Tom Clancy - Locked On

Sam started to look for some measure of cover himself, but one of the jailers came to his cell. The man’s eyes were wide with fear and determination. Sam got the impression this fucker was going to use him as a human shield if the PDF made it down into the basement.

They’d been off the helicopter for nearly two minutes, and Jack Ryan had not yet seen the enemy. First they dropped into a knee-deep trash pit some one hundred yards from the target. Jack could not understand why the pilot had dumped them so far from their target until, upon running closer to the compound, they saw several rows of electricity poles and wires crisscrossing the open ground in front of the main gate.

Then, while Chavez set the water-tamped breaching charge at the perimeter gate, Jack, Dom, and Mohammed watched his six. They dropped to their knees and scanned the dark rooftops and gates of a cluster of walled compounds on the other side of a rocky plain, and they kept their eyes on the corners of the wall of the Haqqani compound to the north and south. Above them the big Puma choppers circled, occasionally emitting jackhammer bursts from door guns or staccato cracks from Zarrar commandos firing their small arms into the compound. A twenty-millimeter cannon fired from one of the fat birds sent explosive rounds into the hillside beyond the compound in order to let the forty Taliban supposedly in the barracks know that they needed to stay right where they were.

Finally, over the hellacious sounds from above, Jack heard, “Fire in the hole!” and he found cover by pressing himself against the fourteen-foot-high baked-brick wall. Just seconds after this came the boom of the breaching charge, blowing the black oak and iron gates of the compound in like tossed toothpicks.

And then just like that, they were inside the walls, running for the main building, thirty yards ahead. Ryan saw the long low barracks some forty yards off his right shoulder, and just as he looked tracer rounds kicked up sparks near the dark structure from machine guns fired from above.

Jack was tight on Dom’s heels and Mohammed was just behind Jack, all the men running behind Chavez, who led the way with his AUG at his shoulder.

Jack was surprised when Chavez fired his rifle ahead. Ryan looked to see where the bullets were impacting and saw they were tearing up a small building or garage to the left of the main house. From there a bright light flashed and a rocket-propelled grenade launched into the sky but it seemed to have been poorly aimed.

Ding fired again and again, Ryan got his P-90 up to send some rounds downrange himself, but the team arrived at the wall of the main house before he even found a target in the night.

They scooted down the wall, closer to the front door, Ding still in the lead. Chavez nodded to Caruso, who quickly raced across the closed door and pressed up against the wall on the other side. Chavez nodded to Ryan, who started to pull a stun grenade from a pouch hanging on his right thigh. But as he reached for it he saw a second and a third RPG flying through the air, launched from the grounds behind the main building. Both grenades looked like they were perfectly aimed at a Puma that flew nearest to the barracks buildings.

And they were. The first RPG streaked right by the pilot’s windscreen, and the second slammed into the tail just aft of the two engines. Ryan stood fascinated, watching as the tail exploded and the aircraft spun away to the right, turned nose down, and disappeared behind a plume of black smoke.

The crash came outside the wall, lower on the rocky plain.

Immediately one of the three remaining helicopters veered out of its tight circular pattern around the Haqqani compound and flew off toward the crash.

“Shit!” said Chavez. “We’re losing our cover. Let’s go!”

Dom kicked open the front door of the house, and Ryan tossed his stun grenade into the entry hall, staying just to the left of the doorway and out of the line of fire from inside the building.

Boom!

All four men rushed in; Dom and Ryan went to the right and Ding and Mohammed shifted to the left alongside the wall. They used flashlights mounted onto their weapons to illuminate a dark open room. Almost instantly Dominic saw movement through a doorway on the right. He shifted his light’s beam, it flashed off the metal of a rifle, and Caruso fired a ten-round string of fire into the doorway.

A bullet-riddled bearded man fell out into the room by a wooden table, his Kalashnikov tumbled out of his hands.

Behind them in the courtyard, small-arms fire crackled. These were not guns fired from circling Pumas. No, these were AKs from the compound’s guard force. The fire picked up, and it became clear that the men in the barracks had broken out; they were either targeting the choppers or heading toward the main building. Perhaps both.

Chavez, Caruso, Ryan, and al Darkur moved in a tactical train down a low hallway, clearing a few rooms on the left and right as they moved, using the same “wall-flood” tactics they had used to breach the first room. They’d hit a doorway, enter fast with guns high and lights on, the first and third men moving up the wall to the left of the entrance and the second and fourth men going right.

After the third empty room they came back into the hallway, and Mohammed al Darkur cut down two men trying to enter the front doorway. After that he dropped to his kneepads, keeping his gun trained on the door where men from the barracks would enter.

“Keep going! I’ll keep them back!”

Chavez turned and led the way, with Ryan and Caruso right on his heels.

They made a turn, Ding shot at a gunman retreating up a staircase on his left, then knelt to reload his gun. There was another stone staircase on the right, heading down into a basement enshrouded in darkness.

Outside, large RPG explosions were mixing with small-arms fire.

Domingo turned back to the others, now shouting over the sound of al Darkur’s cracking rifle. “We don’t have any time! I’ll check upstairs, you guys go down! Meet back here, but watch out for blue-on-blue fire!”

With that Chavez hustled up the stairs and out of view. Caruso took a tentative lead down into the basement, shining his light ahead of him. He’d gotten no more than halfway down the uneven stone steps when a rifle up ahead boomed, and the steps and walls sparked around him as copper-jacketed ammo struck and bounced.

Caruso backpedaled up the stairs but crashed into Ryan. Both men fell and tumbled forward, sliding down the stairs on their gear packs before coming to rest in the dark hallway.

The gunman ahead continued firing. Ryan found himself on top of Caruso, pinning his cousin down, so he rose to his knees, aimed perfunctorily on the flashes ahead, and dumped twenty rounds from his weapon at the threat.

Then, through the ringing in his ears, he heard the clinking of his own hot brass bouncing against the stone before it came to rest all around him. Then he heard a heavier metal thud as a rifle fell to the floor ahead. He shined his light and saw a Taliban slumped against the wall at a turn in the basement hall.

“You okay, Dom?”

“Get off of me.”

“Sorry.” Ryan climbed off and stood up. Dom stood up, as well, and then covered ahead while Jack reloaded his P-90.

“Let’s move.”

They made it to the corner and then looked around. Up ahead was a single room at the end of the hall. Inside it was dark, but not for long.

AK fire from two rifles rang out, sending showers of sparks all the way up the hall toward the two Americans as the bullets pinged off the stone wall.

Dom and Jack tucked their heads back.

“I’m thinking that looks like it could be the jail.”