Page 50 of The 9th Man

“He’s a former Army Ranger. That might prove tough.”

“We always have Ms. Stein.”

“True.”

The tall man drew a sound-suppressed weapon and shot Persik twice, then spun and dropped Luke’s two guards. Persik’s remaining two men, standing near Jillian, were cut down before they had a chance to find their weapons. Each shot was delivered with expert precision. Finally, the prostrate men were finished off with a single round to the skull.

The tall man walked over to Luke and stared down at him. “You order a pizza?”

21

THE WITHERING GUNFIRE CEASED FOR A MOMENT.

In the silence Jack Talley could hear shouts in Pashto or Dari echoing down the slope. He knew what the lull meant. The Al Qaeda forces that had had them pinned down for the last seventeen hours were prepping for yet another charge in the hope of overrunning the Delta Force’s already tenuous position on the ridge’s steep backslope. He knew that AQ soldiers liked to get in close and finish off foes with knives and hatchets.

Old school.

Once bad guys made it inside your wire, ejecting them became almost impossible. And he’d already counted eight of his own wounded, combat-incapable. So far the Deltas had driven back nine charges. The ground between them and the AQ forces was littered with corpses, some of them half buried in the snow with only faces, or extended arms or bent legs, visible.

This wasn’t the first time he’d found himself at the jagged end of bad intelligence, but this was the first time it had gotten his men killed. Intelligence hiccups were common, but usually restricted to minor details like structure layouts and whether a target was currently in the area. This time, intel had underestimated enemy forces by a factor of ten. Instead of thirty AQ, over three hundred had bivouacked in the Afghan valley to ride out the storm.

“More massing on the eastern outcrop, boss,” one of his sergeants from the rock alcove nearby called out.

Their position was less than fifty meters wide and a hundred meters long, a stretch of barren ground with a waist-high shelf of rock facing the enemy and a thousand-foot precipice on the back side to which Talley had almost lost two of his troopers unsuccessfully attempting to find a route of retreat.

None existed.

They were stuck here.

And were probably going to die. Their ammunition was nearly gone, and once the guns ran dry that was all she wrote.

Except for the hand-to-hand that would surely come from the enemy.

“They’ve definitely got reserves filtering in from somewhere,” one of his men said.

By Talley’s count his sixteen remaining Deltas had killed or wounded nearly ninety bad guys but still they kept coming, surely force-marching their way through the blizzard and up the mountain from Celam Kae, three kilometers away. He estimated enemy strength at battalion-sized, perhaps five hundred men. Clearly they weren’t happy the Deltas had managed to snatch Nizar Tawfiq, AQ’s regional commander, right from under their noses. While part of the operation had gone flawlessly, a barking dog during their exfiltration had given them away.

“Gimme an ammo count, Bobby,” he said.

“On it.”

“Any word on the Chinooks?”

“Still socked in. Pilots want to come, but command’s saying no.”

Four times Kabul had dispatched Chinook helicopters to pull them off the ridge and four times the blizzard had driven them back. Resupply had been only partially successful. Most of ithad slid off the ridge and into the valley below. They were out of food and water and down to the dregs of their medical supplies and ammunition. And now with night only an hour away the Chinooks would be grounded until morning. He and his Deltas wouldn’t be here to rescue by then.

He wanted to know, “How’s our guest?”

“Sleeping like a baby.”

Upon grabbing Nizar Tawfiq from his house, they’d sedated him for transport. It wasn’t so much that these AQ soldiers wanted Tawfiq back as they didn’t want him in American hands. The man would be an intel gold mine.

“They’re shifting one of their DShKs,” Talley heard over his radio.

“Heads down,” Talley called out. “Incoming.”

Two of the Russian .50-caliber machine guns had been chipping away at their already thin cover for the past six hours. Now they were trying again to drive the Deltas from cover or force them to give up.