He and the other guard in the front of the van carried on a light conversation about what they were going to do over the upcoming holiday.  Ed Stevens’s family always went all-out for Thanksgiving and he was excited. 

Sitting in the back were two more guards, JD, and another prisoner.  They were being transferred to federal custody by a Maryland Corrections Department detail. 

In addition to the van there were escort sedans in front and behind.  Altogether, there were eight corrections officers in three vehicles to transport JD and the other inmate to federal authorities.  JD figured out that he was going to stand trial for shooting up a military installation. 

“Leader, this is Bird Dog, I have the target and escorts four hundred yards from the zone,” a man wearing camo gear, holding binoculars said from his perch above the road as the van passed. 

“Roger that, Bird Dog.  This is Leader.  Hunting Pack, get ready to intercept.  Remember, they are just doing their job.  Let’s try to make sure they go home to their families in one piece.  They might be shooting to kill, but we’re better than they are at their game.  Leader out.”

Twenty seconds later the right front tire of the transport van exploded.  Bird Dog had hit it with a .308 round from his sniper rifle.  A moment later the rear tire on the passenger side of the van blew from a second shot. 

“Transport Seventeen to base, I think we’re under attack, just before Mount Collier.  Repeat, we’ve been hit by someone,” the driver shouted excitedly into the microphone hanging from the dash. 

“Ten-four, Seventeen.  Dispatching local units to assist,” the dispatcher replied before inquiring further what type of emergency they were having.

A tear gas cannister tore through the passenger side window of the transport van.  The car following them slammed into their rear end, and the lead car slid off the road, but he couldn’t see why, he assumed they had also been hit with something else. 

Struggling for breath, the two men in the front of the van exited the vehicle.  Falling to their hands and knees, they could barely see and were clutching at their faces, choking.  Through the tears and smoke, Stevens, who’d driven similar transport vans for decades, saw what looked like a SWAT team or military assault squad come up out of the woods alongside of the road.  They were wearing camo battle fatigues and gas masks.  All were carrying rifles.  He heard the shouts but couldn’t understand them as he struggled to catch his breath. 

There was the muffled sound of suppressed gunfire.  Stevens wondered why it sounded different than normal.  He was pretty sure they were carrying M-4 military assault weapons.  He owned one and often took it to the range, and knew the 5.56mm round had a distinctive sound, and these didn’t sound like that or any other similar round he could identify.

As the guard tried to get up to return fire, he was hit in the back of the thigh by something.  Just before passing out, he saw one of the prisoners… he thought it was Ross, the guy that shot the Senator, being led away, still cuffed, with something covering his head. 

***

To JD, it felt like a SpecOps breach.  Had he been ordered to take a hostage out of a vehicle, he would have run the op similarly.  The guards in the back couldn’t do anything except watch as JD was dragged from the van.  Then the guards followed, gasping for breath.  The other prisoner was still locked in the van pleading for them to free him between coughs. 

“I didn’t do it.  What’s going on?” JD yelled, the gas mask his captors had put over his face, muffling the sound.  A few moments before, the van had rocked… later he found out that was when the tires were blown out… and then swerved to the side of the road.  A few scant moments after that, the side of the van was breached by a spike and tear gas was pumped into the space.  Then the rear doors were blown. 

“Shut up, Kracken,” the voice said, dragging him along the rough ground at almost a running pace.  He was having a hard time maintaining his balance with his hands cuffed, but the men at his sides were keeping him upright if he stumbled. 

“Who are you?”

“Shut up, JD,” the other man said, more quietly. 

After a few minutes of running, JD gasping for breath in the heavy mask, the  group slowed and emerged onto a two-track road.  There were a bunch of various, mostly older four-wheel-drive SUVs parked along the road.  The men went to the backs of different vehicles and started changing clothes into hunting gear.  As they got changed over, some of the men were collecting the combat rifles while others unloaded hunting rifles from a locker in the back of a lifted Suburban.  One of the captors freed JD’s hands from the cuffs and pulled off the gas mask.

“Put these on,” Colonel Gilson said as he tossed a new set of hunting camos and a blaze orange vest to JD.

“Sir?”

“You’re riding with me in that old Jeep over there… the one with no doors.  We’ll talk after we get going.  Move it, Soldier.”

JD swapped the orange prison jumpsuit for the camo coveralls, jacket and orange vest the Colonel had tossed to him.  He pulled the orange and camo cap low over his eyes and climbed into the old, lifted Wrangler.  He was pulling on the seatbelt as Colonel Gilson deftly jumped and twisted into the driver’s seat.  It only took a second for him to pull down his seat belt and latch it in one, smooth motion.  The old rig fired as soon as the key turned.  Gilson dropped the shifter into first gear and maneuvered around the few other vehicles that were in the way, heading deeper into the woods on the two-track.  It was almost dark, so as the forest enveloped them, he switched on all his auxiliary lights, turning everything around them into day. 

“Probably wondering exactly what the hell is going on, I’d guess,” he said over the noise of the Jeep scrambling along the bumpy road. 

“Yes, Sir.  I must say that I am.  What’s the deal?” JD asked.

“I got an answer as to why you’d been mustered out.  You were being set up for the murder of the Senator.  Apparently, the operation has been in play for a while.  I have a source that picked up the intel on it.  I can’t go into who or how… but it was a VERY elaborate set-up.  Wait until we get back to our ops base and I’ll show you what we picked up.”

The two men spoke a little more as they made their way back to their base of operations, a cabin that belonged to another member of the Colonel’s vast network of friends and contacts. 

***

Christi pulled back on to the main road just as the black van went out of sight around the bend.  She hammered the gas pedal on the old Taurus, the front tires spinning, looking for traction on the gravel.  By the time she approached the bend the van had disappeared, it was gone.  There was the main road and several dirt roads going off into the woods on either side.  She elected to take the main road and see if she could catch the van.  Otherwise, she would double back and start looking on side roads. 

A couple of miles up the road, she hadn’t seen the van yet.  She thought to herself that they had to have jumped off the main road onto one of the dirt roads she’d passed.  She had been going fast enough that she should have picked up a visual of them, unless they’d done otherwise. 

She doubled back and turned right on the first dirt road she’d passed.  It looked like this was the most parallel to the main road and the dirt looked like it had been disturbed since the last rain.  If the Russians were doing anything along the main road, this might have been where they went.  If they were just running, it wouldn’t matter. 

It was getting darker, and she knew that the chances of her finding anything dropped with every minute that passed.  At this point, she might even stumble into their operational zone… and if they were true to form, they would kill her for being there, just to make sure there were no witnesses.  She cut her lights and pulled to the side of the road.  Even though time was of the essence, she needed to think. 

Christi grabbed her Sig, stepped from the vehicle and tucked it into the back of her waistband.  She walked the short distance to the meandering creek and sat on a small rock outcropping.  She was angry, scared and frustrated.  She knew that the Chugunov brothers would be hunting for Jason, and she had lost them.  They were in her sights… now they were gone, and she didn’t have a clue as to where they went. 

A few minutes later she heard the sound of an engine over the sound of the babbling creek.  She dashed up to the road and looked both ways.  Deeper into the woods she could see a slight glow along the road.  There was no way she could get in the car and move it before the vehicle got to her location, but she could get off the road. 

She turned and ran back toward the creek.  She stepped into the cold water and was across in two strides.  She ducked behind some shrubs along the bank opposite the road.  She saw an old Jeep Wrangler with two men in it rumble by.  They were dressed in hunting camos and wearing orange hunting vests… just a couple of hunters returning from a day of hunting, she thought to herself. 

As she got ready to walk back to the car, she thought she could hear another engine approaching.  She decided to remain hunkered down behind the bush until everything cleared. 

An older Suburban on giant tires stopped right by her car.  The man in the driver’s seat dropped out and pulled a handgun from a holster concealed at the small of his back.  He went to the car and looked through the windows, shining a flashlight into the car.  There was nothing suspicious, so he returned toward the big SUV.  Another man dropped from the passenger side and Christi could hear him tell the first man that he needed to take a leak. 

As Christi sat in her blind, the second man approached within thirty feet of her.  He called back to his companion, “That was messed up, man.  That has to be the weirdest op I’ve ever run.”

“No injuries and we got Kracken… didn’t kill any of the guards, either.  I just wonder what Big Bird is gonna do from here, though,” came the reply from the driver. 

“No doubt, Hammer.  Kracken is in a heap of trouble and can’t show his face anywhere.”

“Come on, Dude.  We gotta RTB.  How long does it take you to piss?”

The man called Hammer zipped up his fly and jogged back toward the Suburban.  As the driver fired the big vehicle up, he swung back into the passenger seat.  The truck started to roll away before the door was even closed. 

Christi emerged from her spot. 

“Kracken is Jason’s ‘in-op’ name,” she said to herself, “and they have him.”  She knew these men had taken him… and she assumed they were friendly but couldn’t be certain. 

She emerged from her cover, quickly splashed across the creek and headed back to the car.  She jumped in and fired it up.  Soon she was speeding along the two-track with her headlights off, trying to get the tail of the big truck in her sights.  She slammed into every bump in the road, barely able to see in front of her. 

She was concentrating so hard on the road in front of her that she didn’t notice the lights in the distance behind her until she was almost to the main road.  That was when she slammed on the brakes and slid to a stop right behind the stopped Suburban, its lights off and its three occupants all standing facing her… armed.  Then she saw the lights in the mirror from the following vehicle, a late model Dodge four by four. 

“Step from the vehicle, hands out and up,” the Suburban driver said to her.

Christi took a moment and centered herself.  She swallowed and opened the door.  She put her hands in the air between the top of the door and the roof, then stepped out of the Taurus.  She felt a sting in the back of her thigh before everything started fading to black. 

One of the men quickly moved forward to check her pulse and make sure she was only knocked out by the dart.  Another man went to the car to make sure there were no other occupants.  He saw the keys hanging in the ignition.  He popped the trunk.  Inside her found a hunting rifle with a scope.  He knew it was strictly civilian kit, but she also didn’t have any hunting gear.  “I think she needs to come with us.  Hunting rifle and ammo… loaded… but no other gear to be hunting, and the Sig on the seat.  She looks dressed to hide in the dark, too.”  The driver of the Suburban agreed.  Then man with Christi gently lifted her and carried her to the Suburban.  He set her on the back seat and secured her hands.  One of the men from the following vehicle hopped into the Taurus and fired it up.  He would be following the other two rigs. 

He closed up his footlocker and rolled it over.  Grabbing his knife off the counter, he popped off the metal strapping around the bottom.  He tore off a piece of duct tape and stuck the card in the middle of it, then reassembled it.  He quickly undressed and slipped into his bunk.  His five o’clock call was only three hours away. 

***

The Afghani soldier that was driving the squad stopped the HMMWV outside the squat building southeast of downtown Kandahar.  They had a report of an insurgent cell trying to assemble improvised explosive devices, and he was bringing out a Special Forces team, along with a squad of Afghani Security Forces soldiers.  He was training the ASF soldiers. 

The Ranger team led the raid, breaching through the side of the building.  His squad was at the opposite end of the building to mop up on anything at their end. 

“Green, do a secondary breach and bring your squad in from the west end.  We’re in position to catch,” was the call over the radio. 

“Roger that, Sergeant,” Green replied to the change in tactics.  He turned to his ASF contact.  He translated and ordered his men through the breach, Green on their tail. 

A moment later he rounded a corner.  He heard the popping of an AK-47, the sound distinct from the M-4s the US and ASF soldiers were using.  He scrambled backwards as several rounds hit his plates, crab walking as fast as he could. 

“Mr. Green,” Rafi, the ASF translator said, looking at him with worry in his eyes.  “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah… I’m good.  Took it in the plates,” he replied. 

“No, Mr. Green.  You’re hit,” Rafi said.  He turned to a couple of the ASF soldiers.  Green heard him shouting in Pashto. 

The men he yelled to grabbed Green, dragging him further back.  He tried to protest, but everything started to fade.  He was getting confused.  Rafi took the radio from his belt and he heard him talking but couldn’t make out the words.  The world went black. 

***

Sharif Hussain was right behind Green as he rounded a corner into the main room of the commercial building.  As he cleared the corner, he saw the muzzle flashes.  Looking up, he was positive that the uniform of the soldier shooting was American.  Then he saw the soldier toss the gun at a downed insurgent. 

As they scrambled back, Sharif could see that Green was struggling.  When he was able to look at him, he saw that he’d been hit, blood oozing from his shoulder next to a plate.  The American was operating on adrenaline.

“Ahmed, Begum, take Green to the HMMWV.  We need to get him out,” he shouted to two of his men. 

“But the medic…”

“Do what I said.” 

The two ASF soldiers grabbed Green by his battle-rattle and pulled him out of the line of fire.  Two more men grabbed his legs and hauled him toward the back of their vehicle.  Rafi followed them out, the building exploding in their wake, blowing the armored transport onto its side, and throwing the ASF soldiers across the courtyard.

Sharif ignored everything as he ordered the downed soldier to an Afghan hospital only a few blocks away.  His men picked him up and ran out of the other side of the courtyard and down the street.  They carried him six blocks to the ER entrance, carrying him inside to meet the stretcher coming to get him.  One of the men cut the plate carrier and other protective gear off him as he was rushed to surgery.  From the time he was hit until he was in surgery was less than ten minutes.  His heart had stopped eight minutes in. 

***

“He’s dead, sir,” Commander Sharif Hussain told the American officer.  “I saw him cut down by an insurgent just before the building exploded.  Two of my men were injured, one severely.  Our HMMWV was damaged, and I had to get them to medical help.  Mr. Green had the radio, so we had no way to communicate with anyone.”

“What happened to Green’s body?” Colonel Wilson asked. 

“I couldn’t get him.  I pulled one of my men clear of the building, but before I could go back, I was blown away from the building by the explosion.  There was nothing left.  Lieutenant Abdi was seriously injured by the explosion.  We had to get him medical attention at the nearby hospital.”

“Thank you, Commander.  That will be all.”

Hussain stood and saluted the American.  He turned and exited the office.  After leaving the base, he took his car toward town and to the small hospital to which Green had been moved.  He could concoct a cover story if needed, but before he let the Americans know that Gregory Green was alive, he wanted to know why one of his own soldiers picked up an insurgent’s rifle and shot him, then blew up the building. 

“Mr. Green,” Rafi said, “I saw an American soldier shoot you.  He was aiming for the top of your ballistic vest.  If I hadn’t bumped you when you stopped, you would have died right there.  Then, they exploded the building, just to make sure.  You were set up, my friend.”

“How did you get me out?”

“That was luck.  The Americans think you are dead.  What shall I do?  We can come up with a story to resurrect you, if needed.”

“Thank you, Rafi.  I think for now, I need to remain dead.  I need to find out exactly who ordered me dead.  I have some of the answers, but not all.  Can you get into my quarters?  I have a computer with some research on it.”

“I shall see what I can do,” he said as he took the American’s keys. 

And then, if we are lucky enough to get a couple of books sold, the next challenge is getting reviews. According to everything I am finding out there on the interwebs, 1-5% is about right for the ratio of books sold to reviews. If I sell a hundred books, I’ll get three reviews, plus or minus two.

Many of the promotional sites require five reviews in order to earn the right to PAY to give away books… which we do in hopes of getting reviews. Some require more. One particularly powerful site requires fifty reviews. My most reviewed book has twelve I think. After a year and a half. A few only have one… and a couple newer books don’t have any, as of this writing.

That is the long way of saying… please give me reviews. If you read my books, please give me a review… Amazon and/or Goodreads. I’ll be forever thankful.

“You must be Mr. Grafton… that would make you Mrs. Grafton,” the woman said, grabbing each of them in an embrace.  “Thank you for coming… food’s right through here.  I’m Celia, Jaden’s mother.”

“Everyone just calls me Gunny,” he said.

“And, please, call me Melody.” 

“Jaden will be so excited you came,” his mother said, “he thinks you hung the moon, Gunny.  And he has never been as excited about school as he is now.”

“He’s a good man, Celia,” Gunny said, his grin crinkling his face beneath his bushy beard. 

Celia led them through the house and out the back.  It was chilly, but there was a big crowd, maybe thirty people, Gunny thought, mostly gathered around a grill, a smoker and a table loaded with food. 

“Jaden, Mr. Grafton is here,” Celia shouted into the yard. 

A moment later, Jaden, followed by Tisha, emerged from a clot of people near the table and trotted over to greet the teacher. 

“Let’s get you some food,” he said.

***

Gunny and Melody made rounds, talking with a score of people each.  Sometimes together, other times apart.  Everyone knew who they were, they were the only white people at the mostly family gathering.  Unsurprisingly, they were treated like family. 

Tisha was sitting on one of the old swings in the backyard, Jaden leaned against the swing set talking with her.  He’d had a crush on her for years, but only in the last couple of weeks, since they had started running, had he been able to spend any time with her.  Getting to know her only made him like her more. 

“Your uncle sure has taken a liking to Sarge,” she said. 

“He was a Marine… I think he was in Vietnam, too.  They probably have some stories they are sharing with each other,” Jaden replied.  “But I don’t know… he never talks about stuff from back then.” 

“Funny watching them now… you’d think they were best friends.” 

“Kinda makes me happy.  Mom says that Uncle Roger wasn’t the same after that, you know?  I mean, he isn’t messed up, but I guess he was different when they were kids.”

***

Gunny carried a shopping bag of food out to the Suburban while Celia and Melody stood in the kitchen and talked.  Melody was drying dishes as Celia washed.  The Graftons had stayed behind as everything broke up, determined to help clean up.  They had also both spent a while talking with Jaden’s mom. 

As Jaden came back from walking Tisha home, Melody was walking out the door, headed for the Suburban.  Gunny was next to the passenger side, waiting for his wife.  Celia waved as Gunny climbed into the truck and Melody walked around to the passenger side.  He waved at them as they pulled out of the driveway. 

“They are good people,” Celia commented to her son as she held the door for him.  “I’m glad they came today.  Not just to say thank you for Sergeant Grafton getting you to school, but ‘cuz of your uncle.  I haven’t seen Roger smile like that in years,” she said quietly. 

Roger was still in the living room, finishing his beer as the TV played in the background.  Sunday Night Football was on, but he didn’t seem to care less about it… which was unusual. 

“Son,” Uncle Roger said to Jaden, “damn sure glad you invited that old jarhead to the party.  He’s a hell of a man.”

“Yes, Sir.  Good teacher, too.”

“I didn’t know him over there, but we knew a few of the same people.  And I knew of him.  Ain’t many men that have a reputation that carried on half a world and thirty years away.  Least not a good reputation.”

“So, did you guys fight together?” Jaden asked, Celia looking on.

“No… nothing like that.  What he did… I didn’t do that.  He was what they call ‘Force Recon’ and what he did was serious work.  When things was ugly, they called in the Marines.  When the Marines thought things was nasty… they called in Recon.  And if what I remember is right, when regular Recon thought it was impossible, they called in his unit.”

“So, Sergeant Grafton was a bad-ass?” Jaden asked. 

“Don’t talk like that, Jaden,” Celia quickly interjected. 

“Naw, Jaden.  He was who the bad-asses called when they were scared,” Roger laughed.  “He’s the kind of guy you want to be friends with.”

“So, what were you guys talking about for so long, Roger?” Celia asked. 

Roger wiped a tear from his eye real quick.  He looked down at the floor, then up again.  He’d erased the pain from his eyes when he looked back up.  “He just asked me if I was ok.”

“What’dya mean?” Jaden asked. 

“Told me he has nightmares sometimes… asked me about mine.  We just talked a little about it.  It’s been twenty-five years since I talked to someone that knew what it was like.”

For the next hour, the three of them sat in the living room talking.  Uncle Roger had been through a lot, but he’d locked it away and tried to forget it.  Gunny had been the first person he’d been able to really talk with… that understood what he had gone through.  Even Roger and Celia’s dad, who’d seen a little combat during World War Two, had a hard time wrapping his mind around the conditions in Vietnam. 

It wasn’t just the rain and the mud and jungle.  It was that every moment of the day, on-duty or off, they were in danger.  Even when they were well back from the front lines, guys were getting killed. 

His father had understood and dealt with the racism from fellow Marines and officers, and that was hard, too.  But the worst was knowing that you could be a hundred miles from the fighting, and a kid could throw a hand grenade into the latrine while you were dropping off your morning load. 

And when you were out in the jungle, every time a leaf moved, it could be a sniper.  Every squish in the mud.  Every person you saw… man, woman or child… they might be your executioner. 

He didn’t tell his sister or his nephew that Gunny had given him a card, too.  He didn’t mention that Gunny had told him that he could call, day or night.  Or that there were a couple of other numbers written on that card, and if he called, someone would talk to him.  He didn’t share that Gunny had told him that he had the nightmares, too.  Or that the numbers on the card were the people he talked to.

As he looked around, he noted that the attacking forces looked more like a trained insurgent militia than an untrained Azerbaijani mob, and they certainly didn’t act like a random mob.  “They’re using squad tactics and know what positions to try to hold.  They are ripping apart the Armenian civilians whenever they try to break out.”

“Punch some holes for the locals, then, Bobby.  Do whatever you need to do to help out the civilians.  But be quick, we still have to get to the pinned down UN forces.”

Gunny backed the APC right up to the doors of the building with the UN Peacekeepers on the roof. 

“Hold ‘em down, Bobby.  Ronny and I are gonna see what we have up there.”

Gunny Grafton and Ronny Torres exited the back of the APC and headed up to the roof of the building.  As they went up the stairs, they started finding evidence of the fight that had taken place in the stairwell.  The first casualties they ran across were the hostile fighters that had been attacking the UN group.  Then they started running across UN casualties. 

“This isn’t good, Ronny.  Any of these guys alive?” Gunny stated.

“Not that I’ve found yet, Gunny.  This was brutal,” the medic said as he knelt next to another fallen UN soldier.  “If they had anyone that was injured, they likely dragged them up the stairs.” 

In the background he could hear the machine gun firing from the APC outside.  There were short bursts followed by the tinkling sound of the casings bouncing off the side of the armored vehicle.  Obviously, Bobby was getting some hostile activity.  He was holding off the attacking force, pinning them down with sporadic fire from the turret.  Hopefully, some of the civilians that were pinned down in the square would be able to get away from the area.

As they got to the top of the stairwell, Gunny radioed back to the American Colonel that had called him in to rescue these soldiers.  “Colonel Bryce, pass along that we’re here and don’t want to get shot coming through the door, Sir,” he said.  A moment later a woman carrying an HK MP5N opened the door and ushered Gunny and Ronny inside. 

“You in charge?” Gunny asked.  She didn’t understand, so he repeated the question in German.  Then she took him to Gefreiter Richter.  As he looked at the injured German soldier, recognition flooded into him, “Rolf?  Is that you?” Gunny said, kneeling beside the man on the ground.  “Ronny, get over here,” he yelled. 

“These guys are all in rough shape, Gunny, what’s up?”

“This is Rolf Richter.  He’s a friend, a Scout.  I haven’t seen him in over six years.  He used to date Nicole and he’s a friend of Jack’s.”

Ronny started checking the man over to see what injuries he had.  He immediately saw that he would be losing his left leg, if Ronny could even keep him alive.  And he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do that. 

Gunny looked around on the roof.  There were dozens of civilians, mostly women and children.  A few were injured, but the real damage had been done to the soldiers.  There were only a handful that were even able to stand. 

“One,” Bobby said over the earpiece radio, “it’s getting hot down here.  How much longer are you going to be?”

“It’s bad up here, too.  We’ve got maybe a hundred civilians to try to evac, as well as eight UN soldiers that are still alive.  When we get them down there, can we get these people away from the heat down there?”

“I guess we have to, Boss,” he replied.

Gunny turned around and looked out at the civilians gathered on the roof.  Then he looked over the side of the roof at the square below.  The protestors were gone, and it was nothing but the counter-protestors, the ones they were pretty sure were Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or some similar force.  Bobby was doing a good job pinning them down, but it was going to take more than that to get the civilians out. 

“Who is in charge of comms here?” Gunny asked.

Soldat Schmitz raised his hand, “I am, Sir.”

“We need evac.  If they can’t do it, we might have to camp here until I can get my own assets here to get these people out.  Your unit has done everything it could to keep these people alive, but if we can’t get some help, we’re all going to have some more work to do.”

“Yes, Sir,” Schmitz replied.  He then got on the radio and raised HQ to try to get help with the civilians.  At the same time, Gunny called his UN contact to plead the case for getting more help with the civilian evac. 

“Gunny, Rolf doesn’t have much time.  I need to get him to my big bag in the next few minutes, and then we really need to get him to a hospital.  We can’t afford to wait for the UN.”

As much as Gunny hated the choice he had to make, he knew what he had to do.  Rolf wasn’t going to make it through a delay.  His squad couldn’t hold off the forces in the square, and the civilians were dead without the UN forces and Gunny’s small force.  “I need some people to help carry these soldiers down to our vehicle.  And we ARE going to get you out of here,” Gunny said to the gathered Armenians.  A group of women came forward and offered to help, while several of the older men and young boys scattered in the crowd took up rifles.  Without getting word back from the UN forces about reinforcements, the crowd started making their way down the stairway, Gunny and Ronny in the lead, the injured UN soldiers being carried right behind them. 

“Four, this is One, are you ready for us?  We’re coming out.”

In response, Bobby launched a few rocket-propelled grenades at some of the places that were being used as cover by the suspected IRGC fighters.  He followed that up by saturating the areas around them with the Zastava 7.62mm machine gun.  Gunny added to it with the M249 SAW, Squad Assault Weapon, making sure that any resistance was suppressed. 

One of the locals ran up behind Gunny, “I know a way out of here if you can get us around the corner.  There is a subway station, and we can use the tunnels to get away.”

He took Gunny over to show him the subway station entrance.  The former Marine took a few minutes to make sure the station was clear, at least as far as the platform, before coming back over to the waiting APC. 

He stepped inside the back of the APC, “Bobby, we need to keep their heads down while we sneak a hundred people into the subway.”

“On it, Boss.  I’ll light ‘em up.  Give me a ten count and then make the move.”

Gunny quickly stepped out of the APC and got the locals organized.  The people carrying guns were assigned to the front and back of the group, with the bulk of the group unarmed in the middle.  Ten seconds later Bobby threw everything he had at the hostiles across and around the square.  Everything that he had seen move in the last few minutes took fire from him.  Gunny fired a few RPGs at areas he thought might be providing cover for the insurgents. 

As the attack reached a crescendo, Gunny led a group of Armenians toward the subway entrance.  There was no resistance inside the tunnel.  After getting everyone down into the subway complex, Gunny returned to the APC to make a run through the insurgent fighters, making sure they were suppressed, then they would drive to the next station just to be sure no bogies were able to get down in front of the civilians in their escape. 

Ronny was working furiously on several of the injured in the back of the APC.  He was doubtful that four of the nine would make it to the hospital.  Rolf was on the cusp.  The other four were in better shape.  Luckily one of the civilians was an Emergency Room Nurse and she stayed in the vehicle to help Ronny with the injured soldiers. 

“How far from the hospital are we Irena?” Ronny asked the nurse in German.

“Maybe fifteen minutes,” she replied, knowing that every minute made a difference. 

“Gunny, you better step on it.  Rolf doesn’t have fifteen minutes.” 

Bobby came back down inside the vehicle to help Ronny.  Meanwhile, Gunny pushed the armored vehicle as hard as he could through the pre-dawn streets of Yerevan.  It took him eleven minutes, but he pulled up in the ER portico at Yerevan Medical Center.  The nurse jumped from the back of the APC and ran through the door to get a stretcher and help as Ronnie readied Rolf and the six other remaining soldiers to transfer.  Two had passed away from their injuries on the drive to the hospital. 

Ten minutes later three of the soldiers were in surgery, including Rolf.  He’d lost consciousness before being carried to the APC and hadn’t awoken since. 

Gunny took his small team back out to the armored vehicle and set out to find the people that they’d put in the subway tunnel.  He wanted to know that they had made it safe out of the tunnel and back to friendlier territory.