Locked On

36

Traffic on the Boya — Miran Shah road had been light throughout the day, and it turned near nonexistent at night. Some transport vehicles, Taliban on motorcycles, and a few brightly colored buses with small mirrors hanging from the sides like Christmas ornaments. But the men in the observation post saw nothing that seemed at all out of the ordinary. Mohammed al Darkur said that his prisoner had mentioned that ISI officers were coming into the area via aircraft, which meant they had to land at Miran Shah, and they had to travel this road to get to the camp.

But in the first thirty-six hours of the surveillance, Driscoll and the others had come up empty.

Still, al Darkur photographed each and every vehicle that passed. He had no way to be certain some high-ranking ISI officer, even General Riaz Rehan himself, would not dress himself up like a goat herder to make his way to the Haqqani training camps, so after each vehicle passed their position, al Darkur and his men reviewed the high-res images.

But so far they had seen no indication that the ISI, or even some foreign force, for that matter, was operating in the area.

Just after midnight, Driscoll was manning a night-vision camera on a tripod facing down to the road while the other three men lay on their cots in the hallway behind him. A jingle bus had passed a minute ago; the dust it kicked up still hung in the air above the Miran Shah — Boya highway.

Sam rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then looked back.

Instantly he pushed his face tighter into the eyecup of the optic. There, on the road below him, four darkened pickup trucks had pulled to a stop and men rolled out of the back of the beds. They carried rifles, their clothing was black, and they moved stealthily up the rocky hillside, directly toward the ISI safe house.

“We’re getting hit!” shouted Driscoll. Mohammed was at his side with his radio in his hand a moment later. He used his binoculars, saw the dozen or so men down a hundred yards below them, and turned to one of his captains. “Contact the base. Tell them we need a priority exfiltration, now!” His subordinate headed for his radio, and al Darkur turned back to Driscoll.

“If we take the trucks, they will destroy us with those RPGs on the road.”

But Sam was not listening — he was thinking. “Mohammed. Why would they assault like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“They have to know we are watching the road. Why did they go to the road, the low ground, and not the high ground behind us?”

Al Darkur thought about it but only for a moment. “We are already surrounded.”

“Exactly. That’s a blocking force below us; the attack will come from—”

An explosion rocked the rear wall of the compound. It was thirty yards from where al Darkur and Driscoll stood in the hallway, but still it knocked them to the ground.

The ISI major began shouting commands into his radio and he climbed back to his feet. Sam grabbed his M4 and ran toward the stairs, took them three at a time as he rushed to meet the enemy who would be trying to breach the rear wall.

Sam hit the ground floor and kept running for the back of the building. He passed two 7th Commando men in a room on his left. They trained the lights of their weapons out a ground-floor window, blanketing the eastern portion of the compound with white light, desperate to find targets. Driscoll continued toward the exit to the rear grounds, and hoped like hell the sentries posted at the back gate were still in the fight, keeping Haqqani’s men pinned down in the surrounding brush and hills.

Chattering gunfire came from the front of the safe house as the enemy moved through the rocks up the hill toward the front entrance.

As Sam ran full speed toward the open rear door, preparing to shoot across the pitch-black grounds toward the gate, al Darkur came over the speaker of Sam’s walkie-talkie. He spoke English now. “Sam! Our rear wall sentries are not checking in. The enemy must already be inside the compound!”

Driscoll’s momentum took him through the doorway as he processed this information. He’d not made it five feet out into the night when bright flashes of light flickered from the gate twenty meters ahead, and booming Kalashnikov fire echoed off the outer walls of the house. Driscoll stumbled in the dust, turned, and retreated back to the doorway in a crouch.

The doorframe tore to splinters from the Haqqani fighters’ rounds, but Sam managed to get back inside and up the hall without taking a bullet. Al Darkur met him there; he was still shouting into his walkie-talkie. Both men leaned back around the corner and fired a few rounds out into the dark night. Neither thought he could quell the attack with a couple of bursts of an assault rifle, but they did hold out hopes of making some impression on anyone who thought they could just rush in the open back door and make their way up the hall unimpeded.

Al Darkur shouted into Sam’s ear after firing a few more bursts in the narrow hallway. “I’ve called for a helicopter from the base in Miran Shah, but the quick reaction force will not be ready for fifteen minutes.”

“Not quick enough,” said Sam as he dropped to his knees, leaned around the corner, and shot out the lights of the hall.

“It will be thirty minutes or more before they arrive.”

Driscoll released the empty magazine from the magazine well of his rifle, then replaced it with a fully charged mag from his chest rig. Incoming gunfire from all sides had picked up now, and shouts over the comms, even though Driscoll could not understand the words, gave the impression that the building itself was about to be overrun.

“From the sound of it, we don’t have anything like thirty minutes. How many men do you have left?”

Al Darkur got back on the walkie-talkie to find out while Driscoll went prone at the corner of the hall, then slowly rolled out on his right shoulder, putting him low in the hallway toward the back door, with his weapon’s barrel scanning for threats. He could not see a thing in the dark, so he actuated his weapon light on the side rail of the M4. Instantly two hundred lumens of bright white light filled the hallway, illuminating two Haqqani fighters making their way silently toward Sam’s position. They were blinded by the beam, but they raised their weapons anyway.

Driscoll pulled the trigger on his M4 rifle, swept a dozen rounds of automatic fire back and forth across the two men. They died before either of them got a shot off.

More sparkles of gunfire from the dark night outside forced Sam back around the corner, where he reloaded again.

“I have six men alive,” Mohammed said.

Sam nodded as he reloaded. “All right. Any chance we can make it to the trucks in the garage on the east side?”

“We have to try, but the road will be covered with Haqqani’s men.”

“Who needs a road?”

Driscoll grabbed a fragmentation grenade from his chest harness, pulled the pin, and then flung it underhanded up the hallway like a tiny bowling ball. Mohammed al Darkur and Sam Driscoll took off toward the men fighting at the east window as the explosion tore through the doorway.

Two minutes later, a group of eight Haqqani fighters attacking from below had made it through the gate and up the drive on the southeast side of the compound. They’d left four of their number behind, one dead, felled by a shot through the stomach from a second-floor window of the enemy safe house, and three more wounded: one by gunfire and two by a hand grenade tossed down the hill by a sentry at the gate who had himself been shot dead one second later.

But now the eight survivors were within twenty meters of the garage. The door was open and it was dark inside, so the men approached quietly and slowly while their comrades fired into the building on the other sides. If they could make it into the building from the door here in the garage they could, by staying low to avoid fire from their own forces, comb through the structure and destroy any remaining forces there.

As the men came to within ten yards of the garage entrance, their leader was just able to make out two large trucks parked inside. His night vision had been all but ruined by his firing several magazines from his Kalashnikov, so as he moved forward now he had to squint to hunt for a door inside.

All eight men passed the two trucks, found the door giving them access to the building, and they went inside in a line, crouching and listening for threats.

As soon as the eight Haqqani men disappeared from the garage, Sam Driscoll, Mohammed al Darkur, two ISI officers, and four Zarrar commandos quietly climbed out from under the truck farthest from the door. A driver, al Darkur, and three others climbed in the front of the vehicle, while Sam and two others remained at the back of the garage. Once Sam heard the driver quietly release the hand brake, he and two men pushed the truck from behind with all their might. The nose of the vehicle was already oriented downhill, so once they had pushed the truck out of the garage it began to pick up speed quickly. Sam and the two men gave one more firm shove, then leapt into the back of the covered bed.

The driver did not turn over the engine, nor did he turn on the headlights. The only sound made by the dark vehicle was the crunching on the rocky driveway as it moved faster and faster down the hill. The driver had only a very faint light from the overcast sky to guide him toward the front gate, and if he missed it a few feet right or left, the truck would plow into the wall and they would then have to fire the engine, letting everyone still on the hillside or on the road below know exactly where they were.

But the driver made it through the gate, the truck rolled faster now, and the driver had to force the wheels to turn left and right by using all of his upper-body strength. It was still one hundred yards of steep wnding gravel to the road below, and the pathway twisted and turned all the way down.

They made it out of the compound itself, which was where the majority of the enemy guns had concentrated by now, but someone on the hillside either heard or saw the truck when it was only twenty yards outside the gate. A shout, then a series of shouts, and then finally erupting gunfire put an end to the stealthy part of Sam Driscoll’s plan. He shouted from the back of the vehicle to the driver, told him to forget about trying to stay on the gravel road, now it was all about getting away from the guns as fast as possible, no matter where the truck ended up or what condition it was in when it got there. The driver went off road, used his big heavy truck’s momentum to propel him and his passengers down through the dark.

There were Haqqani men on all sides of the hurtling object, but most of them were unable to fire without hitting their fellow militants. A few men did fire, and Sam’s position in the back of the truck was raked with 7.62 rounds. One man with him was shot through the head, another took two rounds in his left bicep and left shoulder, and Sam took a round high on his protective steel SAPI (Small Arms Protective Insert) plate in his chest rig vest. The impact knocked him over, down to the floor, just as the huge covered truck slammed hard on a large boulder and went airborne several feet. The nearly decapitated Zarrar soldier’s body rolled with Sam in the rear of the vehicle. The truck continued, careening down the hillside, it bounced again and again, and the driver had to focus all of his faculties on keeping the truck pointed downhill so that it would not veer sideways and flip.

They were only twenty yards or so to the road when Mohammed saw more Haqqani network fighters step out of the darkness and open fire on the hurtling truck. One man held an RPG.

There was no way to engage him from the middle of the cab of the truck; it would have been impossible even if they weren’t being battered and jolted in all directions from the roll down the rocky hillside, but as it was there was no point even attempting to point a gun at the man.

Instead he shouted into the back, “Sam! RPG, right side, twenty meters!”

“Got it!”

Mohammed al Darkur could not see the American behind him, so he had no way of knowing that Driscoll hefted his M4, stood in the covered bed, and held on to a roll bar. As the vehicle hit the main road and swerved hard to the left to avoid a parked Haqqani pickup, Sam swung outside of the rear of the vehicle, one-handed his rifle up the road, and dumped a full thirty-round magazine at any and all movement he saw out in the dark. A rocket-propelled grenade ignited and streaked in his direction, but the glowing warhead shot harmlessly high up in the night sky.

Machine-gun fire from the other side of the road clanged against the metal parts of the big truck as it turned toward the east and headed back to Miran Shah. Sam tried to get back inside the truck to make himself as small a target as possible. His feet slipped, and he found himself hanging onto the roll bar, holding the canvas wall of the truck. He let go of his rifle to take the bar with both hands, and his weapon hung from its sling around his neck. While he fought to get his boots back in the vehicle, the one surviving commando in the back with him fired his M4 up the hillside from where they had just come. Return fire from the enemy flickered like fireflies off the rocky hill.

Just then, in the cab of the vehicle, a long stream of 7.62-millimeter tracer rounds tore through the windshield, shattering the glass from the major’s left to his right. Burning bullets slammed into the chest plate of the ISI captain on al Darkur’s left, then clanged off of the steel on his own body armor, and then finally raked across the neck of the driver. The man did not die instantly, though. With a gurgle and a hiss of air, he grabbed his neck wound and writhed in pain. The big truck immediately veered to the right with these movements, and ran off the road, bouncing down the hill again toward the dry riverbed below.

Sam had gotten both feet just inside the truck bed when the vehicle jacked to the right and went airborne before once again starting a violent high-speed descent. The movement spun Sam sideways, threw him hard against the side of the vehicle, and then he lost his grip on the metal bar.

The American fell off the truck just twenty yards or so from the road, and the big vehicle continued on down the hill.