The shooter was so close that I heard him racking the bolt a split second before the shots started banging their way through the day. That little bit of warning saved my ass, because as soon as I heard it, I threw myself off the path and behind a heap of fallen rock. The bullets hammered a line along the ground where I’d been standing. I saw that much as I scurried like a lizard into the smallest crevice I could find. The impact points walked up the path a yard from my nose.
I realized that it was only a single shooter and started to breathe a sigh of relief.
Then I heard other guns open up from back the way I’d come.
I heard someone yell: “It’s more of them! Kill the unholy! Allahu akbar!”
We’d walked into a nice trap, but then I heard Top and Bunny open up with their M14s set on rock ’n’ roll and immediately the valley was filled with thunder. There were some yells amid the thunder. Screams of pain and curses in Pashto.
I had my own worries.
I rolled sideways and peered around the corner of the rock and saw a man firing an AK-47. He stood with one foot braced on the boulder he must have been hiding behind. His clothes were streaked with blood and dirt, and his eyes were completely wild. His turban was in disarray and the ends of it flapped in the hot wind. He burned through an entire magazine, shooting the whole landscape around me, and all the time he screeched prayers to Allah. Calling me a demon. Begging for protection from Allah.
The bullets ricocheted all over the damn place. One plucked at my sleeve, which made me yank my arm in tighter and utter another in a long string of promises to Jesus I knew I’d later renege on. I meant them right then, though.
When he stopped to reload, I leaned out with my Beretta in both hands and put three rounds into his chest. He fell back and the AK dropped onto its stock, stood for a moment, and then fell over with a clatter.
Dangerous guy, but a stupid guy.
Now a dead guy.
I got to my feet and ran in a low, fast crouch across the path and knelt by the man I’d killed—and then did a double take as I looked at him. He was a mess. When I’d seen the bloodstains on his clothes, I’d thought that it was somebody else’s blood. Survivors get like that after a battle, and we had to presume that these guys were the ones who ambushed Rattlesnake Team. But this guy’s clothes were torn, and when I poked around I could see long lacerations—days old—that were festering with pus and crawling with maggots. This guy was more than half dead before I shot him. He had to have been in agony and probably out of his mind with fever.
The wounds were a mix. Long slashes in parallel lines that looked like they might have been done by a rake. Or a set of claws. A big hunting cat might leave marks like that. But there were also burns in weird segmented sections around his face and throat.
I had no idea what could have caused marks like that.
The gunfire abruptly stopped.
I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Echo Team. Give me a sitrep.”
“All clear, boss,” said Bunny. “Three up, three down.”
He was right. As I rounded a shoulder of the mountain, I saw Bunny standing over three bodies while Top knelt between two of them. He used the tip of a knife to lift sections of torn, bloodstained clothing, then glanced up at me as I approached.
“Looks like Rattlesnake Team had some fun with these jokers before we got here,” said Bunny, nodding to the bodies, which were all as torn as that of the man I’d killed.
Top nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.
“My guy, too. Cuts and burns.”
None of us said what all of us were thinking. Those marks might have been the result of some prolonged torture. I knew Finn pretty well, and his boys. They were rough and they were hardasses, but I was sure I’d have pegged them as guys who couldn’t do this.
On the other hand, I’d been wrong before.
I tapped my earbud for the command channel. “Cowboy to Bug.”
It took a few seconds before I got anything but static.
Then, “Cowboy? Jeez, man, what happened?”
“What do you mean what happened? We just got ambushed by four Taliban shooters. I thought you said this valley was empty.”
“I think we have a satellite malfunction. And sat phone is acting funky, too. NASA tells us it’s sunspots.”
“Fuck NASA.”
“Thermals tell me no one but Echo, then a whole bunch—thirty or forty—then no one at all. It’s weird.”
“Go bang the thermals with a hammer then, goddamn it. We nearly got our dicks handed to us.”
“It’s in space, Cowboy,” he complained. “Only so much we can do. Shit, wait, the board just lit up again. Counting six—no, ten—jeez, fourteen signals coming to you from the west. Satellite’s only giving us grainy crap, but it looks like three vehicles. Jeez, Cowboy, you’ve got a Taliban team zeroing your twenty.” He read the map coordinates. “Four klicks out and coming fast.”
“Swell.”
“Hey!” he yelped, but it wasn’t at me. “Cowboy, be advised, RFID tracking chips for Cheech Wizard, Jazzman, and Bear have come back online. Intermittent but . . . no, the signals are strong. Four klicks to the southwest. Looks like they’re on an intercept course with the Taliban, all three.”
“What about Finn?”
But the line dissolved into static.
We looked at each other. Top had the coordinates up on his computer and he pointed the way. Straight down the valley we were in. There was a sluggish breeze coming from that direction, and as he listened, we thought we heard thunder. Way off in the distance.
We all knew it wasn’t thunder.
“Rattlesnake,” said Bunny.
And then we were running.