Taking Fire

Khat wasn’t about to take on thirty or so Taliban with one sniper rifle. But she could fire some shots before the muzzle fire from her rifle was seen by the Taliban. They would be fourteen-hundred-yard shots, and she set up to take out at least two or three of the hidden tangos. A .300 Win Mag didn’t have a muzzle suppressor. Khat knew she could become instant toast when the sharp-eyed enemy spotted her location.

In the back of her mind as she checked elevation and windage, she knew Hutton would get a QRF up and pronto, if one was available. A quick reaction force would be needed because she knew Khogani’s men would attack these four SEALs. Camp Bravo, a forward operating base, sat about thirty miles from the Af-Pak border, near where she was presently operating.

She knew SEALs carried the fight to the enemy, but sometimes it was wiser to back off and wait another day. Frustration thrummed through Khat.

Settling the rifle butt deeply into her right shoulder, her cheek pressed hard against the fiberglass stock, she placed one of the Taliban in the crosshairs. They were in a rocky stronghold waiting to spring the trap on the unsuspecting SEALs. Khat wished she could contact the team directly. She didn’t have their radio code because it changed daily. And that’s what she’d have to have in order to call that lead SEAL and warn him of the impending ambush.

The SEAL patrol members were all carrying heavily packed rucks and wearing Kevlar vests and helmets, which meant they were going to engage in a direct-action mission. Usually, she saw some patrols with SEALs wearing black baseball caps, or field hats, their radio mics near their mouths and carrying light kits, making swift progress toward some objective in the night.

Not this patrol. These guys were armed to the teeth. The lead SEAL’s H-gear, a harness that held fifteen pockets worn around the man’s chest and waist, held a maximum load of mags, magazines, of M-4 rifle ammo where he could easily reach it. These guys knew they were going into a firefight. But in broad daylight? Who authorized that kind of crazy mission? SEALs worked in the dark of night to avoid being seen by the enemy. It was rare they would be out on a daylight mission. What a FUBAR. Whoever put this op together was crazy.

Taking a deep breath, prone on her belly, she was glad she had on a Kevlar vest so she wouldn’t have small stones biting deeply into the front of her chest. She had a 24X magnification on her Nightforce scope and could clearly see in the late-afternoon sunlight the man she’d chosen to kill. Glancing at her watch, she had two minutes before those five minutes were up. Hutton had better damn well have gotten his SEAL ass in gear.

The sun’s slant was changing. Khat patiently watched her target. Every once in a while, she’d twist her head, glancing toward the SEALs slowly making their way up the steep slope. They blended in, but the Taliban had sharp eyes like her.

Two minutes.

Nothing from Hutton.

Nostrils flaring, Khat settled the scope on the nearest man holding an RPG casually over his shoulder. There were seven tangos in total who had RPGs. That was more than enough to kill these four SEALs. And they were a hundred feet of being in range of them. Slowing her breathing, she sighted, her finger brushing the two-pound trigger. Exhaling, she allowed her lungs to empty naturally. There was a one-second beat between inhale and exhale. The snipers referred to it as the still-point. And that is when she took the shot.

The booming sound of the .300 blasted through the silence. The jerk of the rifle rippled through her entire body. Khat instantly shot again. And a third time. She released the spent mag and slapped in another with the butt of her palm. All the Taliban targets went down. Jerking her rifle around, scope on the SEALs, she saw them instantly flatten out against the rocks. They were looking in her direction! Damn it!

She didn’t have to wait long. RPGs launched, even if out of range, toward the SEALs. Khat swung the scope toward the Taliban. A number of them were angrily pointing her way. Yeah, they had her location. But she was fourteen hundred yards out of range, and those SEALs were four hundred yards from the enemy. Were they going to send tangos after her or not? Her heart started a slow beat as she scoped the enemy. There was confusion among their ranks. They were yelling at each other.

And then her blood iced. There was Sattar Khogani, the young punk of twenty-four years who’d just taken over his father’s leadership as chief of the Hill Tribe. His father, Mustafa, had recently been killed by a SEAL sniper. She’d celebrated. Sattar was in the center of his commanders, too short to take a shot at.

There were a lot of arms and hands waving, and she could see his lieutenants yelling and pointing at the SEALs and some pointing in her direction. Who to go after? She was counting on that confusion among the enemy.

Smiling grimly, Khat settled down again, muzzle and sights on the Taliban. She heard the throaty answer of the SEALs M-4 rifles as they engaged, firing off careful shots at the Taliban hidden behind the walled, rocky fort.

Not waiting, she began to fire into the crowd of Taliban officers, picking them off. Her shoulder felt bruised after firing nine rounds, the buck of the Win Mag terrific. Below her, her hearing keyed on the SEALs, they continued to return fire, spread out in a diamond formation on the scree to protect their flanks.

The Taliban suddenly surged out of the fort, waving their AK-47s, firing wildly at the SEALs. The RPGs were launched.

Khat swung her rifle, sighting on the closest man, taking him out before he could lob an RPG into the SEAL team. Damn! There were too many for her to stop! Cursing softly, she heard the RPGs explode. The pressure waves reached her, but she was spared, hunkered down a hair beneath the ridgeline.

Khat couldn’t look to see how the SEALs were doing. She was taking out the enemy systematically, one at a time. There were more than thirty of the enemy and it seemed more and more arrived, and they started realizing they were caught in a deadly crossfire.

Khat pulled out two more mags of three bullets each. She released the spent mag and slapped in the full mag, settling in, swiftly looking through her sites. She saw one man shoulder the RPG. She shot before he did. Sweat was rolling down her face, burning into her eyes, making her blink, her vision blurring momentarily. With a hiss, she remained focused, continuing to pick them off.

The Taliban grudgingly retreated.

Khat waited, taking a deep breath, watching them through the scope. Lifting her head, she checked down the slope at the SEALs. They were quickly retreating in diamond formation. Smart guys. Get the hell outta Dodge because you are way outnumbered, guys...

Wiping her face with the back of her cammie sleeve, she quickly focused on the stone fort. More hand waving and shouting among the Taliban officers. The group had just lost half its men. More fists waved angrily in the air.

Sattar was still surrounded, and she couldn’t draw a bead on him. Damn. She’d really like to take out the little bastard. Partial payment for what his sick monster father had done to so many innocent young boys and girls over his one-year reign as chief. He’d turned into a sex slave trader, and had so many young Afghan children kidnapped and sold across the border in Pakistan. She hated Mustafa, and she was sure his son was going to pick up where his sick sexual-predator father left off.

* * *

MIKE TARIK ORDERED his men to retreat. He’d made calls to Camp Bravo, finding out the QRF was out on another run in the opposite direction from where they were located. There were no flight assets available. Worse, no drone or satellite was available over their area to understand the field of battle.

They were essentially blind in the fog of war, and engaging a much larger force than was anticipated. And they were caught out in the open on the scree with no place to hide.

Breathing hard, he kept watch over the other three men that he had responsibility for. Their comms man, Ernie, couldn’t raise shit in this dead zone. The sat phone he had in his ruck had taken a bullet earlier. They were in a bad situation. The only thing they could do with the sun setting was retreat and then melt into the landscape of darkness and wait for pickup sometime later. They had to get off this scree ASAP.

Tarik heard a scream. Then more screams. He was playing rear guard to his men, higher on the slope than they were. Lifting his M-4, he saw at least fifteen Taliban charging them. Fuck!

He moved backward, slipped and fell among the rocks. Rolling, he managed to hang on to his rifle that was clipped to a harness across his shoulder and chest. He stopped his slide at the edge of the ridge, a hundred-foot drop into a wadi, or ravine, below.

Sighting, he began to slow fire, choosing his targets, remaining crouched. Again, he heard the booming sound of a Win Mag far above him. Who the hell was that? He wasn’t aware of any SEAL sniper assets in the area. Who, then? Whoever was firing was helping his team out a helluva lot. The sniper was giving them a chance to retreat.

Tarik heard the dreaded hollow thunk of an RPG being fired. He jerked a look up and saw the damn thing sailing lazily through the air—right at him. Cursing, he dived to the ground, the rocks biting and bruising him. He automatically put his hands behind his head, buried his face in the rocks, opened his mouth and waited. If he didn’t open his mouth, the blast pressure waves would make Jell-O out of his lungs, the air in his chest not equalizing with the air surrounding him.

The blast went off. The last thing he remembered was flying through the air.

* * *

KHAT JERKED IN a breath, watching the RPG explode, the SEAL tumbling out of the rock and dusty clouds, flung over the side of the ridge, disappearing into the wadi. Her heart banged in her throat, underscoring the terror she felt. She whipped her attention back to the Taliban soldiers running down the slope toward the other three SEALs.

Khat continued to fire, taking them from the back, their bodies flying forward five or six feet before crumpling into a heap. Was part of the group going after that SEAL that had been blown off the ridge? Not if she could help it, dropping the enemy who began to retreat beneath her withering fire.

Finally, Khat quit firing, the escaping SEALs and the Taliban out of her range. Leaping to her feet, she grabbed the rifle and trotted about a tenth of a mile down a narrow goat path. There, she’d have a better view of the slope down into the wadi. Halting, Khat hefted the rifle to her shoulder, and she looked through the scope, moving it from the top of the wadi, working downward.

Breathing slowly, she hoped to locate the SEAL. Doubting the man survived, it was her duty to find him, retrieve his body and then make a call to J-bad. Hutton probably couldn’t even cut loose a damned Medevac, he was such stickler for regulations.

Wait.

She steadied the scope, holding the rifle still in her arms. There! The body of the SEAL was just at the edge of the wadi. She saw his M-4 nearby. The light was getting bad. He still had his arms and legs. Was he breathing? She didn’t know. Looking up, Khat heard smatterings of fire rising from far below her between the SEALS and the Taliban. There was nothing else she could do to help the SEAL team. She’d done everything possible. But maybe she could rescue this SEAL in the wadi. No way did Khat want his body to fall into Taliban hands.

Turning, she slid down the hill where her black Arabian mare, Mina, was standing quietly below. Khat had tied her reins to a branch of a tree where she was hidden. The mare wore a Western saddle, something Khat had insisted on when she started working alone out here. She wasn’t about to ride one of those torturous Afghan wooden saddles. The Arabian mare’s fine small ears pricked up, her huge brown eyes watching her progress down the rocky hill.

“Good girl, Mina,” Khat whispered, leaping off the slope. She quickly slipped the Win Mag into the nylon sheath beneath her left stirrup. Picking up her ruck from beneath the tree, Khat shrugged the sixty-pound pack across her shoulders. She pulled her black baseball cap out of her lower cammie pocket and settled it on her head. Mounting, she urged the small horse into a trot, heading for a goat path that would lead them to the wadi.

By the time Khat located the SEAL, it was dusk. She had put on her NVGs, night vision goggles, and moved cautiously into the wadi, not wanting to make any noise. She knew Sattar Khogani had more men in the area. Taking no chances with the Hill tribe on patrol like a bunch of angry bees running around on the mountain, she wanted to remain the shadow she was. Her mare carefully picked her way through the trees, winding in and around them, her small hooves delicate and avoiding coming down on branches. If a branch snapped, it could alert the Taliban they were in the wadi.

Khat spotted the body of the SEAL. Half of him was still on the scree, the other half hanging down into the wadi. She dismounted, dropping the reins. Mina was trained to remain where she was.

Slipping out of the ruck, she set it quietly on the ground near the mare. Her heart picked up in beat. Was he dead? Injured? Or playing dead? If he was faking it and she came upon him, he could rip her throat out with a KA-BAR knife. SEALs were taught that they were never helpless. If a rifle or pistol wouldn’t do it, a knife sure as hell would.

Approaching cautiously, soundlessly, she had her NVGs on, the grainy green showing there was blood leaking out from beneath his Kevlar helmet and down his bearded cheek. With green filters on, Khat couldn’t see what color his flesh was. His mouth was open. He seemed unconscious. His one arm was hanging down into the wadi. She carefully reached out, placing two fingers on the inside of his thick wrist.

He didn’t move.

She felt his pulse. It was weak and thready.

He really was unconscious. Moving quickly, Khat pulled him into the wadi so no one could see him from the slope. Rolling him over, tipping his head back so he could breathe, she held her ear to his nose. His breath was shallow, but it was there.