his ears was quickly subsiding. He braced his hand against the wall on his right. The faded plaster drew his eyes and then his weariness. The radio, operator, and wounded soldier were just on the other side. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder toward the fractured brickwork. No going that way, he thought with a painful sigh.
Hazy sunlight poured suddenly inward around a silhouetted figure charging toward Gabriel. Gabriel had been a few steps away from a door unexpectedly kicked in. He braced himself against the impact of the sweat-smelling man, painfully catching his momentum. Gabriel pivoted their tangled mass, then shifted hard to the left. The combined and radical velocity was no match for the weakened wall they went crashing through. The wounded soldier in the store jumped backward with a start at the sight and sound of the exploding bricks and plaster. He recognized Gabriel as the dust began to settle. The musty attacker was already unconscious. Gabriel let go of his wiry, greasy hair before standing up.
“We’ve got to call in air support,” Gabriel said over the battle noise from outside.
“We won’t make it,” the soldier said fearfully.
Gabriel shook his head. “We have to try. Do you know where we are?”
“Vaguely.”
Gabriel moved painfully past the blown-out window of the store, keeping his body low enough to avoid getting shot. He crouched beside the other American in the room. He stared out at Gabriel without meeting his gaze. There was no life in his eyes. Gabriel exhaled loudly, graciously closing the dead soldier’s eyes. A few bullets found their way inside the broken store, ending the moment of respectful silence.
The drifting smoke had thickened for a time while the two living Americans were talking. Gabriel had noticed before he had approached the body of the operator. He peered over his shoulder at the gaping storefront, praying the bitter fog held long enough for him to call for help. A chance shot continued to strike against the walls and floor. A passing glance at the other soldier told Gabriel he wasn’t alone in that feeling.
“We won’t make it here,” Gabriel said. “They’ll find us and kill us.”
There were no first responders to call for, no police or emergency workers to request an immediate arrival. With the spray of bullets quickly and desperately intensifying, the idea of law enforcement suddenly seemed laughable. Gabriel focused on the lights and sounds of the active radio he held against him. He wished it was as easy as dialing a phone number, a special hotline to ask for warplanes to blast the enemy into the twilight. In a way, there may have been the ability to do that: a specific frequency nearby pilots were tuned into for just this kind of situation. However, Gabriel didn’t know what it was. All he could do was to scan the band, broadcasting his voice over a handful of frequencies at a time.
“What’s your name,” Gabriel asked the wheezing young man slumped low against a nearby wall.
The soldier took a pained breath before he answered. He was holding the shallow knife wound, his fingers wet and bloodstained. The man who had been beating him hadn’t stabbed him to kill, not immediately. They had just wanted to hurt the American. “Harley, sir,” he answered, his voice strained as he held his bleeding side. “Austin Harley...Private, sir.”
Gabriel nodded. “I’m Gabe-”
There was a noise in the static on the radio. A voice squawked with an American dialect. Gabriel quickly confirmed who he was, explaining the situation and the request for air support. The pilot replied with his call sign once more.
“Warthogs,” Private Harley mumbled, staring at the radio.
Gabriel glanced up at him curiously as he dug for a map in his pockets. With the torn, creased paper unfolded a moment later in his fingers, the anxious corporal did his best to pinpoint their location and the positions that needed to be hit. “Be aware,” Gabriel added after the pilot confirmed the information, “fire will be danger-close. I repeat, danger-close. Unavoidable! Friendlies are dug in and surrounded.”
There was a pause that made Gabriel’s heart skip a beat and start to sink simultaneously. Finally, the pilot’s voice returned over the near-deafening hailstorm of bullets bombarding the building. “We copy danger-close. En-route now. ETA...two minutes.”
“Roger. We’re moving to a nearby corner of the village to get clear. Good-”
Gabriel’s words were silenced by the sound of something heavy ricochetting off the outside facade of the building. Whatever it was sounded bigger than a grenade and had landed close in the upturned soil. Gabriel’s eyes looked to Private Harley and then the wall under the wrecked windows. Both men held the same fearful expression. Both men had the same instinct telling them what the noise belonged to. “Move,” Gabriel said, pushing himself off the floor where he had been sitting. Private Harley was a slow step behind. Gabriel noticed, reaching behind himself to pull the wounded, woozy soldier forward.
Something went pop. That was all Gabriel remembered hearing before finding himself on the floor in the narrow hallway of the small market. The hole he had made with the enemy soldier had expanded in the lost seconds of the immediate past. Gabriel’s chest and side throbbed like never before as he slowly picked himself up. His neck and arms stung with fresh cuts. The bricks of the storefront behind him were reduced to blackened gravel. The body of the radio operator was nowhere to be seen.
Gabriel tried to see through the hot mist of dust and sand burning his eyes. He saw movement at his feet, then movement outside. Austin Harley was trying to stand up. The echo of the explosion was still ringing in both of their ears. Gabriel reached down, wincing as he pulled the shell-shocked private out of the debris. He was already leading the bleeding soldier toward the kicked-open door when Gabriel glimpsed the shadows of a handful of figures stretch across the ruined storefront.
The ground outside tilted left, then right unnaturally in Gabriel’s eyes. He knew it was all in his head. He wondered if he had a concussion. It didn’t matter. The planes were coming. They had to get out of the fire line. Both soldiers weaved dizzily up the narrow path between buildings. Gunfire rattled behind them and from the buildings beyond the main avenue. The fog of muffled silence was fading from their blasted ears.
They were a dozen steps away from a small building at the end of the narrow lane. A wide shadow swept across the ground as something blocked the sunlight sinking slowly into the western sky for a split second. Gabriel squinted into the smoky air. He instantly saw the gleam on the long wings. His ears could barely make out the long snarl of its jet engines. The planes had arrived.
Bullets bit at the sand around their feet, then didn’t. All at once, the endless barrage ceased. Evermore through the thinning, audible haze congesting his hammered eardrums, Gabriel could discern the world around them again. He turned his head at the panicked shouts echoing down the street. But his attention was lost on a sight that gave him goosebumps. Thick plumes of smoldering building fragments, dust, and dirt reached into the air above the rooftops on the far end of the village. The roaring bellow of powerful, twin jet engines lifted his gaze a little higher to behold the A10-Thunderbolt banking lower toward the outcropping of buildings.
Gabriel watched the scene in awe. The ravaging, unstoppable 30mm gatling gun under its heavy, blunt-tipped nose tore across the rooftop armories and improvised turret nests. Sunlight danced across the small explosive that dropped from its left wing. The merciless bubble of earth-breaking noise and fire that followed shook the ground and sprayed the air with fresh flames, smoke, and debris. But Gabriel ignored all of that, watching the Warthog bring the hellish rain that sent the enemy running.
“Wow,” Private Harley said as the strafing airplane veered away to their left, over the crippled wall of the village.
Gabriel blinked in surprise as another Thunderbolt soared swiftly from right to left over the war-infested terrain beyond the buildings and wall. Scattered gunfire from the ground tried to scratch at the armored surfaces of the mighty plane. The brilliant flare from the mouth of its unstoppable cannon was a harbinger of the hell unleashed upon those on the ground.
The unpaved street under their feet rattled again. The heat from a closer explosion swam over the soldiers’ backs. Gabriel glanced behind them to see a third Thunderbolt sweeping low over the village, cutting a diagonal path across the infested village and coming much closer than the first two planes. Gabriel urged himself and the soldier leaning against him forward once more. Airplane shadows crisscrossed the ground as the full squadron arrived over the village. White and black smoke thickened the air again. The heat from more fires stretched up the alleys and streets from the newly bombarded buildings.
New shots rang from behind them, guns hungry for kills sending fresh bullets scuttling through the begrimed air. The two Americans were at the doorway of the lone building tucked against the village wall. Gabriel pushed Private Harley up the short, rickety stairs and into the partially open door hanging loosely on its creaking hinges. Gabriel pivoted quickly around as soon at the private’s weight was off his side. His rifle was already off his shoulder, his finger approaching the trigger. Gabriel found the gunman charing up the street through the smoke. He was a few dozen yards away. And then, he wasn’t. There was only the sound of a body crashing through wood and crippled mortar, though even that was muted by the boar-like call of the passing Thunderbolt.
Gabriel watched the stout fighter with its long, fixed wings move smoothly through the thick trails of smoke and dust. He stood motionless, staring at the tracers that leapt from the end of the cylindrical cannon at the forward point of the plane. Gabriel could not shake his focus from the modern warbird laying waste to those that had so ruthlessly shed so much blood. The planes brought a sense of relief and hope. They encouraged a feeling that his day was done, that the time to rest was at hand. Gabriel’s body had just begun to agree with that thought when something in the corner of his vision tore his attention away from the sky.
He saw the woman in the doorway first, her body shaking, making her quiver as she called out into the firestorm. Through the chaos of blazing weapons and blaring engines, Gabriel could make out the absolute terror emanating in her cries. Suddenly, Gabriel recognized the doorway she was standing in and the ruined building to which it was attached. He suddenly realized it wasn’t the orbiting planes she was frightened of, it wasn’t cries of alarm for her own life the mother Gabriel had seen cowering on a dilapidated staircase was tearfully and frantically extolling out into the world.
Gabriel stepped off the stoop in a daze, aware that something terrible was on the verge of occurring. The woman gripped the doorframe tightly, easing herself inch by petrified inch out of the barely-standing structure. She was trying to get to something. Gabriel’s instincts guessed at what it was. He remembered the father and young son. Then the curling streams of vapor flooding the main avenue cleared just enough to confirm what Gabriel already knew would be there.
The young boy that had been hiding with his family stumbled over the small craters and through the sea of burned and broken debris. Gabriel took a breathless step forward. Where’s the father, Gabriel asked himself. A desperate cascade of rapid rifle blasts from somewhere out of view picked at the steps and stones around the screaming woman. The loathsome gunmen were just shooting at anything they could now, anxious for some kind of victory to claim. It didn’t seem like they had noticed the three-year-old in the smoke yet. Gabriel’s ears perked. Those with the rusty, rattling rifles were no longer the real danger.
A Thunderbolt was making one last attack run. Its engines snarled as the pilot lined his metal bird of war up over the village, guiding it along the main avenue. Gabriel looked back and forth between the boy and the plane soaring just above the rooftops. The smoke choking the street was too thick for the pilot to see him. The dangerous gatling gun was already alive again.
Gabriel didn’t hesitate another heartbeat. He didn’t think or hold back because of the pain and weariness rolling through his body. With only a quick glance over his shoulder, Gabriel tossed his rifle to Private Harley through the gaping doorway before launching into a full sprint. It was a race against an airplane. As he came out of the side street, the noise of the Warthog was almost deafening. He glimpsed bad guys trying to run from the bullets that seemed to seek them out. Their anxious retreat was leading them directly toward the same spot Gabriel was sprinting for.
From the bullet-riddled stoop, the panic-stricken mother watched with despair. An American soldier was rushing out of an alley and into the smoke. Three of the belligerent attackers that had terrorized her village were hurrying up the pulverized avenue. Behind them, an American plane was firing unstoppably into the waves of smoke. All were heading right for her son who stood amidst the chaos pointing with youthful naivety toward the sights in the sky. Tears streamed from her eyes as she pushed herself away from the doorframe, a simple act that took all of her strength. She barely managed a step before she was stopped. A warm, heavy hand gripped her arm. Her husband, bleeding and weak, held his trembling wife tightly. He pulled her back across the the threshold of their home and out of the hellish storm that was unfolding in front of them. The A10 flew past overhead, its engines shaking the walls and floor still intact. A stinging wall of smoke and dirt exploded outward from under the swiftly attacking plane.
The battle-shaken couple sat up off the littered floor of their home, knocked down by the force of the jet’s flight path. All they could see was an ocean of thick, gray and black smoke past their doorway. The sound of mighty, air-smashing engines muted every other noise of the world, from the racing beats of their heavy hearts to the sounds of their despairing sobs. For the mother who had already seen and lost so much, all hope seemed completely taken from her.
The father blinked and gripped his wife tighter. A shadow moved in the smog. Through burning tears the mother watched with held breath a vision she would come to call a miracle. Amidst the fire and death, the smoke and bullets, the American soldier appeared with swift, heavy steps up to their stoop. Gabriel Audaz, out of breath and energy, held the little boy tightly in his arms. Little tears dampened his dusty uniform.
Gabriel jumped out of the firestorm that seemed to be on his heels and through the crippled doorway of the crumbling house. His chest screamed in pain. He wheezed a breath of relief when his body finally came to rest. He had hit the floor, sliding partway across the shallow layer of soot and debris. Gabriel kept the boy he was protecting out of the mess that tore into the cloth around his own skin.
The mother and father appeared above him, smiles as bright and warm as the sun filling his dizzy vision. He smiled back at them, letting the couple take their son back into their own embrace. They spoke words of thanks Gabriel didn’t really understand or hear. His day was done at last. There was nothing else he could manage, including lifting his body off the wrecked floor. Gabriel let his eyelids sink slowly closed, the song of fading airplane engines and tearful joy lulling him to a state of welcomed peace.
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