Ryan fought nausea as he sat on the floor of the helo, looking out at the dark landscape outside. He actually got to the point where he wanted to vomit all over himself to rid himself of any food or water in his stomach so that he might recover before go time. But he did not throw up, he just sat there, pinned tightly between Mohammed al Darkur on his right and Dom on his left. Chavez faced them, and five more Zarrar commandos sat with them in the chopper, along with a door-gunner manning a 7.62-millimeter machine gun and a loadmaster who rode up front near the two pilots.
The other choppers would be loaded up much the same.
Chavez shouted over the engines’ roar, “Dom and Jack. I want you two guys on my back the whole time we’re inside the walls. Keep your weapons at the high and ready. We move as a unit.”
Ryan had never experienced terror like this in his entire life. Everyone for fifty miles in every direction, save for the men in the four choppers, would kill him if they saw him.
Al Darkur had been wearing a headset to communicate with the flight crew, but he pulled it off and replaced it with his helmet. He then leaned over to Chavez and yelled, “It is almost time. They will circle for ten minutes! No more! Then they leave us.”
“Got it,” Ding answered back.
Ryan leaned forward into Chavez’s black-greased face. “Is ten minutes enough time?”
The diminutive Mexican-American shrugged. “If we get bogged down in the building, we’re dead. The whole place, inside and out, is crawling with Haqqani’s forces. Every second we are in there is a second some gomer has to draw a bead on us. If we aren’t out in ten minutes, we ain’t coming out, ’
Ryan nodded, leaned away, and looked back out the window toward the undulating black hills below.
The chopper lurched up dramatically, and Jack spewed vomit against the glass.
Sam Driscoll had no idea if it was day or night. Usually he could make a guess as to the time of day going by the guard rotation or whether or not his meal was just bread (morning), or bread with a small tin of watery broth (night). After weeks in captivity he and the two men still held with him had begun to think that the guards had switched the meals up to confuse them.
A Reuters reporter from Australia was in the cell next to him. His name was Allen Lyle, and he was young, not over thirty, but he was sick with some sort of stomach virus. He had not been able to keep anything down for the past few days. In the furthest cell, the one closest to the door to the hallway, an Afghani politician was held. He’d been here only a few days, and he was getting occasional beatings from the guards, but he was in otherwise good health.
Sam’s legs had healed for the most part in the past month, but he had a significant limp and he could tell he had not avoided infection altogether. He felt weak and sick and he perspired through the night, and he’d lost a great deal of weight and muscle tone lying on his rope cot.
He made himself stand and hobble over to the bars so that he could check on the young guy from Reuters. For the first week or so the man badgered him relentlessly, asking him who he worked for and what he was doing when he was captured by the Taliban. But Driscoll never answered the guy’s questions, and Reuters man finally gave up. Now it looked like Reuters man might give up on his life within a few days.
“Hey!” Sam shouted. “Lyle! Wake up!”
The reporter stirred. His eyes opened to half-mast. “Is that a helicopter?”
The three jailers outside the cell heard it, too. They looked at one another, then stood and peered down the dark hallway, shouting to a guard somewhere out of Driscoll’s sight.
One of the men made a joke, and the three laughed.
The Afghani politician looked to Driscoll and said, “They say it is President Kealty coming to look for you and the reporter.”
Sam sighed. It wasn’t the first time they’d heard Pakistani Army choppers overhead. They always faded after a couple of seconds. Driscoll turned to go sit back down.
And then…
A low crack erupted somewhere above him. Sam turned back to the hall.
Machine-gun fire came soon after. And then another explosion.
“Everybody get down on the floor!” Driscoll shouted to the other prisoners. If this was a rescue attempt by the PDF, and if there was any shooting down here, even out in the hall, then there would be ricocheted rounds banging all around this stone-walled basement, and friendly fire would hurt just as bad as enemy fire.
Sam started to look for some measure of cover himself, but one of the jailers came to his cell. The man’s eyes were wide with fear and determination. Sam got the impression this fucker was going to use him as a human shield if the PDF made it down into the basement.
They’d been off the helicopter for nearly two minutes, and Jack Ryan had not yet seen the enemy. First they dropped into a knee-deep trash pit some one hundred yards from the target. Jack could not understand why the pilot had dumped them so far from their target until, upon running closer to the compound, they saw several rows of electricity poles and wires crisscrossing the open ground in front of the main gate.
Then, while Chavez set the water-tamped breaching charge at the perimeter gate, Jack, Dom, and Mohammed watched his six. They dropped to their knees and scanned the dark rooftops and gates of a cluster of walled compounds on the other side of a rocky plain, and they kept their eyes on the corners of the wall of the Haqqani compound to the north and south. Above them the big Puma choppers circled, occasionally emitting jackhammer bursts from door guns or staccato cracks from Zarrar commandos firing their small arms into the compound. A twenty-millimeter cannon fired from one of the fat birds sent explosive rounds into the hillside beyond the compound in order to let the forty Taliban supposedly in the barracks know that they needed to stay right where they were.
Finally, over the hellacious sounds from above, Jack heard, “Fire in the hole!” and he found cover by pressing himself against the fourteen-foot-high baked-brick wall. Just seconds after this came the boom of the breaching charge, blowing the black oak and iron gates of the compound in like tossed toothpicks.
And then just like that, they were inside the walls, running for the main building, thirty yards ahead. Ryan saw the long low barracks some forty yards off his right shoulder, and just as he looked tracer rounds kicked up sparks near the dark structure from machine guns fired from above.
Jack was tight on Dom’s heels and Mohammed was just behind Jack, all the men running behind Chavez, who led the way with his AUG at his shoulder.
Jack was surprised when Chavez fired his rifle ahead. Ryan looked to see where the bullets were impacting and saw they were tearing up a small building or garage to the left of the main house. From there a bright light flashed and a rocket-propelled grenade launched into the sky but it seemed to have been poorly aimed.
Ding fired again and again, Ryan got his P-90 up to send some rounds downrange himself, but the team arrived at the wall of the main house before he even found a target in the night.
They scooted down the wall, closer to the front door, Ding still in the lead. Chavez nodded to Caruso, who quickly raced across the closed door and pressed up against the wall on the other side. Chavez nodded to Ryan, who started to pull a stun grenade from a pouch hanging on his right thigh. But as he reached for it he saw a second and a third RPG flying through the air, launched from the grounds behind the main building. Both grenades looked like they were perfectly aimed at a Puma that flew nearest to the barracks buildings.
And they were. The first RPG streaked right by the pilot’s windscreen, and the second slammed into the tail just aft of the two engines. Ryan stood fascinated, watching as the tail exploded and the aircraft spun away to the right, turned nose down, and disappeared behind a plume of black smoke.
The crash came outside the wall, lower on the rocky plain.
