My body didn’t want to work. I managed somehow to pull myself up on one knee, and thanked the K-pot on my head and the ceramic plate in the back of my body armor for taking most of the wall’s impact. I could see that Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond were flat on the ground, with only sluggish movement from all three. They were closer to the blast than I had been, and harder hit. Detmond was wounded, a red stain advancing down the gray-green pixels of his Army battle uniform toward his elbow. He managed to sit up but was almost immediately hit square in the chest by an invisible force that knocked him down onto his back. Shit, we were being fired on! Fallon and Stefanovic struggled to their feet and dragged Detmond behind the second of the scuttled Landcruisers – my Landcruiser, the one Bellows was driving. Where was Bellows? I couldn’t see him; Mattock either. All three drivers – dead?
The situation would head from fucked up to fucking fucked up if someone didn’t do something fucking quick. Static burst into my earpiece.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked.
Static.
I was about to tear out the earpiece when I heard a voice croak, ‘Cooper . . .’
The voice was familiar, but my hearing wasn’t so good. ‘Meyers?’ I asked.
‘Legs . . . broken.’
Yeah, it was Meyers. Definitely someone who wasn’t able to do something fucking quick or any other way. But, shit, he was alive.
‘I’ll come to you. Don’t move.’
I heard him cackle. ‘Move . . .?’
Bullet holes appeared in the bodywork of the Landcruisers. It occurred to me that while Fallon, Detmond and Stefanovic were getting pounded, I wasn’t attracting any inbound fire, which meant that whoever had us pinned down was not aware of my position. There was no planned kill zone, where the fire was coming in from all angles, cutting off our escape. So, either the attack was impromptu or we were up against the remedial arm of the Taliban.
I was in the only blind spot for the shooters – directly below them. I looked up. Sure enough, rifle barrels poked out from both second-story windows above me, as well as one from a window on the third floor. I counted a total of five protruding barrels.
‘Stefanovic,’ I shouted into the mike. ‘How’s Detmond? Check on Mattock and Bellows.’
I heard a voice in my ear, but it was muffled, woolen.
‘Get on the radio, and get us some air support!’ I yelled. A response came back, but I couldn’t make it out.
Stefanovic had crawled out of sight behind the second Landcruiser, presumably on the hunt for a working radio. I went through a weapons and ammo check to steady my nerves and get some perspective: one Colt M4 carbine; four mags – one hundred and twenty rounds; one Sig Sauer P228 with two mags, one round up the spout; one Ka-bar. No grenades –
shit
!
The front door beside me was closed and probably locked. My back close to the wall, I moved over to an alley on the left. At the corner of the building I momentarily put down my rifle, pulled the Sig and took it off safety. I popped my head and the Sig around the corner simultaneously. Movement. Two rounds later, a Taliban fighter with an AK-47 found himself haggling with all the other dead martyrs over whose turn it was to get with the virgins.
I holstered the Sig, picked up the M4, shouldered it, and made my way down the alley. I put my fingertips against the brickwork and felt the vibrations. The AK-47s inside the house were spraying away with such exuberance that the percussion was vibrating through the wall. My hearing cleared with a ‘pop’, and what I heard was Stef and Fallon returning fire, the M16 making an altogether different sound than the AK’s.
I followed the Sig around the next corner and came into another alley out back, overlooked by a row of tightly packed dwellings. Men and boys were peering around corners for several blocks up and down the narrow road, eager to catch the action; a good gunfight in these parts being the equivalent of a game of football. One of the boys waved at me from an alcove. I waved back and he flipped me the bird – rooting for the home team, obviously. Maybe he had a big blow-up hand somewhere with ‘Osama’ printed on it.
Pushbikes were scattered behind the rear entrance. The gunmen had cycled to work. The Sig went back in its holster. The M4’s thirty-round mag and short barrel made it the ideal weapon for cleaning house. I flicked the selector to three-shot burst to conserve ammo, took it off safety, and crept inside. It was dark. I stopped against the wall, tried to get my breathing under control and gave my eyes a few seconds to adapt to the available light. There was a room both to the left and right off the short hallway. I checked them and they were clear, so I moved forward into the main room on the ground floor. Also clear. Retracing my steps, I closed the back door – there was no lock – then found the stairs against the wall and crept up the single steep flight to the first floor. It ended on a small landing; the rest of the floor was divided into two rooms, gunfire banging away from my left and right. I cased both rooms quickly. Room on the left had one shooter. Room on the right had two. The floors in both were littered with spent casings and magazines.
The Taliban fighter in the left-hand room was old – mid-fifties – and dressed in black. Pops was making so much noise that he didn’t realize I was behind him until the Ka-bar took out his windpipe and partially severed his spinal cord. Blood went everywhere. I gently laid him down among all his brass trash as he gurgled and shook, then I took his AK and replaced the mag with a fresh one from a satchel sitting on a broken chair. There was no food in the bag, suggesting that this gig was unplanned – good to know. Propped against the wall behind the door were an M16A2 and a bag full of mags. I picked up the rifle. It was brand new, still with that showroom shine. The serial numbers on its receiver had been ground off. Where does a Taliban fighter get one of these? I hooked the weapon over my shoulder and took the satchel with the mags.
Had I killed Pops with the M4, everyone would know that Uncle Sam was making home deliveries. To head off any concern, I fired a couple of bursts from the guy’s AK out the window to reassure his buddies that the old man was still on the job. Then I dropped the weapon and walked across the landing into the room on the right. The door was wide open. Both targets, also dressed in Taliban black, were in their late teens or early twenties. They had their backs to me, firing on full auto on the crippled Landcruisers, wasting ammo, washing my buddies in lead. From the sound of it, one of the targets was firing an M16.
Then a couple of rounds tore into the ceiling above my head. Gray powder drifted down, dusting my shoulders. My guys across the street were zeroing in.
‘Yo, fellas,’ I called out, raising my voice above the din. ‘S’up?’
The shooters glanced over their shoulders, eyes wide. The fighter with the M16 had an orange beard and large blue-green eyes, maybe a throwback to when Alexander the Great arrived here with his army to subdue the local population and get in a little R&R. I didn’t have to think about what to do. Both men got three rounds in the chest. The force of it pushed Ginger out the window, ass first. He fell in silence, already dead.
The shooter on the floor above me stopped firing. He knew something was up, probably when he saw his Islamic brother take the big step backward into the street below. He started calling to his friends. When no answer came, he began firing down through the floor. I made myself small against the wall and changed mags. Plaster, wood splinters, and lead rained down, which gave me some idea of his position. I fired upwards – single shots – emptied the mag, then waited for an answer. I stood on the spot for ten seconds or so, changed mags, listening, looking up. No one was walking around up there, and the shooting had stopped. Blood clogged the bullet holes in the ceiling and began dripping down onto the floor.
I climbed up to the second floor to confirm that only one fighter occupied it, and that he was now dead. I searched him quickly for the benefit of folks back at intelligence but found nothing of interest. I picked up his AK, released the mag, emptied the chamber, and swung it against the wall a couple of times, splintering the stock. Then I went back down to the other rooms, collected the M16, and put those AKs out of action for a while also.
Moving over to the window, I gave my people a whistle. Movement up the road attracted my attention. Shit, half a dozen armed, bearded men were running toward us, black robes flapping in the breeze. Three of them ducked into one of the houses thirty meters away. I lost sight of their friends. Time to go. I searched the corpses and their satchels but came up empty-handed. Sporadic firing was beginning again. Exactly how many more Taliban were in the area? It wouldn’t have been a good idea to hang around and conduct a census.
I took the steps down to the ground floor and contemplated my next decision – leave by the back door or by the front? I figured that my guys would put holes in any enemy fighters who were in full view; and maybe in me, too, if I wasn’t careful. The back door was still closed the way I’d left it, but I wasn’t confident about what might be waiting on the other side. So I moved to the front door and slipped the bolt. It was jammed. The wood was ancient and dried out. I took three steps back, and charged it with my shoulder just as the back door opened a few inches and three grenades rolled in. I hit the door and it splintered into matchsticks. Tangled up in rifle straps, I stumbled and planted my face in the road. And then, behind me, the building exploded in a howl of mudbrick chunks. A torrent of grenade fragments and glass shards warbled as they flew close overhead and landed with a musical tinkle between the Landcruisers and me. Gunfire came next as Taliban fighters charged through the suspect back door and reoccupied the remains of the house that their buddies had just died in.
I got to my feet, dove for the Landcruisers and scrambled behind them. I was relieved to see Mattock and Bellows hunkered down with Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond. They’d taken up firing positions behind the Landcruiser on its side, the one I’d occupied with al-Eqbal. Unfortunately, though, we were now being outflanked by enemy reinforcements and gunfire was coming in on us from a number of directions. It was only a matter of time before the Taliban closed all the angles and started picking us off. Now the assholes were firing on the fuel tanks, too. I smelled diesel. At least it wasn’t gasoline.
‘Radio?’ I yelled at Stefanovic.
He shook his head. ‘According to ops, nothing on the ground this sector.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’ve got Apaches inbound, ETA fifteen minutes.’
We didn’t have fifteen minutes.
I took a few seconds to assess Detmond. He was lying on the ground behind the others, going into shock, and not entirely with us. His eyes were closed, but he was moving.
‘Wounded in the neck and just below his armpit – he’s lost a lot of blood,’ Fallon informed me, shouting into my ear.
In fact, the sergeant was lying in a pool of it. We had to get him out of there. He also looked dazed. The blast had deafened him.
Stefanovic’s hand and M4 were also sticky with blood. He was pale, the color having leached from his face.
‘Where’d you get hit?’ I yelled at him.
He turned slightly. I could see a large chunk of flesh had been chewed out of the back of his arm.
‘Need a compression bandage here!’ I shouted at Fallon.
We had two dead: Rogerson and al-Eqbal. Including myself, Stef, Fallon, Detmond, Mattock and Bellows, there were six of us left. Hang on, someone was missing. Oh, yeah . . .
‘Meyers is alive,’ I said. ‘Fallon, you’re with me. We’re going back in there to get him.’
The look on his face said,
You’re shitting me . . .!
‘Stand by. I’m gonna check Rogerson’s vehicle first.’
Mattock and Bellows threw some rounds downrange at the enemy.
AK rounds buzzed around my head. I could almost see them. I was in the groove, juiced up on adrenalin. It wasn’t that I believed I couldn’t be killed; I just didn’t give a damn if I were.
The third vehicle was badly mauled, but at least it was still on its tires. I ditched the M16, crawled back to the vehicle and, staying low, opened the door. Specialist Rogerson was belted into the front seat, her hands clasped around the steering wheel at the ten-two position. I saw that she had beautiful nails; manicured, painted red. She wore a wedding ring. I reached in and released her belt and she slumped sideways across the bench seat. I tried not to think too much about her. The red lights burning on the instrument panel told me that the ignition was on – a good sign – but the motor had stalled. I hoped there was no disabling damage. If this thing wouldn’t start, we were screwed. Leaning in below the steering column, I twisted the ignition key off, and then twisted it on. Nothing. It was dead. Shit. Then I noticed the transmission was in drive. I banged it into park, pressed on the brake with my free hand, gave the key another twist and the motor hummed to life.
I backed out of the vehicle, sprinted to the others, and tapped Detmond on the shoulder.
‘Three minutes!’ I yelled, ‘Then you go!’
I motioned at Fallon to follow me and we ran at a crouch into the smoking dustbowl behind us. Meyers was in here somewhere, lying in the rubble. We found the old woman, her arm protruding from beneath a ton of broken masonry, then encountered a pile of bloody rags that looked like al-Eqbal’s – but no cousin, no girl, and no Meyers.
Fallon smelled burning American tobacco through the dust haze and followed the scent. The trail led us to Meyers, propped up against a wall beside a bicycle. The guy was pulling hard on a Marlboro, his boots turned at impossible angles on the ends of his shattered legs. The blast had happened minutes ago; he still had some time before his nerve endings started screaming. I hunkered down beside him and hunted through my medical pack for a shot of morphine to see him through.