| Subject: ...For Meritorious Service, Chapter 24d, part one |
Author:
TxJAG_b
|
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 13:31:09 04/16/08 Wed
In reply to:
TxJAG_b
's message, "...For Meritorious Service" on 09:04:26 05/08/07 Tue
A/N1: What did I tell you - the moment I opened my mouth in February, my muse said 'you asked for it'. The good news is you're going to get three parts this month. On with the story....
Forward Operating Base – Metz
Alpha Company positions
1st Lieutenant Edgar Sloan looked through his binoculars again. This was the first time Captain Lewis had put him in charge of the FOB. He wanted to make a good impression on the Cap’n and show him he was up to the task. He looked again at the glowing lights of the two closest houses. The Hassan brothers [as he called them] were at it again. They were running back and forth between those two fortress-like houses that flanked the entrance to Amariya.
Usually when the ‘Hassan brothers’ started this routine, it was normally followed by a round of probing fire directed at FOB Metz.
But today, instead of just taking the probing fire [as they had been for days] Captain Lewis gave him permission to respond in kind. And, when he received a signal from Colonel Livingston, he was supposed to order his mortar units to fire smoke shells at those houses as well.
He didn’t much care for Colonel Livingston. Sloan thought she was one cold fish. She acted like she cared. The key word here was ‘acted’. She acted concerned, she acted human…he wasn’t all that impressed with her ‘acting’ skills.
As for the Cap’n…Sloan would never say this to anyone else, but the Captain gave him the creeps. His orders seemed normal enough, though. Fire all available mortars as soon as you hear from Colonel Livingston. At least now they were doing something. All this watching and waiting made him antsy….
*~*
With Bud’s help, the new MEU doctor was able find what they were looking for; their victim was Charles J. Rathum; Sergeant, 2nd Force Recon. Serial number 0422177-325.
Bud printed a hard copy of the man’s medical record and then hurried over to the MEU NCIS office. The junior JAG attorney also carried with him a copy of the doctor’s preliminary findings – Sergeant Rathum had been shot. From the powder residue found on the Sergeant’s shoulder blades, it had to have been in the head at close range.
*~*
It was Ebbits’ SUVs’ turn to take the lead. Owl four (Ebbits’ call sign) pulled ahead of Mac’s pickup headed toward the next hill listed on their orders.
His truck started up the sandy hill smoothly enough, but it quickly lost ground and slid to the side.
“The El-tee’s truck’s hit a soft spot,” Mac observed. She was practicing her role using Williams as her guinea pig. She was supposed to be a ‘loose cannon’ but with this gnawing pain in her backside, it was hard maintaining her ‘role’. She hoped she wouldn’t make a fatal mistake.
Mac watched as the driver of the other pickup, Corporal Burgess, stopped his forward momentum and let the weight of the truck carry it back down to more solid ground.
Both Mac and Sergeant Williams breathed a sigh of relief. Digging out a stuck pickup truck was not on their agenda, nor did they want that chore to be added.
Carlson got out and looked at Mac’s truck for moment, and then he motioned them forward. As they came even with his pickup, he gave them a wry look.
“Try not to repeat my success, Sergeant….” he told Mac’s driver.
“Aye sir,” he replied. Then he turned to Mac. “Tell the guys topside to hang on tight, ma’am; this might get bumpy…”
“Secure yourselves,” Mac said as she stuck her head out of the window.
As soon as the words were out of her mouth and she was back in her seat, Sergeant Williams gunned the Dodge’s engine and sailed up the questionable slope.
He looked over at a stunned Mac. “The trick is ma’am to go fast enough so you don’t bog down!”
“And how do we stop once we get to the top of this rise Sergeant!?” Mac was able to bite out as she grabbed on for dear life.
But the Sergeant didn’t answer her as they bounded up the slope and arrived at the top of the rise with a resounding ker-thunk! Mac thought her jaw had become unhinged. Oddly, her mind reported that her back wasn’t bothering her anymore at the moment….
The driver looked at Mac. “Are you all right ma’am?” he asked.
From the back of the truck came a shaky voice. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Are we alive!?”
The Master Guns broke into a harsh laugh. “If you can speak, son, then you’re alive!”
Mac gave the driver a less than reassuring smile. “Let’s see if we can avoid doing that again, Sergeant.”
The Sergeant flashed her an embarrassed look. It didn’t matter whether it had worked or not or whether or not the light Colonel was in the bad mood. At least she didn’t dress him down. “Understood ma’am.”
In the meantime, Lieutenant Ebbits’ truck rolled to the top of the rise. The Lieutenant had a big smile on his face.
“Forgot to tell you, Colonel, Sergeant Williams was an off-road racer before he joined the Marines….”
*~*
Sloan tried to dig deeper into his foxhole. Machineguns in both the fortified houses chattered, kicking up clods of dirt and fountains of sand around the Marine positions.
“Able sentry one, taking machinegun and small arms fire from the village!” he barked into his radio.
“Wait one, able sentry….” the responding voice replied.
The cough of mortars could be heard across the front of Forward Operation Base Metz.
Sloan dug out his binoculars again and moved over to an observation position. He watched with grim satisfaction as his unit’s 60 millimeter and 81 millimeter mortar rounds began impacting all around the two fortified houses. Maybe that would shut up the ‘Hassan brothers’ for a while….
*~*
Harm went down to Sick Bay. He wanted to see how Sandy was doing after her ‘performance’ on the flight deck. When he walked through the doorway, the CMO looked up from a report he was typing.
“Are you all right, Commander?” he said with a hint of concern in his voice as he started to rise.
Harm gave the doc a wry smile and motioned for him to sit back down. “Sorry; I just wanted to see how Lieutenant Ribkins was doing….”
“I understand. Well, she’s responding to the medicine we gave her to keep her from throwing up,” the CMO replied sitting back down. “But, she’s still going to have to stay in isolation for a while.”
Harm nodded and turned to go.
“Commander?”
The tall attorney/aviator stopped and turned back to the doctor.
“There’s someone down here who has been asking if you’re on board…”
“Who?”
“Lieutenant Commander Hawkes. Do you know her?”
*~*
When Bud arrived in the NCIS office, Gibbs and Sturgis were back to interrogating Sedrick Phillips. He could hear their voices behind the closed door.
“I do not know anything about this body you have found, Special Agent Gibbs. We’re in Iraq; there are plenty of decapitated bodies out there in the desert…”
Gibbs wasn’t buying his innocent act. Or at least he was pretending not to. “How about ones wearing US military issue underwear?”
“He could have been a soldier killed during the initial fighting and declared missing, desert bandits might have stolen his clothes….”
“But why desecrate his body, Mr. Phillips?” Asked Sturgis’ sonorous voice.
“Perhaps they were allies of Saddam. Revenge of some sort…”
Bud was still trying to decide whether or not to knock when Gibbs opened the door and came face to face with the Lieutenant.
Gibbs’ expression flared ominously for a moment and Bud took an involuntary step backwards.
“What is it Lieutenant?” He said quickly shutting the door and ushering the junior officer down the hallway so that Sturgis and more importantly, Sedrick Phillips, could not hear what Bud had to say.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” Bud said respectfully. “Here are the preliminary findings from the MEU doctor and the victim’s medical record.”
Bud didn’t know about Gibbs’ rules for never interrupting an interrogation, but then Gibbs had stepped out of the room, so technically he wasn’t interrogating a suspect.
Gibbs took the papers from Bud’s hands and quickly scanned them.
“He was with 2nd Force Recon?”
“Yes sir, and I found something else while I was getting that information--”
“What?” Gibbs wanted the junior JAG officer to cut to the chase.
“It’s on the last sheet, sir,” Bud replied helpfully
Gibbs flipped to the last page. He only glanced at it before turning and heading back to the interrogation room.
*~*
Lieutenant Ebbits drew a simplistic map of the area in the sand. The Master Guns and Mac, as well of the rest of the recon team, stood huddled around the CO. “The SEAL Team says they spotted the BMD here,” he indicated with his stick the hill adjacent to the one they were on. “They said mounted and dismounted patrols tend to start at the top of that hill and then make their way down to the base and fan out across the desert floor, coming as far as this farm which is halfway between their hill and our hill.” Ebbits pointed to the mark he had made in between the two circles.
Ebbits looked at the faces of his recon team. “Our job, *ladies and gentlemen*, is to observe this carrier and see if it’s the real thing or just an armored bulldozer.”
A few of the team members chuckled at that comment. Mac knew they were laughing at idea that this ‘bogeyman’ might just be…nothing. But she figured he was using the phrase ‘ladies and gentlemen’ in a sarcastic manner to get their attention. It did.
At this point Master Guns Wilbane took over. “We will note which hidey hole it comes out of and which one it goes into. Then I want us to move into Amariya posing as part of a rag-tag militia unit. Calapango, Mickens, you’ll be our security, while the Colonel, Danvers and I go into town and see if all of them are as friendly to Saddam as the intel reports indicate. The Lieutenant, O’Grady, Szymas will be rearguard backed by Calapango and Mickens if things get rough.”
As with Ebbits, Mac noticed there seemed to be almost a total lack of expletives in Wilbane’s vocabulary. She wondered if he was doing that just because of the mixed company….
“If we’re lucky, we’ll find someone in town who doesn’t think so much of the Baath Party and the Saddam Fedayeen. If we’re really lucky, they might help us lure this mystery machine out of hiding.”
“But you all know the odds of that one happening….”
This time the chuckles were more strained.
Ebbits looked at his watch “Okay, let’s set up for observing. We got some scuttlebutt that says our little Soviet built dune buggy should make its appearance before noon. Let’s hope they’re right….”
*~*
Harm was taking a risk. He knew that. The doctor had advised him against doing this, but when he heard that Skates wanted to talk to him, he had to get inside to hear what she had to say.
Harm had never really forgotten it was Elizabeth ‘Skates’ Hawkes who’d brought him back from the depths of hypothermia after they’d fished him out of the Atlantic back in 2001. She said it was payback for keeping her from drowning after Lieutenant Isaaks’ ramp strike. He felt though, that he had never really thanked her for what she’d done. Sure, he had defended her when she was accused of dereliction of duty, but to him, that wasn’t the same. So, if she needed something, he was going to do his best to get it for her.
Beth was lying on her side as he approached her bunk. Most of the other people in the room were asleep or wishing they could. Retching could be heard occasionally. Harm tried to ignore that.
“Skates….” he said softly, trying not to disturb the man sleeping in the next rack over.
Beth turned over and squinted up at the white robed figure wearing a surgical mask. She seemed to be having trouble getting her eyes to focus.
“Who… C-Commander? What…what are you doing here?” she croaked. Harm could see her sheets were soaked with sweat from her fever.
“The doctor said you wanted to talk to me,” Harm said as he pulled up a chair, “So here I am.”
“You know…you’re not immune to this stuff,” she warned. Next to her a sailor groaned and turned his face off the side of his bed aiming for the bedpan on the floor.
Harm tried to reassure her. “I’m being careful, Skates, now what did you want to talk to me about?”
Skates put a hand to her right temple and massaged it for a moment. Then she slowly pulled herself up in the bed.
“Hey, easy there, Commander,” Harm said gently, “Maybe you should lie back down,”
“After we’ve talked…Commander,” she managed to get out as she struggled to sit upright Her use of his rank indicated she wanted to be sure she had his attention. Harm could tell by the way she was leaning, that the virus was interfering with her sense of balance.
He waited for her to steady her breathing.
Beth managed to crack a weak smile. “You’d better hope you’re immune, sir. This stuff is nasty….”
Somewhere in the room another person retched. “So I’ve heard,” Harm said, hoping the play on words would sound funny.
Beth gave him another weak smile shook her head and immediately looked as if she regretted it.
“You know I could order you to go back to sleep,” Harm said only half-joking. He knew she was in agony.
“Sorry Commander, no can do; you’ve gotta know about Nicole…”
“What do I need to know?”
“Why she’s acting the way she is around you.”
“How’d you know about that?”
“I know her, Hammer, I’ve flown with her, remember?”
“I can find out everything I need to know from her, Skates.” Harm started to get up.
Beth Hawkes’ arm shot out and snagged Harm’s “No, that’s just it, Harm, you can’t, And you two have to trust each other implicitly.”
The tall aviator/lawyer, unnerved by her sense of urgency about this sat back down. “Okay, Skates, I’m listening….”
*~*
It seemed that the ‘Hassan brothers’ were spoiling for a fight as badly as FOB Metz was. The mortar barrage increased the amount of fire from the blockhouses instead of lessening it.
Sloan could see some of his outer perimeter positions were getting hammered. His keyed his radio again. “Keep those mortar rounds coming! If we hit them long enough, maybe they’ll back off!”
*~*
A pair of AH-1W Supercobras zoomed along, hugging the desert floor. They flanked a sand brown CH-46E Sea Knight better known to Marines and Naval aviators as a ‘Phrog’. The three helos roared along at top speed. The idea was to present as small a target as possible to any lucky man with portable SAMs.
Darcy Livingston stood at the front of her stick. She hadn’t been on many missions like this, but every chance she got, she reveled in it. It was one of the few things that gave her any kind of emotional high. Well, as close as she could ever remembering. Most of the time she was stuck back at base being a unit commander. But this mission was special. They were here to observe Ebbits’ ‘kids’ - the newest members of her Force Recon unit.
As her Phrog made its way to their landing zone, she smiled. She was finally going to get to see how MacKenzie did in a real combat situation. It’s one thing to be a legal advisor to a recon team – it’s a whole other story when you have to fight as well as advise.
*~*
Harm walked down the passageway until he reached the female officer quarters. It had been an hour since he last saw Nicole Hollands up on the flight deck.
Part of him wanted to make sure she was all right. The other part wanted to get to the bottom of her latent hostility towards him. Harm had been a pilot long enough to know the difference between friendly rivalry and smoldering dislike.
After his earlier conversation with Skates and Dust Storm who were in isolation, Harm had to find out where he and Nicole stood. He couldn’t have an executive officer with an axe to grind if they got into a tight situation.
Harm arrived at her door and gently rapped on it.
“Just a minute,”
Harm decided at this point pulling himself to his full height when she opened the door [as he usually did when meeting an antagonistic person] was probably not the best way to start off their conversation. Especially since he was trying to be friends with her.
“Who is it?”
How should he answer the request? ‘Commander Rabb’ would imply an official visit and put her on the defensive. ‘Harmon Rabb’ would just sound silly. Maybe…maybe using his call sign would be the best bet….
“It’s Ham--”
Nicole pulled open her door before Harm could complete his spoken choice.
Lieutenant Commander Hollands looked up to see the all 6’4” of Harmon Rabb, junior still decked out in olive drab flight suit, standing in her doorway.
Sandy’s flippant comment, ‘Jolly Green Giant’ mirrored Nicole’s thought as she tried to gather herself.
“Sorry, I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” Harm said apologetically.
“Um, yeah, thank you, sir,” she said opening the door wider, knocked off her guard by his self effacing manner, “Won’t you come in?”
Harm made his way into her cabin, making sure to leave the door open. “I wanted to talk to you for a moment, if I could….”
Nicole really wasn’t paying that close attention to him. She was composing a letter to her brother, back home. She squinted at the screen, her back to him, not paying attention to the tall Reservist. To her, he was still a Reservist, a part-timer. He just played at being a pilot. And, she wanted to get this done before anything else happened.
Nicole was sure this was really not all that important. Even if he was her superior. She finished typing in her last thoughts and hit ‘send’.
“Okay, sir, what about?”
“About your problem with me.”
Nicole turned around, stood up and faced him when she heard that comment.
*~*
Two more men went down wounded. In addition to the ‘Hassan brothers’, it seemed a bunch of their relatives had joined the fight as well. The Lieutenant was getting reports from throughout the FOB that all of them were taking heavy probing fire.
Sloan looked at his watch. If the Colonel didn’t land soon and tell him she was in position, he’d be writing a lot of those damn ‘you’re son died a hero’ letters tonight….
*~*
Two Dodge pickup trucks slowed to halt behind the low rise. Emerging from the trucks were a group of Marines attired like Lieutenant Ebbits’ team.
Sergeant Cienfuentes and Corporal Gonzalez made their way up the slight hill so they could get a better view of Amariya and the hill where Ebbits’ team was positioned. Both men knew Ebbits and what he was doing, having been trained by him. They had been with 2nd Force Recon since before “the old lady,” Colonel Livingston, had made the jump from staff officer to CO.
As they set up their observation post, Gonzalez’s radio crackled with a static filled voice. “Eagle to Ghost 2, situation green….”
Behind them the thump, thump, thump of helo rotors grew louder. Sergeant Cienfuentes and the rest of the team looked up at the three fast approaching craft.
The two Cobra gunships slowed up as they approached the hill. The transport helicopter settled down quickly behind the slope, disgorging its cargo of Marines and then picked up speed again and lifted off, heading back in the direction of FOB Metz. The two helicopter gunships thumped away from the hill and positioned themselves behind a series of dunes in back of the hill. Ready to lend assistance if needed.
Colonel Livingston made her way to the edge of the reserve slope where the two Marines were already positioned.
“Corporal Gonzalez, how are they doing so far?”
The Corporal looked through his binoculars at Lieutenant Ebbits’ position. “Right on schedule, Colonel.”
Darcy nodded to her radioman. “Signal Sloan, tell him to start hitting the insurgents forward positions with mortars.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
*~*
Mac and Kayce made sure their faces were covered as Sergeant Williams pulled into Amariya.
The sky towards the outskirts of the city was becoming obscured from FOB Metz’s mortar smoke rounds. The haze produced made it impossible for the insurgents to accurately see their target, consequently, they reduced their probing machinegun fire.
Emboldened by the reduced enemy fire, FOB Metz continued to pump the smoke rounds into the insurgent positions.
The Force Recon Marines idly watched as insurgent soldiers surged toward the smoke – they were expecting an attack. In the midst of the organized chaos, Mac noticed several older men who had been sitting at tables near the entrances to their homes did not move, but seemed to note who and what was responding to the crisis.
Some of the women had coolly gathered their children and went indoors, pulling their window shutters and doors closed. They had obviously been through this before.
The Sergeant was about to pull off into an alley when a beat up UAZ-469 light jeep screeched to halt beside to the Dodge pickup.
[to be continued in 24d part two]
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
| |
Feedback: 