Again, the two glanced around the boulders. Dwyer couldn’t see where the fire was coming from — the glare from the sun’s corona sinking behind the slope obscured the view. And once more, the two turned to each other.
“What the hell?”
“They’re dropping like flies, boss,” Cipriano declared with a hint of a smile. “Gotta be a whole squad of our guys up there. Maybe more. And not missing. Not missing at all.”
“Maybe Delta. Or Six.” Dwyer looked at McKnight. “Hear that, Bobby? Hear that? Hang in there, buddy.”
McKnight smiled and nodded painfully.
Cipriano whooped and spun around the boulder, firing. Dwyer did the same. The Taliban had broken cover trying to evade the shots coming from the top of the slope, and were now sandwiched by Dwyer and Cipriano below.
Dwyer and Cipriano were jacked. The momentum had shifted dramatically. Fire discipline was out the window. They were pumping rounds at the enemy with glorious abandon.
And then they saw him.
Cipriano noticed him first. At the very top of the ridge, silhouetted against the sunlight. Not a squad. Not even a team. Just one man, on one knee, in a firing position. Exposed, yet obscured by the blinding sunlight. Calmly taking out one, two, three — six, seven, eight Taliban in a matter of seconds, then pausing to slap in a fresh magazine, seemingly indifferent to return fire, and then taking out more.
Cipriano pivoted to Dwyer. The two blinked at each other with expressions of disbelief. Cipriano began laughing almost maniacally, then turned, gave another triumphant yell, and resumed firing.
The attention of the Taliban now was focused almost exclusively on the threat from the top of the slope. Dwyer watched as the man rose, his figure framed but still obscured by sun glare, and began slowly descending toward the Taliban, firing as he went. Confident, as if he believed himself indestructible. Under any other circumstances, Dwyer would have considered the move inexplicably reckless, almost suicidal. But Dwyer conceded that to the Taliban, who were being slaughtered apace, it probably looked ominous. Dozens of them lay strewn across the slope.
The figure continued down the slope, picking off the enemy with deadly efficiency. Merciless. Whoever this guy is, Dwyer thought, he’s badass, stone-cold.
The remaining Taliban, now numbering no more than eight or nine, took off at a full sprint to Dwyer’s right down the crevasse, firing everything they had while making their escape. Dwyer and Cipriano fired after them. A couple more went down.
Less than a minute later, the echoes faded; the crevasse was silent. The Taliban were gone and the spectral figure continued his descent, stopping to check the Taliban lying on the ground with his HK416, making sure they were dead. He looked to Dwyer like a farmer checking to see if his tomatoes were ripe.
As the figure approached, Dwyer and Cipriano moved tentatively toward him from their position behind the boulders. When they were about twenty paces apart, Dwyer came to a dead stop.
“I don’t effin’ believe this.”
“What?” Cipriano asked.
“Mike effin’ Garin.”
Cipriano was incredulous. “You know this guy?”
“Mike?” Dwyer called. “Mike Garin?”
The man’s face, shrouded by long curly hair and a thick black beard, was deeply tanned and weather-beaten. But there it was — the unmistakable intensity in his eyes. Garin acknowledged Dwyer with an almost imperceptible nod as he scanned their wounds.
Dwyer rushed forward and gave him a bear hug, then turned to Cipriano and in a voice that sounded like he was announcing the winner of the Ms. America Pageant said, “Mike effin’ Garin!”
In a quiet voice, Garin responded, “Let’s get you squared away and out of here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Olivia realized she was leaning forward in her chair while listening to Dwyer, her forearms resting on her knees. She straightened self-consciously. “He must’ve been more than a little surprised to see his former BUD/S instructor and football recruiter. What else did he say?”
“Nothing. All business. He looked at our wounds and knew we needed evac, pronto. But we needed to get out of the canyon to higher elevation so our comms could work. He didn’t have any. He’s up there by himself in some of the most hostile territory in the world and the son of a bitch doesn’t even have a radio. Says it got hit by fire a while back. Anyway, he puts Ron’s body over his shoulder and we start climbing the slope.
“Now, it’s about four hundred feet — steep — to the top, and we’re already at altitude. Thin air. But he’s carrying Ron, plus gear, and not even breathing hard. The only thing he didn’t do was hum ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
Olivia laughed, which prompted Dwyer to laugh in turn. The reason for Dwyer’s protective behavior toward Garin earlier in the day was becoming clear. The former BUD/S instructor didn’t merely respect his former pupil; he seemed almost in awe of him.
“It took us a while to get to the top. We were in pretty bad shape. But we get there and I radio in and a little while later, in comes a Chinook. We get loaded up and ready to go and Mike just walks away. The rest of us are yelling at him, asking him what the hell he’s doing, and he just says, ‘Gotta go.’ I tell him to at least take some comms and toss a radio to him. He just nods and takes off. Said maybe sixteen words the whole time. Everybody in that bird just looked at each other.”
Olivia glanced at the photograph of Dwyer in a hospital bed.
“Yeah, that’s me at Bagram right after all of this,” Dwyer acknowledged.
“Did he ever tell you what he was doing up there?”
“No. Playing avenging angel, I guess.”
“Michael the Archangel.”
“Mike never talks about any of those stories. But I suspect he was hunting high-value targets.” Dwyer put down his glass of Long Island iced tea. “Well, I’m sure you thought that story was totally useless.”
“Well, it doesn’t tell me anything about Garin’s connection to the Iranian/Russian matter, but it did give me insight into the man. He’s certainly not your standard-issue cog in the country’s war machinery, is he?”
“I tried recruiting Mike again a year later, this time successfully,” Dwyer said. “I left the teams shortly after my recovery at Bagram. My leg was messed up pretty bad and I couldn’t hack it anymore. So, while recuperating, I got the idea to form DGT and convinced Mike to be one of my partners.”
“Garin helped found DGT?” Olivia asked. “I remember reading in the materials that he went to work for a military contractor. I didn’t know it was DGT.”
“Yep. Like I said, the man’s got more than a few working brain cells. I guess he got tired of sightseeing in the Hindu Kush. My original idea was to provide logistical support for diplomatic missions. I saw that fighting a couple of wars had stretched the military’s capacity pretty thin. So we went to the Department of Defense, and then State, and someone decided to give us a try.” Dwyer shrugged his shoulders.
“A small contract at first that kept Mike, Ken Thompson — our other partner — and me busy for only about sixty days, providing an escort detail for some State Department people who were helping the Iraqi parliament get on its feet. Then, just as that contract was about to expire, we got another one to do the same thing for the USAID folks in Kabul.
“We were limping along for another month until Mike got the idea to go big. He somehow secured us a line of credit and bid on a big DOD contract to provide security for civilians in several locations throughout the world. We won and were off to the races. Then he got us to start diversifying — providing materiel, personnel, making ourselves indispensable to the global war on terror. We grew fast. It didn’t take long for Thompson to cash out. He’s sunning himself on a tropical island somewhere. Not long after, Mike left too, but not before making a pretty decent bundle of cash.”