Afghan Storm (Nick Woods Book 3) (9 page)

Chapter 25

The man was taking a deep
draw on a freshly lit cigarette, the red tip glowing brightly against the dark.
Being a smoker himself, Red hated knowing that the man wasn’t going to get to
finish his very last cigarette.

Red slowly
lifted the barrel of his silenced pistol toward the man’s head. The man stood
ten feet away, but sensed movement in the shadows and peered forward. His mouth
opened in shock, and he turned for an AK leaning against the wall beside him.

Red focused
on his front sight and pulled the trigger twice. TSK. TSK. The man appeared to
try to yell, but his body crumpled lifelessly. Two .45s to the brain have a way
of ending all body function.

Red rushed
forward, knowing speed mattered now more than ever.

A man called
from inside the hut. “Yossef?”

Red made it
to the door of the mud hut, which was nothing more than a rickety-looking thing
made of cheap wood. Nick caught up to him and put his hand on his shoulder.

Red pulled
his powerful flashlight out of a pouch and heard movement behind the door,
moving toward them. “Yossef?” the man called again, but louder this time.

Red kicked
the door in. He flicked the tactical flashlight on, flooding the room with a
blinding light of several hundred illumination.

A shadow
moving toward him shouted “Aiyeehh!!!” as he spun his AK toward Red.

Red blinded
him with the powerful flashlight and fired violently and quickly. TSK. TSK.
TSK. TSK. TSK.

The man kept
coming, either hit and fueled by adrenaline, or Red had missed him in the chaos
of the hasty entry. The man’s AK opened up, roaring in the small room. BOOM!
BOOM! BOOM!

Red shoved
himself to the side, stumbling over a chair that toppled. As he fell, he
desperately tried to re-aim his weapon, but the leg of the chair caught his
arm, knocking his light and his weapon’s aim further off target toward the
ceiling.

The man’s
bullets tracked toward him, dirt exploding along the wall and ground. Red
screamed, “AHHH!!!!” and knew he was dead.

But a
powerful beam of light caught the man in the face, blinding him. TSK. TSK. TSK.

The man
screamed as the rounds slammed him in the chest, and he fell to the ground,
writhing in pain. Nick put the light back on him and shot twice more into his
head. TSK. TSK.

Truck rushed
past Nick and the immobile Red, who was tangled up in the chair. His web gear
was hooked onto it, and he fought to free himself in the darkness with just the
aid of his flashlight.

Truck
turned and
headed into the next room at a sprint. Momentum mattered more than control or
tactics. Light filtered from the next room, and he saw Ahmud al-Habshi working
frantically on a computer. The man was typing desperately and completely
ignoring an AK leaning against a beat-up folding table.

The room was
deep. At least ten feet long and al-Habshi was at the far end, working at a
small desk in the corner.

“He’s
sending a message!” Truck screamed, running forward.

Truck
ignored all tactical considerations. His mind possessed a single purpose:
knocking al-Habshi to the ground.

He barreled
into the room and never saw the man lurking in the corner, waiting to ambush
the first person who entered the room.

The man
knelt with his back to the wall, with his AK up and ready. He opened up the
minute Truck burst into the room, rotating his weapon to catch up with the man
sprinting into the room.

Nick entered
the room milliseconds after Truck. The shooter in the corner swung his weapon
as fast as he could after Truck, but hit just behind the fleeting,
laterally-moving target. Not only could he not catch his target, he also failed
to notice another man entering the room.

Nick stepped
into the room, spun his .45 to the left, and fired two rounds center mass. TSK.
TSK. As the man fell, Nick raised his pistol and fired a round into his face.
The man dropped and started convulsing on the ground. Nick fired once more into
the man’s head, and he stopped.

Meanwhile,
Truck had closed the distance to al-Habshi. Unable to buttstroke the man since
his machine gun was slung, he pivoted the weapon horizontally in front of him
and dove forward. The weapon, acting like the front bumper of a car, slammed
al-Habshi in the side of the head and knocked him to the ground.

Truck
was tumbling
from the collision, and he fell on al-Habshi as he heard the sound of Nick’s
silenced Glock behind him dealing with whatever had been back in that corner.
Truck pinned al-Habshi to the dirt floor of the hut, spun him to put him face
down, and wrenched an arm behind his back. He added pressure, and al-Habshi
screamed. Al-Habshi complied and placed his other arm behind his back.

Truck
zip-tied the man’s arms and pulled a sack from his gear. He covered the man’s
head and turned to give Nick a thumbs up.

Chapter 26

Marcus
yelled from the other room of the hut.

“Guys, we’ve
got shouting outside,” he said, his AK-47 covering the front door. “I think
they’re gathering to rush us.”

Without any of their
flashlights on, the cave-like room was enveloped in a crescent of thick
blackness. Therefore as Nick, followed by Truck, re-entered the front room,
they made an immediate right turn, pressing tightly to the back wall. Then
allowing their shoulders to lightly brush up against the surface, they felt
their way along the back wall, banked left at the corner, and moved up the
right hand side of the hut.

Thankfully, it appeared
that Marcus had successfully collected and cleared the room of any trip-able
debris. Though he couldn’t see it, Nick trusted that as was planned, there was
a pile in the assigned back corner made of rugs, dead bodies, furniture, etc.

The only light came from
the large moon outside. But even while at its near-full strength, the moonlight
failed to push more than six inches in through the entry before it was choked
out completely. Still the contrast between the moonlit scene outside, and the
cavernous black inside, was great enough that Nick had quickly confirmed Red’s
position when he and Truck had entered the room directly behind the kneeling
shooter now covering the entry. The small man’s silhouette was lined up, facing
out the open doorway but set back at the center of the room. So while he had
been easy to spot from behind while framed the moonlit opening, his position
was still deep in the shadows and hidden to anyone outside. Light can be tricky
that way.

According to the plan,
Nick knew where Marcus should be, but he could not see the man for anything.
Then on the right side of the kicked-in door, Nick noticed the edges of a man’s
strong profile slowly break the line of moonlight as Marcus peered out into the
compound.

The utter lack of
visibility inside the hut suddenly reminded Nick of the still-lit computer
screen in the room behind him. He quickly looked back to make sure the light
wouldn’t give them away. But thankfully it was deep enough in the back room
that the monitor’s blinding light carried no more strength than that of a
glow-in-the-dark sticker in the hut’s swallowing darkness.

Men yelled
from outside, the silence and lack of light from al-Habshi’s hut seemed to
encourage them. Some of the yells seemed to sound like questions or queries of
concern. Others seemed to contain anger and foretell impending pain for those
in the middle hut.

Looking out
the door again, Nick guessed that visibility remained at thirty yards.

Nick turned
his head to look over his shoulder and whispered to Truck, “Truck, take a
corner position on the right.”

Nick eased
over to Red, who was still in the center of the room covering the door. He
leaned down by his ear.

“Red, you
take the opposite corner on the left.”

As Red moved
to the left, Marcus moved toward the center of the room closer to Nick.

Now, Truck
and Red waited in crossed, kneeling positions six feet from the door, providing
them with forty-five degrees of visibility into the courtyard. Their “X”
positions on the door yielded them with better safety if someone fired into the
entrance, and it also would prevent anyone in front of the hut from seeing
their muzzle flashes. Any shots they fired would only be visible from an enemy
who was oblique to the door.

Nick stepped
next to Marcus and whispered, “Grab your syringe and go drug al-Habshi. I want
him ready to go.”

Marcus
unsnapped a pouch and glided into the other room, Nick unable to hear him even
though he knew Marcus was moving.

“Here they
come,” Truck announced softly. Nick -- centered on the door, but deep inside the
room -- couldn’t see the angle from which Truck covered, but he trusted the
veteran Special Forces soldier.

He could
just make out that Truck was in the kneeling position, his machine gun
supported by his left arm, which was propped up on his left knee. It was a
great defensive position, keeping him low while also keeping him stable and
accurate.

Nick heard
Truck exhale.

Truck
could see
silhouettes moving toward him from out in his sector. Three men hunched over
and stalking forward like lions of the savannah stalking their prey.

He aimed at
the left one and pulled the trigger. A loud burst exploded the night’s silence.
Truck eased off the trigger as the gun pulled off target, and brought it to the
middle man. The man had kneeled and appeared to be torn between going prone and
darting back from where he came.

Truck
shredded him with a well-aimed burst. Even half-trained recruits can hit a
target at thirty yards. Truck repeated the release of the trigger and moved to
the third target, who had dropped in the prone and fired a hasty barrage of
bullets toward the hut and the muzzle flash from deep within the front room.

A couple of
bullets zipped into the room. Truck flinched but dropped the man with a torrent
of bullets aimed low and worked up into his target.

This small
event felt like a lifetime but lasted no more than a few seconds.

Aim. Burst.
Adjust aim. Second burst. Re-aim. Flinch. A third burst, longer than the
others.

Chapter 27

Nick had no
idea how many rounds Truck had fired, but the drum of his RPK machine gun only
held seventy-five rounds. Truck might have fired as many as twenty shots in the
exchange, so Nick moved over by him and lifted his pistol to cover the opening.

“Reload that
weapon, hoss,” Nick said. “Those damn drums take forever to reload, and we’ll
be breaking out of this place any moment now.”

While Truck
reloaded, Nick covered his sector. He couldn’t see anything in the gray,
moonlit night except for the three bodies Truck had added to the landscape.

Behind him,
Marcus re-entered the room and whispered, “Al-Habshi is ready to move. The man
will be sleeping in thirty seconds.”

“Great. Now
cover this sector while I break out the NVGs,” Nick said to Marcus.

Marcus moved
into position, and Nick eased deeper into the room. He holstered his .45 and
brought up the NVGs.

The compound
lit up in tones of green, and Nick swept the compound yard directly to their
front. He saw two 4x4 trucks, but nothing else. The NVGs easily allowed
visibility all the way to the wall, so he felt confident no one was to their
front.

Nick angled
his way inside the room toward Truck and Marcus to scan their sector in the
compound. As Nick peered into the darkness, he heard Truck finish reloading.
Through the green world of the NVGs, Nick confirmed the three bodies wouldn’t
be getting up anytime soon.

They lay
mangled and unmoving, and Nick studied them a moment longer. Truck had done a
number on the men. They lay in deep pools of blood, which looked black in the
NVGs, and the bullets had twisted their bodies into what appeared to be
uncomfortable, writhing positions. If they were playing possum, they were doing
a hell of a job.

Nick checked
the rest of Truck’s original sector and observed no one else.

He worked
his way the opposite direction, confirming first that the middle area remained
clear. Nick then swung the NVGs so that they penetrated the darkness of Red’s
sector on the right side of the compound. It, too, appeared empty.

“We’re clear
for now,” Nick said in a low voice. “Marcus, go grab al-Habshi.”

Truck, his
RPK finally reloaded, stepped up behind Marcus to retake his position. Marcus
moved to the computer room, and Nick stepped back into the depths of the room,
inhaling deeply. He braced himself for the next part of the mission.

He heard
dragging from the computer room and saw Marcus pulling their bounty by one arm.
Marcus dropped him, and al-Habshi’s body slumped to the ground. They would
leave him in the middle hut while they cleared the other buildings.

“Let’s hit
the two other buildings so we can get the hell out of here,” Nick murmured.