LODESTONE: A Shadow Warriors Novella

by Stephen England

  He lay beneath the shade of a spreading olive tree, about fifteen meters from Nick’s position on the summit. With the long gun, it was going to be his job to reach out and engage targets, before they closed to within the effective range of Crawford and Hale’s Kalashnikovs.

  More movement, and this time he saw a man, step cautiously around a rock, a rifle outstretched before him as he leaned forward, his free hand reaching up the slope.

  Harry’s finger reached up above the trigger guard, flipping off the FN’s safety, his firing reticle centering on the man’s upturned face, glowing pale through the scope. He could feel the tension in the man’s movements, sense the fear.

  Seconds away from his death.

  And then he heard it, a hoarse shout echoing across the hillside. Barely recognizable, pulling his eye off the scope. Nick.

  The words took another half-second to process. “RPG! RPG! RPG!”

  There was no time to react, no time to seek shelter as the five-pound explosive warhead slammed into the branches of the olive tree twenty feet above him, tongues of fire falling from the night as a flaming branch crashed to the ground inches from his head, a five-inch splinter of wood embedding itself like a dagger in the flesh of his right shoulder. Pain.

  Can’t stay here. Harry pushed himself to his feet, his ears ringing from the explosion, his night-vision destroyed as flames sprang from the thin grass around him.

  He’d taken two staggering steps, just getting his legs under him when he heard the big fifty open up, the whiplash crack of machine-gun rounds splitting the air past his head.

  Death whispering in his ear as he slid to the ground behind a rock, already hearing the report of Nick’s rifle, dimly audible amidst the torrent of fire now coming their way.

  An ominous sign that their attackers were closer than he had thought.

  Within two hundred meters now, and closing. Running, stumbling up the rocky slope. As if confident that their covering fire would be enough to save them. As if their faith in Allah was going to stop a bullet.

  He raised himself up, bringing the rifle to bear on a target just as the man went down, shot through the head. Nick’s kill—or Hale’s?

  He didn’t know and it didn’t matter. Next target.

  And there was no lack. He squeezed the trigger—the FN’s buttstock slamming back into his injured shoulder—his first shot going wild into the night, his second sending his target sprawling backward down the hillside. If Allah was in the personal protection business, he was otherwise occupied this night.

  Then a third found its mark, holes opening as the skirmish line wavered, rifle fire crackling all along their ragged perimeter. Automatic weapons fire coming up the slope toward them—single, aimed shots being fired in return. They didn’t have a single round to waste.

  Fire. Move. Harry hit the mag release, a metal magazine clattering to the ground even as the rock beside him disintegrated under the impact of machine-gun rounds, dust and shards of rock pelting his body.

  He fell to the ground on his back, fumbling for a magazine on his belt as the fifty raked the air above his head. Come on, come on.

  “Nichols!” he heard his partner shout. “On your bloody six, mate!”

  Jerking the 1911 from its holster with his right hand, he twisted himself around just as a trio of fighters emerged from a copse of olive trees maybe twenty feet away, dimly visible in the light of the moon—close together, bunched up.

  He heard the report of Nick’s rifle, saw the lead man fall as the straight-eight sights of his Colt centered on the chest of the second terrorist.

  Red shirt, his mind processed, the face of Che Guevara staring back as he pulled the trigger. Once, twice—as rapidly as he could re-acquire the sight picture.

  Harry saw the man stagger back, his rifle falling from his hands as he crumpled to his knees, swaying there for a moment before collapsing face-forward to the ground.

  One target left. He could see his opponent fumbling with his rifle, his eyes wide with fear. Heard the safety catch of the Kalashnikov being slipped off, an odd sound amidst the chaos of the battle. Klatch.

  The Colt recoiled, slamming back into his palm as he fired. Two shots. Center of mass.

  The man went down, hard. Target eliminated.

  Sliding the pistol back into its holster, he heard a voice calling and looked up just in time to see Nick slide into cover behind a rock a few feet away.

  “We stay here, we’re goin’ to get buggered, mate. They just need to move that big fifty up the road and it’s bloody well over.”

  Harry nodded, slipping a fresh magazine into the mag well of the FN-FAL. Two left.

  It was the truth and they both knew it. They didn’t have the manpower to hold the hilltop, not against the onslaught that was coming. “Cover me?” he asked, glancing across at his friend.

  A quick nod before the Brit pushed himself up over the rock, brass ejecting from the port of his rifle as he laid down covering fire.

  Holding the FN in one hand, Harry leaned back against the boulder, digging into his pocket to retrieve the cellphone once again. Their last lifeline.

  Last hope. The screen glowed brightly in the darkness, searching for a signal. A single bar appearing and then disappearing as quickly as it had come.

  He rolled forward onto his knees, a bullet ricocheting off the rocky ground nearby as the phone regained its signal, ever so faint.

  There.

  1:17 A.M.

  The USS Iwo Jima

  It was an empty feeling, death. Empty and sickening, a vacuum into which regrets rushed, unbidden and unstoppable.

  She would never forget her first time, Iraida thought, standing in the CIA hooch in Kandahar the day word came over the radio. One of her instructors had been killed. Manuel Diaz—or “Manny” as she’d come to know him at the Farm. He was responsible for teaching her everything she knew—every last ounce of tradecraft. They’d spent hours in a car together as she learned how to surveil a target. But he was an old hand and he was dying to get back out in the field.

  Dying. It seemed ironic now, years later—how literal that had turned out to be. An Afghan ‘terp had turned on his ODA out there in the mountains that afternoon—led them into a Taliban ambush.

  Over half of the twelve-man Special Forces detachment Diaz had been accompanying was wounded in the first few minutes of the engagement. Pinned down in the mountains—no way out.

  The quick reaction force had been mobilized the moment the distress call came in, a pair of Black Hawks taking off from Kandahar with an Apache gunship as escort.

  Nichols was in the lead chopper that day, a foreboding presence as he’d stormed out of the hooch, carbine in hand—heading off to rescue his friend. Rescue.

  They’d pulled the Green Berets out of the valley a couple hours later, extracting them under heavy fire from the ridgelines above. But they came far too late for Diaz—he’d taken three bullets in the back while sending out the initial distress call. Bled out before the QRF could arrive.

  He’d been sent back to his wife and two daughters in a black bag, three months ahead of the oldest one’s wedding.

  Iraida glanced around the Iwo’s comm center, that feeling sweeping over her once again. Guilt mixed with impotent rage.

  The phone on her hip began to pulsate with an incoming call and she pulled it out, glancing at the number displayed on-screen. It was him.

  “Yes?” she answered cautiously, trying to stop her voice from trembling. Only too aware that he might be compromised, that the line was anything but secure.

  The connection was faint, the line crackling with static. But she could make out his voice—and the unmistakable sound of small-arms fire. “…need extract. Need extract now…have us pinned down.”

  No. It was happening again. “Where are you?” she demanded, careful not to use his callsign—nothing that would identify them. Praying the connection would hold. “I need your position.”

  More static, and for a moment s
he thought the phone had gone dead. “…high ground south of the drop zone. We’re taking heavy fire…chine guns and RPGs. Got one Whiskey India Alpha.”

  WIA. Wounded in action.

  His next words were lost as the call faded in and out. “…sure he knows he’s gonna be flying into a hot LZ.”

  The high ground south of the drop zone… Al Dwair. She shook her head.

  That was barely out of Bint Jbeil, much further in than they had even considered an extraction during the mission’s planning stages.

  But Petras wasn’t in the room. This was her call—her asset out there. Her team.

  And she knew what she had to do.

  “Hold on,” she replied. “Stand by for extraction. Do you copy?”

  Silence. “I repeat, do you copy?”

  And there was nothing.

  1:20 A.M.

  The Black Hawk

  “We’re eight mikes out from the Iwo, Eric,” his co-pilot’s voice informed him. “Should be communicating with their bridge presently.”

  Eight minutes. Jorgenson acknowledged his words with a curt nod, forcing himself to focus on the task at hand. The CIA team was now beyond his saving—the men in his chopper, they were his responsibility.

  It was his to make sure they got home safely, which meant concentrating on the job of landing a helicopter on a flight deck.

  At night. In rough seas.

  His helmet radio came on without warning, jarring him from his thoughts. “DARK HORSE, this is EYRIE. We have a fix on the strike team. Need you to go in and pull them out. DARKHORSE, copy?”

  It was the younger woman this time, and he wondered for a moment where Petras had gone. “Roger that, EYRIE,” he responded, keying his mike. Thank you, God. “What’s their status?”

  “They’re pinned down on the hill of Al Dwair, a couple klicks due west of Bint Jbeil and just northeast of Ain Ebel.” She seemed even more nervous than before, her words hurried as she continued, “I’m sending you the coordinates now—they’re taking heavy fire and the LZ is hot.”

  “What are we talking about?” Details. He needed details, a threat assessment. Going in was one thing, going in blind quite another.

  “Our man referenced heavy automatic weapons…and RPGs.”

  He swore under his breath. One shot—those mujahideen only had to get lucky once, and it would be all over. But not to go…that was certain death for those left behind on that hilltop.

  “We’re on our way, EYRIE. Casualties?”

  “They’ve got a man wounded. That’s all I know—no details.”

  Jorgenson shot a look over at his co-pilot as the Black Hawk began to come around, banking as it described a half-circle in the night sky. “Pass the word back to Carson—make sure he’s ready for the evac.”

  That others might live…

  1:27 A.M.

  Al Dwair, Lebanon

  Hold on. That was all she had given him before the line went dead—an order to stay where they were. Harry leaned forward, his body pressed against the corpse of a dead jihadist as the machine-gun fire ripped over his head once more, fifty-caliber rounds smashing into the wood of the tree behind him.

  A dull, lethal thud.

  It was the warm-up to another assault, he knew that. They were down there, regrouping. Figuring out another plan of attack now that their direct attempt to overwhelm their perimeter had failed. He shook his head.

  If they only knew how close they had come.

  The Black Hawk might be coming for them. It might not be. Either way…he grabbed a fistful of the terrorist’s red shirt, shifting the body up against that of his comrade. That big fifty was going to have to be silenced.

  He lay there on his belly in the grass, carefully shifting the FN-FAL until it could be propped across the bodies of the men he had killed.

  It wasn’t nearly as good as sandbags—nothing was—but you used what you had. His hand came away bloody, the still-warm fluid trickling down his fingers.

  The rifle came back against his shoulder, his eye focusing through the scope. On the technical—maybe seven hundred and fifty, maybe closer to eight hundred meters away. Extreme range.

  There was one man in the back of the parked truck, his hands firmly gripping the “spade handles” of the Browning as the gun spurted flame, raking the hilltop with punishing fire. The type of fire that could cut a man in two.

  Harry slowed his breathing, forcing himself to calm—concentrate as the firing reticle danced over the man’s body. Trying to adjust for the slight cross-breeze. He’d only have one shot at this, one chance to take their trump card out of the game.

  One shot. He took his eye off the scope, the realization washing over him. He could kill the gunner—but that was his only chance. And another gunner would replace him, stepping into dead men’s shoes.

  It would accomplish nothing. He swept the rifle carefully from one side to another, using the scope to glass the length of the technical. Nothing.

  In Hollywood, the solution would have been simple. A single .308 round into the truck’s gas tank would have cooked off a massive ball of fire into the night, destroying the machine gun and everyone within range.

  Real life was rarely so tidy.

  And then he saw it—a man standing maybe eight feet from the technical, a belt of ammunition over his shoulder, an RPG clutched in his hands.

  Man? He couldn’t have been more than thirteen, maybe fourteen at the outside. Just a kid.

  He knew better than that, had seen it all before. The memory still lingered of an afternoon in the mountains north of Gardez Firebase, in the Paktia province, right along the Pakistan border.

  They’d been sent out after a Haqqani sniper that had been harassing the firebase at night, wounding two US soldiers.

  Tracked him for hours, finally catching up with him only hours before sunset.

  It had fallen to Harry to take the kill shot when that moment came. A good shot, a clean shot, he’d told himself later.

  All that didn’t change that the face staring back at him when he’d gone in to confirm the kill was that of a boy barely in his teens, nearly young enough to have been his son.

  If he’d had a son.

  But it had been necessary, he thought—that most damnable of words. As was this.

  The reticle centered on the teenager’s forehead, drifting lower until it came to rest on the warhead of the RPG in the boy’s hands. A weapon that could bring down the Black Hawk—kill everyone that was coming to rescue them. Or blow them off the mountaintop. He’d been in Afghanistan the previous summer, when an RPG had taken down Turbine 33 in the Kunar, killing sixteen Americans. Brave men all.

  It wasn’t going to happen again. Not on my watch. One bullet. That’s all it would take—just a single well-placed bullet.

  Take the shot, a voice within urged. The presence of death surrounded him, his arm thrust forward across the stomach of the corpse to support the fore-end of the rifle. It was just one more death, no different than all the rest. No different.

  God, look away, he breathed, a desperate prayer. Time came that there were things you didn’t want the Almighty to see.

  He adjusted his aim once more, high and slightly to the right allowing for the bullet drop, for the night breeze sweeping over Al Dwair.

  Kentucky windage.

  His finger tightened around the FN’s trigger, ever so gently taking up the slack. All the noise of the firing around him fading away in that moment.

  The trigger broke, the rifle slamming back into his shoulder. He took his eye off the scope just in time, protecting his eyesight as the 150-grain .308 slug connected with the warhead of the rocket-propelled grenade.

  Fire. A small fireball expanded outward from the center of the explosion, heat and shrapnel filling the air, shredding anyone and anything unfortunate enough to be standing in the blast radius.

  The boy never stood a chance. Nor did the gunner on the back of the technical—he was dead long before the truck itself blew up
moments later. Sympathetic detonation.

  Harry felt suddenly sick, his stomach heaving as the reality sank home. No, he thought. Focus. There would be time enough to deal with the demons later.

  If there was a later.

  He forced himself to return to the scope, taking in the sight of the technical lying on its side, the wrecked Browning visible in the midst of the flames. Out of commission.

  No triumph in that moment. He simply felt nothing, a gnawing emptiness inside. Necessary.

  He could hear the screams of the dying, shouts of fear and anger welling up from the valley below him. They’d bought themselves a few moments, minutes even.

  And that was all that could be asked.

  His hand reached out, groping across the still-warm body of the man he had killed until his fingers touched the stock of the man’s Kalashnikov, pulling it toward him.

  He hit the magazine release, letting the half-empty mag drop into his hand. Pulling another pair of magazines from the satchel around the man’s neck.

  Time to regroup.

  “Good work,” were the words greeting him as he reached the summit, falling down behind a cluster of boulders a few feet away from Crawford.

  Good work. He thought of the boy’s face once again, the way it had looked in the glow of his nightscope. The kid had been doomed from the moment he’d picked up a weapon. Fate.

  Or at least that’s what he wanted to convince himself.

  No point in telling Nick. Kids were a sore point with the sergeant—ever since he’d lost his own.

  Harry leaned back against the rock, taking the three AK mags from his vest and sliding them across the ground to where Crawford knelt. “Now you can’t say I never gave you nothin’.”

  He could see the grin on the sergeant’s face in the darkness as he flipped his index and middle fingers up in a backwards “V.” A time-worn gesture of defiance. “Cheers, mate.”

  A bullet slammed into the rock beside Harry’s hand without warning, shards of rock pelting his face—the supersonic crack of a rifle shot splitting the air seconds later.

  He threw himself flat, rolling to the left and away from the gunfire as another round came in from the northwest. Sniper. That was his first thought—they had to have someone on the opposite hill. It would have taken them time to get into position, but they were there now.