Killing Ground

There was no further activity on the trail below him, but overhead Bolan soon heard the tramp of footsteps. One of the snipers had already reached the ridge and was closing in on him.

Bolan was weighing his next move when, about a mile to the north, staccato bursts from several AK-47s suddenly drowned out the sniper’s footsteps, followed by return fire from M-16s. The Executioner craned his neck and scanned the terrain where the shots were coming from. Through the drifting clouds, he saw blips of light punctuate the exchange of gunfire close to where one of the Special Ops forces had taken up position. There was only one likely explanation. More of the Taliban had somehow managed to slip past recon and turn the tables on their would-be ambushers.

There was no time to mull over the turn of events. Bolan knew he had to act. It seemed likely that the distant firefight had distracted the enemy closing in on him, and he went with the odds. Holstering his Beretta, he coiled himself against the rock, then pushed off to his right, extending his arms toward the lone tree growing out from the cliff facing. As his fingers curled around the gnarly trunk, Bolan grabbed tight and swung forward, building momentum so that when he let go, he was able to clear the gap leading to the stretch where, as with the similar slope above, bombing had created a natural slide made up of pulverized gneiss and granite.

Bolan landed hard on his back amid the loose stone, knocking the wind from his lungs. He struggled to remain conscious as he felt himself sliding feetfirst down the incline, dislodging enough rocks and other debris to create a full-scale avalanche. There was no way to tell if the enemy was firing at him. All he heard was the thunder of falling rock and the equally loud reverberation of blood pulsing through his head.

Moments later, Bolan splashed into the lake. The icy water revived him instantly and as soon as his boots touched the shallow lake bottom, he bent at the knees and lunged forward, swimming clear of the larger boulders that had been brought crashing down behind him. Several rocks glanced off his legs and right thigh but their force was blunted by the water, and Bolan was able to stroke his way farther out into the lake.

He remained submerged as long as he could, then, lungs burning, he angled his way upward and broke the surface. There he trod water as he gasped for air. He was halfway out into the lake. A ragged peninsula comprised of fallen trees and snagged debris stretched toward him from the far shore. Bolan swam quietly toward it, relying on leg kicks to keep his splashing to a minimum. Once he reached the trees and wriggled beneath a moss-covered branch, the Executioner stopped long enough to catch his breath.

He could still hear gunfire to the north, but there were shots in the air around him, as well. Bolan wasn’t the target, however, and the most persistent firing came from almost directly overhead. Bolan peered up and saw a small AH-6J “Little Bird” combat chopper hovering in place just past the lake, directing blasts from a side-mounted .50-caliber machine gun at the Taliban gunmen on the path leading up to the ridgeline. Bolan couldn’t see the trail, but the ridgeline and distant peak were both within view, and there was no sign of fire being returned by the snipers.

There was little Bolan could do to assist those in the chopper, which he recognized as part of the U.S. aerial force based out of Bagram. At the risk of being spotted and mistaken for the enemy, he pushed away from the half-submerged tree and circled around the peninsula, then slowly swam toward the far shore of the small lake. By the time he reached it, the Little Bird had let up on its offensive. The chopper was about to drift toward the precipice when it suddenly shifted course. Its halogen searchlight swept across the lake, falling on Bolan as he pulled himself from the water. The Executioner straggled ashore, half-numbed by the cold water but still able to feel countless bruises he’d sustained since first going over the side of the ridgeline.

The chopper dropped to within a few yards of the embankment. The copilot reached out and helped Bolan up onto the skid.

“Don’t think we can squeeze you in here,” the copilot shouted over the blare of the rotors.

“I’m fine here,” Bolan replied, taking hold of the open door frame as the copter pulled away from the lake, listing at a slight angle to compensate for his added weight.

“There were a couple snipers above the ridgeline,” he told the copilot, a Native American in his late twenties.

“Didn’t see ’em,” the other man told him, “but they’ll have to wait. We’ve got an SOS from Team Five. Taliban popped up out of nowhere and have ’em pinned.”

Bolan changed the subject. “You got a dry weapon in there?”

“Sure thing.” The copilot reached behind his seat and handed Bolan a foot-long Heckler & Koch MP-5 K submachine gun. The H&K was larger than his Beretta but still fit snugly in his right palm. It packed a greater wallop, too. Bolan knew that if he kept the weapon close-bolted, he’d be able to fire from the skid with minimal kickback, ensuring better accuracy.

“Where’s O’Brien?” the copilot asked.

“Caught a land mine up on the ridge,” Bolan told him. “Snipers started in on us before I could call for help. He’s gone.”

The copilot spit and readied one hand on the trigger operating the Little Bird’s outer machine gun. “Bastards!”

The men fell silent as the AH-6J banked into the clouds, using them for cover en route to the distant skirmish. Peering down through the mist, Bolan spotted another of the U.S. commando squads spread out in a column, threading their way along one of the mountain trails. They still had a few switchbacks to negotiate, however, and the Executioner doubted they’d reach the battle in time to be a factor.

Once they emerged from the cloud cover, Bolan saw a CH-47 Chinook hovering in place a quarter mile ahead over terrain that looked much the same as the area he’d just left—half-barren mountains ribboned with narrow trails and pocked by bombs and mortar fire. The Chinook’s tail gunner dispensed fire into the brush along a footpath high up near the top of a steep gorge. As they drew closer, Bolan saw a shadowed figure take a hit and plummet into the crevasse. Close by, a second Taliban crouched behind a large boulder, unseen by the tail gunner, drawing a bead on the Chinook with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. The Executioner whipped his H&K into firing position and steadied himself on the Little Bird’s skid. He cut loose with a single round, striking the boulder. When the Taliban turned toward him, Bolan was ready with a follow-up shot. This time he didn’t miss.

“Beat me to him,” the copilot shouted to Bolan. “Nice shot.”

Bolan pointed to the trail leading away from where he’d dropped the insurgent. “That looks like their way out,” he yelled. “Get me as close as you can!”

Bolan’s command was relayed to the pilot. The AH-6J promptly swerved right, then dipped toward the trail. Bolan crouched on the skid and waited until the chopper drew closer, then, clutching the MP-5, he pushed clear and dropped to the ground. He landed hard and felt a sharp pain in his right ankle as he lurched away from where the trailed dropped off into the abyss. He struck the rock facing just off the trail and winced as jagged gneiss bit through his shirt, drawing blood. Bolan ignored the wound and braced himself, ready to face the enemy.

3

Aden Saleh cursed as he watched one of his fellow warriors keel into the ravine, the victim of rounds fired from the large American warbird thundering out in the misty night air before him. The hope had been that dust storms forecast for the evening would have reached far enough into the mountains to thwart visibility and keep gunships from responding to the Taliban assault. Such had not been the case, now Saleh’s men were paying the price. Yes, they’d managed to take the enemy by surprise and decimate those who would have done the same to them, but the arrival of the helicopters threatened their chances of making a safe retreat to the tunnels through which they’d been able to reach the attack site undetected.

Saleh, a lean, grim-faced man who’d spent nearly half his thirty years rising up through the Taliban ranks, directed his wrath at the hovering Chinook, emptying the last rounds from his Kalashnikov, to little effect. His ammunition spent, he cast the assault rifle aside and yanked a 9 mm Ruger from his waistband. Fifty yards to his left, a smaller chopper had just deposited a soldier on the same footpath where he now stood. The entrance to the tunnel lay between them, but Saleh was closer to it and had no intention of letting the other man prevent him from making his getaway. He whirled and fired, forcing the enemy to cover, then charged forward, mere steps ahead of a strafing round fired his way from the Chinook.

Halfway to the bend where he’d last seen the American, Saleh threw himself to the ground and crawled off the path. He squeezed past a mound of holly just off the trail, then bellied his way beneath a rock formation protruding from the canyon wall. There, in the cold darkness, a manhole-size opening yawned its welcome. Saleh burrowed through the gap and wriggled past a loose boulder, following a narrow shaft to the point where it widened enough for him to rise to his knees. He had no interest in backtracking to reset the boulder that had earlier helped conceal the opening. If anything, at this point he hoped his pursuer would find the entrance and come after him.

Saleh crawled a few more yards, then squirmed clear of the shaft, entering a larger tunnel tall enough to stand in. He quickly brushed himself off, then made his way to the first turn. There he stopped and shoved the Ruger back in his waistband, and pulled from beneath the folds of his shirt a Soviet-made F-1 fragmentation grenade. He thumbed loose the cotter ring, then, pressing the safety lever, he drew in a breath, hoping to soothe the loud clamor of his racing heart. He needed to be able to hear the infidel’s approach, so that he would know when to let fly with the limonka and turn the entrance shaft into a death trap.

BOLAN STAYED PUT once the insurgent’s 9 mm serenade drove him to cover. There was no way for him to round the bend without placing himself back in the line of fire. By the same token, he figured the enemy would be unable to flee any farther without coming his way. Judging from the hail of gunfire spewing from the two choppers, the Executioner also thought there was a good chance any of the retreating Taliban would be dispensed with before they reached him.

As he awaited his next move, Bolan felt the warm trickle of blood running down his shoulder. He shrugged it off and tested his arm, then tried putting his full weight on his right foot. The ankle felt sprained, but not severely enough to hinder him, and he was certain that, at worse, he’d only need a couple stitches in his shoulder. He’d fought on countless times in the past with far worse injuries.

The firefight went on without him, but not for long. Soon the only shots were being fired from the helicopters, and then their guns fell silent, as well. As the Chinook lumbered away, the Little Bird pulled back from its firing position and briefly shone its light on the trail leading to the attack site, then slowly drifted Bolan’s way. Once the chopper was within shouting range, the copilot called out to Bolan.

“I think we got ’em all except the one just down the trail from you.” The man pointed to Bolan’s right. “Fucker dropped to his belly and went Houdini on us.”

“He couldn’t have just disappeared,” Bolan shouted back.

The copilot shrugged. “If you want to check it out, we’ll light the way.”

Bolan nodded, readying his MP-5. Once the searchlight illuminated the path before him, he ventured around the bend and cautiously made his way forward, slightly favoring his bad ankle. The dirt was etched with bootprints, all of them leading toward the staging site where the Special Ops force had been attacked. It was another twenty yards before he came upon more tracks. The imprints were different from the others, made by boots other than those worn by U.S. troops. All but one set of the tracks led to the ambush site; the other, headed the opposite way, had been made by the man whose retreat Bolan had hoped to prevent. There was a spot where the latter tracks stopped and had been smudged away, along with the other prints. Bolan surmised the reason and glanced to his right, where a small thicket of holly just off the trail had been partially flattened.

The Executioner pointed his gun into the brush while signaling for the Little Bird to shift position. Once the search light had been redirected, Bolan saw there was clearance beneath a protuberance in the rock wall that flanked the trail. Cautiously he dropped to a crouch for a better look. Just enough light made its way into the clearance for him to spot the tunnel opening.

Bolan signaled for the chopper to hold steady, then leaned inward. He was about to enter the cavity when he checked himself and stopped, heeding an instinct honed by years on the battlefield.

“I don’t think so,” he murmured to himself.

Bolan retreated long enough to track down a handful of stones lying along the side of the trail. Clustering them in his fist, he ventured back to the opening, took aim and flung them into the darkness.

Just as the Executioner took a step back there was an explosion. The ground beneath him shook, and he bent at the knees to steady himself as loose debris and frag shards flew out from the opening, laying waste to the holly. Bolan was spared the worst of it, except for a few bits of shrapnel that glanced off his shins.

The blast was short-lived, and in its wake a foul tendril of smoke curled its way through the collapsed remnants of what had once been the tunnel. Bolan could no longer see the opening, but he suspected it would no longer be large enough for anyone to squeeze through.

He was still staring at the damage when the chopper pulled closer.

“Tunnel?” the copilot shouted out to him.

“Not anymore,” Bolan called back.

IT TOOK ANOTHER ten minutes for two of the other Special Ops squads to reach the ambush site. With the fighting over, there was nothing left for them to do but help Bolan and the Chinook crew load casualties into the bulky gunship, which had touched down on a plateau eighty yards to the north. It was a sobering task. Of the twelve commandos who’d been attacked, eleven had been slain, their bodies riddled with far more kill shots than had been necessary to take them out. The twelfth commando was also near death and had passed out after confirming that the unit had been attacked by enemy forces who’d clearly used the hidden tunnel to slip undetected within striking distance.

As for the Taliban, six men had been cut down just off the trail near the rocks and dwarf spruce that they’d taken position behind once the first shots had been fired. At least two more were reported to have gone over the side during the ensuing firefight. There was no way of knowing, at this point, how many men had managed to retreat back into the tunnel before Bolan’s arrival. The Executioner had inspected the blasted opening shortly after the explosion and confirmed that it was too collapsed and choked with debris to be of use. The AH-6J Little Bird had set out to comb the surrounding mountains in hopes of spotting anyone using another way out of the tunnel. Bolan doubted that anything would come of the search. One of the arriving squad leaders was of a similar sentiment.

“Fuckers are like cockroaches,” Captain Rob Kitt said. Kitt was a pallid, broad-shouldered man in his late thirties. He wore a headset-equipped helmet bearing the same camo pattern as his fatigues. “If you can’t stomp ’em before they slip through the cracks, forget about it.”

“You got that right,” another of the commandos said. “Hell, we could punch these mountains with bunker busters from now till doomsday, and there’d still be tunnels left for them to scurry through.”

While the last of the U.S. casualties were being carted off, Bolan and Kitt, each clutching a high-powered flashlight, took a closer look at the slain Taliban fighters and their weapons. In addition to AK-47s and the ASG-17 grenade launcher Bolan had prevented from being used on the Chinook, the terrorists had carried out their attack with knockoff G-3s as well as at least two well-worn M-16s that looked as if they dated back more than twenty years to America’s campaign to support mujahideen forces opposed to the Soviet occupation.

“Ain’t that a bitch,” Kitt murmured as he inspected one of the M-16s. “Killed with our own goddamn weapons.”