Killing Time

11

Afghanistan, eight years ago

“The boys are taking their sweet time.”

Taggart was right. And Mike was worried. The team should have been back by now.

He squinted into the night. He’d flown the mission totally dark. No locator or position lights, no cabin lights, used only his night-vision technology and his instruments to guide him down to the landing zone. They were still dark, though the bird was powered up and ready to lift off at a moment’s notice.

Behind the controls of the Black Hawk that he’d set down on the unforgiving Afghan terrain with only the night and a jagged wall of rock for concealment, Mike glanced over his shoulder past his copilot, Sonny Webber, to his gunner, Bobby “Boom Boom” Taggart. The Special Forces sergeant had drawn bird-protection duty with him, Webber, and Jamie “Hondo” Cooper, while the rest of the team executed their recon mission—and Taggart wasn’t happy about it.

Restless behind the Black Hawk’s multibarrel M134 machine gun, Taggart wove a jack of spades in and out between his fingers, using the worn playing card as a diversion from the uncertainty and the wait.

Mike understood why the tough-as-nails Bronx native was getting twitchy. Mike and Webber were used to waiting; pilots always stayed with the bird. But regardless of how many missions they had under their belts, Taggart and Cooper would rather be crawling around on their bellies, planted on a ridge with night-vision binoculars, checking for Mr. Taliban, and covering their team’s six. Anything beat staying here in the cramped confines of the idling bird, playing sit and wait for the rest of the team to return.

Salinas, Smith, Wojohowitz, Brimmer, Johnson, and Crenshaw had left over twenty minutes ago to hike less than half a kilometer to conduct a quick sneak-and-peek on a small village. They were following up on a report of Taliban fighters taking over the village and forcing the inhabitants to shelter them.

No engagement with the enemy; observation only. In. Out. Twenty minutes on the ground, tops. Report back to Command Central when they returned.

If this had been a Special Forces team, a Night Hawk pilot would have dropped them in. But this wasn’t an ordinary team. This was the One-Eyed Jacks—Uncle Sam’s grand experiment incorporating special operations personnel from the Navy, Army, and Marines.

It was such a standard-fare mission that Com Cent had dubbed it Operation Slam Dunk. Recon only. Easy Peasy.

Mike checked his watch—twenty-five minutes and counting—and stalled a trickle of concern. Even with full packs and dogging it, they should have been back by now. It was taking too long. But he was used to waiting. Very seldom did he ever leave the bird. His job was to fly the team in, protect the Black Hawk until they returned, then fly them back out. He was damn good at it, regardless of whether they were taking fire on either end of the op. Taggart and Cooper, however, were used to action. Neither liked getting bird protection on the rotation.

“You’re going to wear that thing out, Boom Boom,” Webber, a quiet staff sergeant from Arizona, said as Taggart continued to work the playing card through his fingers.

The card was barely in one piece. Taggart had used clear tape on it several times, repairing a cut from a KA-Bar that had almost sliced it in half.

“I’m going nuts here.” Taggart shifted behind the big gun.

The munitions and explosive expert was an adrenaline junky. And he’d seen too much action. On his last leave home, he’d had a tattoo inked on the inside of his right forearm: a pair of combat boots supporting a rifle on which a combat helmet hung. Beneath the image were the letters RIP, in tribute to his brothers in arms who’d been killed in action.

“You’re already nuts.”

This from Cooper, whose jack of hearts—every One-Eyed Jacks team member had a card—was worn and burned around the edges.

While Taggart was proud of his mixed German and French heritage, Cooper liked to say that his Caucasian, African-American, and Latino blood beat them all in the mongrel department. The communications expert kept in shape doing push-ups with his toes wedged to a wall and wouldn’t think of marring his skin with a tat.

Cooper was a serious Marine but quick with a smile. Unlike Mike, who’d grown up herding cattle on a ranch in Colorado, and Taggart, who’d mixed it up on the streets in the Bronx, or Webber, the son of elementary school teachers, Cooper had grown up in luxury—compliments of his Colombian-born model mother and his father’s lucrative export business. Cooper had been a model himself and an actor, but had enlisted in the Marines when a friend had been KIA in Iraq.

Mike had just decided he might have to send Cooper and Taggart to investigate, when his headset crackled.

“Crenshaw to Primetime, do you read me? Over?”

Relieved to finally hear from the big Minnesotan who towered over most of the guys by a good head, Mike answered quickly. “Read you five by five, Crenshaw. Not like you to miss chow. How ’bout a sit rep? Over.”

“Ran into a buzz saw.” The details Crenshaw proceeded to give him on what they’d found made Mike’s gut tighten.

The team had not only spotted Taliban fighters in the village, they’d witnessed a brutal execution of a young woman. And it wasn’t their first kill. Bodies were stacked up like firewood in the town center that was patrolled by Taliban fighters. It appeared the team had stumbled onto a systematic slaughter that was still in progress.

“Seek permission to engage. Over.”

Mike totally got it. Crenshaw and the team wanted to take the Taliban fighters out before they killed any more civilians. But permission wasn’t his to give—their orders were recon only. He had to contact Command Central at the Forward Operating Base.

“Hold for further. Over.”

“What’s going on?” Webber asked from the copilot seat.

The three men had heard only Mike’s side of his conversation with Crenshaw but they all sensed the news wasn’t good.

Mike changed radio frequency and immediately tried to raise the FOB. As soon as he made contact he recounted the situation on the ground, then waited for the radio operator to relay the intel to the commander. He didn’t have to see the other men’s faces in the dark to know they were chomping at the bit to engage. They’d heard his side of the radio commo loud and clear.

Mike listened, his body tense as he received his orders.

“Roger that,” he replied. “Over and out.”

“We going in?”

Mouth tight, Mike answered Taggart with a single shake of his head. “They’re sending air support. We’re to call the chicks back to the roost and return to base.”

Behind him, Cooper swore. “It’ll be sixty minutes before they get gunships up here.”

No one knew that better than Mike. He knew how hard he could push the Black Hawk in this climate and terrain. Crews could gear up in a matter of minutes and aircraft was always at the ready. The distance was the problem.

And air support with civilians in the area, being executed? JDAM smart bombs were wickedly accurate, but not accurate enough to take out a bad guy with civilians within ten or twenty yards.

Puzzled by his commander’s call, but keeping his opinion to himself, he changed frequency again and tried to raise Crenshaw and call them back to the bird.

“He’s not answering,” Mike muttered aloud after several attempts to contact the team leader.

Silence was always bad news.

After several more unsuccessful attempts, he ripped off his headset. He and Webber couldn’t leave the bird, but Taggart and Cooper could.

“Go,” he told them, knowing he couldn’t stop them if he wanted to. Both had already locked and loaded their M-4s. “Keep commo open.”

He watched from inside the cockpit as the two men in full camo gear sprinted in the direction the team had taken, then disappeared from sight in the inky black night. Webber climbed behind the mini, just in case.

Long minutes passed. Mike repeatedly checked his watch. Swore. Waited. Watched. Then caught his breath when the two men emerged out of the dark fifteen minutes later.

“The sonofabitches have them. All of them.” Taggart’s voice was thick with anger and alarm.

“What are we up against?” Mike already assumed that since they’d come back alone, they were looking at big numbers of Taliban fighters. Too big for two men to engage.

He swallowed hard when they told him.

“We can’t leave them there.” Cooper’s face was set hard with determination. “They’ve got them on their knees in the middle of the village square, rifles pointed at their heads.”

Mike told himself that American hostages made good bargaining chips; they’d be foolish to shoot them. On the other hand, dead Americans also added fuel to the radical zealots’ fires.

There was no telling what they would do to them.

He got on the radio again. “I repeat,” he said, attempting to contain his anger after relaying the gravity of the situation and being told to stand down until the base commander could be contacted. “Situation critical. Request permission to engage. Over.”

When the orders finally came down, he was sure he’d heard wrong. They were to return to the FOB. “Say again. Over.”

The radio operator repeated the base commander’s original declaration to return to base, assuring him that gunships were on the way.

Gunships that were still a good thirty minutes from target.

Mike made a decision. “I can’t read you. You’re breaking up. Over.”

Then he cut radio power.

“Shit. You lose them?” Taggart looked anxious.

Mike shook his head. “They called us off.”

Cooper’s face said it all. “That’s bullshit.”

Taggart looked ready to spit nails. “We are not leaving them.”

“You’re right. We aren’t.” Mike looked at Webber.

When the copilot nodded in agreement with his decision to disobey orders, Mike spun up the main rotor.

“Don’t be shy on that mini.” He hitched his chin toward Taggart, who’d climbed back into position behind the gun.

The big turbine engine whined as he glanced over his shoulder at Cooper, yelling to be heard above the roar. “Fire at anything with a turban and a rifle.” He lifted off, hoping to hell they got there in time.

Mike’s stomach dropped as he flew over a final ridge then dove close to the ground, his NVGs casting the confusing and grisly tableau in ghostly green light.

All he saw were bodies. Piles of them. Heartsick, he could make out Crenshaw’s big prostrate form lying facedown in the dirt next to the bodies of several villagers.

“Fuckers!” Taggart roared and leaned on the mini, scattering the Taliban fighters. The cartridge belt pumped out two thousand to six thousand rounds per minute as Taggart strafed the ground.

Mike banked the Black Hawk into a tight turn and looped around, zeroing back in on the village center, sickened and riveted by the carnage. So riveted he didn’t see the ball of fire heading toward them until a split second before Hondo yelled, “RPG! RPG! Break right!”

“Brace!” he yelled—but it was too late.

The bird jolted, lurched sideways, plummeted twenty feet, then spun a hard three-sixty. Fire surrounded the cockpit, filling it with smoke. Coughing and struggling to see, Mike fought the collective, the cyclic, trying to steady the bird. But when he lost control of the rudder pedals, he knew they were going down.

Not like this. Jesus God, not like this. Not with his team already dead on the ground, and the possibility of innocents in the path of the out-of-control Black Hawk.

Behind him, Taggart roared like a wild dog and clutched his leg; Cooper yelled out a prayer. Mike heard it all on a peripheral level as he fought to right the chopper. The crippled bird spun wildly, dipping and dodging, and finally succumbed to gravity. They dropped like a meteor and the earth roared up to meet them.

The noise was deafening. The stench of hydraulics and burning fuel choked him. And the pain. Holy God, the pain paralyzed him as the rotors sheered through adobe walls and tile roofs, hurling chunks of debris and fog-thick dust while the engine screamed until, with an agonizing jolt, the chopper jerked to a stop.

The impact stole his breath.

And then all was suddenly still.

All but the ping of the hot motor and the groan of the men in the bird with him. Except Webber. Webber was silent. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth; his head dropped to his chest at an unnatural angle.

Mike reached over, felt for a pulse in his carotid. Nothing.

God, oh, God. Webber was dead. Like they’d all be dead if they didn’t get out of the burning bird. Flames licked at his feet, hot and hungry and mean.

Had to get out.

Had to ignore the pain that seared through his shoulder like an axe blade.

He tasted blood. Choked on smoke and fumes and pain but managed to unbuckle his seat belt with his uninjured arm.

Taggart and Cooper were alive. He could hear them moaning. He had to get them out before they went up in the flames that rolled across the windshield.

He stopped thinking and just moved. Somehow, he freed Taggart.

“My leg. I… I think it’s broken,” Taggart gritted through clenched teeth, strangling a scream as Mike dragged him out of the wreckage and away from the fire. Then he went back for Cooper. The Marine was barely conscious when Mike reached him. Blood poured from a gaping wound near his hairline and he was nonresponsive. Gritting through the pain, Mike grabbed Cooper’s arm, steered him toward the hole where the cockpit door had been, yelled at him to stay awake, to move. They had to get away from what was left of the Black Hawk before the fire shooting out the leaking fuel tank blew the bird sky high.

Step by agonizing step they reached Taggart, who had managed to stand, balancing unsteadily on his good leg.

“You’re burned.” Taggart looked at Mike through a smoke-blackened face, his eyes unfocused, like he didn’t understand what was happening.

Mike looked down at his own leg. His flight suit had protected him from the worst of the fire, but part of it had melted into his thigh when he’d crawled back inside for Cooper.

“Wait here,” he shouted above the roar of the burning Black Hawk, and with Cooper’s arm slung over his shoulder, walked him as far away as fast as he could. Then he went back for Taggart.

They had to take cover. Hard to tell how many Taliban were on the ground and had survived the aftermath of the crash. All they had were their pistols—not much firepower against AK-47s. Pain screamed through his shoulder like a vicious bitch as Mike managed to get the two men to an irrigation ditch that ran parallel with the village center. He was about to dump Cooper into the ditch when the Black Hawk exploded.

The blowback caught them in a blast of blazing hot air, lifted them off the ground, and dumped them into the shallow ditch water.

Mike landed coughing, spitting, fighting to right himself.

Cooper was totally unconscious now. Taggart was barely with the program. Swearing, sweating, Mike helped them up toward the lip of the ditch, and partially out of the water.

There he clung, watching as a huge fireball blasted into the night and everything within a tenth of a mile of the village center shot up in flames.

What the hell?

The Black Hawk alone couldn’t have made that big of an explosion.

“It’s an ammo dump,” he muttered and ducked for cover as the entire village lit up to the sound of screams and thousands of rounds of ammo cooking off.

The adrenaline that fueled him let up long before the cache of munitions shot itself out. Pain screamed through his leg and shoulder as he twisted around and searched the site of the crash.

Utter devastation. His men were down there. The sickening smell of burned flesh and gunpowder and an acid smell he didn’t recognize mixed with the billowing jet fuel smoke that blackened the already dark night air. The taste of blood and dirt and despair filled his senses.

That’s when he heard the distant whoop, whoop, whoop of a chopper.

Taggart roused for a moment, swore through his pain. “Flare. Send up a flare.”

Mike reached into the pocket of his flight suit for a flare and was about to crawl out of the ditch and light it, when a sixth sense warned him something wasn’t right.

He shielded his eyes and squinted up at the night sky. Toward the rapidly approaching chopper, not trusting what his eyes were telling his brain.

The bird wasn’t theirs.

How could that be?

The flames from the fire illuminated a chopper covered in camouflage paint as it sat down a safe distance away from the scene of the crash. It was a Russian-made Mi-8 twin-turbine transport that had been converted to double as a gunship.

He stared, still disbelieving even as he knew exactly what he was seeing. What the hell was a Russian transpo chopper doing out here? Tonight?

The Afghan army had a few Mi-8s, but Mike knew every fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft between here and Kandahar, and there weren’t supposed to be any in this area of operations. Even if for some unknown reason there were, the Afghan army wouldn’t be skulking around in the dark on the wrong side of a mission gone sideways.

Keeping his head low as the sliding door on the starboard side of the fuselage opened, Mike peeked above the rim of the ditch, wishing for the NVGs he’d lost somewhere after the crash. Making do with the light from the fires, he watched the action as four men jumped to the ground.

All four carried Russian assault rifles. Two were bearded and dressed in Shalwar kameez, traditional loose trousers and long tunics typical of the region. Their faces were hidden behind balaclavas. The other two wore western camouflage fatigues. And they weren’t Afghani, they were Caucasian. No mistaking that fact. And they were clearly in charge.

Hoping like hell they weren’t spotted, he listened in troubled silence. He couldn’t make out what they were saying above the whine of the chopper’s turbine engine, but he could tell they were speaking Pashto to the Afghanis who were shouting toward the village.

A figure emerged from the far side of the village square. One of the Taliban fighters. He sprinted for the chopper and jumped inside. Several more trotted toward the bird, AKs in hand, and at least a dozen men boarded the bird before the original four climbed back inside.

One of the guys in camo stood surveying the scene for several long moments, then crouched below the slowly winding rotor blades, making certain there were no survivors.

Before he turned and stepped up into the chopper, Mike got a good look at his face. It was a face he would not soon forget. He made Mike think of a ferret. Eyes deep-set under bushy black brows. Narrow jaw. Thin, sinister lips. Sunken cheeks below prominent cheekbones.

Apparently satisfied with the slaughter, he finally ducked inside the chopper and it lifted off, heading north.

What the fuck?

Cooper moaned, still unconscious, and Mike turned back to see what he could do for him. He checked Cooper’s vitals—not good—and willed a Black Hawk to set down soon. With shaking, smoke-blackened hands, he fished a bag of quick clot from a pocket, dumped it on Cooper’s wound, then wrapped a pressure bandage around his head. Then he got to work immobilizing Taggart’s leg.

Ten minutes later, he breathed a sigh of relief at the unmistakable sound of a Black Hawk scooting in fast from the south.

This time he set off the flare.

Only then did he let himself close his eyes and knuckle under to his own pain.