Just after midnight, Driscoll was manning a night-vision camera on a tripod facing down to the road while the other three men lay on their cots in the hallway behind him. A jingle bus had passed a minute ago; the dust it kicked up still hung in the air above the Miran Shah — Boya highway.
Sam rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then looked back.
Instantly he pushed his face tighter into the eyecup of the optic. There, on the road below him, four darkened pickup trucks had pulled to a stop and men rolled out of the back of the beds. They carried rifles, their clothing was black, and they moved stealthily up the rocky hillside, directly toward the ISI safe house.
“We’re getting hit!” shouted Driscoll. Mohammed was at his side with his radio in his hand a moment later. He used his binoculars, saw the dozen or so men down a hundred yards below them, and turned to one of his captains. “Contact the base. Tell them we need a priority exfiltration, now!” His subordinate headed for his radio, and al Darkur turned back to Driscoll.
“If we take the trucks, they will destroy us with those RPGs on the road.”
But Sam was not listening — he was thinking. “Mohammed. Why would they assault like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“They have to know we are watching the road. Why did they go to the road, the low ground, and not the high ground behind us?”
Al Darkur thought about it but only for a moment. “We are already surrounded.”
“Exactly. That’s a blocking force below us; the attack will come from—”
An explosion rocked the rear wall of the compound. It was thirty yards from where al Darkur and Driscoll stood in the hallway, but still it knocked them to the ground.
The ISI major began shouting commands into his radio and he climbed back to his feet. Sam grabbed hiks M4 and ran toward the stairs, took them three at a time as he rushed to meet the enemy who would be trying to breach the rear wall.
Sam hit the ground floor and kept running for the back of the building. He passed two 7th Commando men in a room on his left. They trained the lights of their weapons out a ground-floor window, blanketing the eastern portion of the compound with white light, desperate to find targets. Driscoll continued toward the exit to the rear grounds, and hoped like hell the sentries posted at the back gate were still in the fight, keeping Haqqani’s men pinned down in the surrounding brush and hills.
Chattering gunfire came from the front of the safe house as the enemy moved through the rocks up the hill toward the front entrance.
As Sam ran full speed toward the open rear door, preparing to shoot across the pitch-black grounds toward the gate, al Darkur came over the speaker of Sam’s walkie-talkie. He spoke English now. “Sam! Our rear wall sentries are not checking in. The enemy must already be inside the compound!”
Driscoll’s momentum took him through the doorway as he processed this information. He’d not made it five feet out into the night when bright flashes of light flickered from the gate twenty meters ahead, and booming Kalashnikov fire echoed off the outer walls of the house. Driscoll stumbled in the dust, turned, and retreated back to the doorway in a crouch.
The doorframe tore to splinters from the Haqqani fighters’ rounds, but Sam managed to get back inside and up the hall without taking a bullet. Al Darkur met him there; he was still shouting into his walkie-talkie. Both men leaned back around the corner and fired a few rounds out into the dark night. Neither thought he could quell the attack with a couple of bursts of an assault rifle, but they did hold out hopes of making some impression on anyone who thought they could just rush in the open back door and make their way up the hall unimpeded.
Al Darkur shouted into Sam’s ear after firing a few more bursts in the narrow hallway. “I’ve called for a helicopter from the base in Miran Shah, but the quick reaction force will not be ready for fifteen minutes.”
“Not quick enough,” said Sam as he dropped to his knees, leaned around the corner, and shot out the lights of the hall.
“It will be thirty minutes or more before they arrive.”
Driscoll released the empty magazine from the magazine well of his rifle, then replaced it with a fully charged mag from his chest rig. Incoming gunfire from all sides had picked up now, and shouts over the comms, even though Driscoll could not understand the words, gave the impression that the building itself was about to be overrun.
“From the sound of it, we don’t have anything like thirty minutes. How many men do you have left?”
Al Darkur got back on the walkie-talkie to find out while Driscoll went prone at the corner of the hall, then slowly rolled out on his right shoulder, putting him low in the hallway toward the back door, with his weapon’s barrel scanning for threats. He could not see a thing in the dark, so he actuated his weapon light on the side rail of the M4. Instantly two hundred lumens of bright white light filled the hallway, illuminating two Haqqani fighters making their way silently toward Sam’s position. They were blinded by the beam, but they raised their weapons anyway.
Driscoll pulled the trigger on his M4 rifle, swept a dozen rounds of automatic fire back and forth across the two men. They died before either of them got aof them shot off.
More sparkles of gunfire from the dark night outside forced Sam back around the corner, where he reloaded again.
“I have six men alive,” Mohammed said.
Sam nodded as he reloaded. “All right. Any chance we can make it to the trucks in the garage on the east side?”
“We have to try, but the road will be covered with Haqqani’s men.”
“Who needs a road?”
Driscoll grabbed a fragmentation grenade from his chest harness, pulled the pin, and then flung it underhanded up the hallway like a tiny bowling ball. Mohammed al Darkur and Sam Driscoll took off toward the men fighting at the east window as the explosion tore through the doorway.
Two minutes later, a group of eight Haqqani fighters attacking from below had made it through the gate and up the drive on the southeast side of the compound. They’d left four of their number behind, one dead, felled by a shot through the stomach from a second-floor window of the enemy safe house, and three more wounded: one by gunfire and two by a hand grenade tossed down the hill by a sentry at the gate who had himself been shot dead one second later.
But now the eight survivors were within twenty meters of the garage. The door was open and it was dark inside, so the men approached quietly and slowly while their comrades fired into the building on the other sides. If they could make it into the building from the door here in the garage they could, by staying low to avoid fire from their own forces, comb through the structure and destroy any remaining forces there.
As the men came to within ten yards of the garage entrance, their leader was just able to make out two large trucks parked inside. His night vision had been all but ruined by his firing several magazines from his Kalashnikov, so as he moved forward now he had to squint to hunt for a door inside.
All eight men passed the two trucks, found the door giving them access to the building, and they went inside in a line, crouching and listening for threats.
As soon as the eight Haqqani men disappeared from the garage, Sam Driscoll, Mohammed al Darkur, two ISI officers, and four Zarrar commandos quietly climbed out from under the truck farthest from the door. A driver, al Darkur, and three others climbed in the front of the vehicle, while Sam and two others remained at the back of the garage. Once Sam heard the driver quietly release the hand brake, he and two men pushed the truck from behind with all their might. The nose of the vehicle was already oriented downhill, so once they had pushed the truck out of the garage it began to pick up speed quickly. Sam and the two men gave one
