Bullets whined off the stone walls, kicking up small clouds of dust.
Gil had been firing for less than thirty seconds. Within another thirty, all of his targets would be down. He fired through the fender of the lead truck to send a man sprawling. Another reached out to grab the downed man’s wrist to pull him to safety. Gil blew his arm off at the elbow. The remaining two men began a hasty retreat toward the bridge, keeping low as they scurried behind the vehicles. Gil shot one through the body of the second SUV, catching him in the head by pure luck. This frightened the last man into making a desperate break cross-country.
“Don’t bother to run, partner. You’ll die tired.” Gil shot him dead center between the shoulder blades, severing the spine, and the man pitched forward onto his face.
There was no need to confirm that Al-Nazari was dead — Gil had seen his head explode — but there might be valuable intelligence inside the vehicles.
“Typhoon main, this is Typhoon actual. Do you copy my traffic?”
“Roger, actual.”
“Main, be advised all targets are down. Repeat. All targets are down. Primary target is confirmed KIA. Over.”
“Roger that, actual.”
“Stand by, main. Moving into the target area to sweep for intelligence. Over.”
“Roger, actual. Main standing by.”
Gil emerged cautiously from the hide and moved forward with the Dragunov at his shoulder, ready to fire. He covered the two hundred yards at a trot, then pulled up short to move carefully around the front of the lead vehicle. The man with the missing arm was sitting up against the wheel hub, cradling the head of his dying compatriot in his lap. Both were slowly bleeding to death, their eyes closed in peaceful prayer.
Gil drew the .45, hating like hell the idea of shooting someone in the midst of a prayer, but he realized they would probably continue to pray until they finally blacked out from loss of blood. He shot them each in the head.
As the echo of the second shot faded, he heard a very disturbing sound from the far side of the vehicle — the beep of a cellular phone. He darted around the back end of the lead truck to find the woman was still alive behind the passenger door of the second, a bullet hole through her shoulder blade. Even with Al-Nazari’s blood and brain matter spattered all over her, she was a very striking woman. She was obviously in tremendous pain and just as obviously very pregnant.
For a fleeting moment, Gil felt sick to his stomach. “How far along?” he asked, without even considering whether or not she would understand.
“Eight months,” she gasped in good English. “There will be a place for you in hell if… if my baby dies.”
“You might be right,” he muttered, squatting to take the phone from her hand. “Who did you call?”
“My father. He and his men are coming for me. Your only chance is to leave me alive… run for your life and pray I can talk him out of chasing you.”
Gil had only seconds to choose his course of action. As far as his orders went, they were very clear: shoot the woman, evade capture until nightfall, and get on the fucking helo. But he’d been suckered, and he knew it. Lerher had known the Sherkat woman was pregnant, known it would be a problem for Gil, and so had kept the detail to himself. This betrayal of confidence went well beyond the implicit obsceneness of assassinating a pregnant woman. Had she cleared the car door before Gil could shoot her, he would have seen her belly, and he would have hesitated to fire. He would have hesitated because he would have seen something in his scope that he wasn’t expecting to see, and hesitation was every bit as deadly to a sniper as impatience or overeagerness. Lerher knew this, and it was his responsibility to provide his operators with all relevant, available — pertinent information concerning their targets.
Gil’s hotheadedness made the call for him. He was on his own time now, so fuck Lerher. Let him shoot the woman if he had the balls.
He slipped his arms beneath her to pick her up. “You’re coming with me.”
“No!” She struggled out of his arms, and he rocked back on his haunches to look at her.
“Look, lady. Either I take you with me—try to take you with me — or I kill you. Because I can’t leave a living witness to say I was here. Understand?”
She stared into his eyes, realizing it made sense to assume the Iranian government would not suspect America’s involvement in this. Even she had believed they’d been attacked by bandits until Gil had stepped around the door, as did her father and his men who were barreling toward them at this very moment.
Gil’s radio came to life. “Typhoon, be advised… electronic surveillance reports that a cellular call has been made by your female target. Repeat. Your female target is alive and in contact with enemy forces headed to your exact location. ETA — forty minutes. Do you copy? Over.”
“Roger that, main. I copy. Target has been neutralized. Requesting immediate extraction. Over.”
“Typhoon, are you declaring an emergency? Over?”
Gil knew that an emergency declaration was the only way to get clearance for the Night Stalkers to extract him during daylight. He had no right to endanger the flight crews just because he had decided to enter into a pissing contest with Agent Lerher.
“Typhoon, are you declaring an emergency? Over?”
Gil looked up at the gray sky, the ceiling still too low and thick for either satellite or drone observation. “Negative, main. Negative. I am not declaring an emergency at this time. Proceeding with mission as planned. Over.”
“Roger, actual.”
Under normal circumstances, a forty-minute head start would have been plenty of time to evade an enemy that had no idea who they were looking for. However, escaping and evading with a wounded, very pregnant woman was a horse of a much different color. There were no training ops for such a mission. He would have to improvise.
“Can you walk?”
“Not to the Afghan border!” she snapped. “You shot me, remember!”
He couldn’t help chuckling. “And I’m fixin’ to shoot ya again.”
CHAPTER 18
Two representatives from the US State Department, code-named Tom and Jerry, had been ordered to deliver twenty-six million dollars’ worth of Afghan currency, called afghanis, to the presidential palace. There they would meet briefly with President Karzai’s appointed intermediary, the appropriate agent tasked with delivering the ransom payment to Sandra Brux’s Taliban captors. The president himself was not in the palace that day. He was in Abbottabad, Pakistan, ostensibly to discuss plans for a proposed trans-Afghan natural gas pipeline that would extend all the way from Iran to India.
Officially, Tom and Jerry were diplomats from the US Embassy in Kabul, but in reality, they were two well-armed members of the US Army’s Delta Force, acting under the direction of SOG. They were dressed in khaki pants and black leather boots, ball caps, and matching olive drab North Face jackets, under which they each carried an HK-MP7, a 4.6 mm submachine gun that fired 940 rounds per minute.
After delivering the money to the intermediary, they would wait for him outside, then covertly follow him and his two-man team to the delivery point. Their orders were clear: First, to ensure the cash was not hijacked en route. Second, if Warrant Officer Brux was at the exchange — which was not expected — they were to wait for her to be safely delivered into the hands of the intermediary, and then terminate — with extreme prejudice — all Taliban/HIK members at the scene before resecuring the twenty-six million dollars’ worth of afghanis.