“You can say that,” she said, rising up onto her elbows. “I mean, we only see each other about four months of the year. Sometimes, I wonder why we even—”
Machine gun fire raked the front of the Black Hawk, and bullets went whining off into the air.
“What the fuck!” Mitchell said, grabbing up his M4. “Enemy front!”
“Incoming!” one of the Rangers screamed from the far side of the ersatz village.
The first couple of mortars struck the ground, their telltale crumping sounds ripping through the air. Two more rounds quickly fell, and the flimsy buildings blew apart like houses made from playing cards. The nearest pair of Rangers leapt back to their feet and came sprinting toward the Black Hawk. Another round dropped just in front of them and they vanished.
“Jesus Christ!” Sandra scrambled into the cockpit. “Where the fuck did they come from? We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
“We gotta get this bitch off the ground.” Mitchell was climbing into the gunner’s compartment behind her. “We’re a sitting fucking duck here!”
The four remaining Rangers were still a hundred yards off across the village, running hard for the chopper as Sandra flipped the switches in the cockpit and the rotors began to turn. “We’ll be airborne in sixty seconds.”
“We don’t have sixty—!”
A mortar struck the tail section of the helicopter, lifting the hind end of the bird into the air and causing it to slew wildly around. Mitchell was slammed against the bulkhead, splitting his head open, and Sandra was thrown from her seat to the other side of the cockpit. The sound of small arms fire filled the air. Bullets snapped through the fuselage as she tried to call for support over the radio.
“It’s fucked!” Mitchell grabbed for her arm. “We gotta dismount!” A round struck him in the chest and he dropped dead to the deck.
Captain Bordeaux leapt into the bird, grabbing Sandra’s collar and hauling her from the aircraft against a hail of gunfire. They were both hit and fell out the open door. The other three remaining Rangers took cover as best they could near the fuselage, but it seemed they were surrounded on all sides, and the cover among the rocks was sparse at best.
“Did you get off a call for help?” Bordeaux asked, firing a few rounds into a coppice of trees to keep the enemy’s head down.
“They took out the radio first thing,” Sandra said, gasping against the pain in her thigh where she’d taken a round from an AK-47. “I think it’s up against the bone, Sean. Fuck me! It hurts like a holy bastard.”
Bordeaux grabbed up Mitchell’s M4 and jammed it into her hands as he half-carried, half-dragged her toward the rocks where his men were digging in as best they could with the butts of their carbines. “We’re in some deep shit here, guys. No cover and nowhere to run.”
One of the other men went right to work applying a pressure tourniquet to Sandra’s leg. Shock was setting in fast and she’d already begun to fade.
“We’d better think of something fast,” one of the other Rangers said. “When they correct fire on those mortars, we’re dead.”
“They could’ve done that already,” Bordeaux said. “They’re maneuvering to take us alive.”
“Or her,” said a sergeant named Tornero.
“Or her, yeah.” Bordeaux spat in disgust. Their radioman had been blasted to hell, and it would be at least another hour, maybe two, before anyone tried to raise them and thought to send another chopper. This was supposed to have been a very secure zone, which was why it had been chosen in the first place. Something was wrong. “I don’t know, guys, but it feels like they were here waiting for us.”
Tornero was jamming cotton wadding into a shoulder wound. “Yeah, well, the way they’ve been blabbing about the op back at HQ, it don’t fucking surprise me.”
“I don’t like having a woman in this shit,” Bordeaux said.
“Maybe you can trade me,” Sandra groaned, fighting the urge to vomit.
Another furious fusillade of gunfire erupted, forcing them all belly-down against the earth as the enemy maneuvered still closer.
“There’s at least twenty!” shouted one of the other Rangers, firing away, finally managing to kill one. “They’re gonna jerk the noose tight.”
Bordeaux knew their time had run out. It was time to surrender or break out across country, and there was no way to break out without leaving Sandra behind.
“Sergeant, you three haul ass for that defilade!” he ordered. “There’s no other way. Try to fight your way north toward friendlies. Surrender’s not an option here.”
Tornero exchanged looks with the other two members of the team, all of them shaking their heads. He looked back at Bordeaux and grinned. “I think we’ll stay, Captain.”
“I said haul ass!”
Tornero popped up just long enough to biff a grenade then ducked back down. “You can court-martial us if we live long enough, sir, but we’re stayin’.”
“Stubborn fuckers,” Bordeaux muttered, crawling off for a better look at the defilade to their north. Three of the enemy had already occupied the depression, and they opened fire the second they saw his face. He jerked the pin from a grenade and slung it in their direction before scrabbling back to the others, taking more hits, one to the arm and another to the boron carbide ballistic panel on his back. The grenade went off with a sharp blast, flinging body parts into the air. Bordeaux and his men all sprang into a crouch, firing in all four directions as the enemy continued to maneuver aggressively against them.
One of the Rangers took a round to the face and fell over backward.
Knowing they were down to mere seconds now, Bordeaux fired his M4 until the magazine ran dry then jerked his M9 pistol and turned to aim it at Sandra.
She winked at him and covered her eyes with her hand.
He hesitated a fraction of an instant, remembering the night before, and then squeezed the trigger.
A 7.62 mm slug blew out the side of his head, causing the round from his pistol to strike the ground near Sandra’s shoulder as he toppled from his knees.
Sergeant Tornero spun to fire on the man who’d killed Bordeaux, stitching him from the groin to the throat before taking multiple hits to his armor, limbs, and guts. He pitched forward onto his hands and knees, still taking hits, choking blood as he crawled desperately forward to cover Sandra’s body with his own.
Sandra was struggling to tug Tornero’s pistol from its holster when the shadowy figure of a Taliban fighter blocked out the sun. He stepped on her hand and reached down to take the pistol from the holster, tossing it to one of his men before hefting Tornero’s body aside. He spoke calmly in Pashto, pointing at the American weapons on the ground, ordering them gathered up. The Rangers were quickly stripped of their armor and ammunition, their boots, money, watches, dog tags — everything.
Deep in shock, Sandra was vaguely aware of being lifted from the ground and slung over the shoulder of a squat, muscular man. She opened her eyes briefly, seeing the ground passing below, the sandaled heels of her captor moving back and forth as he walked along.
They walked all the rest of the day, taking turns carrying their prisoner toward the foothills near the Pakistan border. Sometime after nightfall, Sandra awoke to feel herself jostling around in the back of a pickup truck as it made its way higher into the mountains of the Hindu Kush. She mumbled that she was cold, and someone in the back of the truck with her must have spoken English because she was covered with a coat a few moments later.
The next time she awoke was to a bright light being shined into one of her eyes. She was carried from the truck on what felt like a sheet of plywood into a dimly lit hut where she felt needles being pricked into her. She screamed aloud when a steel probe was inserted into her leg wound and struggled against the pain. Someone with gorilla-like strength held her down while the bullet was removed and the wound was sutured closed. After that, a dirty brown sack was slipped over her head, and she was put back into the truck and driven away.