“What kind of explosives?”
“C-four and claymores.”
“Okay.” He started to turn to Ritchie on his right and stopped. “You told me two of the Team Six guys were behind us in Station D. What happened to the other four?”
Perez lowered his brown eyes. “Taken out resisting the initial charge.”
Crocker was afraid to ask, but had to. “Neal Stafford?”
Perez nodded and pointed over his shoulder to the tarp-covered bodies in the back corner. Crocker pictured Neal’s pretty, blond-haired wife and young sons. He wanted to beat the shit out of something, or scream so loud that time stopped and rewound. But he swallowed hard and summoned Ritchie instead. With his arm around the tall man’s shoulder, he led him to the back of the bunker so the two men could hear themselves speak.
Crocker said, “Take Jonesy with you and go back to Station D. There’s a…” Neal’s smiling face flashed in his head. He gathered himself and started again, “There’s a storage bunker there, back of D. I want you to grab all the explosives you can find and bring them here. Ask the SEALs there to help you.”
Ritchie, his eyes burning with intensity, pointed to his backpack stacked against the back wall. “I’ve got blasting caps and detonators. You okay, boss?”
“I’m fine. I want to do something bold. Imaginative. Insane. Get the stuff.”
“You want bold? You tapped the right man,” Ritchie said, grinning. “Depending on what we find in D, I’ll give you cataclysmic.”
“I like the way you’re thinking. Now go.”
Chapter Three
What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.
—Theodore Roethke
Check this mother out!” Jonesy shouted as he burst through the back door carrying a GAU-17/A 7.62x51mm minigun, which featured six rotating barrels capable of delivering a whopping 4,000 rounds per minute.
He got grunts of approval from some of the men crowded inside the dark, smoke-filled room, and one shout of “Sweet!” Otherwise the eight soldiers were occupied with trying to hold back an enemy that wouldn’t let up.
With a sheer cliff to the right of Guard Station C, and considerably higher terrain behind them and to the left, which is where Station D was located, the Taliban had only one way of overrunning the guard post, and that was head-on, which they seemed determined to do, no matter how many new martyrs they created in the process.
One M2HG heavy machine gun covered the Taliban assault from the right; a second was trained on the left, which posed more of a challenge. The six soldiers in between fired a combination of MK19s, M4A1s, MK13s, HK416s, and one MK11 medium sniper rifle.
Crocker’s head, right arm, and shoulder were numb. His ears and knees ached. After adjusting the five-position butt stock of the HK416, he looked through the diopter sight, located the torso of a Taliban fighter crouching and shouldering an RPG-2 in the crosshairs, and pulled the trigger, releasing a stream of 5.56x45mm bullets that tore into the enemy’s torso, neck, and head. The weapon was a marvel of modern engineering that offered power, maneuverability, and reliability.
The Americans were outnumbered, perhaps as much as thirty to one, and due to that and the approaching darkness, Crocker could tell that the Taliban sensed victory. He saw it in the confident way they moved forward and maintained their position despite everything the Americans were throwing at them.
He glanced at his Suunto, then turned to Jonesy, who was busily setting up the minigun with Sergeant Perez’s help.
“Where’s Rich?”
“Ritchie, man, he’s doing his bad thing.”
“Where?” Crocker asked.
“Outside.”
He stepped over the thick stream of blood oozing from the tarp-covered bodies, said a quick prayer for his neighbor Neal Stafford, and ducked through the low door as if leaving one chamber of hell and entering another. Outside, the fresh air smelled good and revived him. On higher ground behind him and to his right, the men at Station D were firing at Taliban targets on the rocks in front of the cliff. Tracers wove through the darkening mist like angry, lethal insects. The top of the mountain and the main structures of the post remained shrouded in white.
A thick, freckle-faced soldier from Alpha Company was taking a piss against the back wall. Crocker took one, too, and in the brief moment of calm thought about snowboarding in similar weather in Vermont.
For a second he remembered Neal standing on a slope beside him. He started to compose the expletive-filled tirade he planned to direct at Captain Battier and stopped. He had to focus. Hearing footsteps crunch the snow, he turned and saw Ritchie walking with a bearded soldier who was pointing out fissures in the rock.