by Dalton Fury
Kolt, Benji, and Monk all arrived at the wall at the same time. Kolt had picked up an AK from a dead Khyber Rifles guard on the way, and he climbed a wooden ladder to a stone landing that allowed him to look out over the hills to the east. The other two men shouldered up to him, and as they peered through the stone parapets they could see heads peek over rocks in the distance. But there was no gunfire toward their position from the enemy force. It seemed the enemy were concentrating on taking out the air assets.
Kolt understood, and he explained to the others. “This was part of the plan. Al Qaeda knew American choppers would come to sanitize the black site after the AQ hit. These guys must have been camped out here waiting to knock them out of the sky.”
Just then, a Little Bird on a strafing run over the hills was hit with a streaking Anza missile. The chopper shuddered and smoked, but it remained airborne. It turned back to the west and began limping for the Afghanistan border.
Benji lifted his HK416 and fired at the cluster of rocks from where the rocket was fired, over three hundred yards away. He stopped firing, doubtful that he’d hit anything. Then he turned to Racer and asked, “Why didn’t these guys start shooting the helos as soon as they came? We’ve had air assets buzzing overhead for twenty minutes. Why did they open up just now?”
Kolt thought for a moment. “Because the AQ guy in charge, this American T.J. told us about, ordered them not to fire until he gave them the signal. He was planning on getting out of here on one of his two Black Hawks. He would have told the Taliban commander to stay concealed until he called him and let him know they could start blasting helos.”
“So the American AQ guy just made a phone call to these guys out here.”
“That’s right.”
Benji said, “Shit. How are we going to exfil with all these fucking SAM crews?”
Monk had been on the radio, communicating with the helicopter air support and ordering the Little Birds to move off five kilometers, out of range of the Anza missiles. He turned to Benji and Kolt and said, “We don’t have the vehicles to go overland. It’s five klicks to the border. We’ll have to suppress these crows ourselves with what we’ve got.”
“What about UAVs?” asked Raynor.
Monk shook his head. “There are a pair of Agency Reapers above us, but they aren’t authorized to provide close air support.”
Kolt turned and looked at the master sergeant. “Then what the fuck are they authorized to do?”
“They are here to wipe any evidence away. They are going to level this place as soon as we get out of here.”
“Damn it! Can’t they make an exception and help us out?”
Monk shrugged. “I’m sure they are knocking that request up the chain of command right now.”
“Shit!” shouted Kolt in utter exasperation. “Not a damned thing has changed in the past three years!”
Benji stated the obvious. “Look, Monk. We’ve lost three choppers already, and we have no idea how many missile launchers are out there. There is no way we can take off without getting nailed.”
Monk just nodded, trying to figure a quick way out of this. They could wait for the Reaper drones to get the go-ahead to launch Hellfires on the missile crews, but every second they stayed here at the Sandcastle the danger increased. Monk wanted to get the hell out of here, now.
Kolt turned to Monk. “Listen. When those two Black Hawks take off, every one of those missile crews is going to have to pop up from cover to launch. One man with a scoped rifle, if he’s willing to stay behind, can keep those heads down, or blow those heads off.”
“Any volunteers?” Monk asked sarcastically.
Raynor answered immediately, “Me. Get me a scoped rifle and I’ll keep them occupied.”
“And then what?”
“Then I head overland toward the border.”
Monk shook his head. “That is ridiculous. No way.”
“I’m not under your command, remember? You can’t stop me.”
“The hell I can’t! I’ll put your ass into one of those helos myself!”
“I’m not getting in one of those helos. They are going to get shot down unless I engage the missile crews.”
“Staying here is suicide, Racer!”
“I’m not staying here. I’m going to head up into those hills to the west. Give me five minutes to get some high ground, and then you guys take off.”
Monk hesitated, only because Kolt was right — he did not have the authority to tell Racer he couldn’t do whatever the hell he wanted. “If you do this, you are on your own.”
Kolt said, “Fine, but don’t make me use this damned AK. Give me a chance.”
Monk reached for his radio. In seconds a sniper appeared. The young man was extremely pissed when ordered to hand his SR-25 over to the American in hajji pajamas, but he did as he was told. While the sniper was busy removing his gear from his body — his gun, his ammo, his ballistic computer from his wrist — Monk took Racer aside. “Nobody’s coming back to pick you up. You’re clear on that, right?”
Raynor was already slinging the rifle over his shoulder. “I’m clear.”
Monk’s professional demeanor did not waver for an instant. “Okay. As soon as we’re gone, get away from this fort. Don’t get your ass blown up by the damned CIA.”
Kolt nodded, began running toward the western gate.
Monk called after him: “Racer. Go make your own luck.” Monk knew better than to wish anyone in the Unit “good luck.” He turned and began running toward the choppers, shouting orders into his radio.
FORTY-NINE
Pam fingered a Motorola handheld radio that she kept on her desk near her coffee mug. Through it she could communicate with her ground crew, the six Radiance employees who maintained her two UAVs.
Her hand lingered tentatively over the black walkie-talkie. Finally she lifted it to her mouth. Pressed the Transmit button.
Her eyes remained on her monitor. The Sandcastle was in the center; the brown hills around took up much of the screen.
“Joseph, can you please come to Trailer 1?”
“Two minutes, Pammy.”
Pam sipped her lukewarm triple mocha while she waited. Looking down at the cup of hot coffee, she noticed that her hands were quivering with trepidation.
She had just heard from Grauer that Racer had insisted on staying behind to fire on the Taliban missile crews as the Black Hawks tried to take off and make their way out of the Khyber Pass. Pete assured her that he was working on a way to help bring Racer out of Pakistan, if he managed to survive the next few minutes. But whatever he had cooked up, Grauer didn’t sound terribly optimistic about Racer’s chances of survival.
Grauer had also told her that the CIA was not likely to use its Reaper drones and Hellfire missiles to do more than its original mission — to vaporize the Sandcastle in order to erase all evidence of the black site.
Pam could not shake the thought that she’d once before held Racer’s life in her hands, and she’d once before been given orders that led to disaster for him and others. Once before she had folded in the face of her commander, and many people had paid dearly for her inability to convince others what needed to be done.
As she stirred sugar into her triple mocha her chin rose slightly and her slight shoulders pulled back inside her olive flight suit.
She’d come to a decision.
She’d do what she had to do.
Come what might, she was going to do everything in her power to help Racer survive the day.
Joseph stepped in from the sunny afternoon. His bald black head shone from the sweat of working outside in the Afghanistan autumn. “What can I do you for, my love?”
As usual, Pamela kept her eyes on her monitors and gauges. There was a tiny rearview mirror taped on her console to her right so that she could see who was behind her in the trailer. She looked into it as she asked, “Can you have Baby Boy towed into the hangar?”
“The hangar? We’ve got the Falcon in there now. I
can fit Baby Boy, but it will be a tight squeeze.”
“That’s fine.”
“There’s no wind today,” he added, confused by her request to bring the bird indoors.
“I need him out of view.”
“’Kay. Why?”
“Because I need him prepped for flight.”
Joseph cocked his head. “Something wrong with Baby Girl?”
Pam turned away from her monitors and faced the man standing at the door to the trailer. Her doing so was a rare enough occurrence that the engineer knew something was up.
“No. I’m going to launch him. Have them both up at the same time.”
Joseph stared at her for several seconds. “Grauer knows about this?”
“No, he does not. But I want you to tell him that I told you he ordered it. That should cover your ass, at least.”
“What the hell are you planning — ”
“Trust me. It will be better for you if you don’t know.”
Joseph nodded slowly. “How soon till launch?”
“Twenty minutes at the outside. Ten would be better. I need full fuel. Every last drop.”
“Wow, Pam.” He shook his head. “I’ll get the team together and start work on it now.” He pulled his radio from his belt.
“You’re my hero, Joseph.” Pam turned back to her monitor.
* * *
Kolt Raynor squeezed the trigger on his rifle. The recoil blurred his vision through the scope for an instant, but he had already refocused on his target by the time the turbaned man’s head jerked back and blood shot into the air.
Raynor had no time to congratulate himself. He heard the Black Hawks’ propellers churning the thin mountain air as they gained altitude ahead and to his right. He scanned quickly with his rifle’s optics and found another crew, stepping out from behind a revetment far on the other side of the Sandcastle. Raynor fired twice. The first round missed high, but the second spun the man with the missile tube on his shoulder down to the ground.
His scope panned again. Another crew of two men, ready to fire. Kolt cracked off another round of Hornady Black Hills Gold.308 Winchester ammo, and another Taliban doubled over dead.
The Black Hawks were high in the air now. A missile launched from the far side of the Sandcastle — Raynor had missed this crew. He listened for the sounds of the impact with one of the big birds as he traced the smoke from the launch. Finding two men who had already ducked deep into a thicket of brush, Raynor fired five rounds in rapid succession from his twenty-round magazine, right where the brush moved.
He was certain he’d hit the men.
The missile missed the chopper and exploded into a hillside south of Torkham. The Black Hawk’s various antimissile countermeasures had done their job.
Kolt emptied his rifle at a group of Taliban who fired RPK rifles at his hillside. They had not seen his exact position, but he had seen theirs, so his last eight bullets sent the machine gunners back to the cover of a large boulder.
He dumped another full magazine at various gunners and missile crews in the next two minutes. He stopped shooting only when the heavy thump thump of the Black Hawk propellers had melted away from his sector of the Khyber Pass.
And then, with no warning whatsoever, an air-to-ground missile slammed dead center into the stockade of the Sandcastle. Kolt was a good two hundred yards away, but still well within the radius for flying bits of shrapnel to tear him apart. He dove to the ground, grabbed the SR-25, and began running, crawling, and scrambling around the side of the hill, staying low to avoid the now continual missile strikes back at the black site.
Shrapnel pinged off boulders around him as he moved.
“Thanks, assholes!” Kolt shouted, directing his rage at the CIA suits in Virginia who had ordered the demolition operation to proceed right on top of him.
Ten minutes later Raynor ran down a hill a half mile to the southwest of the Sandcastle. There was enough traffic below him on the road to keep him from heading for the Suzuki bike he’d left there. It had probably already been stolen, but if not, he would find himself surrounded by civilians that he could not trust to be friendly, and he knew he couldn’t just start shooting people who weren’t shooting at him. Behind him the explosions had died off. He knew there would be Taliban still alive back there, and he assumed they would be well aware that a sniper had foiled their plan to take down the departing transport helicopters.
Raynor would love to hide out in the mountains of the Khyber Pass until nightfall, use his skills in escape and evasion to make his way west and over the border through the rugged backcountry.
But he saw no way that was going to happen, since the only way off the hill he was now on was to go down directly to the road. A road full of Taliban who were, no doubt, hot on his heels. The only option he saw was to get to the road before the Taliban knew what he was doing, and then run, bike, or drive like hell to get to the border town of Torkham, a few kilometers up the road. Only there would he have any chance of hiding out till nightfall.
It was not even a real plan, more like a fantasy, but it was all Kolt had.
So he ran on, hoping his depleted stores of strength and adrenaline would last a while longer.
He had made it to within one hundred yards of the road when the ground around him began kicking up violently. The all too familiar sound of clattering AK-47s firing on full auto came from his right, up the highway, and bounced off the steep cliffs and dry hillsides of the Khyber Pass.
The Taliban had spotted him.
Kolt dove to the ground for cover.
* * *
Pam Archer received the call from Joseph that Baby Boy had been prepped and pulled back out of the hangar, and he was now ready to go. She put down her radio, got up from her seat, took the three steps over to the door of the trailer, and opened it. She popped her head out and called to the Radiance security guard standing just a few feet away. “Jay, can you come in here a sec?”
Jay entered the darkened trailer. His M-4 rifle scratched against the doorjamb. “Hey, Pam, what’s up?” Jay knew there was an intense operation under way — Archer had been in one of the trailers virtually twenty hours a day for the past week. But he was just site security, so he knew nothing about the mission over the border.
“I’ve got one helluva favor to ask of you.”
“Anything for a fellow Browns fan.”
Pam smiled. She pointed to her seat. “Sit down.”
Jay smiled. Laughed nervously. “Sit at the … controls? Really?”
“Yeah. I just need to run out and check something. I’ll be back in a few.”
Jay’s jaw dropped. He looked around to see if his buddies were involved in this practical joke. “You want me to fly the Predator?”
“No, silly. It’s on autopilot. Wide circles. It will fly itself. I just need you to watch the monitor, the system’s console. If something weird happens, a systems failure or some other anomoly, use the joystick to do your best to keep her level and call me on the Motorola. Otherwise, don’t touch anything.” She had already pushed him gently forward in the tight confines of the trailer. His eyes were wide and focused on the chair in front of all the controls. Pam pushed him again, less gently this time. Not unlike a mother prodding her child to encourage him to sit in the dentist’s chair.
“Grauer will have my ass if I fly the UAV.”
“Yes, but just think what he’ll do to you if you crash the UAV. Good luck.” Pam Archer shot out the door and shut it behind her.
Alone in the dark room, security officer Jay unslung his rifle and scrambled into the big-backed chair. “Holy shit,” he said in awe at everything in front of him.
He kept his hands in his lap and his eyes on the monitor in front of him.
* * *
This was a good spot. It would end here.
Raynor sighed.
He’d run back up the hill, two hundred yards above the winding Torkham Road, and found decent cover behind a boulder. He’d peered over it at t
he two large flatbed trucks that had stopped. Armed men had dismounted, a dozen at least, and clearly they’d seen him run to this position.
At that point he’d decided to look for another spot. Then he’d realized he’d boxed himself in. There was nowhere to go but back down the hill to the highway, and he did not want to do that.
Kolt looked through his scope, searching for targets, and was certain now that there were twenty-five men down there, all after him. They obviously knew he had a sniper rifle — they were staying low and behind cover for now. But Kolt knew they would advance slowly but surely on his hide.
One man against twenty-five. He would not survive this fight.
At least he was the one who had the long-range weapon.
A supersonic crack passed on his right, less than a foot from his throat. He threw himself back down into the dirt. His day-old forearm wound screamed at him when he hit the ground.
“Son of a bitch!” They had a sniper too. Kolt knew he needed to keep his head down now, and while he did, the Taliban forces would be converging on him, flanking him.
He tried twice more to pop his head back up to fire, but each time, the sniper sent a round his way. As he was boxed in from behind, his options were few and dwindling.
A third time he stood, determined to get a round off this time, but a shape appeared in the near distance. Instinctively he ducked, but it bounced on the boulder in front of him, ricocheted off to his left. His subconscious brain told him it was a grenade before any conscious understanding had been formed in his mind.
He dove again for the ground, landed hard on his wounded arm, just as the grenade exploded twenty feet away. He’d been shielded by a boulder on his left, but debris and shrapnel rained down on him. A sharp rock hit him hard, slicing open the back of his head and dazing him slightly.