“How bad is it?” Fischer said from behind.
Speed jerked his head around. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I ain’t leaving your ass.”
They waited until the rest of the column reached the bottom of the stairs, then Speed yanked a grenade from Fischer’s harness and hurled it down the alley toward the corner. They were a quarter of the way down when it detonated four seconds later. At the bottom, they found the rest of the team formed up around the corner in a defensive half circle where they waited for the corpsman to treat a severely wounded SEAL named Blane.
Naeem was belly-down in the dirt beneath the knee of a SEAL everyone called the Conman. Conman was the smallest guy on the team, not much over 5'6" at 145 pounds. He was a true gunfighter, a gambler with a killer’s disposition. He had the barrel of his MK 23 screwed tightly into Naeem’s ear, at the same time gripping his M4 in the opposite hand, ready to throw down again at any second. He gave Speed a shrug, as if to say, “Just another day at the office.”
Forogh got his bearings, pointing toward a hut with a rusted blue rain barrel in front. “There’s the rain barrel,” he said, remembering the guide’s directions. “When Doc’s finished, we need to move east through that hut over there.”
“Christ, no matter which way we go, it’s gonna be ambush fucking central.” Crosswhite looked on as the Latino corpsman treated the wounded Blane. He was bleeding profusely from the thigh, the femoral artery severed.
“How’s he doing, Doc?”
Doc shook his head, hurriedly ripping the plastic wrapper from a scalpel. “I gotta cut down to the artery and clamp it off before he bleeds out.” He ordered a SEAL named Jackson to sit on Blane’s chest. “This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker, Blane, but this ain’t fuckin’ Mogadishu — you ain’t fuckin’ dyin’ on me!”
As Doc began to cut down through Blane’s thigh muscle, more firing broke out from the huts across the clearing. The SEALs poured fire into the huts and the firing stopped.
Blane growled and gnashed his teeth like a rabid animal, squeezing Jackson’s hands in his own and biting down on the folded leather glove that Doc had jammed between his teeth. He bit down so hard that he thought his teeth were going to crack.
“Fuck!” Jackson said, feeling Blane’s grip beginning to overpower his own. “You gotta do that raw, Doc? Give this motherfucker some morphine.”
Doc desperately wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “How the fuck’s he gonna fight all doped up? Keep your leg still, Blane!”
More firing broke out from the far end of the alley to the west of where they were formed up. Crosswhite fired an HE round from his M203 and blew the hut apart. He ejected the spent casing and briefly met Trigg’s gaze.
Trigg was bleeding from a neck wound, but it wasn’t too serious. “We can’t absorb much more of this, Captain. You ready to call in Bank Heist Two?”
Crosswhite kept his eyes on the hut he had just blown to smithereens, shaking his head. “There’s nowhere for them to land in here. The helos would have to hover overhead and lower the lines. Any jackass with an RPG could blow them out of the sky, so we have to make it to the EZ — there’s no other choice.”
“Yes, there is. The helos could—”
“I’m not wiping out a village,” Crosswhite said. “If we’d found Sandra, that would be one thing, but we didn’t, so we have to tough this out.”
“Found it!” Doc exclaimed. “Fuckin’ A!” He took the artery clamp from his lapel and clamped off the artery deep in Blane’s thigh. Then he took a compress and pressed it down hard against the wound, wrapping it tightly around with green duct tape so that Blane would be able to walk, and hopefully fight, without shaking the clamp loose.
Jackson got off of Blane’s chest, and Blane sat up sweating, his face pale, eyes glassing over. Doc took a stainless steel flask from his medical bag and put it to Blane’s lips.
“Chug it down!” Doc said, tilting the flask up to pour it into the back of Blane’s throat. “We gotta stop the shock from setting in, or you’ll be too fucked to fight.”
Blane choked down the burning liquid and jerked his head away, coughing and shaking his head. “What the fuck is that — Tequila?”
“It slows down the shock,” Doc said, quickly jamming his gear back into the bag. “You stick close by me all the way out of here, vato. You’re in bad shape.” He looked at Crosswhite. “Ready to go when you are, Capt—” He noticed for the first time a SEAL named McAllister applying a bandage to the lower right of Speed’s back. “How bad are you?”
Speed shrugged. “Bad enough there ain’t shit you can do. If we don’t make the EZ pretty soon, I’m fucked.”
Crosswhite made a quick assessment. Counting the bullet hole in his own leg, five of them were carrying wounds, two of them critical. Even Fischer had been hit again in the same damn shoulder, though he didn’t seem to be complaining.
Doc and Jackson helped Blane to his feet. Blane winced badly when he put weight on the leg, but he assured them all that he could continue the mission.
Alpha got back on point, and they made toward the hut with the blue rain barrel.
Once inside, Crosswhite took one of the claymore mines from Trigg’s pack. “Alpha, keep the column moving down through the village. I’ll catch up. Those cocksuckers at the top of the stairs are going to try and dog us all the way to the EZ.”
The rest of the team rousted the cowering Kalasha family from their hiding places and took them along out the back door, finding the narrow passage the tour guide had told Forogh about.
Crosswhite unfolded the scissor legs on the bottom of the claymore and stuck them into the dirt floor at the back of the hut, facing the door. Then he got up and fired a burst out the window at the small squad of Taliban fighters who were just emerging from cover at the top of the stone staircase. He didn’t hit anyone, but he managed to drive them briefly back under cover. As he returned to work setting the claymore, a hail of AK-47 fire rained through the hut, forcing him down onto his belly. He quickly ran the trigger wire from the mine to the door, securing it around a rusty nail protruding from the wood near the floor. A bullet struck his helmet a glancing blow and embedded itself in his back between his shoulder blades near his spine. Now more than ever he was regretting the decision to leave their body armor behind, but this was a moot point. Wearing armor, they would never have completed a forced march up the mountain.
As the Taliban gunners paused to reload, he leapt to his feet and dashed out the back door, running down the passageway to catch up with the team. A door opened and he plowed right into a pair of Taliban fighters in the midst of displacing to outflank the hut with the blue rain barrel.
All three men went sprawling, and a furious free-for-all ensued as they scrambled back to their feet. Crosswhite knew better than to try and recover the M4, or to even bother with the pistol. He simply drew his Ka-Bar and went to work, jamming it up under the rib cage of the much bigger Taliban fighter, pivoting to keep the dying man between himself and the other man in the narrow passage. The younger fighter who couldn’t directly engage just sort of stood there as his skewered compatriot screamed in agony, trying desperately to gouge out Crosswhite’s eyes.
Crosswhite gave the man a shove and jumped for space, leaving the knife embedded in his torso. He jerked out his pistol and shot both men down.
At this same moment, the Taliban squad from the staircase arrived outside the hut with the blue rain barrel. The leader jerked open the door and detonated the M18A1 claymore mine. Seven hundred 1/8-inch steel balls blasted outward in an arc of 60 degrees, at a velocity of 3,900 feet per second. The front of the hut disintegrated, and all nine Taliban fighters more or less disintegrated right along with it.