by Dalton Fury
He turned around to yell again at Kraus, but all the men had melted away on the dark mountainside.
Kolt Raynor crawled on his beaten hands and knees back to his bedroll, pulled the torn tarp over himself like a blanket, rolled into the fetal position, and moaned.
* * *
“Two friendlies, coming in!” The shout came from down the hill, the voice muffled by the thick firs and pines and by the snowfall that drifted lazily toward the wet ground. Raynor sat on his pack and stoked the fresh fire in front of him, lifted a collapsible metal pot out of the flames, and poured instant coffee into three tin cups on a flat rock near the fire.
“Friendlies, my ass,” he muttered softly.
Raynor had bandaged his head to keep the mud out of the shallow swollen wound at the base of his skull. He’d also wrapped his two smallest fingers on his left hand together to reduce swelling in a sprained knuckle, and put antibiotic medicine and gauze on the oozing scrapes where the AK Sim rounds had broken the skin on his chest. His ribs and extremities were sore from the beating he’d taken the night before, and the cold had done nothing but stiffen his body further.
On either side of him, close by, were his weapons. He’d cleaned them at first light, their chambers were loaded, and spare magazines rested at the ready in a shoulder rig by his side.
Monk and Benji appeared from the wood line near the camp. They wore camouflage fatigues and small backpacks, and they sat down in the dirt by the fire, each taking a cup of black coffee from Kolt as they came to rest.
Kolt opened the conversation. “No chance I can get a couple of days to get acclimated to the altitude? The air is thin and—”
Monk interrupted. “No chance.”
Kolt rubbed the aching bulb on the back of his head. “Who is in the opfor? Other than you, I mean?”
“Haji we scarfed up in Konar Province. You may recognize one or two if you look close enough. Radiance Security hired them to come to the States. Bet they figured they’d be riding rides at Disneyland and not just exchanging one cold-assed valley for another. I’m in charge of them.”
“Yeah, I put that together when you executed me.”
Benji laughed into his coffee cup, stifled himself after a second. Monk just stared out over the foggy morning valley.
Raynor looked to him. He started to complain, to tell Kraus that throwing him up here at ten thousand feet in the snow and pummeling the shit out of him was not the training that Webber and Grauer had promised. But he held his tongue. Kolt knew better than to whine.
Monk would enjoy that, and Kolt did not want to give the big sergeant the satisfaction.
Kolt fought the urge to bitch, and instead just asked, “So, what’s on today’s lesson plan?”
Monk sucked the steaming coffee down his throat. He motioned to all of Raynor’s gear. “Today you’re going to get all this on your back, descend the valley, cross the floor, and then ascend to nine thousand on the other side.”
Raynor just looked off at the mountains on the far edge of the valley, thinking about his sore ribs and the heavy straps that would soon be cinched tight across them.
“You’ll make camp, and then come back down the mountain and meet us at the ranch. We’ve got some gear lists to go over, some maps to memorize, codes and radio freaks, shit like that. Then, after dark, you’re heading back up to your camp.”
“Where I’ll no doubt get jumped by you and your gunners.”
Monk smiled for the first time. “No doubt at all.”
“Is there a medic at the ranch?”
“Sure is. You hurt?”
“No. Just planning ahead.” He thought a moment. “I need some O2.”
“No. You’re good. We won’t start pushing you for a couple more days.”
“Look, Monk. I’m more amped up than anybody about getting T.J. back. I just need—”
Monk tossed the dregs of his instant coffee over the fire. Stood up. “The problem is, Raynor, that you need to be switched on, not amped up. Your good intentions aren’t going to amount to jack squat in Hajiland. We are going to make it uncomfortable for you now, miserable for you in a couple of days, impossible for you before the week is out. You aren’t going to make it through this, you are going to fail, fall by the wayside, and then Webber and Grauer can move on and find a qualified former Unit member to do this job.”
“So you think I’m just wasting everyone’s time here?”
“Yes, I do.”
“This is because I was an officer, isn’t it?”
“In some ways, yeah, that’s what this is about. What has to be done in Khyber has nothing to do with being an officer.”
“Bullshit. I led men into combat. I have fought—”
“Yeah, and that last batch of men you led into combat are dead, so you don’t have anybody left to lead. What is needed now is a man who can lead his own body, and Raynor, you don’t seem to exert the same kind of control over yourself that you did on others.”
“Then tell Webber I’m unsatisfactory, and then we can all move on!”
“I would love to tell him you are unsat, but he isn’t going to take my word for it. You’ll have to quit or drop dead on this mountain. So either you get your shit together and get ready for this mission, or by God I will do my damnedest to drop you dead on this mountain. If T.J. and the boys are over there, if they are alive, then you can be damn sure we aren’t going to get a second chance to prove it. I have been against you going from the very beginning, I know you are going to fuck it up, so the best thing that can happen is you fuck it up in Wyoming, so you don’t compromise a real attempt at a rescue. Your failure is the best thing to increase this mission’s chances of success.”
Kolt stood angrily, began breaking camp. It was going to be a long day, and arguing with David Kraus wasn’t going to make it go by any faster.
FOURTEEN
Kolt was “killed” again five hours later. He’d spent an hour at the ranch meeting and getting started with his Pashto instructor, a middle-aged woman in a hijab face covering who did not know his name; nor did he know hers. An hour later the Afghani opfor hit him on a mountain pass at nine thousand feet, a typical L-shaped ambush, and Kolt knew he should have seen it coming. He marveled at the ease with which these Afghans could handle the altitude, and he wished he was as thin-blooded as they. After the hit he struggled higher up the mountain, and he made it through the night without another attack.
But when he was hit again the next morning on his way down to the ranch, he managed to shoot three enemy and break contact, sliding and splashing and rolling down a hill until the opfor gave up the pursuit.
Day three found Raynor with a serious head cold. The altitude and the low temps had swollen his sinuses shut, his weakness growing worse instead of better. By day four he was on a cot in the ranch, getting injections of antibiotics and vitamins from the doctor. Though sick as a dog he kept his language training up. That, he felt, would be the extent of his work until he got back on his feet, but he was wrong. Monk and his Taliban attacked him in the building itself—they did not give him a day off just because he was sick. He was pulled from his cot in the hallway, pushed back down into the kneeling position, covered with the hood to absorb some, but not enough, of the impact from the Simunitions round, and “executed” again by the Delta master sergeant.
After being cleared by the doctor he was led down to the front door. His pack was waiting for him outside in the rain, and he hefted it with tired and sore muscles and staggered off into a mountain storm. “You’re discharged from the hospital,” growled Monk as Kolt stepped out into the weather.
It got worse before it got better, but it did get better. On day eight, just after a grueling one-hundred-foot rock-climbing ascent with Benji, four of Monk’s Afghans attacked in a pincer move, attempting to pin Raynor against the rock wall. But Kolt took down the two men on his left, flanked the others as they moved in for the kill, and destroyed the rest of the opfor arrayed against him.
; His physical and mental strength began to grow with each passing day. Not in a straight line—day eleven had him back under a doctor’s care, and day fourteen had him on the verge of quitting after he was executed by Kraus yet again while sitting at a picnic table studying Pashto with his teacher. But by day seventeen he’d dropped twenty pounds of fat, revealing lean muscle that was hardening by the day, and his body was sufficiently acclimated to the altitude for him to operate the entire day without teetering on the edge of collapse. He also improved his Pashto, practiced with the gear he’d be taking with him over the border, studied maps of the FATA, and finally took down all eight opfor, when Kolt found a hide above their staging area for an attack on his camp, and then sniped them one by one with his AK at sixty yards as they struggled to pinpoint the origin of fire.
Two days later he “killed” all eight of his opponents again, the last two in hand-to-hand combat that ended with both Taliban tapping out, and with muscle spasms in their necks and bruises on their backsides that would nag the fit young Afghans for days to come.
* * *
On his final full day in Wyoming, Raynor staged another surprise attack on Monk and his forces. Most of the Afghans had long tired of the hunt, especially after they found themselves, as often as not, the prey. They were just leaving the ranch in the early-morning darkness, with a plan to set a dawn ambush in the tall grasses a kilometer up the trail Kolt would take into the valley. But their quarry had come down during the night, positioned himself by their 4×4s, and ferociously attacked and killed every last man as they sleepily began to lace up their boots and load their guns on the front porch. Monk made it into the front door of the lodge, but Kolt chased him back inside, rushed right past Benji and the doctor, and kicked Kraus’s pistol out of his hand the instant he raised it to fire. The master sergeant put his hands up in surrender, smiled, and began complimenting his pupil on how far he’d come in three weeks.
“I gotta hand it to you. I didn’t think you had—”
“Shut the fuck up!” barked Raynor, a hard, wild look in his eyes. He spun Monk around, turning his face toward the paneled wall of the huge great room. Kicked at the back of the older man’s knees until he dropped into a kneeling position.
“Benji, you better get Monk a padded hood.”
Kraus’s hands were still up in the air. Furious, he shouted, “Americans don’t execute prisoners, Raynor!”
“American soldiers don’t, Sergeant. But, like you said, I’m no soldier.” Benji rushed over with the hood, put it over Monk’s head, and Kolt shot David Kraus in the skull with the powerful simulated round. Knelt down over him afterward.
“You made me, asshole. No one to blame but yourself.”
Raynor stood, turned, walked back out the front door, past the awed stares of Benji and the eight “dead” men watching through the windows of the front porch.
FIFTEEN
Pakistan
The four men shackled to their rope cots awoke to the sounds of vehicles outside their door. Two trucks by the sound of it, 4 × 4 pickups, because nothing else would survive the trek through the valley.
Three of the four rolled over and went back to sleep. They were not healthy. They tired easily and woke slowly. They were given next to no exercise, very little natural light, and a diet that, while recently much improved over what they’d lived on for the past three years, was by no means well balanced.
The man who remained awake was the leader, and his responsibility for the others meant he would not let himself go back to sleep. Josh Timble cocked his head and listened carefully, trying to pick up clues about the new visitors from any sounds. He had become an expert in the art of deriving intelligence while imprisoned. The sound of a vehicle, the mood of his guards, the change in the weather or in the quality of the bits of vegetables mixed in with his rice … everything was a potential source of information to be gleaned. He spoke more of the local language than the others, and he’d used this and his minimal Arabic to make friends with some of his captors over the years. This, too, was a crucial means of gleaning intel.
He’d already pegged the two trucks as Toyota Hiluxes, but this was no great feat. He’d been in this compound for two months now and had not heard a single engine larger than a tractor’s that was not connected to the ubiquitous pickup truck in Pakistan, the Hilux. During the day T.J. and his men were unchained and free to walk around the small room, and a high window slit in the stone-and-poured-concrete wall was accessible by stacking two of the beds on one another and then climbing up and stretching oneself. He’d done just that dozens of times he’d heard engines, and he wished he wasn’t shackled right now, so he could see if these trucks were Taliban or al Qaeda or just local vendors or allies of the warlord who ran this little valley fiefdom.
He pulled against his chain until his wrist burned, then let his arm drop back to the rope cot.
Hearing no more noise outside, he looked around his dark cell.
The room was twelve feet square, with dirt floors and reinforced concrete walls. It was featureless save for the four cots made of wooden posts and woven rope, and a two-foot-square indentation in the dirt in one corner from which a three-foot pipe made from empty mortar shells led out to a drainage culvert along the wall of the compound.
This was their “shower,” the corner where they poured the bucket of hot water over each other once a week.
The rest of the time the men kept a rock over the pipe to keep the bugs and rats out.
The window slit above his cot showed him it was morning, maybe six thirty. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Only the tiniest slivers of light came from the window slit and from below the heavy metal door to the room, but these served as their clock in the morning, the first indicators of daylight. Soon, T.J. knew, he would hear the steady thumping sound of the women pounding the morning bread behind the main building, and that told him it was an hour or so until breakfast.
The conditions here at this compound, run by a man they knew as Zar Afridi, were actually not all that bad. In the past three years they’d been kept in caves, in urban cellars chained or caged like monkeys, in dank underground bunkers, and even tied to trees on more than one occasion. They’d also been force-marched, or stuffed like cordwood into the backs of trucks, each man’s full body weight pressing down on whichever unlucky compatriot had been tossed in first.
No, this compound of Zar’s was not Club Med, but it was much better than anywhere they’d been before. They even got a tiny smattering of exercise during the evening walk. One at a time, each man was taken from the one-room stone hut that served as their prison and led, under guard and with hands chained in front of him, from the northwest corner of the compound, fifty yards to the east, where the simple outhouse stood in front of a copse of trees.
One hundred yards of strolling a day was not much exercise, nor was it much fresh air or solitude, but it was something.
The most interesting aspect of their imprisonment here in Zar Afridi’s compound was the arrival of the doctor at the beginning of their stay, and his decision that all the men immediately begin taking medicines to help wean them off the heroin they’d been given for years. The cruel drug had been cruelly administered to debilitate the elite war fighters and keep them compliant and addicted.
Josh had no idea why the decision had been made to clean them up. At first he wondered if they were to be released, but he’d gotten no wind of that rumor whatsoever from his captors. Some of the guards were, in a word, stupider than the others, and they spoke a little too much, revealed things to T.J. without realizing what they were doing. There was no discussion by these simpletons with guns about setting the Americans free. No, if there were discussions about the politics of their captivity it always centered on a tug-of-war between the Taliban factions on one side of the rope and the foreign al Qaeda forces here in FATA on the other.
T.J. and his men were, of course, the rope itself.
Just when Josh was about to lie back on his bunk, footsteps ap
proached the shack and Josh forced his mind to awaken and clear. At this time of the morning it was still early to see Zar himself, though he would be by to deliver the morning meal. It was an interesting dynamic of Pashtunwali, the local tribal code, that the owner of the property saw to the care of his prisoners. The warlord, who while certainly of no importance on a global scale, was unquestionably the local strongman, the big fish in the little pond that was this valley. Zar had personally been bringing food for the men each morning. The other guards saw to them the rest of the day, but Zar came and in a polite, if not friendly, manner asked after the men’s comfort and needs.
Timble took advantage of this, asking for fresh water and medicine for his men to help with the near-constant diarrhea they were suffering from. Sometimes it was delivered.
Sometimes not.
The chain outside the iron door was unlocked. This made a distinctive sound that stirred the other men in the room. Then the door opened, cutting the still dark air with a bright shaft of light.
The three men in the doorway looked like giants in silhouette before they entered. They were bigger and broader than the Pashtuns around here. They stepped inside, and Josh Timble blinked hard and rapidly.
Three American soldiers in full battle dress. Helmets on their heads, sunglasses over their eyes, and rifles slung across their chests.
Their uniforms revealed them to be Army Rangers.
Josh turned to look at his three cellmates, to make sure they were seeing the same vision. All three sat up quickly, rattling their chains with the movement.
T.J. had long thought of rescue, dreamed of it, but he wasn’t dreaming now.
Could this be?
No. Something did not add up. He knew good and well that there had been no firefight outside in the compound, and he could not believe Zar’s men had just evaporated into thin air.