The man stopped suddenly He brought his AK-47 up into his shoulder with the practised speed of an old warrior. Jed pulled the trigger and felt the recoil in his shoulder. The silencer muffled the noise of the round exploding from the barrel.
The Afghan pitched forwards and his rifle clattered against the boulders. A split second later the noise of a gunshot destroyed the night’s peace.
‘Jesus Christ,’ the reporter said.
Jed spoke into the mike again. ‘Subject is down. Hawk, what is your status? Repeat, what is your status? Who fired that shot?’
‘What’s happening, Snake, what’s happening?’ the captain hissed in Jed’s earpiece.
Jed was concerned now. It was going to shit. One of the guys in the snatch team, Murphy probably, who didn’t have a silenced weapon, had panicked when he saw the Afghan raise his rifle and fired a shot as well.
‘We’re fucked, Snake. We’re pulling out,’ said Kirby, the leader of the snatch team.
Jed knew there was no alternative. ‘Roger that. All call signs, abort. I say again, abort. Move to emergency LZ. Fall back through my position.’ Jed moved the mike away from his mouth and turned to Luke, whose face was a ghostly white. ‘Keep it together, man. As soon as the captain gets here, you go with him. I’ve got to wait here for the other guys. OK?’
Luke nodded dumbly.
Jed pressed his night-vision monocle against the aperture of his rifle scope again and saw the four men from the snatch team running back up the hill away from the compound towards him. The picture was lime-green and grainy, clear, but devoid of depth. Another movement caught his eye. First one, then two men appeared in the watchtower. They were struggling with a tarpaulin.
The captain and McCubbin, the team’s radio operator, appeared from Jed’s right, panting as they knelt next to him.
‘What happened, Banks?’ the officer demanded.
Jed ignored the stupid question. ‘Get Boss Man on the radio, Mac. It looks like they’ve got a Dooshka in the tower.’ Boss Man was the United States Air Force Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft, orbiting unseen somewhere above them.
‘What?’
The radioman was thinking faster than the captain. He spoke rapidly into the handset of the radio he carried in his Alice pack. ‘Boss Man, Boss Man, Boss Man, this is Cougar one-five. Request immediate CAS, over.’
Jed saw the reporter had stopped taking notes and was balling his fists to try to stop his hands shaking. ‘It’s OK, Luke,’ he said softly. ‘We’re calling up some CAS – Close Air Support. They’ve got a Russian DSHK heavy machine-gun down in the tower, a Dooshka we call it. Just be ready to move if I tell you.’ The Australian nodded. Jed licked his lips to stave off the dryness in his mouth.
The weapon was probably older than himself, but it was built to last and the 12.7-millimetre rounds in its belt would tear a man in half.
Jed continued to watch the tower. ‘Get the Harriers on station, Mac. We need them close, but we don’t want to blow the whole place up if we don’t have to. There are women and children in the compound.’
The long barrel of the Dooshka swung up in profile momentarily as the two Afghans readied it.
Jed placed the point of the laser on the man on the left, whose torso was visible above the mudbrick wall. He squeezed the trigger again and the man careened backwards. The other man, however, was out of sight, presumably behind the weapon. ‘I’d get down if I was you, Captain.’
The machine-gun opened up with a din like a giant striking an anvil five hundred and fifty times a minute. The heavy bullets split the air a couple of metres above the heads of the small group of Americans. Every now and then a green phosphorescent tracer round arced into the sky. The captain landed in the dirt beside Banks, sending up a cloud of dust.
‘Put some fire down, sir,’ Jed said to the captain. To the best of his knowledge it was the officer’s first time under fire. He was Special Forces, but a staff officer from CJSOTF – Coalition Joint Special Operations Task Force – headquarters. He’d been assigned to accompany the reporter and supposedly make sure neither Jed nor any of the other ODA team members said the wrong thing – like how much they resented having a newsman and a rear-echelon dude from HQ along for the ride.
The captain screamed at his radio operator. ‘Mac, call in the CAS. Wipe that fucking compound off the face of the earth. Now!’
McCubbin hesitated.
‘Don’t look at Banks, goddamn it! I just gave you an order.’
Jed ignored the screaming captain. The man behind the machine-gun had raised his head a little, desperately trying to see his target. The gunfire stopped. Jed placed the dot of the laser on the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The silenced rifle coughed. The pale-green face disappeared.
‘Sir,’ Jed said, ‘here comes the snatch team. Mac, call up the CH 47. It’s time for us to get out of here.’
‘On its way, Jed.’
‘Good man. Sir, we’ve silenced the gun for the time being. If you lead the men back to the emergency LZ I’ll tidy up here.’
The captain realised he had been overruled, but Banks had given him an out. ‘Right, you men, let’s go. Now! You too, Luke.’
Jed reached for his pack and unstrapped a sixty-six-millimetre light anti-tank weapon, a disposable one-shot rocket-launcher that was pretty well useless against modern tanks, but still handy for busting open buildings and bunkers. He slung his M4 and extended the telescopic case of the rocket-launcher. The weapon was not overly accurate and he needed to get closer to the compound.
There was enough explosive in the rocket to wreck the machine-gun if he could score a direct hit.
‘You need a hand, Jed?’ McCubbin asked. The captain and the snatch team were disappearing over the brow of the barren hill.
‘No thanks, Mac. Won’t be but a minute,’ he said. ‘Don’t dick around now.’
Jed half ran and half slid down the face of the dry slope. He cut right and started to climb again, then moved forwards once more until he was within a hundred paces of the compound’s tower.
Someone shouted. Jed could see a big man with a white beard climbing the inner steps to the compound wall. He couldn’t be sure from this distance, but he looked like one of the four men they had been sent to capture or kill. Intelligence said they were Al Qaeda, Arabs who had crossed over from Pakistan with a couple of shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles which they planned to use against Coalition aircraft.
Jed pulled the safety pin from the rocket-launcher and flipped up the crude sights. He squinted through the aperture. He could see the Dooshka and one of the bodies of the two men he had killed.
The white-bearded man came into view as he swung the machine-gun around. Jed realised he was silhouetted on the slope, casting a telltale shadow on the ground from the moon’s illumination.
The first rounds from the machine-gun brought up geysers of dirt in front of him. He pressed down on the launcher’s firing mechanism and the rocket screamed from its tube. A cloud of dust erupted behind Jed from the back blast. He dropped to his knees and watched the projectile find its mark. The explosion lit up the compound, and the timber roof of the guard tower disappeared in a thousand splinters.
Jed tossed away the used launcher and ran back up the hill.
He paused on the other side of the crest and punched in the pre-set waypoint for the emergency helicopter extraction zone on his wristwatch GPS. He started jogging again, following the illuminated arrow on the display. He ran for three minutes, until the GPS told him he was only two hundred metres away Gunfire once again ripped apart the night. AK-47s, two probably. An M4 was returning fire. Dead ahead. Shit.
Jed heard the clatter of approaching rotors. There would be an AH64 Apache attack helicopter escorting the big Chinook. He cautiously crested another rise and instantly saw the cause of the problem. There was a Toyota Land Cruiser parked in the middle of the track. Two men were out of the vehicle, lying on their bellies and firing at the fleeing Americans.
Jed brought his M4 into his shoulder, lased the first man with his night-aiming device and fired.
The man writhed on the ground, wounded but not dead. The Chinook was coming in fast, unaware of the gunfight below. Why hadn’t McCubbin warned them? The answer was plain a couple of seconds later. Murphy and Kirby came into view from behind a boulder, dragging the radioman between them.
Mac’s feet dug twin furrows in the powdery dirt.
Just as Jed took a sight picture on the second man the Chinook started its descent. The downwash of the giant twin rotors stirred up a dust storm that obscured the terrorist from view. Jed unsnapped a small pouch on the front of his combat vest and pulled out a grenade. He’d never pulled a grenade pin with his teeth, but he had his rifle in his other hand and there was nothing else for it. He was glad none of the others could see him as he extracted the pin – he’d never live it down. He spat the pin out and lobbed the deadly orb in the direction he had last seen the enemy rifleman.
The sight and sound of the explosion were all but lost in the cacophony of noise and dust generated by the huge transport helicopter. The snatch team were dragging Mac and his heavy pack onto the rear ramp of the Chinook. The captain was already aboard by the look of it. The fat rear wheels of the machine were barely touching the ground.
Jed saw Luke scramble aboard, two crewmen in bulbous helmets and tan flight suits reaching for him. Jed sprinted for the helicopter and saw one of the crewmen waving to him. Luke was standing on the ramp now, waving as well, urging him on.
From his left, above the din of the screaming engines and the
thwop
of the blades, Jed heard the unmistakable pop of AK-47 fire. The bullets found their mark, stitching a line of holes in the helicopter’s metal skin. One of the crewmen held his helmet mike close to his mouth and the machine started to rise. Jed dived for the ramp and managed to get his torso on board as the chopper lifted off, his legs kicking in the air as he tried to find purchase.
The gunman fired again. The door gunner positioned at the Chinook’s front hatch returned fire with his M60. Luke was down on one knee, grabbing at Jed’s combat vest, trying to pull him aboard. The helicopter rocked to the right and suddenly Luke slipped. Jed watched in horror as the young man fell past him, his arms windmilling. He dropped three metres to the ground and landed on his back. Jed looked up at the crewman, but the man just shook his head and screamed something the Green Beret could not hear.
‘Fuck it,’ Jed said, and let go of the ramp. He fell, maybe five metres now as the chopper was still rising. It was a heavy fall, but he rolled over, unhurt. He had dropped his rifle and couldn’t see where it had fallen. He crawled to Luke, who was still lying on his back, and drew a nine-millimetre automatic pistol from inside his combat vest as he moved.
‘Luke! Talk to me!’
The reporter coughed and tried to sit up, but the fall had winded him.
‘Steady, son. Anything broken?’ Jed yelled over the engine noise.
The Chinook was still rising, the door gunner firing blind into the night. Jed hoped the fool didn’t cap them by mistake. The AK man had stopped firing.
‘Don’t think so …’ Luke spluttered.
Jed helped the young man to his feet, then reached into a pouch of his vest and pulled out a batterypowered strobe light. He flicked it on. The flashing infra-red beacon was invisible to the naked eye but would be easily picked out by the pilots and crewmen through their night-vision goggles.
There was a noise like a buzz saw fifty metres off to his left. Jed heard the sound of lead tearing into metal. The Apache had let rip on the Land Cruiser with its thirty-millimetre chain gun in a long swooping pass. The gas tank caught and the vehicle erupted in an incandescent orange fireball that lit the surrounding hills.
Jed looked up and saw the Chinook swinging around again. There was no sign or sound of the enemy rifleman. He waved the strobe above his head. The Chinook came back around and Jed shielded his eyes from the stinging dust it stirred up. His other arm was wrapped around Luke, supporting him.
The Chinook blocked out the night sky and the moon with its dust and its fat-bellied green bulk as it descended once more. As the edge of the lowered ramp neared the ground, Jed pushed Luke into waiting arms.
One of the crewmen who dragged Luke aboard was wide-mouthed for a split second. In the next instant he was thrown backwards into the bowels of the chopper. Jed turned and saw the enemy rifleman not twenty metres away. The man stepped from behind his rock and swung the barrel of the AK towards him.
Even though it was dark and the air was thick with dust, Jed saw the man’s face clearly and was struck by his piercing eyes. Jed was quicker than the gunman. He raised his arm instinctively and fired two shots. A double tap. Both rounds hit the man in the chest and he pitched backwards.
Jed felt hands on his shoulders, dragging him back. He didn’t resist. He landed on his backside on the helicopter’s cargo ramp, feet still dangling in space as the Chinook rose like a big, noisy elevator.
It was over. He shook his head. More action in the last ten minutes of his last patrol than in the rest of his six-month tour of duty. In a few days he would be finished with Afghanistan and reunited with his daughter. He closed his eyes and tried to think of Miranda, and not of the wide-eyed look on the face of the man he had just killed.
Hassan bin Zayid put down his chilled Mosi Lager and reached for the remote. He turned up the volume on the television set in the lodge’s bar. He was alone in the cool, dark retreat. The staff had returned to their compound for lunch and he had no guests at the moment. It was CNN, something about Afghanistan.
The announcer said: ‘Five known Al Qaeda terrorists were killed yesterday in a raid on their hide-out in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. US military sources said the men, all natives of unspecified Arabic countries outside Afghanistan, were in the process of shipping antiaircraft missiles deeper into the country for use against Coalition aircraft. Two American servicemen were injured in the shoot-out but are said to be recovering. CNN’s Mike Porter has more, from Bagram, Afghanistan …’