“I’m glad you’re here,” he said as she flipped over to face him.
“So how much longer until you have to go back on shift?” She was referring to his time up on the sand dune pulling security. He looked at the luminous hands of his Seamaster watch.
“At least an hour,” he said.
“Well,” she said seductively as she began unbuttoning the front of her blouse, “I can think of a way we can pass the timeandkeep each other warm until then.”
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 And while there were some who considered the practice outdated, Tim’s team had used this tactic in Afghanistan, where the Taliban often planned attacks at a similar hour.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 waited for the vehicle he saw in the distance to crest the next dune and brought a pair of binoculars to his face. Shane had bought them all Vortex Razor UHD 18x56 binoculars, and with them he could perfectly make out a pickup truck brimming with men, all armed withrifles.Shit, he thought, lowering the binoculars and thinking for a minute. He was facing north, meaning that these shouldn’t be friends of the terrorists they hadunaliveddown south. But they sure didn’t look like uniformed Saudis either.
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 ofmal hombrescoming 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 toencounter 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.
