Locked On

66

Sam and Dom led the way back up the stairs while Jack and the Afghan carried the incapacitated Reuters reporter. It was a tough climb back to the ground floor, but once they were there, things became even more precarious. Chavez had cleared the upstairs, but now he and al Darkur were in the hallway near the stairs, firing toward the front of the building at enemy fighters positioned there.

The Pakistani major had been hit in the left shoulder and his rifle had been damaged by another round, but he continued to fire his pistol up the hall with his right hand.

Chavez saw that he had six people behind him now, and one was being carried. He nodded to himself and patted al Darkur on the shoulder. “Let’s find a way out of here before the enemy starts firing RPGs!”

They headed toward the back of the building, a limping Sam Driscoll in the lead with a salvaged AK. Now Chavez brought up the rear and fired constantly to keep heads down in the rooms and hallways near the front of the house.

The hallway came to a T and Driscoll went right, with the rest of the procession following behind. Sam came upon a large room at the back of the house, but the windows had been bricked up and there was no door.

“No good!” he shouted. “Try the other direction!”

Chavez led now. He was surprised that the enemy fire up this stretch of hallway had lessened noticeably. With Ryan and Caruso firing down the base of the T, Chavez and al Darkur darted across, and then ran into a long narrow kitchen. There was no exit here, but a small side door looked promising. Chavez opened the door, desperate to find a window or a door or even a staircase back upstairs.

The doorway led to a dark room roughly fifteen feet across and thirty feet deep. It seemed to be some sort of repair shop, but Ding didn’t focus on the room itself; instead he shined his rifle’s light quickly along the walls, searching for any other exit. Seeing nothing, he started to turn away to try to go back and fight with the others. But he stopped when something caught his eye in the low light.

He’d ignored the wooden tables and shelves in the room when looking for a way out, but now he focused on them, or more specifically, what was on them.

Containers of car parts and electrical components. Batteries. Cell phones. Wires. Small drums of gunpowder. Steel pressure plates and a blue fifty-five-gallon drum full of what Ding immediately assumed was nitric acid.

On the floor were mortar shells, partially disassembled.

Ding realized he’d stumbled onto a bomb factory. The improvised explosive devices created here would be smuggled over the border into Afghanistan.

This explained why the Haqqani fighters hadn’t fired a rocket toward Chavez and his team here in the back of the house. If anything in this room detonated, the entire compound would be obliterated, the Haqqani men included.

“Mohammed?” Ding shouted, and al Darkur peered into the room.

Immediately he nodded. “Bombs.”

“I know what they are. Can we use them?”

Mohammed nodded with a crooked smile. “I know something about bombs.”

Ryan and Caruso were both down to their last magazine. They fired individual rounds from the top of the T down to the base. They knew they’d taken out a lot of the Haqqani members with rifle fire, but there seemed to be an unlimited supply of armed assholes remaining.

One of the Puma helicopters was flying in circles behind the compound. This Jack could tell from occasional automatic fire from his six-o’clock high, coming from outside the building. He could not actually hear the helo — with the gunfire in the narrow hallways his ears were trashed, so nothing less than small-arms fire up close or heavy machine guns at distance registered.

Chavez appeared just behind the two men, sliding a fresh magazine around and into their chest rigs. While he did this he shouted, “There is a bomb factory in the back!”

“Oh, shit,” said Ryan, realizing that he and his mates were, essentially, exchanging fire while sitting on top of a powder keg.

“Al Darkur is wiring an IED to blow the back wall. If he gets it right it should make us a hole in the back of the building. When it’s time to go, just turn and run up the hallway. I’ll cover your egress!”

Jack didn’t ask what would happen if Mohammed did not get it “right.”

Ding next said, “Do not head out back until you toss your LZ beacons. The door gunner in the Puma has been rocking his MG for the past ten minutes. Don’t count on him to spot the IR strobe on your back. He’ll turn you into ground beef. Use your LZ marker as a second way to alert them that friendlies are coming out.”

The two young men nodded.

“Sam and the Afghan will drag the wounded man, you guys just keep up the covering fire for them until the chopper lands and they get on board.”

“Got it!” Dom said, and Ryan nodded.

Both Ryan and Caruso kept up the controlled fire, just enough to let the enemy know that, if they ventured up the hall toward the T, then they were going to pay a heavy price. They still took some fire, but it came from AKs that were just held around the corner and sprayed by their handlers, and the rounds banged along the walls, floors, and ceiling.

Twice al Darkur and Chavez passed behind them as they took IED material out of the bomb factory on Jack and Dom’s right and carried it to the other end of the hallway on their left.

Within a minute, Chavez was back behind them. He screamed into their ears, “Get down!”

Both men dove to the stone floor of the hallway and covered their heads. Within a few seconds, an incredible boom from behind them pounded up the hallway with a concussive force that made Jack think the building would fall on top of them. Cracked mortar, stone, and dust did fall from the ceiling, raining down on all the men in the hallway.

Caruso was first to his feet. He ran up the hallway with Ryan close behind, passing the wounded Reuters man being dragged by his shoulders by Driscoll and the Afghani prisoner.

Jack caught up to him as they entered the room with the bricked-over windows. Their weapon lights were useless with the dust in the air. They just continued on toward the far wall until, finally, they could see open sky. Immediately Dominic threw the flashing landing-zone signal into the rear of the compound. The beacon would, in theory, alert the gunmen in the circling choppers that friendlies were in that area so they should not fire.

As Dominic stepped into the rear courtyard he worried he would take a blast from the door gun of the chopper, but fortunately the Zarrar commandos had good fire discipline. The American crouched behind a small stack of truck tires and covered the north side of the compound, while his cousin went prone beside a large pile of rubble left by al Darkur’s bomb blast, covering the south side.

One of the SSG choppers had used its 20-millimeter cannon to take out the poles holding up the electric wires in the back of the property, so the helo landed near Major al Darkur, the prisoners, and the American operatives. Within seconds everyone was aboard and the helo lifted back into the air and immediately began racing for safety.

Inside the helicopter, all seven men who’d made it on board lay on the metal decking, arms and legs atop one another. Jack Ryan found himself near the bottom of the pile, but he was too exhausted to move, even to push the thick leg of the Afghani politician off his face.

It took another twenty minutes of nap-of-the-earth flying before the lights in the cabin of the helo came on and the pilot announced, through Mohammed al Darkur and his intercom-linked headphones, that they were out of danger. The men sat up, water bottles were passed around, and al Darkur’s shoulder was attended to by the loadmaster of the aircraft, while one of the Zarrar commandos started an IV into the arm of the Australian Reuters correspondent.

The normally dry and stoic Sam Driscoll hugged each member of his extraction team, then he rolled into the corner and fell asleep with a water bottle tucked to his chest.

Chavez leaned over into Jack’s ear to yell over the engine noise, “Looks like you had a pretty close shave back there.”

Jack followed Ding’s eyes to the canvas magazine rack on his chest. A jagged hole was torn through one of the pouches. He pulled out a metal and plastic P-90 mag, and found a bullet hole all the way through it. Fingering his way into the hole in his chest rig he fished out a twisted and sharp 7.62 round that had slammed into his ceramic breastplate.

In all the action, Jack had no idea he’d taken a hit right to the chest.

“Fuck me,” he said as he held the bullet up and looked at it.

Chavez just laughed and squeezed the younger man’s arm. “Not your time, ’mano.”

“I guess not,” Jack said, and he wanted to call his mom and dad, and he wanted to call Melanie. But he had to put both those communications on hold, because he suddenly felt the nausea return.