by Tom Clancy
He shrugged.
Yes, I was trying to convince myself more than him. He didn’t buy it, and really, neither did I. But we needed to trick ourselves into thinking it was good guys versus bad guys, especially in the hours before we committed. If we started thinking about the millions of dominoes we might kick over with every move, we’d become paralyzed.
I slapped a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for having my back. You always do.”
He gave a slight nod. “What’s the plan to get off the base?”
I beamed at him. “We’re Ghosts. I think we can come up with something.”
“Yeah, we’ll figure it out.”
At about two A.M. we piled into a Hummer and drove straight for the main gate. I had no clever plan. I just told the sentries we were relieving a security detail at the construction site. I showed him the fake credentials that identified us as regular Army personnel. We weren’t on the guy’s list. I argued. At the sound of my first four-letter word, we got ushered through. It wasn’t as glamorous as sneaking off the base, but it did work.
Or at least I’d thought it had.
After we left, the son-of-a-bitch guard called the XO, who in turn woke up Harruck.
We left the truck and driver at the edge of the construction site and talked to the rifle squad posted there. I told them we were on a classified operation but if they heard gunfire and explosions, they were welcome to join us. The sergeant in charge grinned and said, “Is it bring your own beer?”
“Hell, no. We supply everything.”
He smiled. “I like the way you guys roll.”
We hustled off into the desert, the sand billowing into our eyes, the sky a deep blue-black sweeping out over a moonless night.
The foothills lay directly ahead, cast in deep silhouette, and I strained to see the tunnel entrances that Treehorn so fervently believed were there.
At the base of the first hill, with our boots digging deeply into the soft, dry earth, Ramirez called for a sudden halt, and then we dropped to our bellies, tucking in tightly along a meandering depression. Someone was approaching.
Actually two figures.
I whispered into my boom mike to activate my Cross-Com. The hills lit up a phosphorescent green as the HUD appeared and the unit made contact with our satellite. Within the next two seconds my entire team was identified by green diamonds and blood types via their Green Force Tracker chips.
So, too, were the two men approaching, and I gave a deep sigh as I read the names. Warris had come along with a private, probably his driver.
“Ghost Team, this is Ghost Lead. Friendlies approaching. Hold fire.”
“Roger that,” said Ramirez. “But are you sure about that?”
I grimaced over the remark, but yeah, I understood how he felt.
Warris, unbeknownst to me, was wearing a Cross-Com and had linked to our channel. He’d been clever enough to research the access codes. He’d heard Ramirez’s remark and suddenly said, “Ghost Team, this is Captain Warris. I’m coming up. And if I were you, I’d be sure about holding fire.”
Ramirez shifted over to me, covered his boom mike, and issued a curse.
I saw his curse and raised him two.
Warris, crouched over, slipped up to the depression and dropped down beside us, with his private doing likewise.
“Ghost Team, this is Ghost Lead. Turn off your Cross-Coms and huddle up.”
They immediately complied. I didn’t want anything recorded at this point.
“How you doing, Scott?” my former trainee began, as though he were about to offer me a beer. I sensed, though, that he was speaking through clenched teeth.
“What’s up, Fred?”
“Harruck sent me out here to relieve you of command and bring the team home.”
I pretended I didn’t hear him. “Maybe we shouldn’t’ve slipped off the base, but you know what? I’m just too lazy and just don’t care anymore. We’re heading up to find, fix, and destroy the enemy. We’ve got enough actionable intel to justify this raid. If we let ’em keep moving in and doing overwatch of our construction site, they’ll set up their offensive, and all of Harruck’s work will go to hell. So you need to go back now and tell him that. Tell him we’re out here to save his ass.”
“You can tell him yourself. We’ll contact him right now.”
“I don’t have time for this—”
“Captain, I’m here to relieve you of command.”
“Okay, but can you give me about an hour?”
Warris’s voice came in a stage whisper, but he would’ve shouted if he could: “This is serious shit, asshole! I’m relieving you of command!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Ramirez, butting in and ignoring my glare. “But we don’t recognize your authority here, nor will we obey your orders.”
“You think you speak for the rest of them?” Warris asked.
Ramirez looked at the others. “Oh, yes, sir. I know I do. We won’t follow you. Trust me.”
I shook my head. “Freddy, the problem is you’re trying to play by the book with people that don’t exist.”
He looked lost for a second, then said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“That’s fine. You can wait for us.”
“No, I’m coming on this mission.”
“Negative. I need you to return to the FOB, and bring your driver along.”
“Excuse me? I’m here to relieve you.”
“I am not relieved.”
“You’ve got no authority to refuse me.” He glanced around at my team. “Captain Mitchell has been relieved of command and will be returning to the base with my driver.”
“Guys, just ignore him. I’m in command. Prepare to move out.”
“Scott—”
Now I was talking through my teeth. “You listen to me, and you listen good. Each one of my guys has got two rifles. One’s their favorite toy. The other’s an AK confiscated from the Taliban. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“That I could accidentally get shot? You gotta be kidding me. You don’t threaten me with that. We’re on the same team, and you just need to suck it up. I’m in. You’re out.”
He told the private to hold his position and wait for us.
Ramirez whispered to me, “The hell with it. Let him come. We can babysit. He could get hurt . . .”
I lay there, panting. If I abandoned the mission, I’d still go home to be hung. So the hell with it. We were going.
Biting back a curse, I got to my feet. “Guys, you will ignore any and all commands from Captain Warris. Moving up. Let’s roll.”
I looked at Warris. “What’re you going to do now, Freddy? Phone a friend?”
“No, I’m still coming along. I’ll document all this insubordination, and by the time I’m done, you and this entire team will go down.”
Then he told me to fuck myself and broke off with Jenkins, Hume, and Brown, our Bravo team. I took Ramirez, Nolan, Smith, and Treehorn. I put Treehorn on point. Bravo shifted off to the north side. I told them to activate their Cross-Coms and to watch what they said—we were being recorded.
Ramirez looked back at me, as if to say: Oh my God, what’s happening now . . .
I just steeled my gaze and got back on the horn. “Brown, this is Ghost Lead, over.”
“Here, Ghost Lead,” he said, as I patched into his Cross-Com’s camera and watched them scurrying along the foothill, climbing higher along a lip of gravel and dirt.
“Stay in touch.”
“Roger that.”
Warris didn’t know it, but Brown was in command of that team. He would be reporting to me, and I knew that Hume and Smith would fall in line.
Ramirez hadn’t lied. The military might have been full of backstabbers and ass-kissers, but my men were fiercely loyal—every last one of them. They would do anything for me. I mean anything.
I kept close to Treehorn as we ascended, hunched over, our computers scanning the mountainside for enemies. Clear so far. We climbed for ano
ther fifteen minutes, making good progress, when Treehorn called for a halt, and I zoomed in with my camera to see the ragged depression in the mountain, like a bruise against the stone.
“Cave entrance, right there,” reported Treehorn.
“We got one, too,” said Brown.
“I’ll report that,” cried Warris. “We’ve got a tunnel entrance. Can’t get a good read on it, but I’m guessing it runs deep. Could connect to your entrance, over.”
“Roger that. If we get in too deep, we might lose contact with the satellite.”
“Understood. Recording. Let’s do it.”
I hadn’t mentioned anything to Warris about our Cross-Coms’ being knocked out during our first night raid, but I’d assumed he’d read it in my report. I wondered if being inside the tunnel would protect the gear from whatever the Taliban was using against us.
The answer would come shortly.
As in the second we entered the caves.
It all went dead. Again. Everything. High-tech gear reduced to crap.
We’d taken along some old MBITR radios, standardissue stuff as backup, and strangely enough they still worked. Maybe they had thicker casings and were better shielded from EMP waves or other countermeasures.
We had penlights taped to our rifles. Even as I turned mine on, the first wave of gunfire stitched across the mountain. They were coming at us from outside, from above the entrance.
“Move, move, move!” I screamed, driving the group into the tunnel.
Treehorn rushed forward. He hadn’t taken along his sniper’s rifle; instead he had a terrifically loud shotgun, and when it boomed, sending pellets into the face of the Taliban guy rushing toward us, I dropped to one knee and crouched tight to the dusty rock wall at my shoulder.
“Ghost Lead, this is Brown! We are taking fire inside and out, over!”
“Roger that,” I said. “Move in. Flush them out!”
“He’s right,” said Warris. “Let’s move in!”
Like I needed his confirmation.
The tunnel was barely two meters high, about three meters wide, but it grew more narrow as we stepped over the guy Treehorn had shot.
Pops and booms echoed from somewhere deep in the tunnel, telling me that yes, Bravo team’s tunnel was, in fact, connected to ours.
“Look at this,” said Ramirez, crouching down beside the dead guy. In the dirt lay an odd-looking rifle with a funnel-like barrel.
“I know what that is,” said Nolan. “HERF gun for sure. Like EMP. High-energy radio frequency. Just what I thought. Works better in close quarters. They must’ve been very close when they zapped us the first time.”
“But look at this thing. Seems homemade,” said Ramirez, lifting the gun up to his penlight.
“They didn’t make ’em up here, or even in the town,” I said. “Somebody’s supplying them—somebody who knows they’d need them. Like the CIA. Pack up that gun. Let’s go!”
Ramirez shoved the gun in his backpack, and we began to work our way along a curve that dropped sharply. I had to hang on to the wall to prevent sliding forward for a few meters.
Ramirez was pulling up the rear now, keeping his rifle pointed back while shuffling to keep up with us, the thin beams of our penlights playing like lasers over the walls.
Treehorn remained up front, ready to blast the hell out of anyone who tried to confront us. He stole a quick glance back at me, and I’d never seen his eyes as wide. The sergeant was wired to the moment, and I had every confidence in him.
“Mitchell, this is Warris. We dropped two tangos. Picked up a gun of some sort. EMP, over.”
“Same here,” I answered. “Keep moving in, but call out if you see our lights.”
“Roger that.”
I noticed how Warris wouldn’t refer to me as “Ghost Lead.” What a fool . . . I wondered why he hadn’t called Harruck to “tell on me” yet. Then I thought, he’s just a kid and wants a little action, that’s why he’s delaying the call. What a bigger fool!
And then, before he could say contemplate anything else, Ramirez opened fire behind us. We hit the dirt, and I whirled back, along with Nolan, to add our fire and drive back a pair of fighters who vanished behind the curve.
“Keep moving!” I ordered.
“They’re still back there,” warned Ramirez.
“That’s why you keep watching,” I said.
The air grew dank as we descended even farther. Trash appeared along the walls—discarded wrappers, even some bottles of soda, along with MREs, which had obviously been stolen from U.S. and coalition forces.
“Looks like an intersection coming up,” said Treehorn. “Two tunnels.”
“Warris, do you see us?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you see an intersection?”
“Yeah, we do.”
“All right, we’re coming at you. Hold fire.”
I think we got another ten meters, maybe fifteen before it all went to hell.
The two guys dogging us from behind attacked again, and Nolan and Ramirez were on their bellies, cutting loose with salvos that ricocheted off the back walls. I dove forward, just behind Treehorn, who in turn spotted two guys rounding a corner from the intersection.
Before they could open fire, he blasted them with his first shot, just as Warris and Brown were coming up behind them.
Warris clutched his leg, having caught some of the buckshot, then looked to his right and saw something. I lost him for a second in the shadows as his gun rattled and then Brown appeared for a second in my light and was as quickly lost.
But then his shout came loudly up the tunnel: “Grenade!”
The Taliban were suicidal fools to drop a grenade inside the tunnel, and as Brown dove back from where he came, the blinding flash made me blink and drop my head. I gasped as the explosion tore through the tunnel ahead, my ears ringing loudly, the shattering rock and streaming sand barely discernible as debris pelted us and Ramirez and Hume kept firing to the rear.
I lifted my head, my face already covered in dust, the beam of the penlight thick with more dust as the ground reverberated a second time . . . and then Brown once more hollered, “Cave-in! Get back! Cave-in!”
FIFTEEN
I’d read some accounts of Marines and other Special Forces operators who’d dropped into Afghanistan just after 9/11. They’d discussed how difficult it was to flush the enemy out of the labyrinth of caves and tunnels that lay along the border with Pakistan. One Special Forces operator from the storied group known as “Triple Nickel” had described the tunnels as “great intestines of stone” that were, in fact, “part of the innards of some ancient warrior who’d died millennia ago.”
That was damned poetic. I would describe them as damp, dark holes that made perfect burial grounds, like the catacombs of Europe. They smelled and foretold of death and were the setting of many of my nightmares.
Ramirez ceased fire, reached out, grabbed something, threw it. I realized those fools behind us had tossed in another grenade. I didn’t know where Ramirez got his reflexes, but I wasn’t complaining.
“Get down!” I screamed, but my order was lost in the second explosion, this one much louder, the debris striking more fiercely as up ahead, a flurry of gunfire also vied for my attention. Smith, Brown, and Hume were advancing toward the intersecting tunnel where the explosion had occurred, and they were engaging more troops.
The air grew thicker as the ceiling collapsed and heavy rocks and earth poured in from above. Ramirez rose and began running back as pieces of the ceiling the size of truck tires came down and split apart across the floor. The stench of the explosives and the choking dust had me coughing, along with the others, and my eyes burned as I turned forward and called, “Brown? Brown?”
I couldn’t hear myself screaming through the echo of the explosion. I finally staggered to my feet, and, dragging a gloved hand along the wall for balance, I moved forward to find Brown, Hume, and Smith about four meters down the intersecting tunnel to my right. A
wall of rocks and sand blocked the entire path, and the guys were covering their faces and letting their penlights play over the obstruction.
“Where the hell’s Warris?” I asked, swinging around.
Brown shook his head.
“What?” I cried, growing even more tense. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. He was on the other side when the grenade went off.”
I got on the radio, tried to call him, nothing. “Wait,” called Smith, pressing his ear against the rock while Ramirez and Nolan approached to cover us.
“I hear something,” Smith added. “Sounds like him! He’s calling for help.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“All right, start digging,” I said.
“We’ll cover the back tunnel,” said Ramirez, waving Nolan after him.
“Do it,” I said.
“Bad night,” said Brown, grabbing the first large rock he could find and groaning as he lifted and threw it aside. “Very bad night.”
“We’ll be here for hours,” said Smith. “And they’re probably massing for us outside.”
“We’ll need backup,” Brown said.
“You guys are right,” I said. “Go back down there, tell that private we need a digging team out here and two rifle squads. Then get right back.”
As they were about to leave, Ramirez and Nolan opened fire on the tunnel ahead, and I remembered only then that all other exits had been blocked by the caveins. There was only one way out.
Brown realized it as well and said, “Guess, we ain’t going anywhere . . . yet!”
“All right, everybody, mask up!” I said. I didn’t like it, especially within the confines of the tunnel, but the Taliban guys were ready for us, so we had no choice. I fished out a couple of CS gas canisters and let them fly down the tunnel.
We waited as the gas hissed into a thick fog, and then we rushed forward, enveloped in the smoke, Brown and Smith covering our rear, Treehorn and Ramirez up front.