SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

As they reached the end of the causeway, Ritzik was pleased to discover that the gap between the concrete surface and the unpaved road was huge — an eight-inch drop from the end of the causeway into an enormous pothole. The literal bump in the road hadn’t shown up on the satellite images. But it was going to force the convoy to slow down precipitously.

Rowdy Yates jogged through the light ground fog the slightly less than half a kilometer to the bridge, carefully paced back, and took Ritzik and Ty Weaver aside. “Change of plans. You initiate on ‘Two — just like always.’ But you hit the lead truck first.” Yates looked at Ritzik. “Time your countdown so Ty can shoot just as Truck One comes off the causeway. It’ll bottleneck the others. They won’t know what’s happening in the back of the column until it’s too late. I’ll set the claymores off and you’ll be picking ‘em off from the rear like Gary Cooper in the old Sergeant York movie.”

The sniper snorted. “Promise it’ll be that easy, Rowdy?” “On my word.” Yates held up his right hand, palm raised. “Oh, by the way, I got some lovely waterfront property to sell you right outside Mazār-e Sharīf.”

“And you’ll respect me in the morning, too, right?” Ty started walking to the rear to search out a shooting position.

Yates gestured toward the causeway. “Setting those claymores is gonna cause us a headache or two, boss.”

Ritzik nodded. “I saw.” The trouble lay in the narrowness of the causeway. The Chinese claymores had an effective range of roughly two hundred meters. But they were most deadly when the target was within a sixty-meter cone. The problem was that the concrete sides of the causeway were just over three feet high, and the causeway itself was more than ten feet above the marsh. The precise measurements had been impossible to gauge from the satellite images. It was going to be unworkable to position the claymores where he’d wanted to, because the causeway sidewall would mask too much of the blast.

Oh, the situation could be remedied. But it was going to take precious time to camouflage the damn things and hide the firing wire. Ritzik shook his head, disgusted. “Do what you have to. They’re critical.”

2316. The firing positions were going to be problematic, too. The marsh was soft — and much deeper than expected. That was the trouble with technical intelligence: it could give you just partial information. Nothing was as good as an old-fashioned, eyes-on recon. An old-fashioned, eyes-on recon would have shown what Ritzik and his team discovered in a matter of minutes: there were fewer cover and concealment possibilities than they would have liked.

But the downside came with an upside: there was no easy avenue of escape for the bad guys, either. The ambushed tangos would have to try to flee by jumping off the causeway into the marsh — where they’d be killed quickly. Or, they’d try to push forward onto the roadway, where Ritzik’s second element would cut them to pieces. Once the convoy was stopped, it could be decimated. Terrorists seldom practiced vehicular counterambush drills. And at 2340, Ritzik got another piece of good news: Rowdy, Goose, and Shep had solved the claymore situation. They’d camouflaged the devices and set them so the deadly cones of the blasts would broadside directly into the last three trucks in the column, the shaped charges killing most of those inside.

2325. Ritzik called back to the LUP. He’d need Mickey D’s firepower. And he wanted Wei-Liu close by, to work on the MADM as soon as the killing zone was safe.

2345. Now came the hard part: the waiting. The ambushers had laid themselves out in a modified letter L. Rowdy, Shepard, Masland, Curtis, and Goose were strung out in the marsh shallows by the western end of the causeway, concealed by the patchy fog and clumps of saw grass. The other five were split: Ritzik, Ty Weaver, and Mickey D on the right side of the road; Tuzz and Sandman on the left, to deal with any tangos who tried to flank from behind. The element’s fields of fire were marked by IR chem-lights.

Rowdy Yates ran the marsh-side group — and controlled the claymore detonators. Ritzik and Mickey D had the road — positioned close enough to be able to engage the first vehicles close-quarters. Ty Weaver had the high ground. He lay concealed atop a small dune at an oblique angle to the convoy’s path. The position would afford the sniper a panoramic view and a protected shooting site that allowed him to engage targets anywhere along the convoy. Well behind him, hidden by a dune, Ritzik stashed Wei-Liu, with instructions not to show herself until he or Weaver came for her.