Jakobs grinned upwards into the
vehicle, having popped open the electrical box on the underside to
expose the wires inside. They'd disabled two of these mobile AA
vehicles today, all without anyone realizing it. Sure, they'd caused
a bit of havoc and blacked out a huge segment of the region to cause
a diversion, but they figured if they'd never get caught it'd be a
simple thing to explain away as collateral damage.
That was assuming the guys catching
them would be friendly after the hostilities ended. Jackknife was the
first American SF unit to deploy behind enemy lines in ten years,
though the instructors and trainers hadn't told them that. After a
series of intelligence fuck ups CENTCOM had decided to tone down
their operations and play it safe, letting the newly formed CSAT
expend manpower and political capital all over Asia and the Middle
East. The culture of the elite special operations teams rising out of
swamps in fifty-thousand dollars worth of high-tech gear persisted,
even if only a few of the guys still around had ever even landed on a
hostile shore.
Putnam popped his head up on the other
side of the vehicle, leaving a muddy smudge along the digicam print.
Still nothing, just the faint sound of Chinese-made attack choppers
in the distance shining searchlights on the highway to the south. The
last time the Jordanian security team had come by, they'd been
smoking with their rifles slung low and safetied, chatting about
christ knows what. The two Americans hadn't learned Arabic or Farsi
or Persian or whatever the other guys were talking, but years of
messing with fuesboxes and wiring on trucks had given them a decent
idea on how to disable the delicate systems of just about anything.
Sure, it lacked elegance to just pull
at whatever until it pulled from wherever it was supposed to be. It
however acquired a new lethality when they rigged the panel with
explosives to wound or kill anyone trying to repair it—and
hopefully direct some force upwards into where they thought the
ammunition was housed to finish the thing off.
“About done?”
“Yep, just gimme another minute,
man.”
They heard some muffled laughter,
their heads swiveling around to find the sentries on their next pass.
They figured it was a bunch of washout conscripts that were tasked
with the air defense, it was the only excuse for how easily they'd
slipped through and done their work. It would've been a bad time for
those guys to climb back into their track to check in with their
command for new orders, and the two yankees stared and held their
breath waiting for their figures to come out of the trees.
The cherry red of the cheap cigarettes
lit up their faces first, then they stepped out of the brush and into
the clearing, heading straight towards them. The two operators
(That's what they call you when commando sounds too retro) shrank
down into the earth and curled against the treads. The footsteps grew
closer, their laughter petering out as they neared the vehicle. These
were the moments that decided good covert operations, right?
Jakobs shook his head once in the
direction of the near treeline and mic-ed his radio twice without
saying anything. A few moments passed, obviously tense as anyone
would expect. This would normally be the point in the movie where the
two sentries passed unawares, but the 6.5mm rounds smacked into the
chassis of the vehicle a few inches away from their bodies
instead—the silencers barely concealing the pop of them from the
rifle.
They glanced around, lowering to their
knee as more rounds buried into the dirt. Jakobs and Putnams eyes
rolled as their bodies crawled out from under the vehicle. They
flashed their tac lights twice before firmly smashing the two
sentries in the side of the skull with their rifle butts. It lacked
elegance, that tactical operator style-cool they were told they'd
have. But it got the job done. They plodded back to the treeline,
falling next to the other three guys who'd almost blown their cover.
“Is it so hard to hit a target when
they're stock still? Jesus.”
“Hey man, it wasn't like shooting a
cardboard cutout. Give us a break.”
“Yeah? And how much did that
marksmanship instruction cost the army, man? For special forces you
sure can't shoot for shit.”
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