Spoils of War (A Soldier of Fortune Adventure #3) by Peter McCurtin

Author:Peter McCurtin [McCurtin, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: action adventure, action hero, andy mcnab, Mercenaries, piccadilly publishing, soldiers of fortune, strike back
Publisher: Piccadilly
Published: 2022-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

I HAD HAD to leave a few of my men at El Abyad alive.

Now, in normal warfare that might not be a situation to concern a commander. But with the Arabs it was something else.

I knew they were dead men.

I knew, also, that the Moslems would wring every bit of information from them they wanted, before finally letting them die.

It angered me inside.

All the rest of that long night, at Erbil, I lay on my cot and thought about them. But there was nothing I could do.

The first couple of hours, after our arrival back, were spent in tending the wounded. A couple of my people, even though they had made it back in the cars, were not fit for further duty. Not for a while, anyway. All in all, including the men who were taken prisoner in El Abyad, I had lost over half my men. At roll call the next morning we counted ten enlisted personnel. We had gone with over twenty.

Not long after the morning muster I made arrangements to fly to Beirut for a couple of days. I needed to talk with Karami and Bagir again. I needed equipment replacement, and a quickie recruitment program, and I was going to ask for a consolidation of forces. Strategically the New Disciples had been leaderless for a long time, with Karami in Beirut getting quiet help from the Christian-led government, and now in the hospital recovering from his gunshot wounds he received while with me on that dusty back street.

There was a flight to Beirut from Tarabulus in mid-afternoon, and we could drive to Tarabulus very quickly, so I spent a brief time in the morning looking at our wounded and talking with them, and telling the others not to look at the El Abyad assault as a defeat. We had wrought havoc at El Abyad. We had killed a lot of Moslems, and we had given them something to think about.

The boy we had brought out was taken to a local family that very morning. He had been the one bright spot in the assault. He was a bright boy, and likeable, and he was taking his mother’s death well. He had been fatherless before the El Abyad horror. Now he would have to overcome all of that. If he did, we might have saved a future leader of the nation. It was something to hope for.

I had been sorely disappointed that we had not found Ibraham Sherif at El Abyad. Later I learned that he had probably been at Beirut, secretly gathering recruits for fighting in the south of Lebanon. He had been lucky. We most likely would have killed or captured him in that bloody, pitched battle, had he been there.

In late morning a teen-aged boy came to us at the villa headquarters with a message from the El Abyad Moslems. It was a written message, and it was addressed to ‘El Hakim.’ That was me.

The boy found me in the courtyard-compound, as I was speaking with Brussard and Halfin about flying to Beirut in the afternoon.

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