Sniper Elite (23 page)

Alpha reached the end of the alley and stole a quick peek around the corner, seeing a mob of Taliban fighters charging toward them. He jumped back and tore a grenade from his harness, biffing it around the corner. None of the SEALs had to be told to hit the ground. The explosion blew away the corner of the hut and body parts flew through the air. Men and women screamed from inside the shattered dwelling. An infant began to shriek.

“Move!” Crosswhite shouted, jumping to his feet and charging around the corner. Half a dozen blasted bodies littered the alleyway between a stone wall and a row of huts. Bleeding civilians scurried for cover inside the shattered dwellings as the SEALs dashed by. There was nothing to be done for them. They would have to fend for themselves as best they could. This was the ugliest part of war.

At the end of the alley they came to a stone staircase, very steep, very narrow, perhaps fifty feet in length. Crosswhite hated the idea, but there was no other avenue of escape. Halfway down, a Taliban gunman opened up on them with a semiautomatic SKS from behind a pile of firewood. Two of the SEALs were hit. Crosswhite and Alpha poured fire onto the sniper's location and took him out, but another pair of Taliban fighters appeared behind them at the top of the stairs and opened fire.

Fischer was hit again in the same shoulder and thrown off balance. He fell backward down the stairs, firing his pistol one-handed. He hit one of the Taliban in the neck and drove the second one
back long enough for Speed to recover from the shock of being hit. Bleeding from a bullet wound in his lower back, Speed charged back up the stairs, firing the instant the Taliban's face came back into view and blowing away his forehead. He took a knee atop the staircase and called down for the rest of the team to continue on to the bottom.

“I'm right behind you!” he shouted, making brief eye contact with Crosswhite before turning to fire a burst back in the direction they had come, driving three Taliban back around the shattered corner of the hut. He swiped at the wound to his back and brought up a handful of blood.

“Fuck me,” he muttered. “This isn't too good.” He found the remaining Benzedrine capsule in his arm pocket and swallowed it dry, feeling it stick in his throat halfway down. He swiped at his wound again and managed to suck enough blood from his glove to choke the capsule down.

“How bad is it?” Fischer said from behind.

Speed jerked his head around. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I ain't leaving your ass.”

They waited until the rest of the column reached the bottom of the stairs, then Speed yanked a grenade from Fischer's harness and hurled it down the alley toward the corner. They were a quarter of the way down when it detonated four seconds later. At the bottom, they found the rest of the team formed up around the corner in a defensive half circle where they waited for the corpsman to treat a severely wounded SEAL named Blane.

Naeem was belly-down in the dirt beneath the knee of a SEAL everyone called the Conman. Conman was the smallest guy on the team, not much over 5'6" at 145 pounds. He was a true gunfighter, a gambler with a killer's disposition. He had the barrel of his MK 23
screwed tightly into Naeem's ear, at the same time gripping his M4 in the opposite hand, ready to throw down again at any second. He gave Speed a shrug, as if to say, “Just another day at the office.”

Forogh got his bearings, pointing toward a hut with a rusted blue rain barrel in front. “There's the rain barrel,” he said, remembering the guide's directions. “When Doc's finished, we need to move east through that hut over there.”

“Christ, no matter which way we go, it's gonna be ambush fucking central.” Crosswhite looked on as the Latino corpsman treated the wounded Blane. He was bleeding profusely from the thigh, the femoral artery severed.

“How's he doing, Doc?”

Doc shook his head, hurriedly ripping the plastic wrapper from a scalpel. “I gotta cut down to the artery and clamp it off before he bleeds out.” He ordered a SEAL named Jackson to sit on Blane's chest. “This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker, Blane, but this ain't fuckin' Mogadishu—you
ain't
fuckin' dyin' on me!”

As Doc began to cut down through Blane's thigh muscle, more firing broke out from the huts across the clearing. The SEALs poured fire into the huts and the firing stopped.

Blane growled and gnashed his teeth like a rabid animal, squeezing Jackson's hands in his own and biting down on the folded leather glove that Doc had jammed between his teeth. He bit down so hard that he thought his teeth were going to crack.

“Fuck!” Jackson said, feeling Blane's grip beginning to overpower his own. “You gotta do that raw, Doc? Give this motherfucker some morphine.”

Doc desperately wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “How the fuck's he gonna fight all doped up? Keep your leg still, Blane!”

More firing broke out from the far end of the alley to the west of where they were formed up. Crosswhite fired an HE round from
his M203 and blew the hut apart. He ejected the spent casing and briefly met Trigg's gaze.

Trigg was bleeding from a neck wound, but it wasn't too serious. “We can't absorb much more of this, Captain. You ready to call in Bank Heist Two?”

Crosswhite kept his eyes on the hut he had just blown to smithereens, shaking his head. “There's nowhere for them to land in here. The helos would have to hover overhead and lower the lines. Any jackass with an RPG could blow them out of the sky, so we have to make it to the EZ—there's no other choice.”

“Yes, there is. The helos could—”

“I'm not wiping out a village,” Crosswhite said. “If we'd found Sandra, that would be one thing, but we didn't, so we have to tough this out.”

“Found it!” Doc exclaimed. “Fuckin' A!” He took the artery clamp from his lapel and clamped off the artery deep in Blane's thigh. Then he took a compress and pressed it down hard against the wound, wrapping it tightly around with green duct tape so that Blane would be able to walk, and hopefully fight, without shaking the clamp loose.

Jackson got off of Blane's chest, and Blane sat up sweating, his face pale, eyes glassing over. Doc took a stainless steel flask from his medical bag and put it to Blane's lips.

“Chug it down!” Doc said, tilting the flask up to pour it into the back of Blane's throat. “We gotta stop the shock from setting in, or you'll be too fucked to fight.”

Blane choked down the burning liquid and jerked his head away, coughing and shaking his head. “What the fuck is that—Tequila?”

“It slows down the shock,” Doc said, quickly jamming his gear back into the bag. “You stick close by me all the way out of here,
vato
. You're in bad shape.” He looked at Crosswhite. “Ready to go when you are, Capt—” He noticed for the first time a SEAL named
McAllister applying a bandage to the lower right of Speed's back. “How bad are you?”

Speed shrugged. “Bad enough there ain't shit you can do. If we don't make the EZ pretty soon, I'm fucked.”

Crosswhite made a quick assessment. Counting the bullet hole in his own leg, five of them were carrying wounds, two of them critical. Even Fischer had been hit again in the same damn shoulder, though he didn't seem to be complaining.

Doc and Jackson helped Blane to his feet. Blane winced badly when he put weight on the leg, but he assured them all that he could continue the mission.

Alpha got back on point, and they made toward the hut with the blue rain barrel.

Once inside, Crosswhite took one of the claymore mines from Trigg's pack. “Alpha, keep the column moving down through the village. I'll catch up. Those cocksuckers at the top of the stairs are going to try and dog us all the way to the EZ.”

The rest of the team rousted the cowering Kalasha family from their hiding places and took them along out the back door, finding the narrow passage the tour guide had told Forogh about.

Crosswhite unfolded the scissor legs on the bottom of the claymore and stuck them into the dirt floor at the back of the hut, facing the door. Then he got up and fired a burst out the window at the small squad of Taliban fighters who were just emerging from cover at the top of the stone staircase. He didn't hit anyone, but he managed to drive them briefly back under cover. As he returned to work setting the claymore, a hail of AK-47 fire rained through the hut, forcing him down onto his belly. He quickly ran the trigger wire from the mine to the door, securing it around a rusty nail protruding from the wood near the floor. A bullet struck his helmet a glancing blow and embedded itself in his back between his shoulder blades near his spine. Now more than ever he was regretting the decision
to leave their body armor behind, but this was a moot point. Wearing armor, they would never have completed a forced march up the mountain.

As the Taliban gunners paused to reload, he leapt to his feet and dashed out the back door, running down the passageway to catch up with the team. A door opened and he plowed right into a pair of Taliban fighters in the midst of displacing to outflank the hut with the blue rain barrel.

All three men went sprawling, and a furious free-for-all ensued as they scrambled back to their feet. Crosswhite knew better than to try and recover the M4, or to even bother with the pistol. He simply drew his Ka-Bar and went to work, jamming it up under the rib cage of the much bigger Taliban fighter, pivoting to keep the dying man between himself and the other man in the narrow passage. The younger fighter who couldn't directly engage just sort of stood there as his skewered compatriot screamed in agony, trying desperately to gouge out Crosswhite's eyes.

Crosswhite gave the man a shove and jumped for space, leaving the knife embedded in his torso. He jerked out his pistol and shot both men down.

At this same moment, the Taliban squad from the staircase arrived outside the hut with the blue rain barrel. The leader jerked open the door and detonated the M18A1 claymore mine. Seven hundred
¹
/
₈
-inch steel balls blasted outward in an arc of 60 degrees, at a velocity of 3,900 feet per second. The front of the hut disintegrated, and all nine Taliban fighters more or less disintegrated right along with it.

Crosswhite retrieved his weapons, pausing to make sure their pursuers were dead before dashing back down the passageway. He called out over the radio: “Alpha, the claymore did its job. I'm moving to catch up.”

“Roger that,” Alpha replied. “Take a left at the end of the passageway,
then another right. We're about fifty yards from your position, behind a stone wall. Be advised we are taking fire!”

Crosswhite could hear the rotors of the Black Hawk helicopters arriving high overhead now, well inside of the outer marker. He got them on the radio next.

“Bank Heist Two, be advised we're in a running fight down here! There's no way for you to extract us safely at this time. Pull back to the outer marker. Over!”

“Bank Heist One, be advised we are maintaining an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet. If you will activate your infrared strobes, we'll try and put a little bit of heat on those bad guys for you. Over.”

Crosswhite kept moving, realizing the helos were maintaining an altitude of 3,500 feet because an enemy RPG-7 self-detonated at a distance of roughly 3,000 feet. He doubted, however, that an RPG would fly that high if fired straight up into the air. “Negative, negative, Bank Heist! The bad guys are all mixed in with the civilians down here.”

He could hear small arms chattering elsewhere in the village now and realized the helos had already begun taking fire. He switched on the infrared strobe attached to his combat harness and ordered the rest of the team to do the same so the helo gunners could tell friend from foe. He heard a loud explosion high over the village and realized that some wing nut had just tried to shoot down one of the helos with an RPG.

“Bank Heist Two, did you take any damage from that RPG? Over.”

“Negative, Bank Heist.” The pilot's voice sounded almost bored. “Listen, we've got a pretty good visual on both you and the enemy now. They seem to have anticipated your march route out. They're assembled and waiting for you in the rocks just below the village. Why don't you clear us to fire and let us expedite your exfiltration? Over.”

Crosswhite realized that by now either the NSA or the CIA—or both—would be intercepting all of this excessive radio traffic and
that pretty soon their unauthorized mission would be hitting prime time. “Bank Heist, you advise they're clear of the village? Over.”

“Roger that, Bank Heist. But we'd better fire soon, because they're moving back toward the village now. Over.”

“Take 'em, Bank Heist.”

“Roger that. Get your heads down, gentlemen.”

Crosswhite managed to reestablish contact with the rest of the team just as the Night Stalker gunners began to engage the Taliban fighters outside the village with a pair of M134, 20 mm Gatling guns that fired up to 6,000 rounds per minute. From their position behind the stone wall, they watched as the Taliban broke from the cover of the rocks, running for their lives in every direction. The hot 20 mm tracers sought them out like red laser beams, exploding their bodies with hundred-round bursts of fire, raking the mountainside with great, sweeping arcs of fire. Within a few seconds, twenty-five Taliban fighters were obliterated.

Crosswhite ordered the team out from behind the wall. They made their way five hundred yards down the mountain to a relatively flat piece of real estate they had preselected as their extraction zone and waited for the first Black Hawk to set down. The second helo remained on station high overhead, providing top-cover.

The crew chief jumped out and saluted Crosswhite. “The word's out, Captain. We've just received orders to return to base immediately. We haven't acknowledged the transmission, but they know we're listening. We should have F-15s buzzing the area any time now.”