“The doctor visit. Did they figure anything out?”
“We still don’t know. In the meantime, though, you’ve got to stay healthy, Amanda. Your lipids are terrible. So we’ll keep doing these visits as long as we need to.”
Amanda stared out of the window to her right as her mother returned her to the school parking lot. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her as she wondered what the hell lipids might be and what it might mean if they were “terrible.”
“Don’t you worry about anything. We’ve got the party tomorrow night. That’s what you need to be focused on.”
CHAPTER 3
Mullah Rahman had led his team into the cave after he watched the second helicopter explode early Friday morning. He wasn’t certain about the first one, but there was no question about the second one. The Balkan operators had done well.
Indeed, very well.
As they had made haste through the labyrinth from one side of the mountain to the back, through nearly a half mile of complex tunnels, dead-ends, and guarded posts, Rahman made the decision that they would keep going until they were deep inside their Pakistan sanctuary.
So they walked, carrying their wounded and their spoils of victory, until nightfall. Now they rested in a small village several miles from where the combat took place. Rahman directed his men to conduct triage, secure the prizes from the landing zone, and reload their ammunition quickly.
The snow had been deep on the top of the mountain but they had been descending most of their trek and now were in relatively bearable temperatures for May. The small village was nondescript with several adobe huts that had been reinforced with mud and straw over the years and now could withstand a 500-pound bomb. He walked into the structure where the wounded were being treated by a team of two doctors. Both men had thick, untrimmed beards and wore scrubs, surgical gloves and surgical masks. The doctors’ compliance with Sharia law was as important as saving lives, thus the long, unsanitary beards.
On the first table, he saw one of his Pakistani Taliban fighters bleeding from a severed leg. Rahman himself had tied the tourniquet, which the doctor had loosened, but he doubted the young man would survive. On the second table he saw Commander Hoxha, who had taken several shrapnel wounds to the chest. Blood was blowing in bubbles from the right lung as the doctor had removed the battlefield dressing and now worked furiously to patch the sucking chest wound.
Rahman looked at Hoxha’s gear, piled in the corner on the dirt floor. He saw the tactical vest with empty AK-47 magazines, the AK-47, and an M4. Hoxha had radioed in to Rahman that he had captured an American rifle, always a prized possession of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Often these weapons hung over the fireplaces of Muslim fighter homes the way American Civil War muskets hung over mantels in Virginia. Rahman picked up the M4 with all of its high tech gadgetry. He popped out the magazine, which still had several rounds packed against the spring. He pulled back on the charging handle and ejected a solitary 5.56 mm round which tumbled across the room.
“Not in here,” the doctor working on Hoxha called over his shoulder to Rahman.
Rahman nodded and left the operating room, moving into the room he used as his headquarters when they were operating from this village.
He sat on the rug cross-legged and placed the M4 in his lap, studying it. He was experienced with its predecessor, the M16, and the two weapons looked essentially the same other than size. Rahman held the M4 up, the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling providing a weak yellow hue. There was no name that he could see on the weapon, but it did have a serial number just above the magazine well. The numbers were meaningless to him. He adjusted the weapon so that the light would shine on the opposite side. As he turned the rifle, he heard a sliding, scraping noise in the butt-stock, as if something were loose.
He turned the weapon so that the muzzle was pointed down at the floor and he was staring at the machined backing of the telescoping stock. He saw a detent button and a cutaway portion of the butt. Similar to the M16, but smaller again, he knew this was where the soldiers normally carried their weapons cleaning gear.
He pushed on the button, pulled on the miniature trap door and turned the weapon upside down.
Into his lap fell a 4 GB flash drive.
CHAPTER 4
Sergeant Lance Eversoll sat inside Colonel Zachary Garrett’s command Humvee as it idled in the daylight. A bright sun had squeezed the purplish gray from the morning and now reflected off the white snow, making him thankful that he had his dark Wiley X sunglasses. He had parked the vehicle at the base of the mountain where the helicopter had crashed, and he had been monitoring radio transmissions for a full day since.
As soon as they’d gotten word of the crash, another helicopter had ferried in a full platoon of infantry to secure the site. There were nearly one hundred people floating around the area, and with the enemy about four thousand feet above them in the mountains, no less.
Right up there, he thought, looking at the top of the inhospitable ridge. He visualized the explosion and then the aircraft plummeting into the crevice below. He had listened to the entire fight on the radio, and his heart sank when he heard the reports from the AC-130 pilot that Colonel Garrett’s aircraft had gone down in a fireball. Moments before the crash, the radio had crackled with the constant stream of spot reports that the team had rescued the Navy SEAL. Eversoll had pumped his fist with a definitive Yes!
Then came Rampage’s excited voice from the AC-130 gunship that they were concentrating fire on approximately twenty Al Qaeda moving toward the aircraft.
Seconds later the pilot reported the explosion.
He had participated in the subsequent rescue mission that had taken all of Friday and now into Saturday. Mortuary affairs soldiers milled around the wreckage like scavengers looking for scraps. There wasn’t much left. The Kunar River raged and tumbled at the bottom of the abyss. Some of the bodies had been found a mile downstream. Still others had yet to be located.
Then the call came over the radio that the rescue operation had officially changed to a recovery operation. There was no one to rescue.
Sergeant Eversoll wiped his forehead with his sleeve and then placed his advanced combat helmet back on, snapping the chinstrap tight. He gritted his teeth as he whispered the warrior ethos to himself. Always place the mission first. Never accept defeat. Never quit. Never leave a fallen comrade. These were words for a soldier to live by, he thought to himself. And to die by.
He refused to believe that his role model was gone.
“Sir,” he said, turning to Lieutenant Colonel Chizinski. “Sir, are they certain that they found Colonel Garrett’s dog tags?”
Chizinski looked at Eversoll with sullen eyes.
“Chopper exploded with a full tank of gas then fell four thousand feet into a damn crevice. They’ve only found the remains of four people.”
“What about the other ten?”
“Still looking.” Chizinski coughed into one hand and opened the other to reveal a charred piece of metal half the size of a credit card. “The colonel’s dog tags were in the wreckage.”
Eversoll took the identification tag in his gloved hand and stared at it, touching the last remains of his commander: Zachary A. Garrett; O-Pos; 227-54-0987; Methodist.
“His buddies called him ZAG,” Eversoll whispered more to himself than to Chizinski. He handed the piece of metal back to the lieutenant colonel. He stared into the sun and looked at the ground two hundred feet below them.