True Faith and Allegiance

“That’s how it sounded.” Van Damm pointed in the direction of the stairs to the Situation Room. “Back down there you sounded like you wanted to pick up a machine gun and lead the attack into Mosul yourself. That’s what the public needs to hear. Not a poli-sci lecture about Third World madmen and street crime in Chicago.”

Ryan thought Arnie had a point, but he said, “I wasn’t ready to be honest with the way I feel right now. We need more of a plan, less groping in the dark. I’ll talk to the public when we are prosecuting this fight against the intelligence leak and the terrorists in some meaningful way.” Together they entered the Oval. “For now we are on the back foot, and I couldn’t let that show in my emotions.”

42

This Iraqi village hadn’t been much, probably just a few thousand had lived here before the war, but now it was nothing more than a battle-scarred wound built into the hills. A wasteland of destruction, just a dozen kilometers northeast of Mosul, it had been abandoned by ISIS the day before, and now twenty-two-year-old commander Beritan Nerway led her all-female platoon carefully through the streets on the northern side of the town, their wire- or wooden-stocked Kalashnikovs at their shoulders They slowly picked their way through the broken stones in their boots and tennis shoes.

These women were Kurds from the YPJ, an abbreviation in Kurdish for Women’s Protection Unit. They were a rebel force, not part of the Peshmerga, although they fought the same foe.

Beritan was a nom de guerre; her real name was Daria. She gave herself the war name of Beritan in honor of Kurdish female battalion commander Beritan, who led seven hundred male and female troops during the Kurdish civil war in 1992 and threw herself off a cliff when she ran out of ammunition.

Kurdish women had a long history of fighting, but never more so than over the past three years fighting ISIS. They’d helped push them back out of this town the afternoon before: over a wide canal they’d watched from their forward positions as trucks and tanks and technicals escaped, heading back into the suburbs of Mosul, fewer than twenty kilometers south.

But by the time of the enemy pullout it was too dark to cross the canal to move into the town, so the YPJ waited till daylight to send in troops to check through what was left. Now several platoons like Beritan’s, male and female alike, were picking through the rubble to make certain ISIS had not booby-trapped the buildings or the roads, or even left forces behind to slow the YPJ’s advance in this small section of the war.

Beritan knew there could be danger around any corner, a tank tucked into any alley or a machine gun emplacement hidden in any crater or darkened window.

Her radio chirped where it was attached to her shoulder strap. One of her snipers on the far side of the canal reported possible movement in a window two blocks ahead of the YPJ position.

Beritan and her fighters all tucked behind cover on the broken street, but not before the crack of a rifle echoed in the rubble of the town and the first woman fell dead to a sniper’s bullet.

Then the gunfire seemed to come from every nook and cranny of the broken buildings.

Beritan and her unit of forty were cut off from other forces and supported only by mortars and DShK machine guns back at the YPJ lines. Serious firepower, but firepower that needed good targeting information.

Targeting information they weren’t getting through their binoculars.

Beritan realized she and her women would have to climb up from their cover and expose themselves to press the fight to the ISIS snipers.

* * *

Fifteen kilometers to the north and five thousand feet in the air, Pyro 1–1 and Pyro 1–2, two Apache helicopters, circled in a wide racetrack pattern. They were in the area in support of a nearby coordinated attack by Peshmerga forces supported by U.S. Special Forces and a JTAC, a Joint Terminal Attack Controller, a soldier on the ground with the ability to call in support from artillery fires and rotary-wing and fixed-wing assets in the area.

So far the Peshmerga advance had not been met with any resistance; they’d walked into a town picked clean and abandoned by ISIS, so the pair of Apaches circling in the desert had had little to do but listen in on the four radio frequencies in their ears as they flew around.

Both of the Apache AH-64E Guardian aircraft had plenty of fuel today. Right now they circled at endurance speed, seventy knots, giving them more time in the air in case they were needed to the south.

Captain Carrie Ann Davenport mentally tuned out the four radio frequencies broadcasting in her ears and spoke to CWO Troy Oakley through the permanently open intercom between the two of them, negating the need to push any buttons to transmit to each other. He was seated only six feet behind and above her in the cockpit, but out of her view except through a small mirror over her head on the door frame.