Free Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) by Peter Nealen Page B

He had the advantage of being stationary, and therefore stable.  He had the disadvantage of not being that good with the gun, and trying to hit us as we were moving.
    The Humvee’s turret lit up with a six-foot muzzle flash.  Tracers snapped by overhead, but he was shooting high, which seemed to be a pretty normal thing for most of these fighters.  He was probably free-gunning it, too, the weapon swinging freely on the pintle, and therefore at the mercy of its own recoil.  One round hit the truck ahead of us with a bang that I could hear even over all the other noise, but the truck didn’t slow down, and the rest went by overhead with a staccato series of loud snap s.  The tracers looked huge, but they were flying by overhead instead of into us, and seemed to be going higher with each burst.
    Little Bob was a bit better at this; he leaned into the gun and fired off a couple of short bursts in return.  He waited until we’d gotten over the curb before firing, and even then, the truck’s motion meant most of his rounds were off.  They were close enough to get some heads down, though, which bought us a little time to get across the open space.  That was really all we needed.
    The crossing took seconds.  I was grateful, if somewhat surprised, that none of the trucks broke an axle going over the median.  Unfortunately, we’d been spotted and drawn fire.  Now we weren’t going to be able to just slip by.  And, we’d just ducked for cover in one of the most intensely pro-Jaysh al Mahdi neighborhoods in Basra.
    The lead driver floored it, but the streets were narrow, often with cars and pickups of varying levels of repair along the sides of the street.   We scraped by a battered-looking HiLux and almost collided with a sedan coming out of a compound gate only a few yards further on.
    I had my window rolled down and my rifle pointed out, as did everyone else in the truck who wasn’t driving.  Well, everyone else except Daoud, since he was sitting bitch in the back seat, flex-cuffed and gagged.
    Somebody had phoned ahead again.  A set of loudspeakers I couldn’t see started blaring in strident Arabic.  I hadn’t seen a mosque in the area, but a lot of them consist of normal buildings with loudspeakers mounted on the wall, so that wasn’t too much of a surprise.  It was still bad news.  We had kicked the hornet’s nest.
    Hearing the yelling from the mosque’s loudspeakers, more and more people were starting to look out their windows or through their compound gates.  I was trying to watch all of them at once, looking for a weapon, an initiation device, anything.  My heart rate was starting to climb; once I was in a fight I was calm as hell, but the lead-up was always nerve-wracking.  I kept finding myself thinking come on, let’s fucking go already .
    I didn’t see who threw it.  All of a sudden something hit the hood of the truck, bounced off, and exploded just behind us.  I’d caught just enough of a look to see it was a grenade before it blew up.
    Hassan had already opened the back window, and twisted around in his seat.  “Little Bob, okay?” he yelled back.
    I couldn’t make out what Little Bob said, but Hassan turned back forward and gave me a thumbs-up.  “He is okay,” he reported.  His words were almost drowned out by the long burst that Little Bob ripped off at someone above, and then we were too busy trying to stay alive to talk much.
    Fighters were starting to pop out of the woodwork.  Two appeared on a balcony to our right, one of them with an AK pointed down at us, the other with a weapon I couldn’t see clearly enough to identify as anything other than a weapon.  I didn’t have a very good shot at either of them, given that we were still moving at close to thirty-five miles an hour, and so I made up for inaccuracy with volume of fire.  My short-barrel M1A wasn’t automatic, but it didn’t need to be.  I dumped about five rounds each, and saw both drop out of sight,