Without warning

Alcibiades arose beside him like an apparition, the muzzle of his rifle sweeping through a narrow arc in front of them, covering the men who were scoping out the rubble under which their attackers had died. Melton waited for the call of ‘Medic!’

It never came. Whatever injuries the troopers had taken did not require immediate intervention. He kept his personal weapon to hand but consciously dialled back on the tension compressing his whole body into an impacted mass of nerve endings. They’d survived another one. The brigade and most of the 3rd Infantry Division had been remarkably lucky so far. Fewer than fifty KIA after days of fighting, and all of them lost in close-quarter battles like this one. Out on the desert plains, where they’d first engaged the Iraqis, it had been a pure slaughter of the foe. Nobody had any idea of the enemy’s casualties, but in this sector alone it had run into the thousands. Perhaps more than ten thousand by now.

Lieutenant Leo Euler appeared beside him, handing back a receiver to his radio operator. ‘D’you get all that, sir?’ he asked the reporter. ‘Gotta keep the folks at home informed.’

It was an attempt at light banter, but the young officer’s eyes were too tired and far away to carry it off. ‘Sleep when you are dead’ became a soldier’s unofficial motto.

Bret Melton nodded absently and spat onto the ground, the nicotine slowly infiltrating his wired nervous system. ‘Any casualties, Lieutenant?’ he said.

Euler shook his head. ‘Nothing serious. No sucking chest wounds or lost limbs, so I’ll count myself a happy man. Worthless Fedayeen fucktards. Sometimes I think they shoot high and wide, praying to get fucking captured.’

Saddam’s volunteer militia had borne the brunt of the fighting in the crossroads towns and although they’d handed out some grief here and there, as a fighting force they seemed to be tasked with holding up the Coalition forces and making them ‘waste’ ammunition and lives. The Coalition didn’t have the troops to provide POW facilities so without an order per se, the higher-ups let it be known that there would be no quarter. Some units in 3^rd ID had taken up the old practice of flying a black flag from an antenna. It didn’t take long for the Iraqis to figure out what that meant.

As a tactic, Melton had to admit that sending your worthless troops forward as bullet-catchers made some sense. Everyone knew they weren’t pushing on to Baghdad now, that’d be insane. The British and US forces executing Operation Katie in southern Iraq were planning to leave the whole leprous mess to fester on its own when they were gone. That was assuming they could kick the Kuwaitis and the Saudis off so they could actually get the hell out of Dodge. The tiny Polish and Australian special forces contingents were already gone, what missions they’d originally been assigned now irrelevant. And Saddam was openly mocking them from Baghdad, whipping up a perfect storm of pan-Arab hysteria at his ‘defeat’ of the infidel crusaders. Well, not openly – not since the Americans dropped that JDAM on Uday.

Saddam still made appearances in the open, but they were never televised live, and they never lasted very long. They did hit the mark, though. The allied air campaign went forward pretty much as originally planned, from what Bret had heard the Air Force liaison say, in an attempt to decapitate Iraq’s command and control systems. The only difference was that Coalition air power had destroyed bridges they’d originally needed. But as long as the fat little fucker survived to taunt them, his stature only grew. He was openly comparing himself to Saladin now, declaring himself the reborn leader of the faithful.

The crackle of gunfire drifted in over the rooftops of the surviving buildings from somewhere to the west. It was another element of 3rd ID conducting sweep-and-clear ops to make sure that everyone – ladie dadie everyone – could withdraw through this shithole without getting nickel-and-dimed to death by snipers, suicide bombers and the half-assed incompetents tricked out like Arab ninjas who called themselves the Fedayeen Saddam.

Euler’s men were moving towards one of the remaining intact bridges three blocks away, in tandem with another platoon taking a parallel route two streets over. Apaches from the squadron’s air cav component buzzed about high overhead, waiting to pounce on any resistance. When Operation Katie went into effect, the rulebook was thrown out along with it. Melton remembered Captain Lohberger saying, ‘Fuck the rules of engagement’ before he buttoned up his Bradley so many days ago. Somebody seemed to have handed 3rd ID’s commander, Major General Blount, an open chequebook.