Another War Another Desert

These soldiers knew that they didn’t know, and kept alert, because these explosions, and the rain of fire the sheriff and her officers would lay on the building that harbored the Turks was merely investigative work. They were looking for answers to that which they didn’t know. Numbers, weaponry, stratification of defenses. They couldn’t get over their collective impression, but the Turks were acting like they were retreating, on the run, and yet the lethality of their munitions suggested there was a baiting going on as well. Much like their own cue-shot that began with the exploding boobytraps, it was designed to provoke the Turks.

Sheriff Coyle shouted out, “Fire like hell at the windows!”

At the order, the Pahrump law enforcers lit up on the hotel, the air still acrid, smelling as wet as it did caustic from the explosives… Sheriff Coyle took a position right by the very door where Butch was blown to kingdom-come, her feet slipped in what she would not wonder over. She turned and aimed across the pool patio… it felt so strange to be raining riot over a resort of debauchery… the long trials of moral condemnation seemed to win their every argument in these moments her people were pressed into action. She turned the corner and began firing in a deliberate anger for all her dead. Pow! Pow! Pow! In singular bursts, aiming at windows… just windows because there was nothing else, then pull back to safety.

Harry popped up and let out three-round bursts from the sole M-16, sounding like a noisy, broken sewing machine. Bdd-rrr-rripp! He would duck back in security awaiting a lethal volley in response.

Each officer sent concentrated fire without enemy targets, yet certain that clandestine eyes had them in sight. It was a curious rally as they levelled hell on the building across the pool, chipping at stucco, putting out the glass; but silence responded to their assault, as if the building was inhabited only by ghosts.

Cliff and Donnie looked on, a thrumming in Cliff’s ear, the well-remembered sound of a jugular vein pounding out in high tension maneuvers. It was like a fuse to dynamite to Cliff… a tempered, measured place of observation, knowing his turn at devastation was nearing… But otherwise silence. Again he saw the guns from the sheriffs lay out another heavy volley into the suites hotel, chunking into cement and shattering windows, but again no response from the Turks. Donnie who had moved up about 50 yards was still in fading sight, he texted, “WTF?”

Maybe they were gone. But where? Cliff replied to all of them with only one character, “?”

Boobytraps, the standoff, the SWAT crew… this was supposed to be a war. But this was anxious silence. The smell of cordite, blood and smoke were convincing arguments. But none of this felt right, even as wrong as it all was.

Just then Cliff saw a thick muzzle turn out from a second-floor, central window, and it began blazing with feverish fire, tracers piercing through the darkness to their targets; like heavy bolts of electricity in the night, illuminating the patio, the sheriffs ducking into some false security behind walls. The steady pounding continued. Big clots were being punched out of the concrete and stucco, chiseled pockmarks the size of baseballs were opening on the façade that was supposed to provide the police protection. One of the officers screamed in pain as a .308 caliber bullet impacted through the wall, pancaking into his thigh. He wasted no time in retreating to interior safety, with a prolific flow of blood painting his way to escape.

Sergeant Polite put out a cryptic message, “M-60 fuckers.”

Cliff lifted the sniper rifle, half-hoping this would be quick work… could they really be down to only one or two confederates? He put his eye to the scope, searching for the ghost of a figure because there was no night vision assistance… Cliff needed a better image to assure his shot, otherwise he could be exposed by the failed bullet; and lying alone on the desert floor with scrub brush as your only ally, he needed to be true. Just as he scoped down on the window, he saw a muzzle emerge from the nearer, westernmost, second-floor window… a smaller weapon, the telltale double-structure of the gas-port and tall sight on the muzzle. It was an AK-47 lighting into the building now as well… and a matching bookend on Johnny’s and Art’s end of the hotel. Cliff spoke a text to his comrades, “Take the shot if you got it. But don’t miss nothing!”

Disconcerting, as in war, the infinite of accidents far outweigh intention. Art shot back, “FUCK MARINE! GIVE US SOMETHING HARD, SARGE!”

A cryptic smiling emoji followed… Cliff smiled… he had his guys…

And in the hellacious doom falling down on this whorehouse in Pahrump, Nevada, Cliff saw Donnie crabbing along further away and into the dark towards the consumption of the desert. Despite the deathly chaos, it was working exactly as they had planned.

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The M-60 was busting up the walls, dismantling their fortifications, but it was the more precise work of the AKs that compelled Cliff’s attention. The M-60 was as much to scare the shit out of the enemy and send ‘em running, but the instrument of death was a fighter with a good eye and one of the most reliable weapons in mass use in the world, the Kalashnikov-47.

He concluded his target. And knocking off the shooter on the west side of the building would give Donnie better chances. Someone needed to balance the odds a little in the administering of death, for they had been perpetual victims all day.

Cliff looked down the scope, dialed the optics, cursing the muddy grey of a nighttime image, the AK muzzle leaning out and lighting up would be his best chance at a true and accurate target… another benefit, if he fires on the bursts from the AK, there’s lesser chance his bullet is noticed against the fusillade already flying.

He found his distance and he put the bead on the weapon, and the AK lit up, ratcheting like a workingman’s tool. Rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat! And in the ferocious blaze from the muzzle, Cliff saw the head of the shooter… and he squeezed the trigger. The high-powered rifle let out a full resounding shot.

The half-open window blew up and the muzzle fire instantly ceased into benign blackness… the shooter was dead.

He texted for all to feel the encouragement, and the commitment this would require of them all, to the last man, and woman. “One shooter on the western window, down!”

No responses came… it wasn’t trophy hunting… he didn’t expect a response, for they were in war. He just knew what a small success can infuse in a vulnerable group of warriors… and they would respond. In fight!

Then Cliff posted his strategy of success. “Shoot em when they’re blazing. The light of the muzzle will give you the shot.”

Timely post as Art was beading down on the fighter in the eastern, second-floor window. Likewise, an AK-47 blitzed down on Pahrump’s last and best hunkered down in the social building. All of them had retreated to middle rooms, allowing the M-60 to thrash the forward defenses into bits… it wouldn’t be long before these weapons would be reaching interior rooms for the lack of structure providing them cover on the perimeter.

Art didn’t have a scoped weapon, so he would have to rely on the three bursts of the M-16 and hope. He had a good angle, in a kneeling firing position, Johnny, not quite the marksman as the marines, held fast, keeping his weapon trained on the side door to the building.

The AK reached out and started rattling at the sheriff’s again, and Art snapped off the auto three-burst, like a drill-bit snapping. Bdd-rrr-rripp! The fighter spun from the window, as the AK-47 turned skyward, and spun a circle as the shooter seemed to fall, his bullets sheering into the ceiling, lighting up the room. It was a hit!

Then out of the same window another fighter reached out turning in the direction of Art and Johnny, with an RPG rocket launcher. He let go on their position; it sent the vets running in panicked aim and dove into a small arroyo where they had been staging. WHUMPF!

The blast lit up the sky in a ball of fire, a hail of debris and sand splashed high over their heads and raining on them, but a fortunate and substantial miss. It suggested the Turks knew the bullets came from the east, but could not fully identify them. It was yet another threat but clearly not a precision effort at a kill. But it brought a message from Cliff.

“You grunts ok?”

Art turned back a thumbs up emoji, and “No sweat. At least we know they got all the toys.”

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“Omer is dead!” Lenin screamed in the night. He turned back out the hall, “Omer’s dead!”

Yusef, who was with Ule, alternating on the M-60 and feeding one another the bands of shells, keeping the fire on the insurgent westerners, had his first moment’s panic… if they had no guns on the west, they could lose control of the building. And now that there were enemy forces announcing a bravery he had never expected of the fat and pampered Americans, the next level of strategy had to be engaged.

“Ule, keep dem in place wid de 60. I send a message.”

With that he walked across to the hostages, still zip-tied to each other, now with their ankles secured. A wanton desire to survive etched their haggard faces, Leonard and Tobias as well as the frail women in lingerie. One of the girls had gone catatonic for the voracious battery that was being laid out and absorbed. Bullet holes dotted the walls and ceiling, sheered lighting fixtures to nubs, all in this lurid darkness only momentarily given illumination by loud muzzle-fire. The innocence of the damned never expected such a reprisal for their sins.

“You! Get up!” Leonard, got to a knee, “Why me?” The Turk didn’t answer. He pulled his sidearm and a tactical knife and cut the zip tie to the whore that connected to Leonard… the woman blanched for the splatter she expected… her nose was bubbling in snot, slobbering, looking as unsavory as she may have ever looked. Yusef took pleasure in her defilement. But he ignored the woman after Leonard’s question.

“You get up, now!” He planted the barrel of his Beretta against the man’s head, and lifted him from the floor, then got behind the Zanzibar security man and walked him to the window, Leonard scrunching his eyes, expecting to be pulverized by bullets as they would think him the enemy.

The truth he couldn’t know, the sheriffs were all tucked well back into the social building, two attending to severe wounds. Their greatest security was no longer the rear of the building as it was now a tattered mesh of rubble, wall and dust. Sheriff Coyle lay prone, positioned in a hall, so she could keep her vigil and send the occasional round at the window laying the heavy rounds. She recognized the hostage by the clothes. This is what she had feared the most, the police woman that she was.

Yusef yelled out, with the hostage positioned directly before him, “Dis you want? Dis you get!” He fired the Beretta into the hostage’s head…

Leonard’s tenure at The Zanzibar Club ended brutally, without severance, without a compassionate hug or even a thank-you. His brains spattered the window sill, and Yusef allowed the natural gravity to take the body out the window, first flopping on the sill, then a flip of Leonard’s legs sent the lifeless corpse swinging inertly like a ragdoll in its plummet to the sidewalk below.

“Now you want more?”

It was the problem none of them had considered… none but for one.

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