Читать книгу Killing Ground - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

Aden Saleh cursed as he watched one of his fellow warriors keel into the ravine, the victim of rounds fired from the large American warbird thundering out in the misty night air before him. The hope had been that dust storms forecast for the evening would have reached far enough into the mountains to thwart visibility and keep gunships from responding to the Taliban assault. Such had not been the case, now Saleh’s men were paying the price. Yes, they’d managed to take the enemy by surprise and decimate those who would have done the same to them, but the arrival of the helicopters threatened their chances of making a safe retreat to the tunnels through which they’d been able to reach the attack site undetected.

Saleh, a lean, grim-faced man who’d spent nearly half his thirty years rising up through the Taliban ranks, directed his wrath at the hovering Chinook, emptying the last rounds from his Kalashnikov, to little effect. His ammunition spent, he cast the assault rifle aside and yanked a 9 mm Ruger from his waistband. Fifty yards to his left, a smaller chopper had just deposited a soldier on the same footpath where he now stood. The entrance to the tunnel lay between them, but Saleh was closer to it and had no intention of letting the other man prevent him from making his getaway. He whirled and fired, forcing the enemy to cover, then charged forward, mere steps ahead of a strafing round fired his way from the Chinook.

Halfway to the bend where he’d last seen the American, Saleh threw himself to the ground and crawled off the path. He squeezed past a mound of holly just off the trail, then bellied his way beneath a rock formation protruding from the canyon wall. There, in the cold darkness, a manhole-size opening yawned its welcome. Saleh burrowed through the gap and wriggled past a loose boulder, following a narrow shaft to the point where it widened enough for him to rise to his knees. He had no interest in backtracking to reset the boulder that had earlier helped conceal the opening. If anything, at this point he hoped his pursuer would find the entrance and come after him.

Saleh crawled a few more yards, then squirmed clear of the shaft, entering a larger tunnel tall enough to stand in. He quickly brushed himself off, then made his way to the first turn. There he stopped and shoved the Ruger back in his waistband, and pulled from beneath the folds of his shirt a Soviet-made F-1 fragmentation grenade. He thumbed loose the cotter ring, then, pressing the safety lever, he drew in a breath, hoping to soothe the loud clamor of his racing heart. He needed to be able to hear the infidel’s approach, so that he would know when to let fly with the limonka and turn the entrance shaft into a death trap.

BOLAN STAYED PUT once the insurgent’s 9 mm serenade drove him to cover. There was no way for him to round the bend without placing himself back in the line of fire. By the same token, he figured the enemy would be unable to flee any farther without coming his way. Judging from the hail of gunfire spewing from the two choppers, the Executioner also thought there was a good chance any of the retreating Taliban would be dispensed with before they reached him.

As he awaited his next move, Bolan felt the warm trickle of blood running down his shoulder. He shrugged it off and tested his arm, then tried putting his full weight on his right foot. The ankle felt sprained, but not severely enough to hinder him, and he was certain that, at worse, he’d only need a couple stitches in his shoulder. He’d fought on countless times in the past with far worse injuries.

The firefight went on without him, but not for long. Soon the only shots were being fired from the helicopters, and then their guns fell silent, as well. As the Chinook lumbered away, the Little Bird pulled back from its firing position and briefly shone its light on the trail leading to the attack site, then slowly drifted Bolan’s way. Once the chopper was within shouting range, the copilot called out to Bolan.

“I think we got ’em all except the one just down the trail from you.” The man pointed to Bolan’s right. “Fucker dropped to his belly and went Houdini on us.”

“He couldn’t have just disappeared,” Bolan shouted back.

The copilot shrugged. “If you want to check it out, we’ll light the way.”

Bolan nodded, readying his MP-5. Once the searchlight illuminated the path before him, he ventured around the bend and cautiously made his way forward, slightly favoring his bad ankle. The dirt was etched with bootprints, all of them leading toward the staging site where the Special Ops force had been attacked. It was another twenty yards before he came upon more tracks. The imprints were different from the others, made by boots other than those worn by U.S. troops. All but one set of the tracks led to the ambush site; the other, headed the opposite way, had been made by the man whose retreat Bolan had hoped to prevent. There was a spot where the latter tracks stopped and had been smudged away, along with the other prints. Bolan surmised the reason and glanced to his right, where a small thicket of holly just off the trail had been partially flattened.

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.