The ledge was littered with equipment.
Howard was the last American on the mountain and quickly started to toss the gear over the side.
A squad automatic weapon.
CK’s body armor and rifle.
Handfuls of M203 grenade rounds.
Even his own assault backpack.
The gear landed in the wadi below with a thud, much to the chagrin of the wounded soldiers. But there was no way Howard could carry it all down, and he didn’t want to leave it for the insurgents.
With the ledge clean, he began his descent with another commando who had stayed behind. Before that, Howard had handed the SR-25 to commandos scaling down the mountain. The rifle passed from commando to commando all the way to the wadi. Howard didn’t want to mess it up while he climbed down.
Armed only with a pistol, he quickly ran into trouble. He knew the route was steep, but he had trouble keeping his footing. At one point, he lost his grip in the dirt and the soil gave way. Grasping for anything, he latched onto a root that stuck out of the mountain, the same one that had saved Walton and Rhyner. It looked like something Wile E. Coyote would use to steady himself.
When Howard was about halfway down, Rhyner, unknown to Howard, had called in a two-thousand-pound bomb strike. Howard could hear the bomb whistling in and then his world went black.
The bomb hit the building directly above him—the one that he had been trying to hit with the Carl G. The structure was less than sixty feet away, but because it was up and over the ledge, there wasn’t a direct line to Howard. The angle of the cliff protected him from the pressure, but not from the debris, dust, and smoke that covered the cliff face. The entire mountain shook. Pressed as he was against the cliff, huge boulders bounced over him.
He couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be if, after everything he had been through this day, he died because of an American bomb—not an insurgent’s bullet.
Howard finally made it to the bottom. After he checked on the conditions of the wounded soldiers, he searched for his sniper rifle. But when he found it, he noticed that the LCD screen was cracked. The range finder was broken, but he wasn’t too upset. He’d stolen it, and the jerry-rigged device had served its purpose.