by Ted Bell
At least he’d fight with good men at his side.
One look at the dark-eyed and heavily bearded militia and he knew Patoo had chosen his small band of fighters carefully. Hawke had been constantly studying them, assessing their willingness to fight when things got spicy.
Then he’d seen the looks on their faces as the battle drew nigh. He’d never seen such volcanic hatred in men’s eyes. These were men—and boys—who’d seen the Taliban stone their sisters and mothers to death for sport, or cut off the fingers of anyone caught smoking. Seen Taliban thugs drag their fathers and brothers from their houses into the streets. Where they were castrated and then beheaded and left to rot where they died. Their brothers’ heads mounted on pikes on the roads that led into their villages, welcoming them home with empty eye sockets.
At night, the Taliban would roam the streets, amusing themselves with a game they laughingly called the “Dance of the Dead.”
They would prop a beheaded corpse upright and pour gasoline into the open neck. When they set them afire, the dead would jerk their limbs spasmodically and kick their hideously bent legs outward before collapsing into the street. This blasphemy, the self-righteous Taliban seemed to find endlessly amusing.
The militiamen now standing with Hawke had seen this kind of thing happen to their families for decades. They would fight to the last man.
Five minutes later, Hawke’s entire army was in readiness, standing side by side inside the perimeter of the hastily built breastworks. The tension was palpable and Hawke stepped to the center. He felt it necessary to say a few words.
“We are reasonably well protected. We have enormous firepower and unlimited ammunition. The men who are coming for us will be on horseback and they will fight to the death, which, for them, is the ultimate reward. I want each of you to pick individual targets and stay with them until the kill before moving on to the next. Make every shot count. Shoot the horses out from under them if necessary. When the fighters get up, kill them quickly before they can charge us on foot. I guess that’s it. Good luck, God bless you, and good shooting.”
He went silently around the circle, shaking hands with each and every one of them, looking them in the eye, showing his confidence in them with his eyes and his smile. When he got to Sahira, he held her hand a little longer and bent his head toward her ear.
“Listen carefully. I am sure we will be all right. But if the worst should happen, you should know that under no circumstances will I let these barbarians take you alive. Do you clearly understand what I am saying? What I will have to do?”
“I do, Alex. And I appreciate your concern.”
“It’s more than concern, Sahira,” Hawke said with a gentle smile before walking away to take his place among the men standing at the breastworks.
THEY SAW THE RISING CLOUD of dust long before they heard the thunderous pounding of hoofbeats drawing nearer. Stokely Jones, who was standing to Hawke’s immediate right, was leaning over the berm, peering through a pair of tripod-mounted, extremely high-powered Zeiss 8X30 binocs, his well-used M24 SWS sniper rifle at the ready beside him.
He would see the enemy long before the enemy saw the tiny band of fighters taking a desperate stand behind a pitiful mound of sand, the carcasses of dead animals, and old leather saddlebags. Stoke was a trained ex–SEAL sniper and it was said he could shoot the wings off a firefly at a hundred paces. He would start picking off the enemy in the vanguard as soon as they appeared in his lenses. The opposition’s day always got off to a bad start seeing their commanding officers toppling from their saddles before they’d seen, or even engaged, the foe.
“See anything yet?” Hawke asked Stoke. He’d been looking around at his defenders, all of them doing last-minute weapons checks, adjusting their Kevlar flak vests for the tenth time, getting mentally prepared for battle.
Praying.
“Just the dust cloud,” Stoke said. “Big damn dust cloud, though, and moving fast in this direction.”
“As soon as you acquire a target, start shooting. Pick off as many of the obvious commanders as you can. As soon as the main body is in range of our weapons, I’ll give the order to fire at will.”
Hawke saw Abdul at the breastworks, speaking quietly with Sahira. Earlier that morning he’d asked his reliable new friend to stick by her during the battle, no matter what, afford her all the protection he could. Dakkon had proven his bravery and loyalty beyond question. Hawke knew the man would lay down his life for any of them.
Harry Brock, at his station to Hawke’s left, had pulled a battered harmonica from his vest pocket and was playing it softly. Hawke recognized the plaintive American Civil War tune, even recalled some of the lyrics, sung to him as a child long ago by his American mother. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…”
“What’s that song called, Harry?” Hawke asked.
“‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
“It’s lovely. Don’t stop.”
Harry played on as the massive twister of swirling dust and sand drew nearer and nearer.
Faces appeared out of the dust, hard faces with hooded black eyes and tangled black beards, tattered robes flapping wildly behind them in the wind. Glittering belts of ammo criss-crossed their chests. Their mouths were torn black holes in their fierce faces; but their murderous war cries went unheard, obliterated by the pounding hooves and the sudden explosion of gunfire.
At the forefront of the charge was a big bearded man in flowing black robes that were wildly whipping and snapping behind him. The commander was beating his horse, urging his steed to gallop even faster. He had his rifle raised above his head, exhorting his troops onward with fierce battle cries.
“Who is that man leading the charge, Patoo?” Hawke asked.
“That is the legendary Colonel Abu Zazi, sir. He is Sheik al-Rashad’s brilliant and brutal second in command. He was born in the United Kingdom and graduated with honors from Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is now responsible for the worst of the suicide bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He leads an alliance of Taliban, Punjabi militants, al Qaeda, and the former Mehsud fighters.”
“He looks fearsome enough, I’d say.”
Dakkon said, “Colonel Zazi has a price on his head of US$5 million, sir. He was among the assassins who murdered Pakistan’s beloved premier Benazir Bhutto.”
Looking through his binoculars, Hawke clearly saw the face of his enemy. And knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was in for the fight of his life. Outwardly he awaited the battle with composure and confidence. This was one of those times that called for stern tranquillity.
“NOW I KNOW HOW GENERAL George Armstrong Custer must have felt,” Harry Brock said, firing as rapidly as he could. The mad horde of wildly galloping Taliban fighters, shouting and screaming their war cries, had completely encircled them. There had to be at least a hundred of them, riding around and around at full gallop, directing the fire of their AK-47s at the vastly outnumbered men inside the pathetic and hastily built fortification.
It may have been pathetic, but it seemed to be working, Hawke thought, as he slammed another mag into his weapon, welded the stock to his cheek, and rapidly killed as many men as he could before pausing to reload. Bullets filled the air, whistling overhead, thudding into the berm, and sometimes finding his men. He already had two of his fearless militiamen dead, and four badly wounded.
But Patoo’s gravely wounded Pakistani militiamen stood their ground and kept fighting. They were not fighting for their lives, Hawke knew. They were fighting for the very soul of their country. And they were fighting in the memory of their fathers, their mothers, their sisters, their brothers, all victims of the vicious Taliban jihadists.
Hawke believed he could ask for no finer men than those who fought at his side.
Stokely had taken to firing RPGs into the ground in the midst of the charging Taliban horses. His objective, Hawke saw, was not only to take out the horses, but to create large craters with the ex
ploding grenades. This caused a great many of the horses to stumble when the unexpected hole appeared suddenly, and they went down, throwing their riders to the ground and making them much easier targets.
“Where the hell’d you learn that, Stoke?” Hawke shouted over the deafening roar of gunfire.
“I didn’t,” Stoke said. “I just made it up.”
Hawke laughed and took out a large number of fighters who were stumbling around looking for their AKs after being thrown from their mounts. Some of the militia fighters had seen what Stokely was doing and began doing the same thing. One man fired RPGs, the two men to either side of him concentrating their fire on the thrown fighters as they scrambled to their feet.
The firefight raged on for ninety blistering minutes.
The now-diminished enemy forces showed little sign of retreat, continuing to pour it on. Brock thought he was in one of those battles where the bad guys just kept turning the volume up, and it was getting louder and louder. They had at least three or four KIAs inside the redoubt now, and many more wounded still standing at their stations. Brock began to wonder how much longer they could withstand this withering assault.
And then the brave little man to his left, Patoo, was killed, the incoming round tearing away most of his throat, blood spouting out in gouts as he lay sprawled on his back on the ground, no chance. The militiamen had lost their brother and leader.
Brock saw Hawke register Patoo’s death, saw the devastated look on his face. And then Hawke was going about inside the circle, walking right through the hail of bullets whistling across the compound at head height, encouraging Patoo’s men to stand up to their duty and not let the bastards whip them. He never once sheltered his own person, and Harry could not see how he escaped being killed.
Hawke was one of the bravest men he’d ever seen in a fight and he’d seen one hell of a lot of brave men.
“Harry!” Stoke shouted. “Above you!”
Brock whirled around to see a Talib fighter standing atop the berm with a sword in his hand, a demonic look on his face, and clearly ready to relieve Harry of his head. Guy must have crawled on his belly up to the berm when Brock was kneeling and reloading, trying to comfort the dying Patoo at the same time. No time to get his rifle up, so he whipped his sidearm out of the holster on his thigh and brought it to bear on the man just as the sword blade started its deadly arc toward him.
He shot the guy in the face, causing him to drop his sword and pitch backward onto the blood-soaked sand.
When Harry got back to his feet, he saw an amazing thing.
The enemy seemed to be withdrawing. They had taken severe casualties, had probably lost more than half their original force, and it looked like the bad guys didn’t like the heat and were getting out of the kitchen. At least, temporarily.
“Keep firing until they’re out of range,” Hawke said to Stokely, before expending an entire mag at full auto on the retreating foe. “Then use sniper sights and see what you can do to the rear guard.”
Brock said, between bursts of automatic fire, “A good victory, I’d say, chief. How the hell did we survive that?”
Hawke, reloading, said grimly, “Right. Another victory like that one and we’ll all be dirt-napping throughout eternity, Harry. We are now officially in what we used to call in the Royal Navy, ‘the Deep Severe.’”
“What do you think, boss?” Stoke said, pausing to reload. Then he saw Hawke had his radio out and was desperately trying to raise somebody, anybody, to come to their aid. “Bloody thing doesn’t work! We’re in a dead zone,” he said, and he threw the radio to the ground in frustration, before regaining his composure.
“They’ll be back,” Hawke said, still firing at the last of the retreating enemy. “They’re only nursing their wounds, regathering for the next assault. Pausing to regroup and replenish their ammunition. The commander, Zazi, if he’s still alive, is at this moment coming up with a new strategy of attack.”
“Well, we can hold them off,” Brock said, trying to convince himself.
“I don’t think so, Harry. We’re still seriously outnumbered. If I were Colonel Zazi, I’d be telling the troops to bunch the horses up flank to flank, charge straight at us, en masse, and simply overrun our position.”
“Yeah, that’d probably work.”
“Harry, listen up. I don’t know how much time we’ve got before they come back at us. Here’s what I want you to do. These radios are useless. You’ve still got the sat-phone satchel? Tell me it’s not all shot up?”
“Right here. Looks intact, I think.”
“You need to take it and leave the compound. Right now. Go to the top of that dune, set it up, and try to call in some help. You may not raise anybody, but you’ve got to try, it’s the only chance we’ve got. The B-52s just across the border in Afghani airspace can’t help from that altitude, but if they could send in a nearby AC-130 gunship from over there, we might get through this. You’ll get a lot of bureaucratic crap about invading Pakistan airspace. Don’t listen. Give them our approximate position and the strength of the enemy and tell them just how bloody serious this is. Tell them we’ve got our guys dying out here…we need help before we get overwhelmed. Go, Harry, go. Godspeed.”
HARRY BROCK, AT THE TOP of the giant sand dune, set the range finder next to the satellite phone in the sand beside him. He pulled out his map and spread it out, using the spidery legs of the sat phone to keep the map from blowing away. Then he looked out across the valley they had passed through. He looked to the mountains on either side, their prominent features, the way they funneled down to their present position, matched that with where they’d built their defensive perimeter. He could still see the old British fort in the hazy distance. He absorbed it all, creating a map in his mind.
Then he looked down at his real map, transposing the features in his mind on to the elevation lines fanned across the paper. He did this many times, looking back and forth between the valley and the map until he located the position on the paper that matched the features he saw with his eyes until he had a fix on their position. He pulled out his small spiral notebook and wrote down the position’s grid coordinates. These would be the numbers he would radio up to anyone he could raise and—
He heard a clink of metal and grabbed his weapon. Five armed Taliban fighters were just starting the long climb up the dune.
MINUTES LATER HAWKE HEARD the rattle of heavy automatic weapon fire coming from the direction where Harry had disappeared behind the dune. At least three or four weapons firing simultaneously. Hawke figured Harry had surprised a Taliban squad mounting the back face of the dune on foot. Planning to use the dune’s elevation to fire down into the redoubt.
Harry was probably dead.
And no help was on the way.
They’d stand alone.
ONE HOUR LATER THE ENEMY force returned with a vengeance, riding en masse, just the way Hawke had predicted. He’d pulled every man who could still fight to the forward rim of the circle facing the onslaught. Stokely had patched up the wounded militia guys and now, God only knew how, they were back on their feet at the ramparts. They all started firing RPGs the instant the Taliban horsemen got within range, eleven hundred meters. It had some effect, a lot of horses went down, but it was not nearly enough to even slow the charge.
“Full auto,” Hawke shouted up and down the line. “Keep pouring fire into them, throw as much lead out there as you possibly can.”
And they did, but still the enemy kept coming, and their intentions were clear. They would simply roll right over the flimsy fortification. Then wheel, return, and kill every single one of them with blades or bullets.
Hawke looked over at Sahira, firing her weapon with an intensity he’d never imagined she was capable of. Abdul Dakkon stood beside her, cleanly picking off anyone directing fire in their direction. Hawke called her name and she looked over at him.
He shook his head and mouthed the words, I’m so sorry.
He saw the tears rolling down h
er cheeks and his heart broke and once again he felt that stabbing—
“Look! The top of the dune!” he heard Stokely shout. “Holy mother of God, will you just take a look at that!”
Hawke whirled just in time to see an armored U.S. Army Humvee come flying over the top of the massive dune and go skidding down the face of it, throwing out waves of sand. It was followed by a second, a third, and then a fourth! The four vehicles immediately whirled toward the enemy, raced across the desert, and inserted themselves directly between Hawke’s team and the charging Taliban horsemen.
Hatches flew open in the roof of each vehicle, and soldiers manning M240 7.62mm machine guns opened up on the now-terrified horsemen. The Humvee was also equipped with an MK19 40mm grenade launcher now firing a variety of grenades at an effective range of more than two thousand yards. The Americans were launching them into the enemy at a rate of sixty rounds per minute.
The Taliban force, shocked and disoriented, either died in the saddle or turned and ran. Most of them died. The Humvees charged in pursuit of the retreating enemy, and Hawke knew their fate was sealed.
He looked up into the vast blue sky above and thanked whoever was up there. It was over.
Hawke, deeply moved by the courage he’d just witnessed, went around the little compound with Stokely. While Stoke, who had extensive battlefield medical experience thanks to Vietnam, tended the newly wounded, Hawke embraced each man in turn, saying to each, “Well done. I shall always remember your courage.”
When he came to Sahira, he embraced her, too. He whispered into her ear, “I told you we’d be all right.”
“I didn’t believe you,” she said.
“Frankly, I didn’t either.”
WHEN HE WAS SATISFIED THAT EVERYTHING possible was being done to care for his dead and wounded, Hawke left the compound and headed behind the dune to retrieve the body of Harry Brock.
He found Harry lying spread-eagled on his back, high on the back face of the dune next to his satellite radio and his rifle. Blood was seeping from his multiple wounds into the sand. Below him were five Taliban, sprawled on the back of the dune, dead.