Improvised, the attack resembled a reverse-L ambush. The Mujahedeen had been presented with a gift. They took full advantage.
Mujahedeen charged the column, firing single shots and short bursts. Beatty was hit three times. His front plate stopped one round. Another drilled his shoulder. The third hit him in the throat, two inches above his chest plate. He went down, coughing blood.
Cray was in extremis. The groin wound had severed his femoral artery, and he was bleeding out. Trainor tore open a battlefield dressing and slapped it over the wound, but the blood spurted from around the edges. It was like trying to plug a garden hose with a wad of Kleenex.
The Mujahedeen ran at the column from the left and behind. Trainor watched Cray’s eyes roll back in their sockets. She let go of the dressing, snatched at the rifle she had dropped on the rocks.
A Mujahedeen carrying an AK47 rushed at her and kicked her in the chest. The force of the impact knocked the breath from her body. She tumbled onto her back. The man pinned her to the ground with his foot, shoved the muzzle of the AK47 in her face.
All around her, the firing had dwindled to sporadic single shots. She realized the Mujahedeen were finishing off the survivors.
Staring down the black muzzle of a rifle, Robyn Trainor closed her eyes and prepared to die.
“Had you never been to the village before?” I ask.
“No,” Trainor replies. “Our platoons were fresh into the valley. In fact, the Arwal was considered relatively safe. The three sides… ours, Najibullah’s, and Shahzad’s… tended to avoid action in the valley. It was a kind of neutral zone.”
“Were you the only survivor?” I ask.
“Yes,” Trainor says. “I’m surprised they didn’t tell you at the briefing.”
I’m not. The reason I wanted her story was because Stein, General Anthony, and Koenig glossed over it. Their focus was on Colonel Grissom. To them, Sergeant Robyn Trainor is nothing more than a pawn. An excuse to conduct face-to-face negotiations over the fate of a country.
“You were lucky.”
“I think so. I have a theory about that.”
“I’m all ears.” We arrive at a tangled obstacle of exposed roots and brush. Trainor holds onto a tree branch for support, starts to swing herself out onto the slope. “Come right back,” I warn her. “We don’t know where that Taliban patrol is.”
Trainor takes one step onto the bare slope, hops nimbly back inside the tree line. I give her a twenty-foot head start, then follow. A sniper surprised by her quick movement might be ready for me.
Concealed by the tree line, I breathe more easily.
“They wanted to capture an American woman,” Trainor continues. “I took my headscarf off, and my hair stood out. They were careful not to shoot me.”
“An American and a woman,” I observe. “It wasn’t luck.”
“No,” Trainor says. “It wasn’t.”
11
Sniper Duel
Kagur-Ghar
Tuesday, 1100
The trail ahead opens onto a thirty-foot stretch of mountainside. Hubble stops and raises his right fist.
I crane my neck to scope out the situation. A landslide carried away a triangular section of the slope. There are pine trees forty feet above the cleared zone. Their root systems are exposed, hanging over the edge in a dirty tangle.
“Five-Five Charlie, this is Five-Five Sierra.”
“Go ahead, Sierra,” Hubble says.
“What do you think?”
“The slope looks solid enough.” Hubble studies the open ground with suspicion. “Suggest we cross one at a time.”
Koenig’s voice crackles onto the squad net. “Five-Five Charlie, this is Five-Five Actual. Go ahead when you’re ready.”
Rifle slung across his chest, Hubble ventures onto the slope. Tests the mix of loose red earth and black shale. He finds a stable purchase, picks his way across. Ten feet. Twenty feet.
Hubble’s body jerks, and he pitches over the side. A gunshot echoes from a great distance.
Trainor gasps.
“Fuck.” Koenig drops to one knee, strains to get a better view. “Where did that come from?”
“Didn’t see a flash.” Takigawa presses himself against the trunk of a pine tree. Scans the dark slope of Parkat.
Takigawa didn’t see the flash because he wasn’t looking in the direction from which the shot was fired.
First I squeeze past Trainor, then Koenig. “Wait one,” I tell him. “I need to see for myself.”
I crouch next to Takigawa.
“Son of a bitch has the angle,” Takigawa says.
“He’s picked himself a spot.”
Takigawa glances at Hubble’s body, broken on the rocks below. Then he stares across the no-man’s land at the safety of trees thirty feet away.
“Can you find a spot with a clear shot?” Takigawa asks.
“Depends on where he is, doesn’t it.”
Mentally, I transport myself halfway across the chasm. Where Hubble was standing when he was shot. I look out at the long whaleback of Parkat. Let’s say the bad guy has a Dragunov, effective to eight hundred yards. The distance from where Hubble was shot to the opposite point on Parkat looks a thousand yards. With winds, cold temperatures, and barometric pressure to correct for. Trigonometrically, that implies any other position on Parkat will be outside the sniper’s effective range.
“I don’t care how good he is,” I say. “He’s pushing it.”
At a thousand yards, under these conditions, hitting Hubble with one shot involved as much luck as skill.
Above us stands a wall of pines, where the landslide ripped a chunk out of the forest. “That’s the best spot. Climb to those trees. Let me know when you’re set. I’ll draw his fire.”
Takigawa chuckles. “Dude, you’re the legend.”
I shrug off my rucksack and plate carrier. Fish a laser rangefinder from a side pocket. With the M110 slung across my back, I plunge into the forest and climb the wooded slope.
“You know what I’m thinking?” Takigawa discards radio protocol.
“I can guess.”
“Remember that sniper who got the world record for the world’s longest kill?”
“What about him?” I grunt, testing each handhold and foothold. I’m twenty feet above the trail. The stand of trees over the chasm is obscured. I keep climbing.
“He took five shots to get the hit.”
I laugh. “Yeah, what are you
