by David Poyer
Now whoever had C2 up there knew exactly where they were. If the sniper with the night scope hadn’t already ratted them out. What he probably didn’t know, though, was just how few men they were faced with.
And that they were SEALs, of course.
“One grenade each, out in front. Then we cut a chogie. Three-second rushes—I think they’ve got a sniper with green-eyes. One, two—three.”
As soon as the dark split with grenade flashes, they got up and rushed. Teddy slogged uphill by feel, by memory. Had to be a ridge up here. It overlooked the pass, maybe fifty feet higher. They rushed and dropped, rushed and dropped. He kept waiting for a bullet in the back from the guy with the larger-caliber rifle, but none came, and they wheezed up a slight slope and down another one.
“Was that it, Chief?”
Teddy went a few yards farther and almost walked off the ridge. He backpedaled hastily from a bottomless precipice. This had to be the far side from where Chisel 03 had gone down. The whole pass was only about two hundred meters wide, but it felt like a mile in the dark. Like Bitch Ridge at La Posta, the mountain training facility they ran up to sometimes from San Diego.
He was jogging back toward them when another boom echoed, followed by the unmistakable whack of a heavy bullet hitting flesh.
“Doc’s down, Obie.”
“Fuck. Fuck.” Not their corpsman. Teddy crawled over and cradled his head as they searched for the wound. They found the entry under his left arm, but no exit. Dipper died without a word, bleeding out internally. Teddy laid him down, raging. For no reason he turned his wrist to expose the tritium numerals of his watch: 0250. A long time to dawn. “Line to the front, and I want your eyes out there crawling around.”
“What do I do, Chief—”
“Get your claymore out. Low-crawl it out there. And make fucking sure it’s aimed the right way. Now, now, now!” Something moved in the dark and the men on both sides of him fired. “Moogie, you got to have contact.”
“I’m on the right freq, Chief. Wait a—wait a second.” Moogie spoke at length in a muffled voice, then called, “One didn’t make it in, Chief. They’re orbiting, waiting for word on what to do.”
“Oh, you are fucking kidding me,” Teddy muttered, rolling over to where the radioman had the notebook-size radio set up, the spidery antenna rigged out. “What are you—you’re on satcom. Okay. Who you got?”
It was the pilot of the other Chinook, who’d waved off when he saw the flares and missile-engine signatures. Moogie passed along that he didn’t think dropping more men in what was obviously a heavily defended landing zone was a good idea.
Teddy reached for the handset. The pilot didn’t seem to know Chisel 03 was down, but he didn’t see why he had to be the one to give him the bad news. “This is Echo Two. I can’t honestly disagree with you, dude, but we are looking to seriously get our asses kicked here. I have two KIA already.”
“Roger that. Do you need the QRF?”
“No, I don’t need the fucking QRF. What I need’s the rest of my team. These guys are Fifty-Five Brigade. Osama’s personal bodyguard. If they’re here, there’s a reason.”
The pilot said he’d pass the word, but he was coming up on bingo fuel. Teddy cursed and passed the handset back. “See if you can get a gunship. We could use some support.”
“I’ve got Whale Watcher.”
The electronic intelligence bird. “Great, but he’s a nonshooter. Get a Spectre. Call Boss Man if you have to, but get us some fucking firepower.”
Okay, Teddy, think. He had four shooters left: himself, Moogie, Knobby, and Mud Cat with the machine gun. They’d started with about eight hostiles. Couldn’t be more than four or five left, after that badly advised banzai charge. But one had night vision and an accurate rifle on an overlook. Like being up in a tower. Even worse, that particular Q knew how to shoot.
But the bad guys they’d landed on top of had made one mistake. They’d pulled off to the best tactical position: the high ground, to the right. Unfortunately for them, that left Echo One right smack in the middle of the pass anyone trying to escape from Tora Bora had to thread to go south.
But he couldn’t just sit tight. If bin Laden was really on his way and heard gunfire, he’d back off and take another ratline. Maybe one that the intel guys didn’t know about.
He couldn’t sit tight. He couldn’t wait.
They had to kill all the men trying to kill them. Take the pass and hold it. That was the mission now.
Before the thought was fully formed, he was passing orders over the squad net. The responses came back clipped as he belly-squirmed through the snow. Along the lip of the ridge, the stone crumbling away under the cover. The howling emptiness to his left pulled at him like gravity itself. The lower boss or hump would give him cover for the first few yards. After that, he’d be in the open. He started to slip and clawed frantically at loose scree and snow, pushing it desperately into the void, but kept sliding, gathering speed. He jammed the butt of the SR into a crack and only just managed not to follow the rattling rock off over the edge. Crawled carefully uphill again, until he regained solid ground.
“Okay, now,” he told them.
A crashing fusillade burst out. Tracers and flares, to burn out the retinas of anyone glued to a sniperscope. In the sudden glare Teddy caught an erect form ahead and above. In one swift movement he lined up and fired. It half turned and dropped from sight, and he rolled instantly to the right.
A bullet ripped through the space he’d just evacuated, followed by the crack-boom of the heavy rifle. Then all was dark again, until a burst crackled from the far right. Mud Cat, working his way around with his beloved Gentle Lady to take them from that flank. Teddy lay rigid, unable to cram enough oxygen into his lungs, his overspeeding heart shaking his whole upper body. So the one he’d shot hadn’t been the sniper.
Another crack-boom, and a cry from the right flank. The rattle cut off in midburst. Fuck, they couldn’t have gotten Mud Cat, could they? He had to zip this guy. Now. He rolled again, panted, and crawled a few yards forward, pushing up the snow to shield his own heat. Blew the flash hider of his rifle free of snow, checked the seating of the magazine. Then, slowly, pushed the muzzle up over the little heap of snow.
With a crashing blow and a burst of white light, a sledgehammer caught him squarely between the eyes.
* * *
HE came back from somewhere very black to find himself lying in the snow. He was turned on his right side, and the world was turned funny too. He blinked and pushed a glove gingerly toward his face. A moment later, he was sorry. Something pulpy bulged in the center of his forehead. He couldn’t make his fingers press hard enough to feel exactly what it was. They were numb, anyhow. His skull was split open. His brain was oozing out. But surely that couldn’t be, or he wouldn’t be lying here wondering about it. Would he?
Then his NVGs fell apart under his fingers and something warm ran down from under them. He felt it again, still not quite able to assemble himself into anything he understood.
“Chief Obie. You okay?”
Swager, bending over him. Teddy grappled, trying to pull him down. Get him out of the line of fire. But Swager was dragging him instead, back behind a rock. His hand groped again, and Teddy sensed rather than saw him recoil. “Jeez. You are some fucked up, Chief.”
“Shut the fuck … up.”
“Good, it talks. Looks like you caught a ricochet, right in the AN/PVSs. They’re a wreck. All you got left’s the straps.”
Teddy shook Swager’s hands off and tried to sit up. Vertigo. Nausea. He leaned to the side and coughed. Waited, but nothing came up. “… head.”
“Got a hell of a gouge there. Lucky it didn’t take one of your eyes out.”
Teddy lay panting, ears ringing, passing from thankfulness to respect to rage. A hell of a shot. If it’d been three inches higher, it would have split his face instead of the rock. Even as it was, the ricochet would have killed him if it hadn’t impacted the night-
vision goggles.
Whoever he was, this guy was damned good. Chechen? Arab? From the sound, he was shooting a full-power thirty caliber. Probably a Dragunov. Semiautomatic, and not that different from his SR, except the cartridge was the Russian rimmed round. Effective range, upward of six hundred meters in skilled hands. And he had a night scope on it. Most likely the PSO-1. The PSO-1 had a night reticle, but it was too dark up here for that to do much good.
It also had a special countersniper feature: an infrared charging screen a shooter could use for passive detection of infrared sources.
That is, it wouldn’t illuminate, like the SEALs’ AN/PVSs, or like Obie’s own rifle scope. But it would pick up radiation sources.
Such as the AN/PVSs themselves.
The sniper hadn’t been aiming at them.
He’d been aiming at their night-vision equipment.
“One, this is Obie. Turn your illuminators off. This sniper’s got a passive scope.”
He could hear the slurring in his own speech. He sounded drunk. Felt toasted, too. If only the brunette could’ve been here with him. The cop. Salena. Funny, he hadn’t thought about her in weeks. He lay with blood running down his chin, the savor slick on his tongue. Listening to the wind and the dark. The absolutely utter dark, now that they’d lost their night vision.
Bells tolled in his ears. He was thinking way too slow. Confusion, headache, dizziness, slurred speech. All symptoms of concussion. But he was still here. Still in condition to kick some ass.
The Mission comes first.
No matter what faces you, go over it, under it, around it. The only thing that can stop you is yourself.
He rose slowly out of the snow to a crouch. Then to his knees. Finally, to his feet, swaying in the buffeting wind. His forehead was numb already, passing from pain to freezing in seconds. He tensed, expecting a bullet, but none came.
They couldn’t see him anymore.
Nor could he see them.
Blind men, grappling in the dark.
The net said in his ear, “Chief.”
“Talk.”
“They’ve got a radio active.”
“Say again?”
“Moogie’s losing battery power fast, but Whale Watcher says somebody’s transmitting UHF off to the west of us. About a hundred meters. They don’t have a translator for whatever he’s speaking, but they’re picking up the transmission. Sounds like … sounds like a cheap walkie-talkie.”
Teddy rogered, looking over his shoulder as if he could pick them up. Their mama in the sky, the EP-3E elint bird. Crew of twenty-four, and more electronic analysis equipment than anything else the Navy flew. It would be thousands of feet up and dozens of miles away. Out of visual range, even if heavy cloud and snowstorm hadn’t already cut them off from visual surveillance.
But now he understood the setup. Somebody above them, on the ridge to the left of the pass. Spotting for the sniper.
Or was the transmission from the sniper, rogering for the information?
No way to tell. He had the fuzzy sense he should be able to triangulate where the shots had come from, but couldn’t force the tasking though his mind. It got lost in there and sort of stopped.
Anyway, there was only one way to break a combination like that.
He staggered through the snow, boots dragging, freezing air sawing in and out. A splitting headache, blinding flashes as if reality were coming apart, seams ripping, letting something searing hot beneath leak through. Then a hand grabbed him. “Obie. Where you going?”
“… to get up there.”
“You’re fucked up, Chief. Got half your face hanging off. Want us to, just—”
“Maneuver and lay fire,” Teddy slurred. “Doesn’t matter at what. Just work your way up the pass, lay some fire down.” He hit the intrasquad but couldn’t get a response. Actually, the thing sounded dead. But it’d been working a minute ago. Either his batteries were butt-fucked or the bullet hitting his NVGs had put it into an intermittent fail mode. “You got comms? Oh, I forget, your radio’s fucked—”
“I took Doc’s.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. So how we doing?”
“Moogie took a bullet through both legs. Mud Cat’s with him.”
So the Cat wasn’t hit. “Is he stable? Can the Cat move him?”
“They say affirmative. But not far.”
Okay, he’d be taken care of, anyway. They’d lost their corpsman, but every SEAL was trained in battlefield trauma management. “Tell them to work their way up, take it slow, and lay down some suppression. I’m going up left field. But for Christ’s sake, don’t turn their illuminators on. They can use ’em passive mode, but don’t go to active. You support ’em. Copy?”
“Copy, but where you going?”
“Up that ridge.”
Teddy shook himself free and staggered into the dark. About thirty yards, dragging through the snow, before he felt the ground lift under his boots. Lift, and grate, and shift under the creaking snow; the loose, shallowly concave deposit of scree or talus you found at the base of a weathered cliff. Just feeling that told him that even though they hadn’t brought rock gear or belays, the cliff could probably be climbed. He put his hands out and his gloves met near-vertical stone.
Travel light and mooch, a Team saying. Probably not much to mooch at the top, but he wouldn’t get there toting this weight. He unsnapped the ruck and swung it down to lean against the cliff. Eighty pounds lighter, he slung the SR and checked everything else was secure and wouldn’t rattle; pistol holster snapped, knife and light handy. He got his boots locked into the first set of footholds and a found a cup for his right hand. He levered up and pain tore through his shoulder as his searching left hand found a nice big fracture in the rock.
The face wasn’t quite vertical. He found a ledge and edged upward along it until he ran out of footing, then groped across the rock. Nothing. Smooth face. He retreated, still searching, and found a handhold and then another crack. He got up another couple of yards before one of the fissures crumbled under his weight, leaving him dangling by his left hand. He grunted. Something was tearing in his shoulder every time he put weight on it.
Off to his right in the dark firing broke out. He figured it for the rest of the team, probing the enemy, but couldn’t be sure. Then heard the distinctive poppoppop of Mud Cat’s 249 and knew. Still working their way forward. With any luck, distracting whoever was up top here from looking down.
The invisible ground fell away to his left into what felt like a gully leading upward. Yeah; that had been on the topo. He worked over into this and friction-climbed upward, belly to flat, jagged rock, alert for ice or the slippery lichen he’d noticed the day before. But there didn’t seem to be any, just rock and a dusting of snow like powdered sugar.
He braced a foot and reached, got an outcrop. Pushed upward along a bald plane of cold rock. He had himself pulled halfway up when the outcrop shifted like a loose tooth and came free in his hand. He let go quickly and it rattled away into the dark, but he’d lost his momentum, jiggled his climbing rhythm.
Wait a minute.
The smoothness against his belly wasn’t rock.
It was ice. Snow-powdered, smooth, frictionless ice.
He started to slide backward, pivoting to the left. His arms flung outward, scrabbling for purchase. The rifle sling slipped down his right arm. But just then his left Suzy finger snagged in a crack and brought him to a halt, though enormous pain shot through the damaged shoulder. He lay rigid, gasping, listening to the clatter and jingle of his departing rifle growing fainter and fainter.
No more SR-25. Leaving him with a pistol and a knife. Not a great recipe for facing heavily armed men in the dark. Especially if whoever was at the top had heard the rifle going down the slope.
For a second he wondered if it might not be smart to slide back down the gully. Pick his way back down from cup to crack. Gather whoever was left and retreat. Find the trail bin Laden would be taking down to the valley, and backpedal down
it himself. Find the Pak army and turn himself in. “We got lost in the snow,” he muttered. Surely no one could blame him for getting lost.
Instead he searched his gear pockets, wedged his remaining 7.62 mags into cracks, and started climbing again. This time, angling to the right of the gully, where the snow and ice might not have built up so thick.
And it turned out it hadn’t.
He kept working his way up. It was a little easier without the weight of rifle and ammo, though he felt naked without it. Then he came to a sheer face. There were cracks for handholds, but they were too narrow for footholds. He could find nowhere to put his boots that didn’t place them either square on slick ice or kicking close-grained vertical rock. He tackled it grimly and failed time after time, until he could feel his fingers bleeding inside the gloves. He grappled with the rock like an exhausted, nearly defeated wrestler, grunting, growling deep in his throat. But at last he put together just the right combination of leverage and pulled himself up with sheer body strength alone.
He came to a halt then, wavering, almost toppling backward. The searing fire was streaming from the cracks in the darkness. The pain was hot spikes being driven into the joint of his shoulder. He couldn’t climb any more.
Down? Going down was ten times harder than coming up. He’d never make it. Just didn’t have it. So that just wasn’t really an option.
He reached up one last time.
His outstretched hand waved, groped in darkness. He lowered it to a gritty lip of loose, friable rock the size of clenched fists.
So, he was at the top.
He had his hand to his face before he remembered: no NVGs. And even if he had them, he couldn’t illuminate. He clung like a spider to crumbling rock, rigid, muscles shaking, the ax embedded between his eyes, the void at his back. He searched from left to right, carefully, slowly, by sectors. Nothing but the dark, and the sigh of the wind, and the grate of snow crystals over snow.
The rocks shifted under his weight as he got an elbow over, and slowly, slowly fulcrumed himself up onto the slanted, narrow col. The horizontal wind told him he was at the top. Blowing directly into his face, it tanged of earth and burnt explosive. Straight from the valley of fire. To the right, another cliff face overlooked the pass. To the left, the ridgeline led west. The map lit in his mind and he saw its narrow pointed arrow of kinked topo lines. He sniffed and listened, turning his head from side to side. If the guy they’d picked up a transmission from was still up here, he couldn’t be far.