Each team had been assigned one of the Taliban leaders they wanted to capture. She wasn’t surprised to learn at the ops briefing back at their SEAL compound that Torres and Allen would be responsible for taking two of the tangos down—not one—and cuffing them up. Torres was regarded as the best, most efficient, shooter in the team and Allen was second. If anyone could handle two tangos, it would be them.
That was another reason why she wasn’t going to tattle on what Torres had pulled with her back at base. She didn’t want to see him kicked off the team by Wyatt. Maybe he was just having a bad day, and tomorrow, or on the next mission he’d be semi-friendlier, as he had been before this. Ali wanted nothing more than a white flag of surrender between them.
So far, she had never seen any of their ops go according to the briefing they’d had at J-bad. The wind was sharp, her nose numb, the tops of her ears covered, but the lobes were numb, as well. She wore a checkered black and white keffiyah, an Arab-style scarf made of wool, around her neck and ears to help protect her to a point. The Kevlar helmet strap was tight, cutting uncomfortably into her chin.
She wanted to loosen it a little but wasn’t about to remove her hand from the trigger or stop tracking the area, looking for enemy that might be out there in the night coming their way. It wasn’t the first time the Taliban had set up a trap to get Delta Force, Rangers, or SEALs compromised in such a situation. And there had always been deadly consequences for the Americans when they didn’t realize it was an ambush. No, they’d learned to always have a sniper with a night scope to continually watch the area from a higher point to protect those teams going into any type of op.
Wyatt, too, was using his binoculars to see through the night, a backup for her. Tension momentarily ratcheted up within her as she heard Torres’ dark, angry words echoing, “Don’t fuck this up!”
None of the other SEALs seemed disturbed she’d made op errors. After all, Wyatt was there at all times with her, if needed. Tinker Ledlow had come up to her after the first snatch-and-grab op, placed his arm around her and gave her a quick hug.
“Hey, shit happens out there, Montero. You’re learning on the fly, so don’t worry about the mistakes you made out there, okay? This team is tight and we’ve been together for a long time. Even if you do make a mistake, we can compensate for it out in the field, so stop looking so glum. Don’t be so hard on yourself, okay?”
Tinker had flame red hair and a wild, frizzy beard to go with it. He was the joker of the team, his blue eyes pale and always glinting with merriment when he was playing a joke on one of his SEAL buddies. Nothing seemed to bring him down. He’d given her a second squeeze and then released her.
“Okay?” he demanded, wriggling his thick red eyebrows.
“Okay,” she laughed. “Thanks.”
“We all screw up.” Tinker looked up across the largest room in their compound where they often met to read, watch TV re-runs, or just check out for a while. His eyes narrowed. “And stop worrying about Torres. He’s the best shooter in the team, but don’t listen to his bitches toward you. I overhead him giving you a ration of shit earlier about screw-ups on this last op. If anyone is gonna chew your ass out, it’ll be Wyatt. He’s the team leader. So tell Torres to go find a hole to bury himself in and leave you the fuck alone. Okay? Fight fire with fire—or maybe, put Mazzie in his lap when he’s watching TV. That always seems to make him relax and he’s not so grumpy.”
How many times had she replayed Tinker’s words? She was just as much a professional warrior as he was. This was her first time being sent to a SEAL team, that was true, but she had worked with Delta Force and Army Rangers and knew their op mission templates as well as their tempo. Now, she was learning SEAL operations, which were considerably different, and so she had to throw her old, memorized playbook on missions away and start all over—and the learning curve was steep out in the sandbox.
She had been a field operator and hadn’t been given a chance to attend SEAL school on mounting missions and operations simply because, Wyatt had informed her, her two skills as a translator and being a sniper, were too desperately needed in the field to allow her the time to learn their methodologies at school. Most going into a SEAL team attended this school before going out into the field.
Wyatt had told the team from the get-go that she would be trained “on-the-job.” No one seemed to have a problem with that except Torres, who had immediately voiced his concern. Then, she started making mistakes. But still, she only made a few. Lockwood took them in stride and so did the rest of the team members. Sometimes Ram would wait and catch her off by herself. Sometimes he embarrassed her in front of other team members.
Once, she’d cried in her room later, the pillow stuffed against her face so no one could hear her sobs. It hurt her deeply that Torres kept saying that one day, she’d cost one or more of their lives out on one of these ops. That insult hurt worse than anything else he could say to her. He treated her as if she were some johnnie-come-lately pretending to be a battle-hardened warrior when she wasn’t.
Three clicks of the radio came back into her earpiece.
“They’re in place,” she told Wyatt.
He clicked.
She felt the biting cold, glad she’d put on a double pair of socks to wear in her combat boots and the Kevlar vest, along with her cartridge vest, kept her warm from the waist up. Now, the waiting would begin. They’d have to be patient as the enemy ate and then bundled up in a blanket to go to sleep. The team would strike around 0300, when sleep was the deepest, the tangos less likely to wake up.
In the meantime, the team would be freezing their asses off out here in the flat plain below. Ali had found good camouflage—desert brush growing in large clumps, to hide behind and wait.
And wait. Hoping that afterwards, they would all be around to congratulate each other.
CHAPTER 8
An uneasy feeling crept through Ali. The hours had mounted and increased the tension within her. The SEALs were crawling at a snail’s pace. She kept her scope on the horses, occasionally sweeping upward to the hill above the caves. Those animals would hear them first. She worried they might be ambushed, unable to shake the feeling. Meanwhile, Wyatt lay beside her, unmoving, years of being immobile during similar ops making it much easier for him, than for her. The wind was erratic, whipping the larger brush back and forth, but it didn’t seem to bother the animals on the picket line. They were familiar with the sound of wind through the shrubs.
She checked for any telltale smoke around the cave entrances, and searched above where the large, loaf-like ridge stood. There was a lot of brush on the top of the hill, making it tough to see a human shape. She was grateful for her infrared scope; it would spot the heat from the body of a Taliban if any emerged from a cave exit point.
Glancing over, she saw Wyatt lift the black leather flap over the face of the Rolex watch he wore. The radium dials were a bright green in the blackness of the night. It was 0300, the hour when most people were in their deepest, soundest sleep. They wouldn’t wake up as easily if they heard a sound outside the normal ones encountered here.
She felt Wyatt tense—it was nothing overt, not even a physical reaction—but Ali had learned years ago that her psychic ability went off the charts when she was on a mission and she had learned to trust it.
“Somethin’s not right,” Wyatt growled softly.
She swung her scope up to the top of the hill, focusing the caves once more. Oh, no!
“Tango, twelve o’clock,” she rasped. There, in her scope, was a male form moving slowly through a grove of trees on the hilltop. She was sure he had an AK-47 in his hand, but it gave off no heat signature and she could not confirm it. She panned to the horses on the picket line to see if they had picked up on him. Because of the distance—the height of the hill at least two-thousand feet—they had not heard the man walking around far above them.
Cursing softly, Lockwood ordered the three teams to pull back and cancel the mission. It would take an ho
ur to get them to silently steal away from their sleeping enemy. The others would all head back to where she and Lockwood were located.
Who was up there? Her mouth tightened, as she watched the blob-like form of the soldier. Was he on watch? If he was, why hadn’t she spotted him before now? Was he just out to take a piss? Mind racing, she watched him intently. Wyatt had eyes on his SEALs as they slowly egressed from their areas. He focused on the line of horses outside the cave entrances. She heard Wyatt quietly call in two Apache combat helos from nearby Firebase Alpha where they frequently flew for missions around the boundary area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He gave their GPS coordinates, speaking tersely in military lingo, and told them where every one of his teammates were located in the valley below them.
For the next five minutes, Lockwood was more like a control tower operator, contacting various agencies for help, feeding them intel, GPS coordinates, and anything else, should they need it.
“What’s that tango doin’ now?” he asked her.
“He’s just wandering around the top of the hill. Doesn’t make sense. It’s not as if he’s on security detail.”
“See any others?”
“Negative.”
“You stay on top of ’em.”
“Copy that.”
Wyatt went back to communicating with Bagram, Firebase Alpha, and the Apaches getting ready to spool up after being loaded up with Hellfire missiles. Ali figured that if they could get their teams back to the safety behind the hill they were on, Lockwood would request the combat helos to destroy the hill, Taliban and all. No one would come out of such an attack alive.
Suddenly, the man on the hill turned and began running between the trees, back toward where he’d originated. “Something’s going on,” she warned Wyatt. “He’s running back toward wherever he came from. What do you want me to do?”
Cursing, Wyatt shifted his binoculars.
Ali knew he had a terrible choice to make: if he ordered her to kill him, she would. But there was no muzzle silencer that could be put on a sniper rifle. And when she pulled the trigger, there would be a huge, caroming boom that would echo down into that valley, awakening everyone in the Taliban encampment. This would put their three retreating teams in danger, too. What did the man on the hill see? If he let him go, would he alert the other soldiers asleep in that cave? Then, they would come pouring out of the cave to do what?
“Let ’em go,” Wyatt ordered heavily.
The man disappeared off her scope. Ali chewed on her lower lip, panning on the three cavern entrances.
Wyatt apprised his three teams of what had just happened. There was, indeed, Taliban in at least one cave.
If the tango on the hill had seen something that alarmed him, Ali didn’t know what it could be. The helos were not even lifting off from Firebase Alpha yet and it was twenty miles away. There were no abnormal night sounds, either. So why the hell had the soldier turned and started racing back to his cave?
Suddenly, there was a commotion at one cave entrance.
“Activity! Cave three,” Ali said quietly, watching intently through her scope.
The noise at the front of the cave alerted the Taliban camped out on the other side of the tree grove. All of the soldiers were reaching for the AK-47s that lay beside them.
The horses were startled and the picket line rope broke. The animals scattered, tails high, running hard into the darkness to escape the startling sounds they heard emanating from the unseen cave behind them.
Soldiers leaped up, screamed, some of them running after the fleeing horses that had disappeared into the darkness. Without horses, they had no mode of transportation except to walk.
“Holy hell,” Lockwood muttered, watching the drama unfold.
Ali almost laughed, but swallowed it. Half the soldiers turned toward the sounds coming out of the cave. There was a line of trees and brush between them and the caves, so they could only hear things, not see who or what it was making the sounds.
Wyatt gave the teams orders to stand up, run hard toward their egress point, and hopefully, they would not be seen or spotted.
Bedlam ensued. Ali knew the Taliban was more interested in trying to grab and catch their galloping horses, not even thinking that there might be SEALs in the area.
The first ten Taliban came racing out of the cave, their AK-47s pointed skyward. She couldn’t hear them screaming, but she was sure they were doing just that.
Suddenly, the night turned into a blaze of gunfire between the two parties.
“Hells bells!” Wyatt yelped. “They’re firing on one another!”
Ali couldn’t believe it. The soldiers camped on the other side of the grove must have thought the group outside was US black ops coming to attack them—and the Taliban pouring out of the cave obviously thought the same thing. The flashes of light, the drifting sound of ‘chut-chut-chut’ from AK-47s being fired, continued to move up the hill where they lay.
“All teams accounted for and at egress point,” she reported.
“Roger.” Wyatt turned the radio channel, ordering them to trot around the base of the hill, hidden from view, and join up with them.
Swinging her scope back to the melee in progress, she saw at least twenty more men pouring out of the cave. In less than a minute, the five men at the original outdoor encampment were dead. She saw the Taliban racing through the tree line and thick brush, toward them. They were stunned when they realized they, too, were their brothers in arms, not American black ops as they’d assumed. In the dead of night, in the darkness, with no night vision goggles, they couldn’t see what they were shooting at.
Within minutes, thirty-five soldiers stood around the five who were dead. She couldn’t see their faces, but she was sure they were devastated by what had just happened. She switched scopes to night vision capability, wanting to identify the five dead soldiers faces.
“Good news,” she told Wyatt. “The four we wanted to snatch are dead.”
Snorting, Lockwood growled, “What a busted FUBAR, but it broke in our favor without firing a shot. Jesus, what a crazy, screwed up mission.”
She chuckled softly, hearing the SEALs running up the hill behind them. “Unbelievable. They did the dirty work for us.”
“Heads are gonna roll on this one,” Wyatt said. “Literally.” He scooted down below the hill so he couldn’t be spotted from below, going to meet his six men who were breathing hard after that run. “Stay on watch,” he ordered her.
“Roger.” Ali took her time, looking at each face of the cave, soldiers standing around. They all looked in shock.
Two soldiers returned, towing their caught horses in hand. They had heard the firing. Almost instantly, one of the men with a horse, started screaming at the assembled group. Another man from the cave group stepped forward, yelling and waving his arms in anger. She had always taken her night vision goggles and riflescope for granted. But this situation showed what could happen when combatants didn’t have such sophisticated equipment. In the night, no one could tell friend from foe.
“Come on down,” Wyatt ordered her. “We’re closing up shop here; let’s vamoose.”
“Roger that,” she said, placing the Win Mag aside and pulling up her own NVGs. In moments, she had slid back from the top of the hill, prepared her rifle for transit and then stood up, joining the group midway down the hillside. Coming to Wyatt’s side, she saw Ram Torres opposite her. Everyone was wearing NVGs so she couldn’t tell his expression from anyone else’s. The fact that she cared about what he thought of her was simply more salt in her open wound. Now she had to wait to see if he attacked her once they were back at J-bad.
*
Ali had gotten so used to armoring up emotionally when they arrived at J-bad, disembarking from an MH-47 helicopter, that she wanted to avoid Ram at all costs. There was a vague line of orange light lying along the eastern horizon, heralding the coming dawn. She kept her NVGs in place because the entire base was cloaked in darkness as well. That was bec
ause Taliban liked to look for a light turned on and then send mortars toward it.
It had rained at J-bad and her boots splashed through puddles here and there on the tarmac. Her Win Mag was over her shoulder, her heavy pack against her back. She wanted to be the first one inside their small compound and go directly to her room. She could smell the odor of fear and sweat clinging to her clothes. Now, all she dreamed of was a hot shower at another small brick building in the center of the base. That might take the soreness out of her shoulders and relieve the gnawing pain of the bruises along her thighs where the rocky ground had bit into her flesh.
Two hours later, Ali was showered and dressed in a clean, fresh smelling SEAL uniform. She turned toward her small crate dresser, sat down, and pulled a comb through her still damp hair. Mazzie sat on her bed, watching her. She’d waffled about cutting off her hair to look like a man’s haircut when she knew she’d be with SEALs. But despite her job, she wanted to keep her shoulder-length hair. Surrounded by nothing but male testosterone, Ali wanted to keep some fragment of her femininity under the circumstances.
Outside her thin ply-board door, she could hear a bunch of the guys getting ready to go over to the chow hall. Mazzie heard them and happily starting barking. Laughing, she opened her door and Mazzie jumped into the passageway. She could hear the dog racing down the long hall, her toenails clacking on the surface. She always greeted the returning SEALs in this way and it made her smile, her tension lessening. Mazzie was good for all of them. Her stomach growled, but as much as she wanted to go with the group, she didn’t want to see Torres.
There was a knock on her door.
“Hey, Ali! Come with us to the chow hall!”
It was Tinker.
She opened it. Tinker grinned.
“Come on!”
Trapped (Delos Series Book 7) Page 11