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Sssst!
Sssst!
I lifted up my hat and instinctively looked left, over my portside quarter, to the spot where
I knew Axe would be covering our flank. And he was right there, rigid, in firing position, his
rifle aimed straight up the mountain.
I twisted around to look directly behind me. Mikey was staring wide-eyed up the hill, calling
orders, instructing Danny to call in immediate backup from HQ if he could make the radio work.
He saw I was on the case, looked hard at me, and pointed straight up the hill, urging me with
hand signals to do the same.
I fixed my Mark 12 in firing position, pulled my head back a few inches, and looked up the hill.
Lined along the top were between eighty and a hundred heavily armed Taliban warriors, each
one of them with an AK-47 pointing downward. Some were carrying rocket-propelled grenades.
To the right and to the left they were starting to move down our flanks. I knew they could see
past me but not at me. They could not have seen Axe or Danny. I was unsure whether they had
seen Mikey.
My heart dropped directly into my stomach. And I cursed those fucking goatherds to hell, and
myself for not executing them when every military codebook ever written had taught me
otherwise. Not to mention my own raging instincts, which had told me to go with Axe and
execute them. And let the liberals go to hell in a mule cart, and take with them all of their
fucking know-nothing rules of etiquette in war and human rights and whatever other bullshit
makes ’em happy. You want to charge us with murder? Well, fucking do it. But at least we’ll be
alive to answer it. This way really sucks.
I pressed back against my tree. I was still sure they had not seen me, but their intention was to
outflank us on both wings. I could see that. I scanned the ground directly above me. The hilltop
still swarmed with armed men. I thought there were more than before. There was no escape by
going straight up, and no possibility of moving left or right. Essentially they had us trapped,
if
they had spotted us. I still was unsure.
And so far not a shot had been fired. I looked up the hill again at one single tree above and to my
left, maybe twenty yards away. And I thought I saw a movement. Then it was confirmed, first by
a turban, then by an AK-47, its barrel pointed in my general direction though not directly at me.
I tightened my grip on the trusty rifle and moved it slightly in the direction of the tree. Whoever
it was still could not see me because I was in a great spot, well hidden. I kept perfectly still,
that’s goddamned motionless, like a marble statue.
I checked with Mikey, who also had not moved. Then I checked the tree again, and this time that
turban was around it. A hook-nosed Taliban warrior was peering straight at me through black
eyes above a thick black beard. The barrel of his AK-47 was pointed right at my head. Had he
seen me? Would he open fire? How did the liberals feel about my position? No time, I guess. I
fired once, blew his head off.
And at that moment all hell broke loose. The Taliban unleashed an avalanche of gunfire at us,
straight down the mountain, from every angle. Axe flanked left, trying to cut off the downward
trail, firing nonstop. Mikey was blasting away straight over my head with everything he had.
Danny was firing at them, trying to aim with one hand, desperately trying to rev up the radio
with the other.
I could hear Mikey shouting, “Danny, Danny, for Christ’s sake, get that fucking thing
working...Marcus, no options now, buddy,
kill ’em all!
”
But now the enemy gunfire seemed to center on our two flank men. I could see the dust and rock
shards kicking up all around us. The sound of AK-47s absolutely filled the air, deafening. I could
see the Taliban guys falling all along the ridge. No one can shoot like us. I stayed right where I
was, in my original position, and I still seemed to be taking less fire than the others. But in the
next couple of minutes they had identified my position, and the volume of fire directly at me was
increasing. This was bad. Very bad.
I could see Axe was acquiring his targets quicker than I was because he had an extra scope. I
should have had one too, but for some reason I had not fitted it.
Right now all four of us were really amped up. We knew how to conduct a firefight like this, but
we needed to cut down the enemy numbers, nail a few of these bastards real quick, give
ourselves a better chance. It was hard for them to get us from directly above, which meant the
flanks were our danger. I could see two of them making their way down, right and left.
Axe shot one of them, but it was bad to the right. They were shooting in a kind of frenzy but,
thank Christ, missing. I guess we were too. And suddenly I was taking heavy fire myself. Bullets
were slamming into the tree trunk, hitting rocks all around me. The bullets were somehow
coming in from the sides.
I called down to Mikey, “We’ll take ’em, but we might just need a new spot.”
“Roger that,” he yelled back. Like me, he could see the speed at which they were moving up into
the attack. We’d been shooting them for all of five or six minutes, but every time we cleared that
ridge high above us, it filled up again. It was as if they had reinforcements somewhere over the
ridge, just waiting to come up to the front line. Whichever way we looked at it, they had a ton of
guys trying to kill four SEALs.
At this point our options were nonexistent. We still could not charge the top of the mountain,
because they’d cut us down like dogs. They had us left, and they had us right. We were boxed in
on three sides, and there was never, not even for a couple of seconds, a lull in the gunfire. And
we could not even see half of them or tell where the bullets were coming from. They had every
angle on us.
All four of us just kept banging away, cutting ’em down, watching them fall, slamming a new
magazine into the breech, somehow holding them at bay. But this was impossible. We had to
give up this high ground, and I had to get close enough to Mikey to agree on a strategy,
hopefully to save our lives.
I started to move, but Mikey, like the brilliant officer he was, had appreciated the situation and
already called it.
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