Free Task Force Desperate by Peter Nealen

peeked around the corner, he was too far back from the corner to have a hope in hell of hitting my teammates. I leaned out, put the front sight post on his center-mass, and shot him. He crumpled, and everything went quiet.
    “Hillbilly, coming out.” I did not want to be mistaken for a gomer. Unlikely, given my size and build, but it always pays to be careful. I reloaded with my third and last mag as I came back around to the front.
    Imad was already in the truck, and Larry and Jim were on a knee to either side, rifles up. Alek was behind the wheel. “Get in,” he said. “We’ve got to get moving.” I complied quickly enough, grabbing my rifle off the floor in the back. We hadn’t wanted to leave anything in the Defender when we’d left it, so we’d stashed our heavy stuff with the backup vehicle. As soon as I was in, Jim got in the passenger seat, and Larry squeezed into the back.
    As Alek threw the Range Rover into reverse, and roared out of the farmyard, Larry started patting me over. “I’m fine,” I told him. He finished his blood sweep anyway, and then leaned across me to Imad. I pushed his arm back. “I’ll check him.” It was standard procedure for us to check each other after a firefight. Sometimes you can get hit, and the adrenaline is just going so strong you don’t even notice. I ran my hands over Imad’s arms, legs, and back, checking for blood. Nothing.
    “What the hell happened?” Alek asked, over the noise of the engine and the gravel under the tires.
    “It was a simple robbery,” Imad said. “They didn’t have any info; they just knew we had money.” We stopped at the Defender, and, instead of continuing the debrief, Imad and I jumped out and ran to our vehicle. Imad slid behind the wheel, while I got in the passenger side, reloaded my .45, and pulled my rifle up onto my lap. The rest of what had happened could wait until we got back to the compound.
    We split off from the Range Rover. We’d take different routes back to the compound, to keep our footprint small. This wasn’t like Afghanistan or Libya, where there had been an established presence, and convoys were common.
    As we pulled away, headlights off, we could see people starting to converge on the farm, as well as a couple of HiLuxes, each with several armed men in the back. I took a closer look with the NVGs, and they looked like militia, not official security forces. In fact, I couldn’t hear any sirens, or see any flashing lights. It looked like things had gotten so bad the local authorities really weren’t venturing anywhere outside their strongholds in the city.
    This was probably going to create a stir. I doubted that the guys we’d shot were the only ones who knew there were going to be Westerners at that farm tonight, and the shootout was probably going to tip somebody off that there were more than just scared tourists and idealistic humanitarian organizations in town. I cussed under my breath. Between the lack of support from the States, and now this, the job was looking more and more impossible by the hour.
    If they thought the US had sent JSOC after them, the bad guys were likely to just kill the rest of the hostages, or, almost as bad, move them. Not that we had any sort of reliable intel on even their general location.
    We wound through the streets, taking a complicated and serpentine route back to the compound. There wasn’t a lot of traffic. The streetlights were on, and there were people out walking around, but there was a furtive undertone to their movements. People were scared.
    When we got to the compound, we found quite a crowd there. The lights were on, and Billy was walking along a line of locals, most of them showing injuries, directing some to one room or the other. I got out and walked over as Imad parked the truck, careful to leave my rifle in the cab, and my pistol concealed. These people didn’t need to see what we really were.
    “What’s going on, Billy?” I asked, as I walked up.
    He