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

wounded, dead, or just suppressed—I didn’t much care which.  If the second hadn’t had a weapon, but just a stick, a camera, or something…well, that was tough shit.  Whatever it was, he shouldn’t have been pointing it at a convoy that was already under fire.
    A white micro-bus tried to rush out and block the street at the end of the block, but was just a fraction of a second too slow.  The lead driver swerved to one side and slammed into the van’s front quarter panel, slewing it around and out of the way.  The gunner and the men on the right side dumped a ferocious amount of fire into the van as they passed.  I caught a glimpse of shattered glass, slumped, ragged corpses, and lots of blood as we scraped by.
    They had moved a little quicker as we got to the next block, moving a couple of sedans and an old Toyota HiLux to block the road, with several fighters and a machine gun crouched behind them, shooting at us.  Again, to our great good fortune, they ascribed to the “Insh’allah” school of marksmanship.  The lead truck took a hard right and we started moving north, toward the school.
    This wasn’t going to last.  We’d gotten lucky so far, but we were deep in bad guy territory, and very, very badly outnumbered.  Sooner or later, one of the trucks was going to take a bad hit, and if there were survivors we had to stop and pull out, we were all fucked.  It would be Blackwater in Fallujah all over again.
    To try to hold that inevitability off, our gunners were lighting up anything that moved.  The back of our HiLux was positively awash in brass and emptied ammo belts, and that gun had to be getting hot, given how hard Little Bob was leaning on the trigger.  All of us at the windows, except for Marcus, who was busy driving, were taking shots when we could, but the majority of the fire was coming from the gunners in the beds.  I was starting to worry about ammo, too, as I stripped out my third mag of the morning and rocked in another.  We had several blocks to go before we were clear, and those guys were burning through belts like there was no tomorrow.  Of course, if they slacked off the fire, there likely wouldn’t be.
    We rounded the corner just south of the school with a screech of skidding tires and kept pushing.  More rounds smacked into the truck with a series of metallic bang s, and Daoud suddenly yelled from the back.  It sounded like he’d been shot, though neither Nick nor Hassan checked on him.  Oh well, fucker shouldn’t have tried to screw us.
    The road we were on ended in a T-intersection only about two hundred yards ahead.  I think I saw the guy with the RPG pop up on the roof directly over the intersection at about the same time Little Bob did.
    I didn’t have the best shot, but somebody had to at least throw his damned aim off, or we were going to be toast.  I leaned partway out the window, leveled my rifle as best I could, braced it against the doorframe, and opened fire.  At the same time, the PKP in the back roared again, tracers winging toward the rooftop.  The RPG gunner crumpled in a puff of red mist.
    More vehicles were coming out.  I was glad to see that so far none were technicals, but they were trying to use them to box us in.  The lead gunner was concentrating his fire hard on them; we were leaving a series of shattered windshields, punctured engine blocks, and dead drivers behind us.
    More rounds hit the truck, and Marcus suddenly yelled, “FUCK!”  The truck swerved dangerously close to smashing into the next compound wall before he got it back on track.
    “Where are you hit?” I asked.  I didn’t try to immediately pull my rifle back inside and treat him; if he wasn’t seriously wounded, we needed the firepower directed out more than he needed bandaging.
    He gritted his teeth .  “Lower leg.”  He reached down with his left to feel it.  “I think it’s just a through-and-through.”
    “You good?” I asked.
    “I’d better be,” he