“Let’s go,” he ordered.
Slinging his M4 over his back, Tanner leaped up to grab the top of the wall, pulling himself up. Around him, the others scrambled over the eight-foot-high obstacle. Chad’s leg was wrapped so tightly, he could barely bend it, so getting him over was a pain in the ass, but the machine gunner clenched his teeth and dealt with the pain.
They started taking sporadic gunfire the moment they dropped to the ground inside the compound. Tanner and his guys ignored it as best they could, spreading out to make it harder to hit them, then picking up the pace as they ran through the buildings and narrow alleys of the school property. It wasn’t time to shoot back yet. It was time to move fast—and get as close as they could to the gate before too many people realized they were in there.
They were within sight of the gate, and the two big 14.5mm truck-mounted machine guns positioned on either side of it, when the Taliban fighters finally figured out there was another threat coming at them from inside the walls. That was when the battle really started.
Bullets kicked up dirt around them as Tanner shouted orders to his men, moving them toward the left side of the gate. They’d focus all their attention on the machine gun positioned to that side and do everything they could to take it out. If they survived, then they’d worry about the one on the right. It was better to keep his small force together as long as possible and knock out one of the heavy weapons than split their forces and accomplish nothing.
Unfortunately, the fighters surrounding the machine gun on the left quickly figured out what the plan was and immediately skewed the big weapon around in their direction. The night sky suddenly lit up with muzzle flash and tracer glow. Around Tanner, members of his team went down, and he knew they weren’t going to get back up.
“Keep moving!” he shouted, forcing himself not to think about the price his friends were going to pay for taking out the weapons. “Put everything you have on that gun!”
It was an easy order to give but hard to do. There was nothing as bone-numbingly insane as charging up to the barrel of a heavy-duty machine gun when bullets the size of a person’s thumb were coming at you at a rate of one hundred and fifty rounds per second. There were thousands of people in the world who would never consider doing something so stupid. As for those who were brave enough to try it, most of them would give up after seeing the guy beside him get ripped in half by the vicious weapon.
But Tanner’s men continued to advance, laying down their own machine gun fire and launching 40mm grenades toward the truck. Tanner glanced over and saw Chad was barely keeping up with his bum leg. That’s when he realized Danny, as well as a couple of the Afghanis, were nowhere to be seen. His heart tightened in his chest, suddenly making it hard to breathe. If Danny could have moved at all, he would have been at their side…crawling if he had to.
Tanner pushed that thought away and kept moving, knowing the rest of the team would keep going only as long as he did.
They were less than forty feet away when Vas finally put a 40mm grenade directly in the back of the truck, silencing the thunder of the big weapon. Tanner kept them moving in that direction, emptying the remainder of his M4 magazine into the back of the vehicle until some of the spare ammo back there blew up. The truck bucked under the explosion, erupting into a fireball as the gas tank caught on fire. Flaming chunks of metal rained down on them, and out of the corner of his eye, Tanner saw another Afghani go down hard as a blur of flashing debris hit him in the chest.
Tanner refused to look around anymore, not wanting to know just how bad it really was. But he instinctively knew he’d lost a lot of his guys already.
“The other gun!” he shouted to anyone who was left, reloading his weapon as he ran in that direction.
His remaining men fell into step beside him. They had taken it in the ass so far, but they weren’t giving up.
The Taliban couldn’t swing the second machine gun around to shoot at them, not with Ryan and the other Rangers charging hard at the gate from outside the walls. But even without that threat, the heat coming at Tanner and his team still intensified as the Taliban fighters realized they had to keep them from taking out that machine gun. If Tanner and his team succeeded, the Taliban would be overrun by the good guys within seconds.
Not that what happened to the Taliban fighters mattered to Tanner at the moment. He and his remaining men were focused only on surviving the next few minutes and getting to that machine gun.
They’d advanced another fifteen feet against the onslaught of ball and tracer rounds coming their way, far enough to start laying accurate fire on the operator of that 14.5mm gun, when Tanner heard Chad’s M249 suddenly go silent. He twisted around in time to see the man who’d been on his team from day one tumble to the ground beside Vas, who must have gone down a split second earlier. Neither man moved.
As much as Tanner wanted to drop to his knees and yank his friends to his chest and make this all stop, he knew he couldn’t. He had to keep going or Ryan and the rest of his platoon would end up just like Danny, Vas, Chad, and the Afghanis who’d been brave enough to
