Immediately one of the three remaining helicopters veered out of its tight circular pattern around the Haqqani compound and flew off toward the crash.
“Shit!” said Chavez. “We’re losing our cover. Let’s go!”
65
Dom kicked open the front door of the house, and Ryan tossed his stun grenade into the entry hall, staying just to the left of the doorway and out of the line of fire from inside the building.
All four men rushed in; Dom and Ryan went to the right and Ding and Mohammed shifted to the left alongside the wall. They used flashlights mounted onto their weapons to illuminate a dark open room. Almost instantly Dominic saw movement through a doorway on the right. He shifted his light’s beam, it flashed off the metal of a rifle, and Caruso fired a ten-round string of fire into the doorway.
A bullet-riddled bearded man fell out into the room by a wooden table, his Kalashnikov tumbled out of his hands.
Behind them in the courtyard, small-arms fire crackled. These were not guns fired from circling Pumas. No, these were AKs from the compound’s guard force. The fire picked up, and it became clear that the men in the barracks had broken out; they were either targeting the choppers or heading toward the main building. Perhaps both.
Chavez, Caruso, Ryan, and al Darkur moved in a tactical train down a low hallway, clearing a few rooms on the left and right as they moved, using the same “wall-flood” tactics they had used to breach the first room. They’d hit a doorway, enter fast with guns high and lights on, the first and third men moving up the wall to the left of the entrance and the second and fourth men going right.
After the third empty room they came back into the hallway, and Mohammed al Darkur cut down two men trying to enter the front doorway. After that he dropped to his kneepads, keeping his gun trained on the door where men from the barracks would enter.
“Keep going! I’ll keep them back!”
Chavez turned and led the way, with Ryan and Caruso right on his heels.
They made a turn, Ding shot at a gunman retreating up a staircase on his left, then knelt to reload his gun. There was another stone staircase on the right, heading down into a basement enshrouded in darkness.
Outside, large RPG explosions were mixing with small-arms fire.
Domingo turned back to the others, now shouting over the sound of al Darkur’s cracking rifle. “We don’t have any time! I’ll check upstairs, you guys go down! Meet back here, but watch out for blue-on-blue fire!”
With that Chavez hustled up the stairs and out of view. Caruso took a tentative lead down into the basement, shining his light ahead of him. He’d gotten no more than halfway down the uneven stone steps when a rifle up ahead boomed, and the steps and walls sparked around him as copper-jacketed ammo struck and bounced.
Caruso backpedaled up the stairs but crashed into Ryan. Both men fell and tumbled forward, sliding down the stairs on their gear packs before coming to rest in the dark hallway.
The gunman ahead continued firing. Ryan found himself on top of Caruso, pinning his cousin down, so he rose to his knees, aimed perfunctorily on the flashes ahead, and dumped twenty rounds from his weapon at the threat.
Then, through the ringing in his ears, he heard the clinking of his own hot brass bouncing against the stone before it came to rest all around him. Then he heard a heavier metal thud as a rifle fell to the floor ahead. He shined his light and saw a Taliban slumped against the wall at a turn in the basement hall.
“You okay, Dom?”
“Get off of me.”
“Sorry.” Ryan climbed off and stood up. Dom stood up, as well, and then covered ahead while Jack reloaded his P-90.
“Let’s move.”
They made it to the corner and then looked around. Up ahead was a single room at the end of the hall. Inside it was dark, but not for long.
AK fire from two rifles rang out, sending showers of sparks all the way up the hall toward the two Americans as the bullets pinged off the stone wall.
Dom and Jack tucked their heads back.
“I’m thinking that looks like it could be the jail.”
“Yeah,” agreed Ryan.
Apparently there were only two jailers, but they had good cover at the far end of the hallway. Plus they held a second advantage: Jack and Dom had no idea what was on the other side of the doorway. For all they knew, if they fired up the baked-brick hallway and into the room, their rounds might bounce around inside and hit the man they had come to save.
“Should we go get Chavez and come back?” asked Ryan.
“No time. We’ve got to get in there.”
Together they thought for a moment. Suddenly Jack said, “I’ve got an idea. I take a nine-banger, I throw it short, just outside the doorway. As soon as the first bang goes off, we run.”
“Into the nine-banger?” Caruso asked incredulously.
“Fuck, yes! We shield our eyes. They’ll have to pull their heads in the room while it’s going off. When we get halfway up the hall you roll a flash-bang through the doorway, and that should stun them until we get in. We’ll have to time it right, but that should keep them occupied.”
Dom nodded. “I don’t have anything better. But leave your rifle. Pistols only. We’ll move better, and we don’t want to hit Sam coming through the door.”
The two young men slipped out of their rifle slings, and then pulled grenades from their chest pouches. Ryan drew his pistol and pulled the pin on his grenade.
Dom moved next to him at the edge of the corner. He patted his cousin on the shoulder and said, “No retreat. We start moving on their position, we can’t stop and turn back around. The only chance is to keep going.”
“Got it,” Jack said, and he slung the grenade around the dark corner with a side-arm toss.
After just a couple of echoing metal-on-stone clanks, the first explosion and flash rocked the hall and the men at the far end of it. Dom moved ahead of Jack, sprinted into the forty-foot-long line of fire of the enemies’ guns, and he rolled his flash-bang far into the room like a bowling ball, right through the flashes and smoke of Jack’s nine- banger.
Together Caruso and Ryan ran forward with their eyes turned away from the bursts of fire.
The two jailers had tucked their heads back inside the small room to shield them from what they thought was an undertossed diversion. But by the time the last of the nine-banger’s pops finished and they readied to turn back to resume firing up the hallway, a small canister bounced into the room between them.
They both stared at the flash-bang as it went off, pounding their brains inside their skulls and dilating their blinded eyes.
Jack entered the room first at a run, but he’d caught enough of the effects of Dom’s flash-bang to disorient him. He ran right past the two men who’d fallen to the floor on either side of the doorway, and he crashed into the metal bars of the first cell before he was able to stop on his own.
“Fuck!” he shouted, half blinded and all deaf, at least for the next few seconds.
But Dominic came in behind him; Jack’s body had shielded him from much of the light and some of the sound, so the ex — FBI agent still had his wits about him.
He shot both of the disoriented Haqqani fighters where they knelt on the floor, putting a bullet into the back
