Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

as soon as the ISI insurgents began firing, three of the coalition troops loaded M406 high-explosive rounds into their M203 under-barrel grenade launchers and fired them into the compound almost simultaneously, the clunk of these weapons firing completely inaudible against the rapid, hammering fire of the assault rifles.

Grenades are at their most devastating in a confined space. Three heavy explosions crashed out and instantly the small compound turned into a killing ground. The ISI fighters had nowhere to hide or take cover as the grenades, each with a kill radius of 5 metres and capable of causing injuries within 130 metres, detonated inside the boundary wall.

Screams of pain followed the explosions and, significantly, the firing from inside the compound stopped.

The coalition troops advanced in stages, still using fire-and-cover tactics, towards the target. The first of them checked what was waiting for them on the other side of the boundary wall, then scrambled over it.

About half of the ISI defenders were clearly either dead or badly wounded, but the coalition troops took no chances, eliminating every man who still showed signs of life, just in case any of them had decided that wearing a suicide vest made sense.

Then another two Kalashnikovs opened up, firing from a couple of broken windows on the ground floor of the house itself.

The coalition soldiers ducked into what cover they could find and returned fire. They were too close to the building to use grenades because the weapons wouldn’t arm in such a short distance, and in any case the M203 wasn’t accurate enough to fire a grenade through such small openings. So they were going to have to do it the hard way.

The soldiers inside the compound were pinned down and unable to do more than concentrate their fire through the windows and an open door of the house, to prevent the ISI fighters from accurately targeting them. But not all the coalition soldiers were inside the compound.

The NCO, a master sergeant, knew exactly what he had to do. With two other soldiers dogging his footsteps he ran along the outside of the compound wall, crouching down so as to be immune to the fire from the house. As soon as they got abeam the wall of the building, the NCO shouldered his Colt assault rifle, clambered over the wall and ran across to the left-hand side window. The besieging soldiers altered their aim to make sure none of their bullets went anywhere near him. He stopped a few feet short and pulled a small brownish spherical object from his utility belt.

Timing is important in life, but crucial in conflict.

The NCO removed the safety clip from the M67 grenade, changed his grip to remove the pull ring and almost immediately released the lever. That type of grenade explodes between four and five seconds after the lever is released, so the NCO counted to three before lobbing it through the open window and over the muzzles of the two Kalashnikovs that were still firing into the compound. He couldn’t allow time for one of the insurgents to grab the grenade and throw it back, because that would ruin the master sergeant’s whole day. And probably kill him.

He took a couple of paces back, knelt down and covered his ears. As he did so, he heard a shrill yell of alarm from inside the room, followed immediately by the crashing explosion as six and a half ounces of Composition B detonated. A mixture of RDX and TNT, Comp B is the workhorse explosive of the American military, used in everything from land mines to artillery shells.

The master sergeant jogged forward a few feet to the second window, priming another M67 as he did so, and repeated the treatment.

The moment the second grenade detonated, the coalition troops surged forward, streaming in through the half-open door between the two windows, clearing each room as they advanced. It was a case of overwhelming force meeting disorganised and demoralised defenders, many of them already wounded by the Warthog’s strafing run. It was more or less a mopping-up operation.

Ten minutes later Nick Montana and his Iraqi counterpart strode around the compound, Montana comparing the faces of the dead insurgents with printed images on half a dozen sheets of paper. Unlike the major players in the invasion of Iraq, who had merited their names and faces being included in the packs of playing cards issued to front-line soldiers to identify them, Abū Omar al-Baghdadi’s face had just been provided as a monochrome image on a page spat out by a laser printer.

‘Nothing here,’ Montana said, using the toe of his boot to turn the head of the last corpse so that he could see the man’s face.

‘He was supposed to be at a meeting here,’ the Iraqi lieutenant replied in good English. ‘If he was, he’ll be somewhere inside the house.’

The master sergeant stepped out of the door of the property as Montana approached.

‘The building’s secure, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got sixteen men in cuffs, some of them wounded, plus a couple of women. All the others in the house are dead.’

Montana nodded and walked inside. The two women had been locked in one room and the surviving men assembled in another. The building reeked of cordite and he stepped over sprawled bodies and crunched over empty shell cases as he made his way from room to room.

None of the prisoners looked anything like Abū Omar al-Baghdadi, but Montana thought he recognised one of the corpses, one of two dead men lying sprawled on the floor in one of the smaller upstairs rooms. It looked as if the other man had been killed by shells from the Warthog’s Avenger cannon because of his appalling injuries, but the man whose face was familiar to the American officer had died from small-arms fire. He was also wearing a suicide vest.

‘I know your orders were to take as many of them alive as we could,’ the master sergeant said, as Montana looked at the body, ‘but