Pressing his body against the rocks, Howard took a deep breath.
For a half hour, he had been frantically climbing up the mountain, followed closely by Williams and several Afghan commandos. It was a mad dash over unforgiving terrain to try to reach Walton. What Ford had told him was disturbing. The team was badly shot up. Just looking at Ford, he could tell that.
Howard began thinking about his friends. How they were stuck on the ledge, bleeding and desperately fighting for their lives. Walton needed help getting the wounded off the mountain. He could hear Ford’s words in his head as he climbed. That was his motivation. Nothing was going to stop him. But just as he was about to scale the last switchback to reach the captain, Williams grabbed him.
“What are you doing?” Howard said.
“You can’t go up that way,” Williams said.
Howard pulled away. “I have no choice.”
Williams hesitated. He didn’t want to say the words he had been thinking. But finally he did. Howard needed to know the truth. “Everybody who has gone up that way has been shot.”
It stopped Howard in his tracks. “Okay. Good point.”
Now they had to find another way—and quickly. Howard had his Carl Gustav team and AJ in tow. But now rounds started cracking near them. They ricocheted off the wall and impacted the dirt near their feet.
Howard still didn’t have a radio, and Williams was unable to reach Walton on his despite being less than fifty feet away. They had no idea if anyone was alive on the ledge, which was just above them. It was difficult to hear anything over the belching gunfire and the bombs exploding in the villages. It was frustrating. All they had to do was reach up, grab the ledge, pull themselves up, and they would be there. They were that close. But with the firefight, they might as well have been back in Jalalabad. It’s hard to maneuver when you’re inches away from death.
“We’re going to wait two minutes, and if we can’t get in touch with Kyle, we’re going to go over there,” Williams said.
Williams was always putting time lines on things.
“Okay. Good plan,” Howard said.
But they never followed the time line. Less than two minutes later, Howard and Williams came up with another plan. Grabbing AJ by the shoulders, Howard explained to him what they wanted to do.
“Have all of the commandos step out and those two guys are going to shoot that way,” he said, pointing toward the closed portion of the valley. “Those two are going to shoot that way. And they are going to cover us and we’re going to climb around the rock face over to where Kyle is at.”
Slinging their weapons, Howard and Williams prepared to move.
“One. Two. Three. Go!”
The commandos were supposed to start shooting, but all of them hugged the rocks. Finally, one of the commandos leaned out and fired off a short burst. His comrades soon followed, but Howard and Williams were long gone. They were already moving up the mountain in a different direction. They were trying to find a back way to Walton’s position—a path that didn’t expose them to deadly gunfire—when Williams signaled to Howard that he’d discovered one. They found a few good hand- and foot-holds and made it to an outcropping large enough to stand on and peek over the ledge directly behind Walton’s position.
Williams poked his head over the ledge. Both Walton and Rhyner were huddled below a sloping rock ledge. Rhyner was lying there motionless.
“What’s up? Are you guys okay?” Williams said.
Walton finally heard them and turned. His satellite radio had lost its secure link to Bagram and Jalalabad.
As Howard crawled past to start providing cover fire, Walton tossed the radio to Williams.
“Matt, the radio is fucked.”
Breaking open the backpack, Williams quickly reloaded the COMSEC, the codes that allowed the radio to make a secure link to the Army’s satellite communications network.
Bullets skipped off the rocks, making it nearly impossible for them to stand up or move forward. Howard was shocked at the conditions up here. The space on the ledge where the team was pinned down was small—no bigger than a typical living room. Yet they were all squeezed in there. It was claustrophobic.
“How many guys do you got?” Walton said, relieved to finally have some fresh bodies.
“We have like five or six commandos,” Williams said, scrambling to where Walton was concealed.
“Um, no, we don’t,” Howard said.
“What?” Williams said, looking back at the ledge. Only AJ was standing there.