by Leigh Barker
“Not saved yet,” she said, turning back to the officers.
Loco saw the Taliban duck down behind the pickup, which was odd, the rest of them charging up the hill. Unless he was their boss, the leader pointing the way from back in the rear. Yeah, that would be the officer. He focused the scope on the pickup, but couldn’t see the man. Then he saw his reflection in the broken door mirror. He was crouching down and talking into a radio. Probably ordering a Kabuli Pulao, though more likely a Big Mac. Hate the Great Satan; love his Big Mac.
He lowered his aim and fired a round that went through the side window, the driver’s seat and the door. He saw a drifting mist of crimson blood and he got back to the pressing task of staying alive.
Gunny and Winter slid down the hill behind him and took up position on either side.
“Picked a bad time to visit, Gunny,” Loco said, then raised his rifle and blew a fighter back off the rock he’d just jumped up onto to get a better shot. “The natives are restless.”
Gunny ignored him, as usual, rested his M16 on the boulder he was using as cover, and got to work, with Winter on his left already firing down on the Taliban advancing up the boulder-strewn hill.
He didn’t have to search for a target, there were plenty to go around and spare. He knocked down a fighter as he jumped across a narrow gulley, and another coming up from the pickup. Even with rest of the squad laying down deadly accurate fire, he knew that at almost ten to one, they didn’t have enough time or ammo to do anything more than delay the inevitable.
Loco saw a fighter running up the rutted road towards the village and sighted and fired without conscious thought. He wondered for a second where the man had been going. Maybe to kill the villagers or to outflank them and come up behind the hill. Didn’t matter now, the fool had a hole where his chest used to be.
“I ever tell you I love you like a brother, Gunny?” he said, and treated him to a slightly manic grin.
“Stop talking, start shooting,” Gunny said, without looking.
“Anybody particular you want me to shoot at?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gunny said. “Pick one.” He saw an arm appear from behind a boulder, put a round in it and then in the man who stumbled into view.
The Taliban were spreading out, using the pickups and the boulders as cover. Gunny watched them moving for a moment, then turned to Smokey ten yards off to his right. “Smokey, they’re trying to flank us.” He pointed at the bend in the road where it started up towards the village.
“Copy that, Gunny,” Smokey said, and crawled further up the hill.
“Winter?”
“Yo, I’m on it.” Winter moved off to his left.
“Loco, make some smoke.”
Loco adjusted his position and sighted on the Toyota wedged against the rocks. The first round ruptured the fuel tank as though it were rice paper, and the gas gushed back down the road and under the pickup with the wrecked engine. No fire, yet. He could see part of the tilted truck’s transmission and checked it through the scope. It was a couple of feet above the road. Too high for his needs. He switched to the second pickup. The fuel was puddling under the front towbar. Even at two hundred yards what he planned was a tough shot. He relaxed, put the crosshairs on the edge of the towbar and squeezed the trigger.
The round clipped the steel plate and sent a shower of sparks over the gas. That worked. The gas ignited and the flames ran back up to the punctured tank. A moment later the exploding fuel tank flipped the Toyota up and onto its back. Then the second pickup blew, and a moment later the third. It was a chain reaction, each explosion engulfing the vehicle right up behind it. In a few seconds all six taliwagons were blazing and belching thick, acrid smoke out among the rocks.
The Taliban fighters were caught. They could stay under cover and choke to death, or try to break out and get shot by the Americans.
They went for option two. The first three to break cover didn’t make it more than a couple of steps, but then the rest of them jumped up and ran up the hill, screaming Allahu Akbar!
The Taliban were firing their Kalashnikovs on the run, just emptying their mags. It was a technique that would’ve put a marine in the stockade, but with so many rounds blowing up the hill, sooner or later somebody was going to get hit. Gunny pushed the thought from his mind, it wasn’t doing any good, and there were other more pressing things to think about. Staying alive long enough to be worried about being dead.
“Shit!” he said, and started firing. “That plan worked.”
“Yeah, didn’t it?” Winter said.
“You hear something?” Loco said, and cocked his head to listen.
“Yeah, Saint Peter calling,” Winter said, then stopped firing and listened. “Yeah, I do.”
Gunny stopped firing and put his head above the boulder, then pulled it back again as a dozen rounds zipped by.
“There!” Winter said, pointing southwest, but keeping his hand behind the rocks.
The Taliban had heard it too and stopped their advance to look back across the road at the hilltops. When the Apache helicopter suddenly popped up above the hill, some of them turned to fire at it, but the rest just ran.
Smokey opened up with his machine gun and woke up the others. In a few seconds the fighters brave enough to take on the Apache were chopped down by the boys on the hill.
The Apache banked, dipped and released four of its sixteen Hellfire missiles, then it came on in and opened up with its M230 chain gun.
The Taliban had nowhere to run.
“Come on,” Gunny shouted above the cacophony of missile strikes and the clatter of the Apache’s thirty-cal chopping up the Taliban.
They slid back from the boulders and ran crouched along the hillside, keeping below the ridge. The fighters were dying all over the place, but some of them might just want to take the Americans with them.
They slid down to the road around a sharp bend that shielded them from the Taliban, and from the Apache pilot who might just mistake them for bad men and turn the wrath of that magnificent machine on them. Not something to be welcomed.
Gunny stepped onto the dirt road and stopped. A vehicle was approaching fast. He backed up into the rocks and leveled his M16, with the rest of them following his lead. The MATV bounced into sight and accelerated.
“Nice of him to join us,” Loco said, lowering his Barrett.
“Yeah, now the shooting’s over,” Smokey said.
“He did the right thing,” Gunny said. “Staying around would mean we’d be walking back to Bagram.”
“Guess so,” Loco said, and waved Sergeant Abram to stop, in case he decided not to.
They climbed into the all-terrain vehicle and hung on while Abram bounced it off the rocks and got out of there as fast as he could.
“Looks like Major Larkin came through for you boys after all,” he said as they roared through the last village on the way back to the main road.
“Yeah,” Gunny said. “And I plan to go see him the minute we’re back at Bagram. To say thanks in person.”
Ethan answered the call on his cell and listened for a few seconds, then smiled. “Not dead, then, Gunny?”
Kelsey glanced at him from the driver’s seat and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Don’t thank me, it’s SecAF you have to thank.” He looked out of the window at the pale winter sunshine, noticing it for the first time. “Yeah, I’ll tell her next time we’re having tea on the terrace.” He put the cell back in his pocket.
“They okay?” Kelsey said.
“As okay as they’re ever going to be for their advanced years.”
Kelsey laughed, but it was relief, not the joke. “Where to? You still want to go see Dryer?” She glanced at him. “You know he presses your buttons.”
“He’s just doing his job.”
She stared at him. “The excitement must have warped your brain. Did I just hear you saying something nice about Special Agent in Charge Timothy Dryer?”
“Don’t go grey wo
rrying about me. It’s just caffeine withdrawal. And I missed lunch.”
“That’s easily fixed.” Kelsey took the next left at speed and ignored the friendly waves and horn-blowing from the happy motorists she cut across.
The maître d’ held open the door and smiled at her. “Good afternoon, Miss Lyle.” He waved them past into the restaurant. “Your usual table is free.”
Ethan looked around the cellar restaurant. The reason Kelsey’s usual table was free was easy to deduce, for a trained detective. There was only one other table occupied, by a middle-aged couple on an… assignation. And he didn’t need to be a trained detective to see that one either. The way they looked up quickly when the door opened shouted it.
Kelsey took the corner seat and Ethan sat with his back to the door, something gunslingers would never do. He mentioned it to Kelsey, who gave him a long worried look before picking up the menu.
“You come here a lot?” he asked with a grin.
“No,” she said, still studying the leather-bound menu. “First time.”
“But the guy in the monkey suit—” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, then nodded. “Right.” He picked up a menu, glanced at it and put it down. “They do steak?”
“No, only gruel and stale bread,” Kelsey said without looking up from the menu.
“Then that’s what I’m having.”
“What, the gruel and dry bread, or the steak?”
The waiter appeared suddenly but without any puff of smoke and waited in silence. Kelsey ordered Cajun chicken salad and Ethan rib-eye steak with Roquefort cheese sauce and hand-cut potato wedges, which he guessed were fat fries.
He waited for the waiter to disappear, but had to settle for him mincing back to the kitchen, his ass sashaying in his over-tight black pants. Ethan shook his head. “You think he’s ex-army?”
Kelsey sprayed the water she’d been sipping. “Be serious,” she said as she mopped the table with her napkin.
“Okay,” Ethan said, leaning forward so the secret lovers wouldn’t hear. “Here’s serious. How did the Taliban know the boys were there?”
Kelsey watched him while she considered it, then shrugged. “Easy enough, I guess. They’re probably watching the airfield.”
Ethan looked past her at the framed poster of Robert Mitchum in the movie Eldorado on the wall above her head. Out of place in an Italian restaurant. “Maybe they were, but…”
“Yeah, too many, too quick?”
“Exactly,” he said. “You should be a cop or something.”
“I’ll think about it, but I’d rather be a ballerina,” she said, and raised an eyebrow. “So, how did the Taliban know the boys were there?”
“That’s a good question. I wish I’d thought of it.”
“The mole?” She shook her head. “We have her in custody.”
“Sure, but only today, she could’ve told them yesterday.”
“No,” she said, “they left last night. Dryer got the intel from airport surveillance.”
“Then how?” He looked up at the picture. The sixties, a great decade for movies, and other stuff. But if you can remember the sixties… He couldn’t, pity. He’d been born just as it ended.
“Who did you tell?” Kelsey said, interrupting his mental meandering.
He thought about it, even though he didn’t need to. “You.”
She put up her hands. “Okay, you got me. I did it.”
“SecNav. He provided the air transport.”
“Private jet,” she corrected.
“Private jet.” He smiled a smile that died on the vine. “Then that’s where it came from.”
“What? A leak from SecNav? No way, he has floor-to-ceiling secrets. He doesn’t make that kind of mistake. It costs lives.”
“I agree, but if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t SecNav, then it had to be one of the boys shooting his mouth off.”
“Is that possible?”
“Possible, yes,” he said. “Likely, no.”
“Then there has to be another source.”
The waiter with the tight trousers returned and put a dish of oil and a plate of fresh bread on the table, looked at Ethan for a little too long, then turned and drifted away.
“Definitely army,” Ethan said. “Always said—”
“NCIS would know,” Kelsey said.
“They guard SecNav, so yeah, they’d know.” Ethan leaned back in his chair and looked away into space. “Some of them would know,” he said to himself. “Someone with access to the flight manifest.”
“Another mole?” Kelsey said. “That seems unlikely.”
“When you’ve eliminated the impossible, what’s left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
“You quoting Sherlock Holmes? Almost,” Kelsey said. “But it’s a good point. Question is, have we eliminated the impossible?”
The waiter returned, dropped the salad in front of Kelsey with barely a glance, and placed a huge steak and wedges carefully before Ethan with a little pout.
“Were you in the army?” Ethan asked.
“No,” the waiter replied and hung his head theatrically. “I would’ve lurved to have been, but it wasn’t to be.” He leaned closer. “I have an impediment.” He stood up, sighed and turned away.
Ethan slapped his ass as he left and got an Oooh! in response. And a long look from Kelsey.
He lifted his steak with his fork, examined it and turned it over on his plate.
“Looking for an IED?” Kelsey said.
“Looking to see if it’s a piece of horse dressed up as rib-eye.”
“Not in Mario’s, heads would roll,” she said, folded a leaf and munched it.
“That was Mario at the door?” Ethan said, and sliced a chunk of meat off the confirmed rib-eye, though he would’ve eaten it had it been horse. Not the first time he’d eaten grilled Dobbin.
“No, that was Mario’s son, Mario,” Kelsey said, as if it made some sort of sense.
“Good to know this fine establishment is staying in the family,” Ethan said.
“You were talking about Sherlock Holmes,” she said.
Ethan leaned across the table. “Looks like good chicken.” He got a nod in response. “You going to eat that?”
She pulled the plate closer. “Yes. But if you eat all that meat and fries, you’ll explode.”
“Don’t like fries,” he said.
“What?” Her eyes squeezed shut as she tried to silence the grating sound in her head. “Then why order them?”
“Don’t like just meat on the plate. I guess it’s my mother’s fault. Y’know? No meat without having veg, it’s good for a growing boy. And everybody knows fries are veg.”
She continued to watch him as if she expected a hand to reach down from space and whip him back to the mother ship.
Ethan cut a slice off the steak and let it rest halfway to his mouth. “How long have you known the geek kid?”
“You mean Ed?” She got a nod. “Three years or so, why?” She gave a little start. “You can’t think he tipped off the Taliban. What would be his motive?”
“Money.”
“Whose money?”
He shrugged and let the steak continue its journey to fulfill its karma. “Eliminating, that’s all,” he said with his mouth full, something else his mother had an opinion about. He cut another cube and it started its ascent.
“You might just as well say the FBI leaked it. They have access to flight data too.”
The steak stopped more or less where the previous piece had, and Ethan looked up at Mitchum’s poster without seeing him. “Of course they do.”
“What?” she said. “So now it’s the FBI tipping off the Taliban? Yeah, I can see that.”
He pushed the piece of steak into his mouth. “Yeah, I guess it is a bit of a reach.”
“A bit?”
“Still like to get a look at the geek’s bank account.”
She nibbled a tiny bit of chicken. “So here’s a question.”
“Who you gonna call?”
He looked up and skipped the answer that jumped into his head. “To do what?”
“To look at the gee… Ed’s bank account,” she said, finally risking taking a whole bite of chicken.
“And that’s a good question, one I’m sure you have the answer to.”
“I do.” She put down her fork. “Lisa.”
Now he put his fork down. “Lisa? She’s the girl geek at the FBI, right?”
“She is.” She squinted at him. “The one you suspected of being the mole.”
He shrugged. “Could still be. There doesn’t just have to be one.” That was weak and he knew it. “But I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones.”
“That’s big of you.”
“Let’s go and ask her to snoop on her fellow geek.” He stood up. Then sat down. “Are you coming?”
“I am.” She picked up her fork. “As soon as I’ve eaten this.” She set about the chicken salad.
He smiled, pulled his plate closer and resumed his meat feast, pushing aside Mario’s famous hand-cut potato wedges to leave room for a slice of chocolate fudge cake he’d spotted on the sweet trolley. Veg was important, but chocolate fudge cake was vital, everybody knew that too.
“Change of plan,” he said as Kelsey drove back towards FBI headquarters.
She glanced at him. “You change your mind more often than my maiden aunt Mable.”
He chuckled. “You don’t have a maiden aunt Mable.”
“And how would you know?” She glared at him. “You read my file!”
“Interesting reading it was too.”
“I doubt that.” She pulled the SUV up to the curb and fiddled with the radio until she found a station playing country and western.
“You like this stuff?” Ethan said.
“What’s not to like?” She turned the sound up. “Bet it didn’t say that in my file.”
He leaned forward and turned it off. “No, but it didn’t need to, I can see you’re in pain.”
“Thought you’d like it. From your part of the world, isn’t it?”
