The Pale: Volume One by Jacob Long (red novels TXT) 📖

Strykers then pulled to the side to affect cover as the soldiers of the Seventh Infantry Division and Army rangers entered the compound. Soldiers surrounding the area performed a similar tactic simultaneously. Strykers broke down the walls on every side of the stronghold, and American soldiers rushed in.

Adam stuck close to his squad leader, and the sergeant led the squad to their assigned guard point at the front of the building. Adam and the other seven soldiers ran, crouched under the windows of the mansion, and took position at regular intervals along the wall. Each of them pointed their weapons in a different direction to be sure no one snuck up on them. Another squad passed them on the way to the other side of the large front double door that led inside. Adam found himself next to a window. His heart thumped in his chest, and the gas mask served to echo every labored breath in his ears.

The mansion was quickly surrounded by the infantry while the rangers stayed close to the Strykers. They had no intention of entering the building through the front door. The main foyer would be a shooting gallery. Instead, a squad of the rangers moved up to the east wall. One soldier snuck up to a window there and trepidatiously peeked inside. When he lowered back down to his crouch, he signaled a thumbs-up to another soldier holding a pack of plastic explosive and moved away. The room was confirmed to be empty, so the soldier with the bomb stalked up to the window and installed the explosive on the wall below while the rest of his squad pulled security. The process was complete in seconds, and the squad ran back to the safety of the Strykers.

“Clear!” the demolitions soldier shouted.

Dozens of soldiers echoed, “Clear!”

With that, the demolitions soldier ducked his head for better protection behind the armored Stryker and pressed the detonator. That small portion of wall exploded in flame, spraying dust and debris that bounced harmlessly off the Strykers and rolled, smoking, through the sand.

The squad of rangers converged on the breach quickly and efficiently. They stacked up on the rubble next to the hole and then, one after the other, filed inside with their weapons held ready to fire at any threat.

The entire compound came alive with the sounds of gunfire as infantrymen charged expeditiously up its length. The soldiers knocked the front doors of the small buildings open and shouted the Arabic phrase for “Throw down your weapons and release the hostages!” Every time, the response was either gunfire or an angry Arabic response.

The soldiers then pulled out their CS gas grenades, pulled the pins, and threw them into the building. Within seconds, the flood of chemical smoke filled the room, and coughing could be heard. The armed men inside, without the protection of gas masks, succumbed to fits of hacking cough and hopelessly watering eyes. The workers they held in front of them, also suffering from the gas, doubled over, covering their mouths as they wheezed.

The soldiers entered the building, protected by their gear. They quickly identified guards by their dress and weaponry, and then eliminated them with extreme prejudice. Quick, precise shots punched through their chests, and they fell to the ground in limp heaps. The workers were guided outside for some fresh air.

Casualties were inevitable, both for the workers and soldiers. More than once, a jittery soldier failed in his identification and killed a worker. More than once, a soldier caught a bullet in an unarmored part of his body.

Meanwhile, all Adam could do was sit, tense, while he scanned the area in front of him. Gunfire was the only sound. A part of him felt guilty that he wasn’t in the real fight; a part of him was glad of it.

Inside the mansion, the rangers cleared the first room. The door leading to the rest of the house was open, and they filed through, kicking open doors as they advanced down the hall. Another squad of rangers followed through the breach behind them, and another after that.

A ranger kicked a door open to what looked like a small bedroom. One of El-Hashem’s guards was crouched down in the corner with his back to the door. When he turned to see who had entered, the soldier fired two bullets into his torso. The guard fell onto his stomach next to the device he had been operating. It looked like a small box with an antenna standing on top.

“Sergeant!” the soldier yelled.

A staff sergeant entered the room in another second. The soldier pointed to the device. “I think this guy was setting up an IED.”

The staff sergeant knelt down next to the device and gingerly pulled the detonator out. It was a simple electrical conduit connected to a receiver. “Looks like it’s not much.”

Suddenly, there was more gunfire down the hall. It sounded like the Army weapons at first, but then there was the reply of the guards’ heavier Russian assault rifles. The heavier rounds could be heard striking walls. The staff sergeant stood quickly and walked out into the hall. At the far end of the corridor, three guards were running away. Doors had been left hanging open on either side of the hall in their wake. The last guard in the group was running and then fired his weapon in a panic behind him. The staff sergeant ducked back into the room as more of the poorly aimed bullets destroyed the wallpaper all around.

The other soldiers in the hallway, undaunted, took firing positions and fired well-placed rounds down the hall. The last guard in line screamed and fell to the floor, flailing his arms about on the way down. The other two reached the end of the hallway and escaped the line of fire as fast as they could.

The staff sergeant stepped back out into the hallway and peered down the hall. The three doors the men had left open caught his attention. His face hardened, and he began a quick stride down the hall, past his comrades. His walk slowly grew into a jog, and then a run. He cared nothing for the other rooms they hadn’t checked yet. When he reached the first open door, he caught himself and glanced around inside. Sitting on the floor conspicuously was another improvised explosive.

The sergeant backed out of the room, realization dawning on him. Standing in the hall, he grimaced and turned to the soldiers waiting further up. “Get out!” he screamed and ran toward them. “We have IEDs in the building! Everyone out! The place is rigged!”

The soldiers turned tail and ran at a full sprint, echoing the command to the others further away.

“Get out!” the staff sergeant continued to scream, becoming more shrill with terror and exertion. “Get—”

The sergeant never finished his sentence. The loudest sound he had ever heard erupted all around him, and the earth shook. He stumbled and fell as fire flowed up the hallway, tearing down the walls. The ceiling collapsed, and fire rained down from above.

Outside, fire engulfed the entire east side of the building as not just the first floor but also the second and third floors exploded when the IEDs emplaced there were activated. The structural integrity of the east wing failed, collapsing like a house of cards, leaving the west wing all by its lonesome.

One of the Apache pilots hovering overhead exclaimed, “Holy shit!”

Adam heard the staff sergeant screaming as if he were in the room right above him. Curious and concerned, Adam stood and peered in the window. The room was empty, and the door was closed. The guy must have been just on the other side of the door for Adam to hear. Adam dropped back down to one knee and continued scanning for threats. Then the sergeant’s speech continued unintelligibly down the hallway. This gave Adam pause. The sergeant was running. Adam furrowed his eyebrows in concern, and then he turned to his sergeant, who was kneeling further down the line.

Only Adam didn’t even get as far as the staff sergeant inside did. Before Adam could open his mouth, the wall behind him gave birth to a fiery cataclysm. Rock, glass, and flame became Adam’s whole world. The rifle was ripped from his hands, and he was thrown, screaming, into the air. He didn’t know how far he had flown before landing, face-first in the debris, but it felt like diving from a high board into a pool.

The “pool” was a pile of smoking and flaming masonry in the coat of sand that hid the hard ground underneath. Much like diving into a pool, Adam’s breath was stolen upon impact. He lay, incapacitated and gasping. His lungs harvested no air, and no sound reached his ears besides the intense ringing his brain invented to fill the void. Adam’s head throbbed like someone had tried to temper his nerves on an anvil, and the skin on his neck was seared so badly it felt like the pain was in motion, flowing and ebbing from one part of his body to another.

Slowly, Adam regained strength in his lungs, and breaths came in short spasmodic huffs. His mask had been knocked crooked on his face, funneling his every breath up into his own nostrils. Everything was dark and strangling. He forced his eyes open, but there was only the dark. No light shone from any direction. The whole right side of Adam’s body refused to move. He grasped blindly with his left hand, exploring his surroundings like an insect with quivering, shattered antennae.

Suddenly there was gunfire. Adam was still mostly deaf, but the rhythm and the percussion of it were unmistakable. It was sporadic at first, but it escalated into a ferocious gun battle in the blink of an eye. The soft thoothoothoothoothoo surrounded him on all sides. In his mind, he could see the soldiers and the remnants of El-Hashem’s thugs battling it out. Bullets whizzed over his head while he lay helpless on the ground they fought over. The tune the battle made was quickly interrupted by a much-deeper bass line that rumbled in the earth to Adam’s left from the direction of the part of the mansion that hadn’t perished in flames quite yet. Adam was hoping the order hadn’t been given for the Apache’s to dump on what remained of the house. He could easily be trampled under a carpet of gigantic bullets and hellfire missiles. Then again, maybe that would be for the best. However bad his injuries actually were, he doubted that they were the kind you just walk away from. His head was filled with thunder and pain, and no matter how furiously he blinked, Adam’s eyes could only see the dark. His skin was burned, but at least he could feel the burning. That was good. It was likely that whatever the damage, it probably wasn’t that serious. But the pain was incredible, and the last thing he saw before he lost his vision was fire. It was basically all he could see. What if he was still on fire? Nightmare images of his clothes melting to his skin passed through Adam’s mind in the daze, and his brain was becoming a whirlwind of muddled thoughts.

Adam’s panicking was rudely interrupted by someone grabbing him brusquely by his dragon harness and hauling him as fast as possible over the rubble. Then three reports from a weapon sounded directly above his head. It was so loud it hurt. That was good, Adam’s hearing was improving. More good news in the form of unbelievable pain, which exploded all over his body as he was dragged unceremoniously over the hot sand; he could feel his right side. His spinal cord was intact. He was being dragged to his left too. That was good. His buddies were over on his left.

Suddenly, Adam was just dropped onto his back. His helmeted head landed sharply somewhere surprisingly cozy. Fearing the comfort to be a delusion, Adam turned his head from side to side. Two objects of similar composition yielded to his movements. It felt like two feet. Uh oh . . . two feet on either side. His savior had fallen on his back suddenly. Adam couldn’t speak, so he could only will the man back up in his head. He begged for the soldier to stand. There was no way he could accept someone getting shot for him after everything, not for him.

The feet stayed where they were, so Adam lay in the debris, motionless, his head resting between the feet of a hero who was probably bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Adam’s soul actually relaxed, finding melancholy in some distant place inside his head. He wriggled the fingers on his right hand absently, testing the fact that they still worked. His brain seemed to be recovering from the shock and trauma. Or . . . no. It was something else. He felt tired . . . sleepy. Sleep could be good. He didn’t see any reason to resist it, so he let his body relax. The pain slipped away. Everything slipped away.