Jack Coughlin - Running the Maze

The barracks was up one flight of steel steps, which he took two at a time, then marched quickly past some startled workers until he was in the troops’ sleeping area. “Everybody get up!” he shouted, grabbing the closest man and pulling him hard from the bunk. Taliban fighters understood force a lot better than words, and all of them scrambled to their feet, barefoot, bearded, and dazed. Partially eaten food was scattered by the bunks, along with dirty clothes and empty plastic water bottles. Dirty, worthless scum. “Get ready to move in ten minutes! Your patrol leader will come get you and take you out the valley. Your friends went to sleep on sentry duty and are out of radio contact! Inexcusable! You go to sleep out there and I will crucify you and let the birds have your worthless bodies.” He spun around and stalked away in a fury, out of patience with these people.

He went back the same way he had come up, down the steel circular staircases and once again into the gun bunker, closing the outer door and opening the firing slit. He put his face up to the cool outside air and sucked in a lungful, exhaled, then took another deep breath. Hafiz had retreated to the solitude of the pit to regain his composure and reassemble his outward image of total confidence and competence. Everything on the inspection tour was going well so far, except for that outside security detail. Ayman al-Masri had not seemed disturbed by the condition of the chief engineer in the infirmary, but Hafiz had seen displeasure momentarily cross his face when he had also noticed the idle patrol. That lapse was damaging and required a tough response, but Hafiz still needed those morons for guard duty until the regular troops could arrive.

All he could do at present was to continue the tour and let the mighty bridge fortress sell itself, without him having to say much at all. Answer any questions that he could immediately. Admit no weakness. The message was to be All is well here; it is safe.

SWANSON STOPPED, REACHED DOWN,and brushed the dirt beside the trail until he found a patch of smooth ground right where the map indicated. “Another blanket,” he whispered over his shoulder, and Ledford unfurled another cloth. “These are little paths that have been tramped down by maintenance workers who serviced the cameras,” he said. “The map shows a whole network of them coming off the trail at various points. Go up about twenty meters, find it, and cover it.”

Ledford shook out the blanket. Now that she had done it once, her confidence had soared, and when the camera stalk came rising out of the ground, there was no surprise. It wasn’t some mighty alien erupting from the flood-scarred mud. Just a dumb machine. She flipped the cloth over the lens. Through her night goggles, she also now could recognize the slightly flattened area around the device where service crews had been working, pulling weeds, clearing obstructions, and keeping the magic eye functioning. Then she saw a longer strip of discolored earth, running straight as an arrow. She dug her fingers into the muck, pried away a few rocks, and touched plastic. Some things are so basic. Beth returned to Swanson on the main trail. “Done,” she said. “The cameras are hardwired by landlines running through PVC pipes. We can just disable them with our knives.”

“We don’t have time to do them all, Coastie. It’s enough for now that we know where the cameras are so we can dodge. We’ve got bits and pieces of information, but we still don’t know what’s behind it all. I want to get to that bridge. We only have about an hour of darkness left, and weather’s moving in.”

“I can’t figure it out, Gunny. Why all this security to protect a danged bridge?” she asked as he got up. Above them, the sky had filled with troubled clouds, knotting and shifting, blotting out the stars and entirely hiding the moon.

“Nothing out here makes much sense, Coastie. It’s a quacks-like-a-duck thing. There is a reason, but we just haven’t found it yet. My opinion, worst case, since this is Pakistan, they might have stuck a nuke in there. Let’s go. Stay quiet.”

A single raindrop touched Beth’s hand, and a quick wind swirled through the valley to drop the temperature a few degrees. It was followed by a powerful peal of thunder, and lightning sparkled in jagged sharpness overhead, rendering the nightmare landscape even more misshapen. Then the hard rain slashed down, and the first drops changed to torrents. She hunched up her shoulders and moved on.

The mission had never been considered to be a long-duration job, and they had packed no rain gear other than the special blankets in the survival kits, which they would not use as raincoats. Their uniforms were formulated to retain body head and not encumber movement, and the goggles still worked, although they had to wipe them. Rain would have gotten into their exposed eyes just as easily, so wearing the NVGs continued the advantage of being able to see in the dark.

Kyle already felt the dirt beginning to mud up beneath his boots, because the area had been so drenched by the recent floods that it still had not deep-dried, and the water saturated the land and rushed down toward the river. On the plus side, the deluge added concealment and deflected noise. The storm and lightning would help protect them from the nosy cameras and motion detectors, so he considered it an even trade.

Kyle heard them coming. The members of the third Taliban patrol were bitching and complaining loudly over the sound of the falling rain about how that dog of a Pakistani sergeant had forced them out of the dry and comfortable barracks and into the foul weather, and now their clothes were weighed down by water, sticking to their skin, and they were growing colder with each step. They cursed the first patrol that had gotten carelessly ambushed, and the second for failing to do its job and making it necessary to be relieved early. There was nothing tactical about their approach; they were just rambling down the trail with a mob mentality, disinterested, angry, ignoring their leader, and wanting to get to the fallen bridge where they could put up some shelter. Each man had an AK-47 over a shoulder or slung across his chest.

Swanson, with the NVGs, had a couple of seconds to react when he saw the smeared images approach, because they could not yet see him. He went to one knee and softly said to Beth, “Contact, front. Five targets, twenty meters. I take One, you got Two, just like we drilled at Quantico.” She locked into a firing position, ready to shoot over Swanson’s head.

The Taliban came hurrying forward in a ragged line, their eyes on the trail, bodies bent against the slamming rainstorm. Kyle fired when the first man was only twenty feet away, but the target’s forward momentum kept him moving even after he had absorbed a bullet in the chest. As he fell, Beth Ledford’s CAR-15 spat a silenced round into the center mass of the second man. Swanson, a moment later, downed a third one.

The fourth man in line realized something was happening and began to crouch. Ledford’s round smashed into his face and spewed bits of bone and brain onto the fighter behind him.

Because of the melee in front of him, the final fighter had a chance to react and was about to jump from the trail when Swanson shot him; the bullet penetrated under the right arm, and the round bored through the chest cavity, tearing up vital organs as it went. He died as he hit the mud.

“Cease fire,” Swanson said, waiting to be sure Ledford was through pulling the trigger before he stood up. Drawing his pistol, he advanced to administer the necessary final head shots. Then he just said, “Let’s go.”

Beth was breathing heavy, her breath puffing little clouds in the chill and rain. She had felt nothing for these people she had just killed; nothing at all. This time, it was almost like a video game, for the poor visibility and their positions had shielded their faces from her view, so they didn’t even look like real people. She just took the shots. Quick and easy, like clockwork; like Swanson.