I had a bee in my bonnet to write a short story. So here's part 1 of the rough draft. Be kind. There's a little bit of language.
Quick Dial, Part 1
30 September, 2007
Al Fashir, Shamal Darfur, Sudan
“Je suis comment tu ruier de Haskanita!”
The Nigerian Lieutenant had been yelling on the radio for awhile now. 1st Lieutenant Andrew Shepard, Canadian Forces, had just gotten to the radio hut and was shouting orders to the several people around him, most of whom outranked him, none of whom spoke French.
2 UH-60s and from S Troop, 4th Squadron, 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment of the US Army sat on the dusty helipad outside the United Nations Mission to Sudan HQ, spooling up to head out with a squad of Indian infantry aboard. What exactly they were supposed to do when they got there was anybody’s guess until Shepard had arrived.
“Just jump on the damn helicopters, and I’ll tell you what you need to know on the way!” He pulled on the headset with the screaming Nigerian officer. “He’s talking about an enemy force about five klicks away moving towards him. He says the OP to the west got overran.”
He pressed the transmit button. “Y a veni de soutien!” His French was terrible, and he knew it. He’d done a few months in one of the primarily Quebecois artillery units, and that wasn’t the kind of French these guys were used to hearing.
“Quand serond-ils ici?” The Nigerian sounded really spooked.
“When can you guys get out to Haskanita?” Shepard turned to the map of Darfur posted on the wall, and started speaking to the radioman, a civilian from UNAMID. “You get on the horn to the OP on the northern side of Kassab. That’s the South Africans. Tell them UNAMITS wants to fucking talk. Now.”
He hated doing it this way. The lines of communication in this portion of Darfur all came back to the HQ post in Al Fashir since they couldn’t afford to outfit everyone with the wireless sets. Unless the actual refugee camps were under attack, they wouldn’t know about it from satellite phones. So he would have to relay the information to the South Africans at the Kassab-2 post, thirty miles away from Haskanita.
The Americans, along with the French, had integrated communications gear with every man. But for this fight, they weren’t using the United States Army. Their element of it that was on call for combat operations was just now taking off in a whirl of dust. Behind them, a mile away on the UNAMITS main helicopter landing zone outside of Al Fashir, three more Mi-17s of the Indian Army were getting ready to go.
“Quand serond-ils ici!?” The Nigerian was screaming into his ear.
“Vingt minutes!” He had just told the AU unit commander that the Blackhawks would be overhead in twenty minutes. He didn’t know if it was true, but he’d been on the chopper trip from Al Fashir to the Haskanita camp before, and figured it took around that long. God damn, I’m not good at ballparking it.
“UNAMITS HQ, this is Kassab-2. What’s going on back in the world?”
Shepard grabbed the waiting handset. “Kassab-2, we’ve got a situation over at the Haskanita OP. Western one’s already been overrun. We don’t know who did it. The Nigerians are holding up. What’s your personnel and equipment situation?”
“Whoa…uh…give us a second, HQ, I’ll be able to tell you exactly what we can send.” The UNAMID volunteer was looking at him, waving a cell phone. Shepard covered the mouthpiece.
“Who now?”
“Lieutenant, I had the number for a UNACEF guy at Haskanita. He’s driving out to the Kassab-1 post to drop his phone off to the Nigerian guy.” The volunteer scribbled the phone number down on a scrap of paper. “Here’s the number. If you have the South Africans at Kassab-2 dial up, they can talk to each other.”
“Fucking brilliant, Terry!” Shepard rattled the number off to the South African on the other end of the line.
“Alright, Lieutenant. We’ve got three Ratels heading over now. It’ll be at least fifteen minutes, and I can’t promise anything once we get there. We don’t even have a full combat load.”
“That’s alright. 3rd ACR’s got air elements and boots heading there now. Indian Army is also on the way. I think we’ll have air cover by the time you guys get your boots on the ground.” Shepard slumped down in his chair, and pulled on the headset for the Nigerian Lieutenant one last time, pulling enough French out of his brain to tell him that help was on the way, and it would be coming in under a half an hour.