Don Pendleton - Killing Ground

The Executioner pointed his gun into the brush while signaling for the Little Bird to shift position. Once the search light had been redirected, Bolan saw there was clearance beneath a protuberance in the rock wall that flanked the trail. Cautiously he dropped to a crouch for a better look. Just enough light made its way into the clearance for him to spot the tunnel opening.

Bolan signaled for the chopper to hold steady, then leaned inward. He was about to enter the cavity when he checked himself and stopped, heeding an instinct honed by years on the battlefield.

“I don’t think so,” he murmured to himself.

Bolan retreated long enough to track down a handful of stones lying along the side of the trail. Clustering them in his fist, he ventured back to the opening, took aim and flung them into the darkness.

Just as the Executioner took a step back there was an explosion. The ground beneath him shook, and he bent at the knees to steady himself as loose debris and frag shards flew out from the opening, laying waste to the holly. Bolan was spared the worst of it, except for a few bits of shrapnel that glanced off his shins.

The blast was short-lived, and in its wake a foul tendril of smoke curled its way through the collapsed remnants of what had once been the tunnel. Bolan could no longer see the opening, but he suspected it would no longer be large enough for anyone to squeeze through.

He was still staring at the damage when the chopper pulled closer.

“Tunnel?” the copilot shouted out to him.

“Not anymore,” Bolan called back.

IT TOOK ANOTHER ten minutes for two of the other Special Ops squads to reach the ambush site. With the fighting over, there was nothing left for them to do but help Bolan and the Chinook crew load casualties into the bulky gunship, which had touched down on a plateau eighty yards to the north. It was a sobering task. Of the twelve commandos who’d been attacked, eleven had been slain, their bodies riddled with far more kill shots than had been necessary to take them out. The twelfth commando was also near death and had passed out after confirming that the unit had been attacked by enemy forces who’d clearly used the hidden tunnel to slip undetected within striking distance.

As for the Taliban, six men had been cut down just off the trail near the rocks and dwarf spruce that they’d taken position behind once the first shots had been fired. At least two more were reported to have gone over the side during the ensuing firefight. There was no way of knowing, at this point, how many men had managed to retreat back into the tunnel before Bolan’s arrival. The Executioner had inspected the blasted opening shortly after the explosion and confirmed that it was too collapsed and choked with debris to be of use. The AH-6J Little Bird had set out to comb the surrounding mountains in hopes of spotting anyone using another way out of the tunnel. Bolan doubted that anything would come of the search. One of the arriving squad leaders was of a similar sentiment.

“Fuckers are like cockroaches,” Captain Rob Kitt said. Kitt was a pallid, broad-shouldered man in his late thirties. He wore a headset-equipped helmet bearing the same camo pattern as his fatigues. “If you can’t stomp ’em before they slip through the cracks, forget about it.”

“You got that right,” another of the commandos said. “Hell, we could punch these mountains with bunker busters from now till doomsday, and there’d still be tunnels left for them to scurry through.”

While the last of the U.S. casualties were being carted off, Bolan and Kitt, each clutching a high-powered flashlight, took a closer look at the slain Taliban fighters and their weapons. In addition to AK-47s and the ASG-17 grenade launcher Bolan had prevented from being used on the Chinook, the terrorists had carried out their attack with knockoff G-3s as well as at least two well-worn M-16s that looked as if they dated back more than twenty years to America’s campaign to support mujahideen forces opposed to the Soviet occupation.

“Ain’t that a bitch,” Kitt murmured as he inspected one of the M-16s. “Killed with our own goddamn weapons.”

“The Kalashnikovs are just as old,” Bolan said.

“Probably scavenged off dead Russkies,” Kitt theorized. “We’ll haul ’em back to Bagram along with the bodies. Maybe AI can find something that’ll clue us in on where they set out from.”

When the captain’s headset squawked, Kitt excused himself and wandered off, leaving Bolan to muse over the fallen enemy. All but one of them looked to be in their early twenties, wearing black turbans and dark, loose clothing, much of it bloodstained with gunshot wounds. The oldest victim, and by far the most heavily bearded, had a scar along his right cheek and was missing two fingers on his left hand. When Bolan’s flashlight caught a gleam of metal beneath the folds of the man’s shirt, he leaned over and found an automatic pistol tucked inside his waistband. Like the C3s, it was handmade, a crude approximation of a U.S. Government Model 1911. Bolan had seen footage of Taliban camps where children worked by candlelight manufacturing such guns as a means of supplementing the insurgents’ arsenal. The weapons were notorious for jamming or even exploding when triggered, and Bolan wondered if that had been the cause for the man’s missing fingers.

Bolan had begun to search the man more thoroughly when Kitt returned.

“That was Little Bird,” he reported. “No luck tracking down any stragglers.”

“What about O’Brien?” Bolan asked. “Did they get to him?”

“We’ve got a problem there,” Kitt replied. “They went to ridgeline and can see where he tripped the mine, but there’s no sign of him.”

Bolan’s expression darkened. “He was shot through the neck. There’s no way he could have pulled through.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Kitt said. “My guess is the snipers took the body as some sort of consolation prize.”

Bolan’s stomach knotted with rage. If he’d had it all to do over, he’d have reacted the same way once the ambush had broken out, but that did little to ease his mind over the notion that Howitzer O’Brien had been left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy.

Remnants of a late-season hurricane had wandered far enough inland to lash Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with a torrential downpour that left Stony Man Farm, like many other estates scattered throughout the Shenandoah Valley, drenched and wind-battered. Barbara Price, mission controller for the Farm’s Sensitive Operations Group, was out helping the blacksuit security force tend to the damage. Sloshing through rain puddles, bundled up warmly against the late-autumn chill, the blond-haired woman gathered up snapped twigs and broken tree limbs that lay strewed in the orchards and added them to a growing heap in the truck bed of one of the Farm’s Ford F-150 pickups.

“Could have been worse,” one of the blacksuits told her as he stomped on the debris, compressing it to make room for more. Like the others, he had a web-holstered 9 mm pistol concealed beneath his down-lined ski vest and gave no appearance of being anything other than a hired farmhand. “A little colder and the trees would’ve iced over. If you think this is a mess…”

“We’re not out of it yet,” Price said, casting an eye on the dark, leaden clouds still massed over the valley. There was more rain in the forecast, and she could only hope the temperature wouldn’t dip low enough to threaten the trees further.

As Price gathered up the last of the fallen branches, a rumbling sounded overhead. It wasn’t thunder, but rather the familiar, mechanical drone of an approaching helicopter. Moments later, a small Bell 47 two-seater dropped below the cloud line and approached the camouflaged runway that lay between the orchards and the dormant planting fields.