With the house a roaring inferno, Buck found himself staring straight up the muzzle of an AK-47. Agent Starks was flat on his back, out cold with a huge goose egg on his forehead where he’d been struck with a rifle butt. Janet lay unconscious in the lee of the well, and Marie was on her knees with Akram’s knife to her throat.
“Where is Gil Shannon?” Akram shouted at Buck. “I’ll cut off her head!”
“He’s not here!” Buck was enraged and ready to hurl himself at the man covering him with the rifle. “He’s with the government, looking for your goddamn bomb! Now let her go before I rip off your head and shit down your neck!” He got to his feet, and the Al Qaeda fighter screamed for him to get back on his knees.
“Go fuck yourself, heathen!”
“Buck, don’t!” pled Marie. “Don’t give them a reason to kill you!”
“I’m sorry, honey, but we’re as good as dead.” He looked at Akram. “Ain’t that right, you filthy cocksucker?”
Akram recognized the rabid look in Buck’s eyes. They were the eyes of a man unhinged. “Shoot him,” he said in Arabic.
The gunman fired his AK-47 directly into Buck’s chest, and the old Marine flew backward, dead before he hit the ground.
Marie screamed, and Akram hauled her to her feet by her hair, pressing the blade of the knife into the flesh alongside her nose. “Now tell me where your husband is.”
“I don’t know,” she wept. “You cut the phone lines; I couldn’t reach him.”
“Who killed Kashkin… the first man to come here?”
“I did.”
He jerked her hair, twisting her head around and hurting her. “You’re lying!”
“I’m not!” she spat in defiance, her anger suddenly overtaking her fear. “I shot the bastard twice from the bedroom window. Then I burned his body right over there!” She pointed toward the pyre.
Akram saw by the blazing fury in her eyes that she spoke the truth and slapped her to the ground. “You’re going to be very sorry your husband was not here.”
“Go to hell!” She crawled around the well to check her mother.
Akram conferred with the man who had taken Abad’s place as second in command. “How many men are left?”
“There are thirteen of us.”
“Get them ready to go. We’re leaving the same way we came in — and we’re taking these three with us.”
The man turned, shouting orders for an organized departure.
Then Akram heard an airplane engine overhead and pulled on Duke’s infrared binocular for a look up through the foggy overcast. He saw what he recognized as an old C-47 and scanned the binocular back along its line of flight to see parachutes opening in the sky over the northeastern corner of the ranch.
“Paratroops!” he shouted in Arabic, pointing up. “Kill them before they get to the ground—move!”
The men rallied quickly, gathering up any extra ammo they could find and running out to meet the enemy without really knowing exactly where he was going to land.
Akram waited until they were well away before slinging the TAC-50 around his back and snatching Marie up by her hair again. She fought him, so he shoved her back to the ground and unslung the rifle, putting the muzzle of the TAC-50 to her mother’s head.
“No!”
“Then do exactly as I say!”
She submitted, and Akram used one of Starks’s bootlaces to bind her hands tightly behind her back. Then he shoved her out in front of him toward the west, and the two of them moved away briskly, with Marie none the wiser about the parachutes descending over the ranch.
Once they were clear of the light from the fire, he spun her around and gave her a short jab to the abdomen, dropping her to her knees. He pushed her over onto the ground and jerked her pants down, cutting off her underwear with the knife and stuffing them into her mouth. He then tore a sleeve from her shirt and tied it tightly around her head to keep them in place.
“Now get up!” He pulled her pants back up and kicked her in the butt to get her moving again. “Remember… I stab you in the stomach the first time you make a sound.”
70
The SEALs were taking fire before they even made it to the ground. Gil felt rounds ripping into his armor as he landed firmly with both feet together, hitting the release on the jump harness, and then hitting the deck to lay down a horizontal arc fire from his M4, forcing the heat signatures across his field of vision to stop firing and seek cover. This bought the rest of his team members valuable time in the moments before they touched down. The sight of a lifeless body impacting the ground to Gil’s left, however, told him that one of his men was already dead.
He switched out the magazine and began trading fire with the enemy as they were taking cover behind water troughs, wood piles, horse trailers, and corral posts. The SEALs were shouting back and forth, sorting themselves out and preparing to move forward.
Jack Frost crawled up beside Gil. “Take any lead on the way in?”
“Don’t think so. You?”
“Lost most of my foot.” Frost fired the rest of the magazine and pulled another magazine from his harness.
A quick glance, and Gil saw that, indeed, much of Frost’s left foot was gone from the instep forward. “The only easy day was yesterday,” he said, firing a burst and putting a man down as he broke from the stable toward the water trough. “One of my men is dead yonder.”
“I saw him hit,” Frost said. “Couldn’t tell who it was.”
Crosswhite scrambled up on Gil’s left and hit the dirt. “Gil, why don’t you make a break and flank these sorry cocksuckers to the west? Go find Marie and let us reduce these guys. It’s obvious they don’t have infrared.”
The team was formed up now and laying down lethal grazing fire, pinning the enemy and maneuvering forward aggressively for the kill.
Gil detached from the M4 and unslung the Remington MSR, peering through the nightscope to place the reticule on the face of a man firing at their muzzle flashes from the loft above the stable. He squeezed the trigger, and the .308 Lapua Naturalis round struck the man to the left of the nose, mushrooming perfectly within the brain box to blow the head almost completely apart. An instant later, Gil was up and sprinting for the house over open terrain. It was during this sprint that he realized he was missing the little toe from his right foot along with part of the metatarsal bone, requiring him to roll the foot inward as he ran and giving him a slight limp.
Even with his damaged foot, he managed to quickly cover the hundred yards to the house, emerging from the fog to see that it was fully engulfed. The eastern half of the roof collapsed inward, and thousands of sparks shot skyward. A dead horse and a number of bodies littered the back lawn. No one inside the house could possibly be alive, so he ran around front, where he nearly shot Dusty Chatham standing beside his horse with a Browning hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. Dusty’s face was gleaming with sweat.
“Jesus! Is that you, Gil?”
“Dusty! Where’s Marie?”
Dusty shrugged, looking slightly ashamed. “I dunno. I just got here. Buck Ferguson’s dead, and Janet’s been shot in her hiney.” He pointed toward where they lay, just beyond the firelight. “She’s over there with some FBI guy; he’s pretty bad off too.”
Gil found his mother-in-law unconscious, her pulse weak. The sight of Buck Ferguson’s body filled him with a nauseating sensation of dread. Agent Starks was semiconscious, but he was so badly concussed that he could only mumble confused responses to Gil’s urgent questions.
“Who’s doin’ all the shooting yonder?” Dusty asked. “That the cavalry?”
“Yeah, a day late and a dollar short,” Gil muttered, disgusted with himself and terrified for his wife. “Is it possible Marie’s in the house, Dusty?”