with the binos while he explored higher up the hill. Right behind their position, the little path ducked into a flat pocket of land that skirted a slightly higher hill. Kyle climbed it in five long steps, liked what he saw, and did some more digging, arranging a little wall of rocks and some brushwork, then came back down. He was careful this time to leave plenty of bootprints leading to the hide.
Then he went back off the trail and explored both sides of a small canyon that opened before him, and found a field of large rocks and boulders. He established a third hide there.
He trotted back to the original position. Both he and Middleton drank some more water, then lay side by side while they scanned the country they had crossed, Middleton with the binocs and Swanson with the scope of Excalibur, while Kyle explained the next step of the escape and evasion plan.
They saw it about the same time: a triangular dust trail rising from the road, kicked up by a fast-moving vehicle they recognized as the familiar shape of a Humvee. “Here they come,” said Middleton. “With any luck, they’ll stop and search the junkyard, or go highballing right on by us.”
“Not a chance,” Swanson replied. “Get on the horn and tell the MEU to come get us right now.”
Victor Logan was in the passenger seat of the Humvee, with a map on his lap and the GPS locator box between his knees. He was sore all over from the crash, and his spine flared with so much pain that he believed he must have cracked something. At least he was better off than that Russky, who was shot in the face, and the pilot, who had two broken arms. The mercenary ignored his body and studied the readout. The numbers had been flashing steadily when the sniper was on the move, but had remained still now for more than a minute. Logan put a checkpoint on the map.
The big German was expertly handling the Humvee and the Gurkha was in the back seat, relaxed. Neither said anything. Logan saw that the road was flat and empty and straight, with some sort of clutter that looked like a stack of junk coming up on the right side in about a mile at an intersection. He located the crossroads on the map, then drew a line from his position on the road to the coordinates on the GPS. “Turn here,” he told the German, and pointed off to the left at about a forty-five-degree angle.
The driver did not remove his foot from the gas pedal and the Humvee went slashing into the field, the big wheels crushing a path through the cultivated plants.
“Damn!” Middleton exclaimed as the Humvee peeled away from the road. It had not even gotten to the junkyard, much less searched it. Instead, the vehicle was speeding straight for them.
“Yup,” Kyle said. “Be ready to move out.” He banished everything from his mind except the oncoming Humvee, and let time slow down on his internal clock as he took slow, deep breaths, never taking his eye from the scope. He let Excalibur do the math for a higher-to-lower elevation at two hundred yards.
The Humvee closed to three hundred yards, then two-fifty, and stopped.
Swanson released the scope to automatic range-finding. “That’s fuckin’ far enough,” he said.
The German got out of the driver’s side, and reached back inside to get a weapon. He had pale skin and a shaved head, wore narrow sunglasses, and apparently was chewing gum. The blue stripe flashed and Kyle took him out, the bullet crashing into his exposed left side beneath the arm and rupturing the heart and lungs. The big man was thrown sideways by the impact, dead before he hit the ground.
Middleton opened up with his AK-47 and Victor Logan dove from the other side and rolled into a drainage ditch, while the Gurkha went out the back and jumped to the opposite side of the vehicle. Both disappeared into the thick tangle of cotton plants.
Swanson put two more rounds into the engine block of the Humvee, and his shots were answered by searching, controlled, three-round bursts that pecked around their position. For several minutes, the firefight banged sporadically. Logan and the Gurkha were firing and crawling closer, trying to flank the hide.
A dark speck rose from the field and bounced toward them. “Grenade!” Kyle yelled and pushed Middleton down hard. The explosion shook the ground, sprayed a cloud of shrapnel, and blew up a cloud of dust and debris. Both attackers were up and running when the detonation occurred, then went back into cover and resumed firing.
“Go now,” Kyle said. “You first.”
Middleton pushed himself up enough to crawl backward out of the hole, turned, and sprinted up the trail. When he reached the curve, he knelt and called to Swanson. “Come on!” He fired short volleys into the fields.
Logan watched the readout when he saw the figure retreat, and the numbers had stayed steady. That was the general running. The sniper would be next. He took careful aim at a spot halfway between where the grenade had gone off and the spot where he saw the general disappear.
Swanson, with Excalibur in one hand and his M-16 in the other, took off, running low under the general’s covering fire. Logan’s bullets cracked around him, but he slid safely headfirst into the bushes beside Middleton. Both paused long enough to put more lead into the likely approaches to their old position.
“Drop the pack, take the sat phone, get back to the rocks, and pop a smoke,” Swanson said. Middleton did as he was told while Kyle fired a few shots to keep the bad guys’ heads down. He did not wait for Middleton to reach the new position. He ran forward, taking a couple of long strides up the little hill to where he had built the other hide, and lobbed the pack into it, then gripped Excalibur around the barrel and flung it into the hole, too. He sprinted back ten meters, dove prone behind some scrub brush, and began to crawl to his ambush point.
The Gurkha and Logan arrived at the original hide about the same time, and were moving fast. The American read the GPS numbers again and saw they were slightly different, but once again still, which indicated the sniper was in a new hide. While the Asian guy covered him, Logan crawled to the curve in the path and snuggled into some rocks and brush. He spotted the position: a hurriedly built hide bordered with rocks and bushes, with bootprints clear in the dirt.
He heard a pop and saw a stream of smoke rising from further up the trail. They had sent up a red smoke grenade, which meant that a rescue team was inbound and was to consider the LZ to be hot. Logan could not worry about that right now. Al-Shoum would be sending helicopters to the smoke, too, and the Marines and the Syrians could figure out what to do when they all arrived about the same time. Should be interesting, Logan thought, but he had to be gone by then.
He used hand signals to communicate with the Gurkha, who was on the ground about twenty feet away, and for the first time saw the man smile. Born in the Himalayas and growing up in the icy shadow of Mount Everest, the small commando felt more comfortable as the fight left the flat land and moved into some hills. His people had lived for centuries among the highest mountains in the world, and the spirit of these little hills spoke to him. He thought he could probably walk to the highest peak without breaking a sweat. Instead of moving directly up the path, the Gurkha crawled around to the left while Logan pumped shots up there to keep the Americans busy. He slung his rifle across his back and unsheathed his long knife with the thick curved blade. By custom, he could not put the
It took him no more than a minute to come around a boulder and be within reach of the sniper’s position. The Gurkha flipped a grenade into the secluded hole, ducked away to avoid the explosion, and was immediately up and charging, giving a chilling attack scream and slashing with his
Swanson was exposed during the attack for only a moment, but in that second, Victor Logan fired a quick burst at the shadow he saw moving through the dust of the explosion. Kyle felt bullets punch him in the stomach, and he was spun around, knocked over atop the dead Ghurka.
“
The mercenary felt cold steel at the back of his head. Before he could react, Brad Middleton pulled the trigger of the big pistol, and three shots pulverized the skull and the brains of Victor Logan. “No. You’re not,” said the general. “You’re not even close to being as good as Shake.”
Behind him, the sky seemed alive with approaching helicopters.
CHAPTER 59
