Tom Young - The Renegades

“Can the rescue crews fly in that?”

“It’ll suck, but they’re going to try.”

“Sir,” Gold said, “I work for Lieutenant Colonel Parson. I’m his interpreter. I want to ride on the first chopper that goes out to get him.”

The grenade sailed over Parson’s head and detonated behind him. The blast so overwhelmed his eardrums that he heard no boom, just a grinding sound like a knife on a whetstone. With both hands, he raised his pistol and began firing at the enemy above him. Instinct and muscle memory took over. He had no conscious thought of aim and trigger pull, yet he felt the Beretta recoiling in his grip.

Beside him, Conway fired the M4 on semiauto. He unleashed not a burst of rounds but a series of pops, each shot aimed. One of Conway’s empty cartridges flipped into Parson’s flight suit collar. Parson swatted the hot brass away from his neck.

The insurgents scattered and dived. One of them spun to his right as if hit. That must have been from Conway’s disciplined fire, Parson figured. He didn’t think any of his own rounds had connected.

Rashid and his crew chief shot in the other direction. Plunging fire from their PKM door gun kept the terrorists below them pinned down. Their tracers rained into the valley like neon sleet. Parson saw one burst streak to a boulder that shielded a jihadist. The tracers bounced off the rock and angled upward until they burned out and vanished. Sputters of the enemy’s AK-47 fire died down, flared again.

The rock barricades provided Parson’s team good protection from rounds fired up at them from the valley. But the stone offered no cover from the enemy firing down on them from the ridge.

A few feet to Parson’s left, Reyes opened up with his handgun, firing toward the ridge. He tried to use the Mi-17 as a defilade, but he had to come from behind cover to see his target. When the Beretta’s slide locked back, Reyes ejected the empty magazine and reached into his vest for a spare. Just as he began to reload, he stumbled backward and fell.

Parson lunged toward him. He feared he’d see blood spurt from a chest wound or from Reyes’s mouth. But the PJ only coughed.

“Are you all right?” Parson shouted over the gunfire.

“Yeah, but that felt like I got kicked by a mule.”

Body armor, Parson realized. Thank God. Reyes slammed a new magazine into his weapon, clambered up on his knees. Released his slide and fired uphill.

“If we don’t get some help in here, we’re fucked,” Conway said.

“I know it,” Parson said. “Make ’em keep their heads down as long as you can.”

So this is what it means to be flanked, Parson realized. He was no infantryman, but he knew things had gone wrong in a hurry. If the bad guys were only in the valley below, he’d have the upper hand, literally—covering his target from an elevated position. But some of the enemy had come around behind him. Taking fire from two directions, he occupied not so much a fighting position as a kill zone.

Conway’s dog huddled beside the Mi-17, tail between her legs, shaking. Bullets cracked from both upslope and down, and the animal flinched with each round. Wailing came from inside the helicopter. Aamir cried out in words that were incomprehensible to Parson except Allah .

Parson caught a glimpse of an insurgent’s head and shoulder behind an outcropping uphill. He fired two shots. The man ducked below the outcropping. Parson had heard of coalition squads getting into fixes like this. The only way out: Keep the enemy at bay with small arms and wait for air support. The battle’s outcome depended on who ran out of ammunition first.

He fired once more, emptied his Beretta. Thumbed the magazine release and let the spent mag clatter to his feet. Inserted a full magazine and kept firing. Odors of burned gunpowder wafted in quick snatches, ripped away by the wind.

The sound of Reyes’s voice murmured under the staccato snaps of the M4 and the deep rips of the PKM. The PJ had holstered his pistol and was speaking into his headset.

“Spectre Six-Four,” he said, “this is Golay One-Eight. I have an emergency fire mission. Target is riflemen to the immediate northwest and southeast of my position.”

Maybe help would get here in time. Rashid and the crew chief stopped firing their door gun, scrambled to feed a fresh belt of cartridges. Parson almost told them they were doing it wrong until he remembered they were working with a PKM. Unlike most crew-served weapons he’d seen, the Russian-built PKM fed from the right and ejected to the left. Parson turned to look downhill. One of the black-clad gunmen advanced, zigzagged to take cover in a gully. Parson raised his weapon, pulled the trigger. Dirt flew from the lip of the gully.

“Request strafing attack,” Reyes continued. “Friendlies are all within four meters of the Mi-17. Will mark my position with orange smoke.”

The man in the gully rose again, sprinted forward. Parson squeezed off three shots. The man stumbled, dropped his AK. He collapsed face forward, but then he rolled to his side and reached for his rifle. Parson steadied his hands on the stone berm he’d helped build. Took aim at the insurgent’s center mass. Pressed the trigger. The man jerked, but still held his weapon.

All right, Parson thought, maybe you got body armor, too. He aimed for the insurgent’s head, missed. Just a puff of dust by the man’s neck. Fired twice more and the man went limp.

Amid the shooting, Parson listened for aircraft engines. He strained to pick up the sound of turboprops, but he heard only the rush of wind, shouts in Pashto, more shots. All the firepower in the world couldn’t help them if it didn’t get here quickly. He’d brought only two fifteen-round magazines for his Beretta, and he’d already used more than half of the last one. Conway had emptied at least one thirty-round mag, and Parson didn’t know how much ammo the crew chief had for the PKM. Rashid racked the bolt on that weapon and sprayed more fire among the insurgents below. Geysers of dirt spewed upward as bullets flayed the ground.

A sense of hyperalertness came over Parson as he watched for jihadists trying to move closer. The air itself seemed granular, as if he tasted each molecule as he inhaled. Time clicked by in distinct half-second increments. A man on the outcropping above raised his grenade launcher. Parson aimed, focused on his pistol’s front sight centered in the notch of the rear sight. When he fired, he felt everything that resulted: the leap of the muzzle, the cycle of the slide, the extractor kicking out the empty brass, the weapon closing itself with firing pin poised over a new primer, hammer at full cock.

The first joint of his finger on the trigger, Parson nearly squeezed it again. But his target had disappeared. Save ’em, he told himself. Save ’em. He’d been in firefights before, but not like this one. They usually turned on who shot first, shot straightest, and shot most—the volume of thrown metal. But this seemed more like some strange and deadly field sport, in a play to run out the clock.

The enemy must suspect an air strike could be on the way, Parson figured. Their usual countertactic was to fire from occupied homes. They knew the coalition’s own rules about trying to avoid civilian casualties, so they put civilians in front of themselves whenever possible. Not an option today, though. Nobody lived on this mountainside except snakes and scorpions.

Conway ejected another spent magazine from the M4 carbine. “I’m out,” he yelled. Drew the Makarov pistol, fired the handgun until it emptied. Reyes looked up from his radio, patted the pockets of his vest. He ripped open a pouch and withdrew an M4 mag.

“Last one,” Reyes said.