25

Khost Province
Afghanistan

RANDI RUSSELL FIRED a quick burst at the Afghan fleeing up the slope, but only managed to kick up a cloud of shattered rock three meters to his left. It would have been nice to get lucky, but the real purpose of wasting the ammo was to give her two teammates time to find cover.

She’d spent the last three months tracking the men who’d carried out an attack on a CIA outpost. Her normal zeal for this kind of work had been magnified by her guilt over being in Sarabat indulging Fred Klein’s curiosity instead of watching her colleagues’ backs. If she’d been where she was supposed to be, maybe she could have stopped it. Maybe her friends wouldn’t have died.

Five of the six men responsible were already in the ground. And the last was less than a football field away.

Behind her, Billy Grant slid on his hip and dropped into a rocky furrow just deep enough to make him disappear. Deuce had found similar cover and from her position all that was visible of him was the top of his helmet.

It wasn’t the normal government-issue headgear she was familiar with, though. This one was created by a retired SEAL who now made a living building custom racing bicycles. Molded to the owner’s head, it bristled with the ever-increasing array of gadgets that fed information to the Merges that had become nearly ubiquitous in active special forces. Apparently, he couldn’t churn them out fast enough for the ops guys, who were willing to trade the dismal protection offered by carbon fiber for the weight savings.

Deuce’s head didn’t move, but his rifle snaked around the side of the boulder he was behind. Randi used her scope to look downrange and watched the Afghan dive to the ground when a round barely missed him. There was no denying that it was an impressive feat. Not only had the shot been incredibly difficult, but Deuce had fired it without breaking cover.

While she would take talent, courage, and character over technology any day, when you combined all four, the results were hard to deny.

Grant hadn’t given himself over to the Merge quite as completely. He appeared over the lip of the ditch, sighting pointlessly over his rifle to take advantage of the fact that the target was briefly fixed. A moment later a chunk of the Afghan’s left calf was torn away.

His pained cry was clearly audible as he bolted, fumbling something in his hand before leaping awkwardly over the top of a boulder. Both Deuce and Grant were firing now and Randi barely registered another spectacular shot that penetrated the back of the man’s thigh right before he disappeared. Instead, she focused on the object he’d dropped as it rolled across the ground.

“Grenade!” she shouted, but neither man heard her over the sound of their weapons.

It exploded well before it reached them, but the force of the blast sent boulders careening down the slope in a cloud of reddish dust. Grant, maybe thirty meters east of her, was in the path of the worst of it. He leapt from the shallow groove but was almost immediately engulfed by the dust.

“Shit!” Randi said in a harsh whisper, trying to will him to reappear. Luck wasn’t on their side, though, and when the air cleared she saw the dazed man struggling to reach his rifle with a leg pinned beneath a rock that probably weighed the better part of half a ton.

A shot hit the ground ten meters in front of the trapped soldier and she swore again. With too many bullets in him to go farther, the Afghan had dug in and was going to keep fighting until he bled out.

The next round was closer—four meters short and three right. It wasn’t going to take long for him to zero in.

“Deuce—are you all right?” she said, touching her throat mike.

“Fine. But Billy’s pinned and my angle on this asshole is crap.”

“I need you to keep him busy for me. On my mark. One, two, three.”

She darted from cover as Deuce let loose a series of controlled bursts upslope. It had been a hastily conceived plan and worked even worse than she expected. The Afghan either didn’t care if he took another bullet or recognized the strength of his position. He’d been ready for her to try to get to her injured comrade and a round burned through the air just in front of her face.

There was no going back, though. She let her momentum carry her, charging toward the debris left by the grenade as a round impacted the butt of the rifle on her back, spun her around, and dropped her to the ground.

Deuce’s weapon had gone silent in an effort to conserve ammunition and the Afghan used the opportunity to squeeze off another round. Randi tensed, but realized she was no longer the target when the bullet impacted less than a meter short of Billy Grant’s right arm. He immediately abandoned his effort to reach his rifle and instead grabbed his blood-soaked thigh in a futile effort to free himself.

There was no question that the Afghan was going to hit him—if not with the next shot, then with the one after that. Randi was only ten meters from her trapped man, but that was ten meters too far in the present situation. And what would she do even if she could reach him? There was no way to free him that didn’t involve at least a shovel and maybe a winch.

The next round was even closer and Grant scooted toward the boulder trapping him, contorting his broken leg into a grotesque shape in an effort to get as close as possible.

“Randi!” she heard Deuce say over her earpiece. “The new toy. Can you use it?”

“It got hit when I was running and I’m not sure I can even lift my head without it getting blown off,” she said, wiggling out of her body armor and holding it up high enough for Grant to see. He looked like he was on the verge of passing out from the pain but managed a dazed nod.

She threw the heavy vest in his direction and it cartwheeled through the air, landing just behind him. He had barely pulled it in front of his chest when a bullet hit dead center, knocking him back with enough force to elicit an audible grunt. He was still alive, though. The multiple layers had absorbed the majority of the impact.

“Deuce!” Randi shouted. “Get me the hell out of here!”

Grant scooted toward the boulder again and tried to make himself as small as possible behind her vest, but there was still plenty of him exposed. And even if that weren’t true, the situation was quickly becoming a disastrous stalemate—a race to see who bled to death first.

“Randi,” she heard Deuce say in her earpiece. “I’m going to draw this guy’s fire. When I do, run.”

“Wait! I didn’t mean—”

He ignored her and sprinted from cover as the Afghan opened up on him. Randi bolted from her position with equal speed, running east before dropping to her stomach at the edge of the debris field.

Deuce made it to safety, but his effectiveness would be right around zero unless he could find a way to get to a more strategic piece of ground. She, on the other hand, was finally in a position to assess their situation. The Afghan was about seventy-five meters to the north, lying behind two boulders tipped against each other. The gap between them was low and just large enough to get his rifle through, making him impervious to gunfire from below, but affording him only a narrow field of vision.

She saw a flash and Grant took another hit, rocking backward with the force of the round against her body armor. For a moment, she didn’t think he was going to be able to right himself, but he threw a hand back and managed to stabilize before flashing her a courageous grin. His teeth were tinted pink with blood.

There was no way she was going to let him die. She’d lost too many friends already.

Randi dropped her M16 and pulled what Deuce called “the new toy” off her back. There was a fist-sized chunk blown off the butt and she couldn’t help wondering what Heckler & Koch was going to charge to fix it. The combination of the XM25’s thirty-five-thousand-dollar price tag and thirteen-pound weight had made her consider leaving it at home, but Deuce convince her otherwise. It seemed that his sixth sense for combat had come through again.

Randi was chambering the twenty-five-millimeter digital round when another shot sounded, quickly followed by the now-familiar thud of an impact against Kevlar.

“I think that one cracked a rib,” Grant said just loud enough for her to hear. “I would really appreciate it if you’d kill that guy.”

“Working on it.”

The Afghan didn’t have an angle on her so she rose up and sighted through a scope that she prayed hadn’t been knocked out of alignment when the butt had been hit.

A laser judged the distance to the boulders the man was hiding behind at seventy-nine meters. Based on the few inches of barrel she could see protruding from the gap, it seemed likely that the rocks were a little less than a meter thick and that he was lying straight out behind them.

She clicked a button near the trigger and added one meter to the range, which would be right around his shoulder blades. Then there was nothing to do but see if the thing was worth the money the CIA had paid for it.

She aimed just over the top of the boulders and squeezed the trigger, feeling the painful jolt of the broken butt against her shoulder. Inside the bullet, a computer calculated the distance it traveled by counting rotations and, at exactly eighty meters, it exploded, sending deadly shrapnel down to earth.

Randi remained motionless, watching the barrel of the gun between the rocks waver and finally tip to the ground.

“Did it work?” Deuce said over her earpiece.

She panned the scope right and saw the telltale pockmarks in the dirt at the correct range, then scanned left and saw more. “Looks good,” she said quietly. “But I can’t guarantee anything.”

“Only one way to find out,” Deuce responded and then ran back out into the open, sprinting to his previous position. The Afghan’s rifle remained motionless.

“Can you cover me from there, Deuce?”

“No way I can hit him from this position, but I should be able to kick up enough dust to throw off his aim.”

“Do it.”

She dropped the XM25 and drew her sidearm, running up the slope as Deuce fired repeatedly at the ground in front of the gap the man was aiming through.

She slowed when she got within ten meters, watching her footing and trying to remain silent as she closed on the Afghan’s position. At five meters, Deuce stopped firing, concerned about catching her with a ricochet. She held her pistol in front of her, listening to the sudden silence as she edged around the boulders the Afghan was using for cover.

In the end, her weapon wasn’t necessary. He lay motionless with his finger still curled around the trigger and his back riddled with the same tiny holes as the ground around him.