Baptism of Fire Read online

  BAPTISM OF FIRE

  By Todd McLeod & Eric Meyer

  THE HAWKIN’S HEROES SERIES

  Copyright 2018 by Todd McLeod & Eric Meyer

  Published by Swordworks Books

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Foreword

  “Shoot them! Dammit, Hawkins, they’re on us.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Get the lead out man, we need you.”

  He grinned to himself, liking the guys he chatted with over the headset. They said he was the best, a winner, spewing out bullets with a machine gun and he rarely missed. He preferred the M249 SAW, or Squad Automatic Weapon, and he could outshoot anyone, no question.

  Some said it was just a game, but for Hawkins it was much more. The latest first-person shooter on his Xbox, and one that got his heart pumping every single time. He was the closest thing to a god when he played, and he knew it. The console was a present from his Mom and Dad on his sixteenth birthday, and it almost took over his life. Except no sooner had he started to become good when they moaned for him to spend less time online.

  “Get yourself out into the fresh air, Eddie. Ride your bike or play some football.”

  Not good. They’d bought him that console and the latest Call of Duty. Now they wanted to kick him out of the house so he couldn’t go online. Besides, he reckoned he was reasonably fit. He walked to high school and back every day and played ball in the yard. Although he’d like to have been a bit more ripped, and he worked out sometimes in the garage on his Dad’s weights. At five feet nine inches he was Average Joe. Except for his flaming ginger hair. Complete with the inevitable freckles which didn’t impress him.

  He’d met a girl who hung out at the mall and he was sure she was interested in him, although so far it hadn’t come to anything. Maybe it never would, he had an idea his life wouldn’t be complete until he could spend all his time playing the game. Firing that machine gun, maybe doing it for real. He was thinking about joining the army. Would she fall for him in that fancy uniform? Damn right she would.

  His other hobby was capturing images on his battered looking smartphone, and that was something else he’d become good at. It also took him out of the house without his Mom and Pop having to toss him out. Whenever he went someplace new he’d take the selfie and post it to Instagram. But it wasn’t just selfies. He captured landscapes and old, iconic buildings, although people interested him the most. They said you could read a person’s thoughts by looking into their eyes, and he used the phone to capture those eyes. Their expressions told him everything. Whether the subject was happy, miserable, anxious, or terrified. It was all in the eyes. It was like looking into their minds, picking out the good, the bad and the ugly. He liked to weigh them up and see which category they fitted. Most were bad or ugly. Sometimes both.

  But he always went back to online gaming and inside the tightknit online community, the name Hawkins became legendary. And then his eighteenth birthday arrived and he made the fateful decision. Enough gaming, now he’d do it for real. Show them what he could do with a machine gun. He left school and signed up for the army.

  The recruiting sergeant gave him a skeptical glance. “Name?”

  “Eddie Hawkins.”

  “Uh huh. You have a nickname, Eddie? Whaddaya friends call you?”

  “I don’t have one.” He felt his face going red. This tough-looking vet didn’t look like he had much of a sense of humor.

  “So whadda they call you?”

  “Hawkins.”

  “Original.”

  “It’s my name.”

  He grinned. “Okay, Hawkins it is. Do you have a specialty in mind for when you complete basic training?”

  “Uh, the infantry.”

  Another smile. “You reckon you’d be pretty good with a machine gun, is that right?”

  “Well, yeah, I do.”

  “A lot of kids think the same way. We’ll see. Do you have a second choice?”

  “I like taking pictures.”

  “That’d be Photo Recon, I’ll make a note.”

  They gave him a uniform and sent him to Fort Bragg for basic training. When he made it to the range they put him behind a light machine gun. An M249, just like in the game. He stared at the targets several hundred meters away, and it seemed like an awful long distance.

  “Commence firing!”

  He sighted along the barrel and squeezed the trigger. He afterward worked out he’d fired in excess of one hundred rounds. Every single one missed. For some reason, his brain didn’t connect with his eye to line up on the target. Like he had some kind of a mental block, and he couldn’t figure out why. Online, he was the king. Here, he reckoned they’d wash him out of basic. Or put him to peeling potatoes in the cookhouse. What use was an infantryman if he couldn’t hit the target?

  In desperation, he went to see his Lieutenant. “Sir, I’m not hacking this shooting, it just isn’t happening.”

  He frowned. “I saw you out there, Hawkins, and you’re the worst shot we’ve had all year. What about a different specialty?”

  “I take pictures, Sir.”

  “Photo Recon, I’ll talk to them.”

  He finished basic and glanced at the noticeboard to see which Photo Recon unit they’d assigned him to. Wrong, they were sending him to Afghanistan. He’d be a machine gunner in charge of a Browning .50. Great, a machine gunner who couldn’t shoot straight.

  Chapter One

  Sitting high in the armored cupola of the Humvee he could see everything. PFC Eddie Hawkins was also able to hear everything. Like the three officers standing just a few meters away and talking amongst themselves.

  “They’re up there, somewhere. Lieutenant, and there’s only one way to find out. Send them in to flush them out.”

  “Cap’n, if intel got it right they could be waiting for us. Our men could run into heavy fire.”

  A shrug. “That’s what they pay us for, Lieutenant. Get ‘em moving.”

  Eddie pretended not to hear. Two klicks away the low hills were a dark scar across the landscape. The hills where the enemy were likely dug in and waiting. This was Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Bandit country, Taliban country, and he was grateful of the armored steel cupola that protected him.

  He was also grateful for his buddies below him. Even if his usual skill at working out what lay behind their eyes had deserted him. Master Sergeant Dan Jones was the man who kept them alive. A tough, leathery vet, working through his second tour. He was tall, erect, a soldier born to command men in battle. His piercing blue eyes were wintry, and he rarely smiled. The Sergeant just did his job, and he was damn good at it. The kind of guy you felt good about having on your side when the shooting started.

  Next to him sat the driver, PFC Winston Bellows. Always surveying the road ahead through his dark, hooded eyes set in coffee colored skin. Winston was short and broad, and like Dan, Eddie had yet to fathom what went on behind those eyes. Maybe he was working out the best routes for them to travel. Or was it somet
hing else?

  Hunched in back over his radio gear was Corporal Al Taylor. He was about the same height as Eddie, and like Master Sergeant Dan he was on his second tour. Always double-checking for something he’d missed. Ultra-careful, and he always wore a serious demeanor. As if he worried about something he’d missed, something that could cost them their lives. But that was ridiculous, he was a vet. Another puzzle.

  In the short time he'd been in Afghanistan he'd grown to trust these guys. If he ever got out of this country alive it would be because of these men. They were vets, skilled and dangerous, like soldiers should be. Like the Browning .50. The enemy should fear these tough, hard men. But they wouldn’t fear him.

  He despaired of becoming a marksman, like when he played online. He should have joined that Photo Recon unit and maybe he’d have done better. Through high school he’d captured every kind of image imaginable, and his selfies had scored thousands of hits. Several of his images had appeared in the school magazine, and they said he had talent. Now he’d learned the way how the Army worked. They forced square pegs into round holes, like when they assigned him to infantry as a machine gunner. He’d told them again and again it was pointless, but it never made a difference.

  Why won’t they listen to me?

  He was in the middle of a war and his lousy marksmanship embarrassed and worried him. He tried hard to be a better gunner, but nothing changed. No matter what he tried, the simple fact was he failed to hit the target. He should have been behind a camera, not a machine gun. The rest of his team said nothing, even after they’d run into serious trouble just last month.

  * * *

  “Hostiles, hostiles, four hundred meters, four o’clock. Gunner, open fire!”

  He’d chewed through several belts of .50 caliber ammo and he may as well have shouted insults for all the good it did. Their driver took a bullet in the guts and Sergeant Jones took over and got them back to base. The medics patched up the wounded man enough for a ticket back to the States. Dan had noticed Eddie’s misery, and told him his shooting wouldn’t have made a difference. He still wished they’d listened to him and put him anywhere but here.

  * * *

  Bellows was their new driver, and the guy was a wizard with a steering wheel. Although every time hot lead hurtled toward them, Eddie felt bad about his shooting. Waiting for the bullets to cripple or kill another of his team, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  His buddies never complained. They were a team, and their Humvee was much more than steel, electrical cable, rubber and gasoline. The team brought it alive, each man a part of the living organism that was a fighting machine. A living and breathing entity. After that last debacle he’d vowed to do better, and now he had his chance. When they went up that slope, he’d find the enemy wherever they were hiding and nail the bastards.

  He listened as Corporal Al Taylor passed the microphone to Dan.

  “Message coming through.”

  He took the mike. “This is Master Sergeant Jones, go ahead.”

  He listened for a short time, and when he signed off, Eddie noticed the slight frown and the telltale squint in the eyes. Was that a slight shake in his right hand? He looked at his eyes, and what he saw there was fear. No way, he must be wrong.

  Dan’s like a rock, nothing rattles him. A man for the enemy to fear. Not like me.

  Dan saw him looking and he grinned. “Everything okay, Eddie?”

  “I’m cool.”

  He nodded. “Driver, we’re going forward. Start the engine and advance one klick. They want to know if they’re awake up there. We’ll soon know.”

  Eddie automatically made sure his gun was cocked and ready.

  They’re setting us up as bait.

  He glanced again at Sergeant Dan, and one eye displayed a nervous tic. He’d been in Afghanistan for a long time, and maybe it was too long. Although otherwise he seemed normal, and Eddie decided he was wrong. Although he’d like to have captured what he saw with his smartphone. He grinned to himself, what was he thinking? This wasn’t the time, not when they were about to go into action.

  Al Taylor loaded his M4A1 rifle, staring from side to side while he listened for messages on the Company net. They’d recently promoted him to corporal. No more than he deserved, Al Taylor was a skilled vet. He leaned forward to listen to a message coming into his headset, and Eddie wondered how he heard anything over the roar of the engine revving at high speed.

  “Message from Company. They want us to halt by that group of trees halfway to the slope.”

  Dan nodded. “Tell them message received. Driver…”

  PFC Winston Bellows waved a hand to indicate he'd heard the order. He was a high school dropout who'd spent his schooldays playing truant and racing hot rods around his hometown of Boise, Idaho. He was good, so skilled the cops rarely caught up with him. When they did manage to stop him they never knew whether to book him for dangerous driving or skipping school. Then again, they rarely caught him.

  Eddie could hardly believe his luck, being part of such a good team. If they ran into trouble, Master Sergeant Dan was the kind of guy who would get them out of it almost before the bullets zinged past. Winston seemed to anticipate his orders before he gave them, and his skill was little short of magical. He could turn the heavy jeep on a dime, and they’d be heading away from trouble as fast as they got into it. Al Taylor would be calling it in to Company, so they could vector in air support if needed. And inside the cupola, he’d be bringing the gun to bear on the enemy. Knowing anything he shot at was pretty safe. As much as he could rely on them, they couldn’t rely on him. He was a failure.

  He kept searching over the top of the cupola for any sign of the enemy. Taliban tactics were hit-and-run, shoot and scoot. A real fight with a Taliban unit that wanted to trade shots with the Americans was rare. And yet intel said they were, and the officers wanted them to make sure. Like his Humvee was the dartboard, and the Taliban would soon start throwing the darts.

  Most soldiers longed for the chance to fill the enemy full of lead. Eddie was no exception, and he wanted to take them down as much as the next man. The problem was he was unlikely to hit anything. No matter how hard he tried, when he fired that Browning .50, the safest place to be was in front of the muzzle. His brain seemed to be wired differently, for he saw the landscape like when he was capturing an image, as a collection of shapes and spaces.

  Foreground, middle ground and background, all marked with a grid to line up the best elements for a good picture. One part of his brain screamed at him to shoot the damn gun, the other part told him to hold back. Maintaining he needed to take his time, to frame the shot just that little bit better. He’d told them over and over he was no good, but it made no difference. He’d had it out with Master Sergeant Jones just the day before.

  “Sarge, I can shoot at anything you want, but I shoot best with a camera. I shoot people and landscapes, not people.” He’d even showed him the Leica M8 that he rarely brought out. And 18th birthday gift, a two-thousand-dollar camera, and he treasured it like it was made of solid gold.

  “Well, that’s a nice piece of hardware.”

  “It’s the best, Sarge. I’ll show you some stuff I’ve done with it someday.”

  The Sarge grunted a reply. “Just do your job, soldier. You know why you’re here, so don’t screw up.”

  “I can’t help it! I can take a picture of anything you want, just give me the word. But the Browning and me, we just don’t get on. I’ve tried damn hard, but every time I shoot at a target, I miss.”

  “It's never too late to learn, Eddie, so you keep right on trying.” Just for a moment, the Master Sergeant’s care-worn eyes had relaxed almost into a smile. Not quite. “Firing that gun is your job, and don't you forget it.”

  He’d shuffled his feet in the dust, knowing he’d failed to get across what he meant.

  Why wouldn’t they listen?

  “I know that, Sarge, I just wish I could do it right.”

&nb
sp; “Make it work. We’re a team and we each have a job to do. That’s what keeps us alive.”

  Chapter Two

  He dragged his thoughts back to the present. Taylor was shouting to Sergeant Dan. “Order coming over the net, Sarge. They’re going in now and they’re coming over to talk.”

  Eddie noticed the change in his expression. The eyes narrowed, and the lips pursed, sloping down each end. Like a dark shadow had passed in front of him. He climbed out of the Humvee as the officers arrived.

  “Dan, we’re going up that slope and we want you on point. How's that kid working out on the machine-gun, PFC Hawkins?”

  Jones forced a smile. “No problem at all, sir. He's a good man, and I wouldn't want anyone else on my team.”

  “That’s good to know. They have a drone overhead and they said they'll try to pinpoint the enemy positions, if they’re there. You’ll be the first to know. It won’t be long.”

  Jones nodded and climbed back into the Humvee. Like a man with all the troubles of the world on his shoulders.

  Eddie recalled the stories he’d heard a previous engagement, before he arrived in Afghanistan. Sergeant Jones had led the charge and they ran over an IED, an Improvised Explosive Device, remotely triggered from a nearby stone hut. Probably a goat herders hut about five hundred meters away. The jeep was on fire and he did his best to get his men out. Two were dead, and only the communications man had survived. He dragged him out onto the track, but a heavy machine gun opened up from almost a kilometer away, and a hail of bullets size scythed toward them.

  Dan pulled the man behind the vehicle, out of sight of the machine-gun, but they were still exposed. It had been a simple recon mission, and no one expected any serious enemy action. Flames were licking out of the Humvee, and then a line of Taliban came charging along the track toward them. It was a clever ambush, designed to wipe them out, but Jones was having none of it. He climbed back into the burning vehicle, into the cupola behind the Browning .50. He took aim at the enemy and opened fire.