Tom Clancy - Locked On

“Yeah,” agreed Ryan.

Apparently there were only two jailers, but they had good cover at the far end of the hallway. Plus they held a second advantage: Jack and Dom had no idea what was on the other side of the doorway. For all they knew, if they fired up the baked-brick hallway and into the room, their rounds might bounce around inside and hit the man they had come to save.

“Should we go get Chavez and come back?” asked Ryan.

“No time. We’ve got to get in there.”

Together they thought for a moment. Suddenly Jack said, “I’ve got an idea. I take a nine-banger, I throw it short, just outside the doorway. As soon as the first bang goes off, we run.”

“Into the nine-banger?” Caruso asked incredulously.

“Fuck, yes! We shield our eyes. They’ll have to pull their heads in the room while it’s going off. When we get halfway up the hall you roll a flash-bang through the doorway, and that should stun them until we get in. We’ll have to time it right, but that should keep them occupied.”

Dom nodded. “I don’t have anything better. But leave your rifle. Pistols only. We’ll move better, and we don’t want to hit Sam coming through the door.”

The two young men slipped out of their rifle slings, and then pulled grenades from their chest pouches. Ryan drew his pistol and pulled the pin on his grenade.

Dom moved next to him at the edge of the corner. He patted his cousin on the shoulder and said, “No retreat. We start moving on their position, we can’t stop and turn back around. The only chance is to keep going.”

“Got it,” Jack said, and he slung the grenade around the dark corner with a side-arm toss.

After just a couple of echoing metal-on-stone clanks, the first explosion and flash rocked the hall and the men at the far end of it. Dom moved ahead of Jack, sprinted into the forty-foot-long line of fire of the enemies’ guns, and he rolled his flash-bang far into the room like a bowling ball, right through the flashes and smoke of Jack’s nine-banger.

Together Caruso and Ryan ran forward with their eyes turned away from the bursts of fire.

The two jailers had tucked their heads back inside the small room to shield them from what they thought was an undertossed diversion. But by the time the last of the nine-banger’s pops finished and they readied to turn back to resume firing up the hallway, a small canister bounced into the room between them.

They both stared at the flash-bang as it went off, pounding their brains inside their skulls and dilating their blinded eyes.

Jack entered the room first at a run, but he’d caught enough of the effects of Dom’s flash-bang to disorient him. He ran right past the two men who’d fallen to the floor on either side of the doorway, and he crashed into the metal bars of the first cell before he was able to stop on his own.

“Fuck!” he shouted, half blinded and all deaf, at least for the next few seconds.

But Dominic came in behind him; Jack’s body had shielded him from much of the light and some of the sound, so the ex — FBI agent still had his wits about him.

He shot both of the disoriented Haqqani fighters where they knelt on the floor, putting a bullet into the back of each man’s head.

“In here!” It was Sam. His cell door was only a few feet from Ryan, but he could barely hear him.

Ryan shined his light on the cells in the room. A Pashtun man was crouched against the wall of the first cell, a sick-looking white-skinned blond man lay on the floor of the second cell.

Ryan now shined his light into the corner. In the last cell, Sam Driscoll sat astride a dead Haqqani fighter, the man’s twisted neck in the American’s hands.

Caruso found the overhead light and flipped it on. He stared at Sam, as well.

“You okay?”

Sam looked away from the man he had just killed with his bare hands, the jailer who had planned to use him as a human shield, and he looked up at his two colleagues. “You boys playing army?”

Sam and Dom led the way back up the stairs while Jack and the Afghan carried the incapacitated Reuters reporter. It was a tough climb back to the ground floor, but once they were there, things became even more precarious. Chavez had cleared the upstairs, but now he and al Darkur were in the hallway near the stairs, firing toward the front of the building at enemy fighters positioned there.

The Pakistani major had been hit in the left shoulder and his rifle had been damaged by another round, but he continued to fire his pistol up the hall with his right hand.

Chavez saw that he had six people behind him now, and one was being carried. He nodded to himself and patted al Darkur on the shoulder. “Let’s find a way out of here before the enemy starts firing RPGs!”

They headed toward the back of the building, a limping Sam Driscoll in the lead with a salvaged AK. Now Chavez brought up the rear and fired constantly to keep heads down in the rooms and hallways near the front of the house.

The hallway came to a T and Driscoll went right, with the rest of the procession following behind. Sam came upon a large room at the back of the house, but the windows had been bricked up and there was no door.

“No good!” he shouted. “Try the other direction!”

Chavez led now. He was surprised that the enemy fire up this stretch of hallway had lessened noticeably. With Ryan and Caruso firing down the base of the T, Chavez and al Darkur darted across, and then ran into a long narrow kitchen. There was no exit here, but a small side door looked promising. Chavez opened the door, desperate to find a window or a door or even a staircase back upstairs.

The doorway led to a dark room roughly fifteen feet across and thirty feet deep. It seemed to be some sort of repair shop, but Ding didn’t focus on the room itself; instead he shined his rifle’s light quickly along the walls, searching for any other exit. Seeing nothing, he started to turn away to try to go back and fight with the others. But he stopped when something caught his eye in the low light.

He’d ignored the wooden tables and shelves in the room when looking for a way out, but now he focused on them, or more specifically, what was on them.

Containers of car parts and electrical components. Batteries. Cell phones. Wires. Small drums of gunpowder. Steel pressure plates and a blue fifty-five-gallon drum full of what Ding immediately assumed was nitric acid.

On the floor were mortar shells, partially disassembled.

Ding realized he’d stumbled onto a bomb factory. The improvised explosive devices created here would be smuggled over the border into Afghanistan.

This explained why the Haqqani fighters hadn’t fired a rocket toward Chavez and his team here in the back of the house. If anything in this room detonated, the entire compound would be obliterated, the Haqqani men included.

“Mohammed?” Ding shouted, and al Darkur peered into the room.

Immediately he nodded. “Bombs.”

“I know what they are. Can we use them?”

Mohammed nodded with a crooked smile. “I know something about bombs.”

Ryan and Caruso were both down to their last magazine. They fired individual rounds from the top of the T down to the base. They knew they’d taken out a lot of the Haqqani members with rifle fire, but there seemed to be an unlimited supply of armed assholes remaining.

One of the Puma helicopters was flying in circles behind the compound. This Jack could tell from occasional automatic fire from his six-o’clock high, coming from outside the building. He could not actually hear the helo — with the gunfire in the narrow hallways his ears were trashed, so nothing less than small-arms fire up close or heavy machine guns at distance registered.