Without Fear

by Col. David Hunt

  He spotted the first group, three rebels clustered almost on top of each other as the incessant volleys pounded the rock formation. Their greenish shapes clearly visible in his night vision monocular, Wright fired two-round bursts into their heads. The insurgents were totally unaware of what had killed them.

  “First enclave cleared.” He spoke into his MBITR while rushing to the next enemy enclave, noticing the sudden cease-fire on this spot, meaning that Sergeant Gaudet was actually tracking him, managing the attack.

  He took off toward the second enclave, just slightly uphill and fifty feet over, rushing like a shadow, firing while moving. One of the men in the group raised his head, eyes blinking in recognition. He screamed, alerting his companions.

  Wright put one in the middle of the man’s forehead and a second in his throat before mowing down the rest—all four of them—by quickly thumbing the fire selector lever to full automatic fire and emptying his magazine into the cluster of men.

  “Second enclave down,” he reported, dropping the spent twenty-five-round magazine and inserting a fresh one as the covering fire stopped on the third enclave.

  But before he could pull on the bolt to load the first round, an invisible force punched him straight in the chest, tossing him back. He crashed against the side of a boulder, hitting the back of his head hard, the helmet cushioning the blow. He lost his grip on the UMP45.

  Momentarily dazed, realizing that his vest had managed to absorb the impact, though not without shocking his upper chest, knocking the wind out of him, Wright tried to reach for his sidearm. He knew he had only a handful of seconds before whoever had fired that round came in for the kill.

  He tried to breathe, to fill his shocked lungs with frigid air, while his hand slapped the holster of his SIG P220, but he could not bring his fingers to grab the pistol grip.

  Focus, kid. You can do this.

  Wright looked about him in the snowy woods.

  Pops? he thought.

  Now, kid. Get it done.

  Gasping for air, he freed the P220 from its holster, bringing it up as two rebels appeared out of the darkness, AK-47s on him, eyes glinting in the night, their bearded faces contorted in anger.

  The rebels approached him, leveling their assault rifles at his face just as Wright fired once at the closest figure, whose head snapped back in a bloody mess that sprayed his companion.

  Realizing he didn’t have time to switch targets, Wright tried anyway. But the Kalashnikov’s reports never came. Instead, the second rebel dropped to the side, head exploding from suppressed rounds fired from somewhere up the hill.

  Wright just lay there in pain, confused, his chest aching, while he tried to get his diaphragm and the muscles between his ribs working again.

  In the middle of his agony, he saw her, like a greenish apparition materializing from the darkness beyond his night optics, gloved hands holding a TAC-338 sniper rifle with a bulky sound suppressor attached to the muzzle.

  Behind her, the shape of a second sniper loomed through the woods. It was a man holding an even larger rifle, also suppressed.

  At the same instant, as he managed his first lungful of air since getting shot, Wright noticed figures rushing down the hill, firing suppressed rounds into the backs of the insurgents.

  The woman reached his side—Hispanic, long hair tied in a ponytail that swung behind her. Special Agent Monica Cruz.

  “You okay, Captain?” she asked, leaning down and offering a hand.

  Wright took it, breathing again, feeling his own strength returning. He was surprised at her strength, since she was so small, as she easily helped him to his feet.

  “Need a minute … and thanks,” Wright replied, blinking while holstering the SIG and locating his UMP45.

  “No problem,” she replied, as her sniper companion joined them, followed by three helmeted men dressed in black gear and armed with different weapons. The largest of the group, Chief Larson, wielded his massive M2 Browning. A much smaller man, Martin, stood next to him, armed with an MP5A1 and sucking on a lollipop. A third man appeared, Hagen, the former SEAL, also armed with an MP5A1 but smoking a cigarette. Three more figures materialized behind them, all clad in some strange black battle gear, clutching what he recognized as suppressed AK-9s. They wore equally weird helmets, which resembled those worn by cyclists.

  Colonel Stark appeared behind the Russian trio, cradling a woman who was wearing that same black uniform

  “Who are they?” Wright asked.

  “Russians. Spetsnaz. They’re with us,” Stark replied.

  131

  No Entry

  KANDAHAR AIRFIELD. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  “Sorry, Captain,” one of the three Canadian MPs said, blocking her way. “The general is busy with his staff. Big war going on, eh?”

  “That’s precisely why I must see him,” Vaccaro insisted, glaring at the three soldiers planted in front of NATO’s war room in the rear of Lévesque’s headquarters.

  Her rank and the name she had built for herself around KAF had been enough to get her past the door and all the way down here. But these guys were not budging.

  “Could you at least ask for Glenn Harwich, please? It’s about the missing bomb.”

  “No can do, ma’am. The general was very specific. No one goes in there.”

  “But—”

  “No one means no one—even you, Captain Vaccaro. But I’ll let him know you need to speak with him as soon as he gets a break, eh?”

  “Don’t fucking bother,” she replied, stomping away.

  If she could not convince NATO to get eyes on that gorge, then she would do it herself.

  132

  Decoy

  SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  Stark had carried her for nearly a half mile, and his arms were burning, as were his legs and back. Kira had insisted that he leave her behind. Then, as her strength returned, she had wanted to walk. But he kept her tight against his chest, wanting every ounce of her energy to go toward keeping her alive.

  Wright spoke into his MBITR. “Gunny, where are those helos? We have wounded!”

  “En route, sir!” Gaudet shouted from thirty feet away, as he and the rest of the marines emerged from their DFPs and approached them. “ETA three minutes!”

  “The bomb,” mumbled Kira, lifting her head while pointing to the GPS screen in her hands.

  Stark laid her gently on a cushion of pine needles and took a look at the screen, then started to his right, toward the source of the transmission. Wright and the others followed, tracking down the origin of the signal, near a group of dead insurgents.

  The colonel moved them aside with the help of Monica and Ryan, but he soon realized there was nothing there that remotely resembled a nuclear device.

  Are you kidding me? Stark thought. The signal intensified the moment Monica rolled one of the rebels onto his back, revealing a canvas bag.

  “Are you kidding me?” she shouted, opening the bag and producing a cylindrical object roughly the size of a stick of dynamite. “What the hell is this?”

  “That,” said Kira, limping over to them assisted by Sergei, “is part of a battery pack, plus our embedded transmitter.”

  “So where the hell is the damn bomb?” said Stark, standing up.

  “The picks and shovels,” Wright offered. “I’m betting the bastards—”

  “Buried it?” Monica blurted.

  “What else they could be doing with them?”

  “Gunny!” Wright shouted. “I want this entire hillside combed for anything that resembles freshly dug ground! Get everyone not involved in the exfil of the wounded to—”

  “Sierra Echo One, Red One One,” Stark heard through his earpiece.

  He blinked at the call sign, and also at the fact that it wasn’t Vaccaro but a woman with a strong and quite familiar British accent.

  “Maryam?”

  “Aye.”

  “What the hell are you doing calling here?”

  �
�I’m conveying a message from Red One One. Get eyes on the gorge west of the cave’s exit. Repeat, get eyes on the gorge west of the cave’s exit.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “The bomb, Echo One. The bloody bomb.”

  “Where is Red One One?”

  “Don’t know. She asked me to pass this message before she went off to do, and I quote, ‘whatever it fucking takes.’”

  133

  Gunslinger

  KANDAHAR AIRFIELD. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  U.S. Air Force Second Lieutenant Jessie James worked ground control at the KAF control tower in the predawn hours. She had been handling traffic between the tarmac and the runway since the attack began, the previous evening, and she was damn tired.

  Her relief, however, wasn’t due for another two hours, at the 0600 shift change, when Jessie could look forward to a breakfast pit stop at the closest DFAC before crawling into bed for some well-deserved shut-eye. But what Jessie looked forward to the most was the end of her rotation, in another eleven days. Then it was back home to her fiancé in Oklahoma City for a long-planned wedding and the start of her new life as a married woman and air traffic controller at Tinker Air Force Base.

  New life and new last name, she thought, staring at the A-10C starting up at the far end of the flight line. She looked forward to shedding her last name, which, combined with her first, had been the source of countless jokes and pretty much the bane of her existence for most of her twenty-three years of life.

  But her dad, rest in peace, had loved the Wild West, and she had been an only child, so …

  Jessie dropped her gaze at the lone Warthog as it started taxiing onto Taxiway Echo One without requesting permission, heading straight for the beginning of Runway 23. She turned to First Lieutenant Vargas, who was in charge of the tower frequency that controlled the traffic on the runway and in the vicinity of the airport.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  Vargas pulled up a pair of binoculars to try to read the tail number. “That’s Mike India Niner Six Seven … Not on the list for tonight. Let me check who it belongs to.” He put down the binoculars and worked his terminal.

  Jessie tapped her radio. “Mike India Niner Six Seven, Ground Control, please state intentions.”

  “Ground, Red One One. You guys okay with me taking my new ride out for a spin? I heard there’s a war out there.”

  Jessie blinked, recognizing Captain Vaccaro’s call sign and voice. She had followed Vaccaro’s inspirational story closely, from the unprecedented landing of that crippled Warthog to her getting shot down to protect the lives of those marines, her survival in the middle of Taliban country, and finally her daring rescue. It was truly the stuff of legends, and Jessie, like most women—and quite a few men—on the airfield, had become fans of the gutsy air force officer.

  “That’s her bird all right,” confirmed Vargas, looking up from his screen. “But this says she’s grounded until the flight surgeon clears her.”

  And that made sense. Last Jessie had heard, the captain was in the hospital.

  Frowning, Jessie finally said, “Red One One, Ground. Hold short of Runway Two Three at Echo One.”

  “Roger. Red One One holding short, Two Three at Echo One.”

  Looking at Vargas again, Jessie said, “She must have clearance, right?”

  Vargas shrugged. “I guess … but she’s not on the list. Maybe there was a mistake at NATO headquarters, given the large number of flights we dispatched earlier. Most of them are due back by dawn.”

  “You think she might be…?”

  “Winging it?” Vargas said.

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “She could be … you know … shooting from the hip,” Vargas said, shaping his right hand like a revolver and pretending to draw, gunslinger style. “Takes one to know one, right?”

  Jessie shook her head. It was an old joke, one of many she looked forward to leaving in the past after her—

  “Ground, Red One One still standing by. Just burning good fuel here, folks. Don’t want to keep those troops on the ground waiting for their air cover.”

  “Technically, it’s your call, Jessie,” Vargas said. “I handle runways and airspace. Any aircraft you hand over to me, I have to assume it’s already been cleared by you.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that,” Jessie replied, shaking her head, eyes back on the A-10C waiting just short of the runway threshold.

  * * *

  Vaccaro knew the folks in the tower were checking the clearance list and noticing she wasn’t on it. And she also knew that they could get in trouble if they let her go. On the other hand, she was already in a world of shit for even getting this far.

  Never stop fighting, Red One One. Never.

  And make your life matter.

  She had already tuned in the tower frequency on her second communications radio and knew there was no one on final approach for Runway 23, meaning she could just go.

  “This one’s on me, guys,” Vaccaro said, nudging the throttles and taxiing beyond the threshold before aligning the nose down the runway and pushing full power.

  The Warthog kicked her back as it accelerated. Her eyes shifting between the end of the runway and the airspeed indicator, she pulled back gently on the control column at 180 knots and held that airspeed during her climb out.

  The airfield fell behind her as she stared at an ocean of stars beyond her bulletproof canopy. Reaching fifteen thousand feet, she turned to her self-assigned vector of 230 degrees, placing her bird in a direct course with the north side of that damn mountain.

  She settled the Warthog at a cruise speed of three hundred knots, which placed her precisely eighteen minutes from her objective.

  Vaccaro blinked to clear her sight. Just sitting up was a pure effort of will. The meds she had decided to take were her limit, considering her weight and that she needed to be very present and in the moment, so some pain would have to be tolerated.

  As she scanned her instruments, the KAF departure controller came on the radio.

  “Red One One, Bravo Niner Six. RTB. Repeat RTB.”

  Vaccaro grinned under her oxygen mask, before flipping a switch to cut them off. Instead, she dialed the ops frequency of the marines up on that mountain.

  “Six Six Zulu, Six Six Zulu, Red One One. How do you read?”

  A pause, followed by, “Please tell me … that you’re not … airborne.”

  It was John Wright, and he sounded out of breath. “Six Six Zulu, do you have eyes on that gorge?”

  “Negative … Two clicks away … Running.”

  “Then, John, darling,” she replied. “Run faster.”

  134

  Running on Empty

  SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  Stark watched Hagen, Martin, Ryan, and even Monica disappear up that hill as he and Larsen tried to keep up. But it was no use. There was something about the vigor and stamina of youth that no amount of exercise and diet could replace. He was hurting, and that was after shedding everything except for his night vision monocular, his MP5A1, and six spare magazines.

  Chief Larson and Captain Wright ran alongside him, also hauling the bare essentials. Sergeant Gaudet and the rest of the platoon—plus the Russians—had remained behind to search for a potentially buried bomb and to tend to Kira and the rest of the wounded until the helos arrived.

  “Go, Janki mishka,” she had told him. “Go find my bomb.”

  And to add a degree of surreal to the situation, Captain Vaccaro had decided to join in the fray after appropriating an $18 million U.S. government military aircraft. Apparently, she had been denied entry to see Lévesque, currently holed up in one of his conference rooms with his staff, which included Harwich and Duggan. So the air force captain, convinced that the Taliban attack across the mountain was just a decoy, had taken matters into her own hands.

  And based on what they had just discovered in that dead insurgent’s canvas bag, Stark had to agree wit
h her—thus the running back to where they had exited the cave, which, ironically, had been less than a thousand feet from the edge of the precipice.

  “That pilot,” Stark said to Wright, as they clambered up icy rocks leading to a snowy switchback. “Quite the pistol.”

  “You have … no idea,” he replied, checking his watch. “But shit’s about to hit the fan … at KAF headquarters.”

  They reached the switchback, turned, and faced another snowy hill.

  But at the moment Stark would much rather be here—exhausted, cold, hungry, and nearly out of breath—than at KAF, where the good Major General Lévesque was about to receive some most unsettling news via Six Six Zulu.

  135

  Around the World

  JAFABAR. SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  Osama bin Laden exited the tunnel that led to the outskirts of the village of Jafabar, back on the southern face of the mountain. To the north, he could hear the massive battle of his own creation, near the distant foot of the mountains leading to the Panjshir Valley. Over nine hundred of his battle-hardened warriors drew the attention of NATO forces, keeping the enemy looking in the wrong direction.

  But not for long, he thought, realizing that by now the group that had killed Akhtar—and nearly killed him—would have realized the ruse.

  Escaping the strafing had been easy in their tunnel systems, which nearly traversed the mountain. They were used primarily to allow contingents of men to recover from their holy jihad, to shift forces from one theater to another, and of course, to survive the onslaught of bombs on the surface.

  The enemy had sophisticated and highly terrifying weapons.

  His men had deep caves and tunnels, which had been good enough to defeat all previous invaders.

  And now the mighty United States.

  This remote headquarters in the Taliban-controlled town in the middle of Taliban-controlled territory was away from NATO’s prying eyes in the sky.