The Warlord of Tora Bora

by Eric Meyer

  His mercenaries opened fire, and the area descended into bullet-riddled chaos. He glanced around to make sure Akram had reached the two posts. He was releasing the prisoners. Then he turned his attention to what mattered the most to him. Wayne Evers.

  * * *

  Stoner flinched when the Afghan appeared out of nowhere, and he assumed he’d come to kill them at point-blank range, after the lousy shooting from the men in front of the cave. He breathed a sigh of relief when the man got nearer and he recognized him.

  “Akram! How did you get here?”

  He grinned. “Ivan decided to do the right thing.”

  “Ivan the Terrible doing the right thing? Are you serious?”

  “He came to the right decision after some persuasion. A lot of persuasion.”

  Akram freed them with his knife, and he handed them each a pistol, a battered and scratched Colt 1902 ACP, the venerable Browning-designed automatic. Over one hundred years old, and still as good as the day the first pistol left the factory. They thanked him, and he nodded.

  “One thing, Ivan said to keep Sara away from any shooting.”

  Stoner glanced at Sara, and she didn’t look happy. “We need to get into cover before the shooting starts.”

  “Cover!” She glared at him as she flexed her sore wrists, “Cover is the last place I plan to be. Those bastards tried to kill me, now it’s time to return the compliment. And we have to get to Greg.”

  “But, Sara, you know…”

  “Yeah, my father, I know. But he’s not here, and I am, and I intend to start killing bad guys. That fucker Wayne Evers is high on my target list.”

  Akram pulled her to one side. “Ivan said he’d deal with Wayne. No one is to touch him.”

  “Forget Ivan. If Evers appears in my gunsight, he goes down. Lead the way, Akram. It’s time to join the fight.”

  He was too slow, and he hurried after her as she started to jog back toward the caves. He caught up with her. “No, not that way. We can loop back the way I reached you. Ma’am, do me a favor. At least stay under cover until we get there. Otherwise…”

  “Yeah, yeah, Ivan won’t like it. Okay, we go back your way, but when we get near enough, we start shooting.”

  The Afghan led them through a rough patch of ground, threading between boulders, sometimes dropping to a crawl, making a wide circle to loop back to the caves. They made it halfway, and chaos ignited. Ivan’s mercs had taken them unawares, but more fighters came racing from the caves. They’d lost the element of surprise, and the fighting became desperate. A group of six insurgents broke away, intending to flank the mercenaries, and Stoner’s group ran headlong into them. For a second, they stared at each other, frozen in astonishment, and Sara was first to break the spell.

  She aimed the Colt, pulled the trigger, and the first hostile went down. A lucky shot that put a bullet right through his forehead, but their luck ran out. The five survivors swiveled their rifles and pulled the triggers. Stoner and Akram grabbed her and were diving beneath the fusillade of bullets to take cover behind the rocks. The insurgents didn’t hesitate, and they came after them.

  The first man appeared, and Stoner put a bullet in his guts. He went down screaming, but the other four were coming in behind a barrage of automatic fire. They had no choice but to duck down below the hurricane of lead. The bullets stopped firing, they looked up, and they were reloading, slamming new magazines into their rifles. Stoner didn’t hesitate. They were outgunned, two pistols and a rifle against four assault rifles, and it was a time for boldness. Shock and awe, he reminded himself as he raced toward them, firing single shots. A bullet took down another hostile, and he ducked as the next hail of gunfire split the air inches from his head.

  The assault rifles went quiet again as they emptied their magazines, but an enemy fighter was standing a meter away. He raised the pistol and took aim, and the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. The shot came from further back. Akram had fired the shot, but he was under pressure, fighting off two more insurgents that came out of nowhere. One grabbed Sara, desperately trying to fight back. Stoner was on his own, and with an empty gun. He rolled away from a next burst of bullets that danced around him, and hit something hard.

  A rifle dropped by the first man he’d shot. He snatched it up, praying there’d be bullets in the magazine. He came to a stop with a jarring impact and fell into a narrow channel in the rocky ground. A couple of feet deep, almost like an irrigation ditch, except no one had bothered to irrigate this place in a long time. Probably not since Alexander the Great’s legions smashed through the Afghans hundreds of years before Jesus Christ trod the Holy Land.

  The ditch hid him until someone shouted a warning in Pashto. He didn’t understand, but he’d been in enough firefights to know what was on men’s minds, staying alive being number one. He waited, cautioning himself to be still, to be patient. And once again, wondering about the rifle he clutched to his chest. How many bullets were in the magazine? Was it full, packed with thirty 7.62mm rounds? Half full, a quarter, or maybe just one or two bullets left. Even empty. He’d soon know. He couldn’t check, couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound, and he waited.

  The shadow fell over him, and they stared down at him, their expressions almost comic in their amazement. He pointed the rifle and squeezed the trigger. The magazine held bullets, enough bullets, and he hit the two hostiles with three apiece. The bodies were still falling when he leapt out and ran to help Sara. Akram was fighting an uneven battle against two hostiles, and they’d resorted to hand-to-hand combat, too close to get in a shot with their assault rifles. Sara, armed with the Colt, was kneeling on the ground. Nursing a cut to her head where an Afghan had hit her with the steel muzzle of his rifle, raking the foresight down the side of her face. She was trying to wipe the blood away to restore her vision, but for a few seconds she was out of it.

  The two Afghans were using their AKs like fighting sticks, jabbing them into Akram’s body, and some of the blows connected. He fought back, but one against two were not good odds, and each time he tried to connect with a blow, one blocked it while the other struck back. Stoner raced over to them, they looked around, and one man stepped back, leveling his rifle. He sneered, anticipating getting in the shot before Stoner reached him. His expression changed when a bullet from the AK he’d snatched up slammed into his chest, and he reeled. The second shot missed, and he had to dodge away from as an Afghan opened fire. A single bullet, and it almost missed, grazing his leg and tearing off a strip of flesh a quarter of an inch deep.

  Akram renewed his attack with fury, but Stoner stumbled, and he thought it strange. Maybe it was because he expected the bullet to be the one that finally ended it all. Yet it missed.

  No, it didn’t miss. Sara had used the Colt; aimed and fired in a single, smooth action. The bullet took the man high in the chest, right over the heart. He stopped, frozen, his eyes registering astonishment, then pain, then nothing as he toppled. They were all dead. Akram had finished his man, and he helped Sara to her feet, while Stoner continued to search for survivors, finding it impossible to believe they’d won the fight. For a moment he thought his imagination was playing him tricks, and that they had to be dead. But the pain in his leg said the opposite. He was alive, they were all alive, and the insurgents they’d fought were dead. Yet there were plenty more to kill.

  A hundred meters away, the fight was going badly. Outnumbered more than two to one, Ivan’s men were falling back to the slope.

  “They’re going the wrong way,” Akram shouted, “Dammit, there isn’t enough time. If they get trapped up there, they’re dead. We have to help them.”

  “Help them? Jesus Christ, Akram, there’s two of us.”

  “Three.”

  He turned to Sara and grimaced. “Okay, three of us, so what do you propose? Akram, what’s the hurry? They can stage a fighting retreat over the mountain if necessary.”

  “Not today they can’t. Not with a B-52 squadron about to unload several hundred tons
of bombs.”

  Her mouth opened in astonishment. “B-52s? Tell me you’re not serious.”

  “I’m serious. A whole squadron, they thought you were safe, and after you missed the target, they decided to forget Afghan politics and turn Mohammed Tarzi into mashed potato.”

  “When are they due?”

  “A few hours, I’m not certain.”

  She wanted to ask him, had to put the question, although she dreaded the answer. “Do you know where they’re coming from, these B-52s?”

  He nodded absently. “Yeah, someone said something about Guam. As if that makes a difference.”

  She turned away.

  It makes all the difference, all the difference in the world. If Paul is leading that squadron, and I just know he is, he’s about to kill his kid sister. If only he only knew. He’s a couple of thousand miles away, six miles above the earth, and sealed inside a pressurized, strategic long-range bomber. Oblivious to those he’s about to kill.

  Chapter Ten

  Major Paul Gibbons swept his eyes over the control panel, and everything looked good, all in the green. His co-pilot, Captain Myron Reid, had switched off the autopilot and taken over the controls to vary their speed and altitude. At the same time, the navigator calibrated his equipment. Precision bombing was a skill that required serious attention to detail, and the crew were serious professionals.

  He was a desperate man. Despite what they’d said, the news his sister Sara was down there somewhere worried him.

  They assured me she’s well clear of the target, and there’s nothing for me to worry about. Assurances are one thing; reality’s another. Problem is there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. I can’t get in contact with her. It’s as if she’s on another planet. She obviously isn’t working as a freelance reporter, and CIA means she could be operating anywhere, including Tora Bora. Would she have been that stupid? Is there anything I can do? Could I put a priority call through to my father?

  He couldn’t. They had rules for strategic bomber crews, and rightly so. If he tried to circumvent them, he’d spend the next ten years in the stockade. It would be worth it if he saved his sister’s life, except they’d refuse to patch the call through, and he’d serve the time anyway. If he called in his worries to Guam, they’d laugh him out of the sky.

  “Major, you okay?”

  He swung around to look at Myron Reid, who was staring at him in a friendly but puzzled way. “I’m fine, sure. Just woolgathering.”

  “Long flight. Not much else to do.”

  “No.” Other than worry about my sister.

  “What about the Afghans, did they finally give permission?”

  “Permission?”

  “For the raid.”

  “No, they didn’t give permission, and they don’t know we’re on the way.”

  “Uh, huh.” He was silent for almost a minute, “Major, does that mean they’ll send up fighter interceptors when they pick us up? As I recall, they have Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucanos.”

  “They have what? Myron, have you been reading up on Afghan Air Defenses?”

  A shrug. “Well, yeah, I kind of looked at the details on my iPad a while back, when we were on autopilot.”

  “Okay, tell me about these Super Tucanos.”

  “They’re two-seater single engine turboprops, pretty advanced for that kind of a design.”

  “Turboprop. You’re telling me this thing has a propeller.”

  “It does.”

  “What about performance?”

  “Ceiling of around thirty-five thousand feet, maximum speed about three-fifty mph. Okay, it’s not the fastest aircraft in the world, but they’re armed with Sidewinders.”

  Gibbons couldn’t resist smiling. “So you’re asking me about a slow, out-of-date aircraft with an out-of-date missile system. What’s the question, Myron?”

  “Thing is, Major, if we happened to drop lower, we could come into their target envelope, you know…”

  He sighed in frustration. “We won’t be flying any lower than we are now. Forget these Super Turbocrap things, or whatever you call them.” He spoke a bit more sharply than he’d intended. He couldn’t shake the worry about Sara from his mind, “Hey, Myron, I didn’t mean to bite your head off, but forget the Afghan Air Force, okay? They’re not a problem.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  The aircraft droned on, and Reid switched back to autopilot. Hands off, he helped himself to coffee from the vacuum flask and sipped at the Java, looking through the windshield at nothing except clouds, thinking.

  “Major…”

  “What is it?”

  “About the Afghan Air Defenses?

  “The what?”

  “The Afghan Air Defenses.”

  “Which Afghan Air Defenses?”

  A pause, and then it sunk in. “Oh, right.”

  He tried to ease the tension. “Myron, this’ll be a walk in the park, and afterward, they’ll need to redraw the geography of the area. They can call it a lake instead of a mountain once the rains come. How are we doing for time?”

  He spoke to the navigator and nodded in satisfaction. “We’re good. Apparently, we caught a tailwind.”

  “Roger that.”

  Myron Reid smiled. “Yeah, Roger that. Soon, it’ll be goodbye Tora Bora forever. Good riddance, I say.”

  What would you say if you thought your kid sister might be down there?

  * * *

  He listened to Akram explain about the bombing mission. The first they’d heard of it, and if they didn’t get off the mountain soon, they’d never leave it. Pulverized into rubble by hundred of tons of high-explosive iron bombs. Ivan was up there, still fighting and desperate to get away from the area, with all escape routes cut off, all except one, the slope. If they tried to get out that way, they’d be too close to the bombs when they detonated. Close enough to get chewed into tiny pieces.

  “We have to help them.”

  Akram nodded. “That’s a given, Stoner. Problem is, we don’t know how. How can the three of us,” he glanced around, acknowledging Sara, “Take on that bloodthirsty bunch of psychos?”

  “We need a diversion.”

  “A what?”

  “A diversion. Make them think there’re a lot more of us down here. Get ‘em to come back this way, and give Ivan’s men a chance to hit them from behind.”

  “Sure, sure, but how? We can’t even reach them in time, let alone do them any damage. Look at what we have, a couple of rifles and a pistol. Enough ammo to last a minute or two, and that’s it. If we’re gonna go that route, Stoner, we need an armory.”

  Armory.

  The word hit a chord, something he should know, should remember. And it came to him. Inside the cave, they had an armory. The men who’d normally guarded it would be fighting Ivan’s mercenaries on the slope.

  “Akram, you’re a genius. I happen to know where there’s a nice juicy armory just waiting for us to walk inside. Follow me.”

  “What about the guards?”

  He pointed up the slope. “They’re all busy fighting Ivan. We should be able to get in and out without running into a single hostile.”

  He jogged across the open ground to the cave entrance and stopped a meter short, alerted by the smell of cigarette smoke. He’d been wrong. They weren’t all fighting Ivan. Tarzi had left a guard, maybe more than one. He signaled them to wait and went on at a fast, silent crawl.

  He was just inside the entrance, sitting on a rock, with his rifle across his knees. Sucking on a cigarette, and incredibly, he had earphones in his ears, listening to music. Stoner picked up a rock and tossed it to land two meters past him. The guard turned his head toward the source of the strange noise, and the American raced toward him, slamming his pistol butt against his head. He crumpled, Stoner picked up the dropped rifle, and struck him a hard blow on the forehead. Stoner then rushed inside the cave, just in time to see another man coming toward him.

  He wasn’t expecting trouble, carrying a gla
ss of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, no doubt about to join the other man for a smoke break while his comrades fought and died above them. He was too far away to do anything other than use the gun, and he fired twice. Two bullets struck him square in the chest, and he fell, but the gunshots echoed through the cave system. Deep inside the tunnels he heard shouts of alarm. He estimated he’d heard two more men back there, and he dove into a shallow niche in the rocks and waited.

  They came cautiously at first. Then they saw the body and rushed to inspect it. One man cried out in rage, as if it had been a relative. His grief was short-lived. Stoner fired four times, and both men joined the other two insurgents in death. He waited a few seconds, listening, but there was no further noise. No voices echoed or reverberated inside the cave system. He raced back to the entrance and signaled for them to join him.

  They ran through the labyrinth, searching for the weapons store, for the armory, and some means to take the heat off Ivan’s force. They found it, a wooden door in the wall of a connecting passage. Incredibly, they’d locked it with a simple padlock. He didn’t bother searching for a key, just hammered his boot into the woodwork, and the door crashed open. Inside, an oil lamp gave a dim light, and the floor was littered with empty ammunition boxes, after they’d raced away to join the fight. He searched for the weapons they needed.

  Akram grabbed a light machine gun and gestured to Stoner. “Russian RPD, 7.62mm, the drum carries a hundred rounds.”

  “One machine gun won’t be enough.”

  “No, but there are more on the rack. One RPD apiece, plenty of spare drums, and they’ll think an army is attacking them.”

  Sara caught on immediately. She’d been a solider. “They’re the best chance we have to hold them back. Take the machine guns, and we’ll get out there and do some shooting.”

  He and Sara each took an RPD and began stuffing spare mags into canvas bags. He was about to leave when he saw something that stopped him. When they’d grabbed him, they’d taken his guns, his prized Desert Eagles. They were here, tucked into the canvas webbing holsters hanging on a peg. He eagerly took them down and strapped them on. They were heavy, very heavy, but the weight felt good. It felt right, and for the first time in a long time, he felt fully dressed. Sara was growing impatient.