Sniper Elite (41 page)

Gil felt himself borne up from the ground, hands pushing him into the air. He heard the urgent shouting of men over a very great distance. No, not distant. Close . . . but it was as though he were hearing them from beneath the water. The blood ran from his ears, and suddenly he could hear their voices clearly, chattering away in a language he did not understand. The enemy had him, and now they were carrying him over their heads as a trophy of war, shouting in glee over their victory.

He struggled to draw his pistol, but a hand caught his wrist. The orange glow of the fire receded with the heat, and he was swallowed by darkness. He felt cold air against his skin where patches of his uniform had been burned away, then came to rest again against the hard ground. Ice cold water poured over his face, washing away the blood to clear his vision.

“Gil!” someone was shouting into his face. “Gil, can you hear me?”

For the first time, he realized that his ears were ringing like church bells, but, yes, he could hear the voice. The dim face came into focus. Forogh was kneeling over him, shaking him by the shoulder, showing him the PRC-112.

“Gil! I need your authentication code! There isn't much time! Your people will shoot us!”

Gil opened his mouth to speak but found that he could not talk above a whisper, his trachea twisted. “Roll me onto my bad side,” he croaked.

Forogh put his ear close to his lips. “Say it again, Gil.”

“Roll me to my wounded side. Can't breathe!”

After a quick examination, Forogh found that Gil was bleeding from the right side of his back. He rolled him onto that same side to keep the blood from draining into the good lung.

Gil felt some relief at once and was able to speak with a bit more force. “Typhoon Actual,” he said. “Authentication . . . Whiskey-Whiskey-X-ray-Five-Zero-Five.”

“I've got it,” Forogh said, preparing to key the radio.

“Find Steelyard,” Gil croaked. “Steelyard!”

“We have him, Gil. I'm sorry—he's dead.”

Forogh keyed the transmitter. “Hello! I am calling for Typhoon Actual . . . Whiskey-Whiskey-X-ray-Five-Zero-Five! . . . I am his interpreter! Typhoon is badly wounded and needs a medevac! Over!”

Another sortie of F-15s swept into the valley to the south. The mountains erupted in orange-black roiling pyroclastic clouds of fire, and the blasts of thousand-pound bombs echoed like thunder.

Forogh called out again, but no one answered.

His uncle Orzu appeared at his side, holding the reins of his horse as the rest of the men held their defensive perimeter. “We need to leave,” his uncle said. “We're not safe here. The Americans will mistake us for the enemy.”

“We have to let them know!” Forogh insisted. He spotted the kit box from the STAR system and dropped the PRC-112, running back toward the flames. Inside the box, he found a flare gun and a standard strobe light. He ran back to his uncle. “This will be enough.”

His uncle gave orders for the three Americans to be brought along.

Forogh mounted up. “Put that one up here with me,” he said, pointing down at Gil.

Crosswhite came to, howling in pain when they tried to sit him up on a horse, his fractured hip unable to take the strain. So he was draped over the animal's shoulders, the same as Steelyard, and they galloped north back toward the original extraction zone.

When they arrived, they put the Americans on the ground, and Forogh activated the strobe.

“Our job is done,” his uncle said. “I can't risk my men being killed.”

“Thank you, Uncle.” Forogh offered his hand.

“You trust them?” his uncle said, jutting his chin back toward the valley, where the last of the American aircraft was flying away to the south.

Forogh shrugged. “I am in the hands of Allah, Uncle. I trust
him
.”

His uncle nodded and shook his hand, turning to order his men north into the mountains. That's when they both saw for the first time the column of vehicles racing south down the pass, bristling with rifles and RPGs. Without headlights, the trucks had drawn to within two hundred yards, unseen in the dawning light. Forogh and his uncles were caught between the enemy to both the north and the south, with nowhere to run but a short box canyon to the west.

“Allah, be merciful,” Forogh muttered.

“This is no time for mercy, boy.” Orzu turned in the saddle, bellowing to his clan. “Ride! Put your backs to the wall! We will see if the Americans are still a friend of the Tajik!”

More than twenty horses bolted across the shallow river into the box canyon. The trucks came speeding toward them, bullets whizzing through the air and ricocheting off the rocks. An RPG exploded against a boulder, and one of Forogh's cousins was thrown dead from his horse.

Slouched in the saddle behind Forogh, struggling for every breath, Gil drew the 1911 and forced his eyes open, turning to fire at the enemy.

The horsemen rode into the box canyon and dismounted among the rocks. The firing fell off for a moment as the trucks slid to a stop on the far side of the Panjshir River and the HIK unloaded, taking up positions of their own as they began to maneuver aggressively toward the canyon.

Orzu was shouting orders to his men, putting them where he wanted them. Finally, when there were not enough rocks or positions of cover for them to fall back to, he ordered the horses formed into two separate phase lines of a dozen each. Then he ordered them all shot in place.

Gil screamed and slammed his fist against the earth, strangling against the tension pneumothorax in his chest, his blood-soaked face turning blue, lips beginning to swell.

Crosswhite and Forogh dragged him to the back of the canyon and propped him up on his knees over the belly of a dead mare.

“You're dying!” Crosswhite said, jerking the water tube from Gil's CamelBak. “I gotta drain that lung. Forogh, hold his ass down!”

A wild firefight broke out at the mouth of the canyon a hundred feet away; rockets exploded among the rocks.

“Do you know how to do this?” Forogh asked, shaking like a dog shitting a peach pit as he lay across Gil's shoulders.

“I saw it once in a cartoon,” Crosswhite said, grunting against the pain of a cracked pelvis. “Be sure and hold his ass tight.”

He took Gil's Ka-Bar from its sheath and cut Gil's jacket up
the back to expose his sweat-soaked skin. “Hold on now!” He put the point of knife into Gil's lower back and slowly pushed it in at an upward angle toward the bottom of where he hoped the pleural cavity would be.

Gil writhed around like a fish on the end of a spear, choking blood, unable to breathe or scream. The fight raged on in the mouth of the canyon, the HIK desperate to kill them all before the next inevitable airstrike. A grenade landed in the middle of the canyon and exploded harmlessly near the first phase line of dead horses. Crosswhite pulled out the knife and stuck his finger deep into the wound, sliding the hard plastic water tube in behind it. He felt the tube slide into what he hoped was the empty space of the pleural cavity, and a few seconds later a pinkish red fluid began to drain from Gil's body.

“Got it!” he said, slapping Forogh on the shoulder. “Can you fucking believe that?”

After forty or fifty seconds Gil had begun to breathe again. “Get me a rifle,” he croaked, his face contorted with pain, still smeared with gore.

Forogh gave him his AK-47, and Crosswhite took Gil's pistol and what was left of his ammo. Forogh ran to join his clan among the rocks where he knew there would soon be another available rifle.

Crosswhite took a few moments to get Gil propped comfortably in the crook of the dead horse's shoulder, careful to keep his wounded side lower than the other. “How you wanna play this?”

Gil took the last grenade from his harness and gave it to him. “Save that for us.”

“Okay,” Crosswhite said with a smile, tucking the smooth green orb into his jacket. “I wouldn't be able to run even if we had someplace to go.”

Couture went back into the office and picked up the phone. “Still there, Mr. President?”

“What the hell is going on over there?” the president demanded, very pissed at having been put on hold.

“Mr. President, one of our men on the ground is already dead. At this time, the two survivors and twenty-some of our Tajik allies are cornered in a canyon just outside the Panjshir Valley, south of the Khawak Pass in the Hindu Kush. They are surrounded by more than one hundred heavily armed Taliban and HIK fighters with hundreds more on the way. I've got two B-52s about to drop a JDAM strike, but that's only going to buy these people ten or fifteen minutes of relief. I do have a few helos on standby to extract our men—both of whom are very badly wounded. What I do
not
have, Mr. President, is
the means to extract the Tajik fighters who have risked their lives on this operation to save our people.”

The president cursed under his breath. “So exactly what are you asking me for, General?”

“Mr. President, I'm requesting permission to declare Winchester, sir.”

The president hesitated, embarrassed to admit that he didn't immediately know what Winchester was.

“Mr. President, declaring Winchester means that I intend to call upon every single air asset at our disposal in a continuous series of sorties until I have annihilated all HIK and Taliban forces within the Panjshir Valley . . . leaving only the village of Bazarak itself untouched. This will not only eliminate the imminent threat to our personnel and our allies on the ground, but will also eliminate the expanding HIK military presence in the Panjshir Valley.”

Couture looked at the major and covered the receiver with his hand, giving the go-ahead for the B-52 strikes to commence.

“Are you aware, General,” the president asked, “of the parliamentary problems such a military strike against the HIK would create for President Karzai in the present political climate over there?”

“With respect, Mr. President—Mr. Karzai's political woes are not my concern. My concern at this time are the lives of our people and our allies on the ground who helped to rescue Warrant Officer Brux. What are your orders, sir?”

Couture waited as the president considered his response, pensively watching the screen as the JDAMs struck all around the mouth of the box canyon. Men and truck parts were blown across the valley floor in great sweeping explosions, leaving gaping black craters in their place.

“General Couture,” the president said finally, “I'm going to grant you the authority to use every air asset we have in that hemisphere from Diego Garcia to London, England. In fact, I'm calling the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs to tell him you have the tactical authority to call upon whatever you need—be it air, land, or sea. But understand me, General: if you decide to escalate this battle to that level, you had better make damn sure you can bring those people out of there alive. If you fail, I don't want to hear any excuses. Is that clear? Because I've just given you
everything
you've asked for.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. Now, if you'll excuse me, sir, I have a battle to direct.”

“Very well, General. Good luck.”

“Sir!” Couture hung up the phone and turned to his staff. “Winchester is in effect, people! I want those A-10s in the sky right now, and get those alert B-1s off the ground in Diego Garcia—I want them supersonic all the way to the target!” He stabbed his finger at the screen. “Our priority is to bring every one of these fighters trapped in this canyon out alive! Is that clear? Every one! Now get on the phones—brief your helo crews, your flight leaders, and crew chiefs! Everybody! I don't want there to be any confusion on this! We are lifting those indigenous people
out
of the Panjshir Valley!”

Practically everyone grabbed for a phone.

Couture sat down on the edge of the table next to Captain Metcalf. “I damn near cried when they gunned down all those horses, Glen. Reminds of me of what my granddaddy had to go through on Corregidor back in '42.”

Metcalf thoughtfully stroked his chin. “Your grandfather was a cavalryman?”

Couture nodded. “He was forced to eat his horse . . . and he never got over it to the day he died.”

Gil was firing single shots over the open sights of the AK-47 when the JDAMs struck at the mouth of the canyon. Great shock waves reverberated off the canyon walls. He and Crosswhite took cover behind the corpses of the horses to avoid being hit by an avalanche of pineapple-size rock that came showering down. The B-52 pilots had been smart, carefully dropping their ordnance much less than danger close to avoid killing friendlies, wiping out the vast majority of HIK and Taliban fighters who had come down from the north but leaving enough of them alive that the Tajik fighters were still engaged in a dangerous firefight. At least now, however, they weren't in immediate danger of being overrun.

“I'm not sure I can walk!” Crosswhite shouted over the din. “I think my hip's dislocated.”

Gil was busy flashing back to Hell Week, five and a half days of misery and pain in the cold surf during the first phase of SEAL training, a week specifically designed to determine who was cut out to endure days like today and who was not. He could see in Crosswhite's eyes that he was beginning to break down mentally and knew that time was running out. Every man had a limit. Gil had his. But even though Crosswhite's wounds were not as bad as his own overall, Gil could see that Crosswhite was now much closer to reaching his limit. No shame in that. Had it not been for Crosswhite, Gil would be dead already. This was not a matter of who was the better man. It was simply a matter of who had the deepest reserve of will. Gil would now have to impose that will upon Crosswhite to keep him from giving up so close to the goal line.