Afghan Storm (Nick Woods Book 3) Read online

  The losses were unfortunate but necessary.

  Chapter 17

  Watching through his scope to check for range, Nick saw the villagers had finally closed to three hundred yards.

  “Now!” he yelled.

  Marcus and Red opened fire on the mob, their AK-47s adding to the hell Nick and Truck were already unleashing. Both Marcus and Red were using the older style AK-47s, which fired a larger bullet than the newer, more modern variants. Their AK-47s fired 7.62 x 39 mm bullets, a much heavier bullet with stronger knockdown power. The AKs also sported expensive ACOG scopes, and at three hundred yards, you would almost have to try to miss.

  The mass of villagers slowed, the casualties too disheartening, the fire too heavy. As the assault up the hill ground to a halt, the remaining villagers looked for cover. Unfortunately for them, there was none. A few took a knee. Others dove into the prone. And finally, they commenced firing.

  Their fire up the hill picked up in volume, but would have only been overwhelming if they had been trained in fire discipline or had any concept of accuracy. A few fired from under their arms, others from the hip. Only a few truly aimed, but even then their weapons were too worn and poorly cared for to be precise machines.

  The four Americans were dialed in, completely focused on the task at hand. They ignored narrow misses and stayed locked on their sights and the execution of firing accurately: taking their time, aiming well, and pulling (not jerking) the trigger.

  Nick finally found the man in the white turban -- Tariq -- in his scope and moved his point of aim to center mass. The man was yelling and shouting, leading with strength despite the situation.

  Nick noted this, briefly respecting the man before sending a round straight through him. He nudged his rifle to the right and aimed in on a man who had taken a knee and was now firing up the hill. His bullet struck the shooter in the face, and the man dropped hard. At this distance, Nick could shoot three-inch groups from the Dragunov sniper rifle with barely a strain. And with a ten-round magazine and a weapon that was semi-automatic instead of bolt action like the M40 he’d started on in the Marine Corps, he was bagging his limit today.

  The barrel of Truck’s machine gun was steadily growing hotter, brass and links piling in front of him. He saw a man lugging a machine gun up the hill and fired a burst low into the ground in front of him. Rounds and rocks ricocheted up into the man and he dropped. Truck readjusted his aim and fired three more rounds to make sure the man was dead, then rotated toward a cluster of men.

  Again keeping his aim low -- as all great machine gunners do -- Truck skipped a burst directly into their ranks. Rounds shattered shins, knees, and ankles, sending the men to the ground. Truck poured more bullets into the targets who were now gripping the ground in terror.

  Marcus knew exactly how the men below were feeling. Being a prior Marine Corps Gunny, he’d both witnessed and participated in numerous assaults. Therefore, Marcus set to picking his shots with purpose and relying on some hard-earned instincts.

  Keeping his eyes constantly moving, Marcus quickly sized up individual targets and focused on the greatest threats. Ultimately, Marcus knew that engagements were won and lost based on leadership. Consequently, he looked for men yelling or pointing, and he promptly fired a heavy round from his AK-47 through them. The 7.62 x 39 mm, 120-grain bullet hit them so hard that most didn’t require a second shot.

  Red, however, followed no such strategy and picked off the men below with how he’d always done everything. With a mad, unshakable determination. He watched the surviving men below him with deep satisfaction. Among the surviving few, Red recognized a subtle change had swept over them.

  What had been a hoard of confident warriors running headlong into battle now looked like a frantic scattering of startled chickens. Red could see it in their actions, if not in their eyes. It was a look that Red knew very well.

  It was the same look that eventually dawned upon every big man who went to square up with little Red. Every single time. There was that small, but deliciously validating moment. The very moment they realized just how greatly they’d underestimated their opponent, and how much they were going to hurt in the morning. Red called it the “Oh Shit! Moment.”

  Chapter 18

  The entire fight with the villagers ended in ninety seconds. All fire from the villagers had stopped though many moaned or cried from their positions.

  “What do you say, sir?” Red asked, looking at Nick. “We can’t leave any survivors, right?”

  He had crawled out from the net and now stood, waiting for Nick’s answer.

  Nick hesitated, looking to Marcus.

  Marcus, an honorable man if there ever was one, shook his head “no” without a moment’s hesitation. His years as a drill instructor at Parris Island had molded him into a man with the highest standards and uncompromising integrity. Marcus would never be the type of man that would agree to shoot survivors.

  “Marcus is right,” Nick said. “Besides, we don’t need to waste our ammo.”

  “We could use their weapons and ammo,” Truck said, standing to join Red outside the net.

  Nick knew Truck was hardly the shining example of a healthy conscience. He was a bull-headed man who had not only been kicked out of Special Forces for beating the shit out of an incompetent officer, but he’d also been fired as a military contractor after he defied orders, abandoned his company vehicle, and ran pell-mell into a Taliban ambush. Although knowing the stories behind these incidents had made it easier for Nick to understand Truck’s actions, Nick believed the results might have been a little less devastating to Truck’s career if he had avoided trying to solve all his problems with violence.

  Nevertheless, Nick leaned Red and Truck’s way. The last thing they needed was someone hobbling off and alerting the entire country that there were four armed Americans hiding in the mountains.

  Marcus slid forward under the net so he could see Nick better.

  “Don’t do this, Nick,” he stressed. “We’re better than this. Besides, the timeline favors us. We can pack our shit up, head further up the mountain range, and work a circular route toward Ahmud al-Habshi’s compound. Even if someone stumbles upon the men below, they won’t have time to track and find us before dark. Not to mention, there won’t be time to get a warning out to al-Habshi. There are no cell towers here, and there’s not enough time to get down the hill, locate a vehicle, and drive there before dark.”

  Nick gripped his face with one hand and nodded toward Marcus. Maybe I’m getting soft, he thought. Marcus had made several good points. For once, time was on their side. And besides all that, Nick already had a hard enough time sleeping at night.

  “We let them live,” he said to Red. “But take Truck with you and collect any ammo that will fit our weapons.”

  And catching a glance from Marcus, Nick added, “If you see anyone you think might survive, tie off their wounds if you can. But be sure to hogtie ’em with paracord if they look like they might be able to run.”

  As Red and Truck turned to leave, Nick finished his orders and warned, “Oh, and be careful you two. There’s always a chance someone might be playing possum.”

  Truck and Red collected ammo without incident and returned to their camp.

  “Most of ’em had bled out by the time we had walked down to ’em,” Red reported softly.

  “A few may survive,” Truck added, attempting to sound hopeful as he looked toward Marcus.

  Marcus shrugged in acknowledgement. It wasn’t that he struggled with their deaths. After all, people die in war, and the villagers had made their choice when they attacked up the hill. Nonetheless, he vehemently opposed executing wounded men who could no longer defend themselves, and he didn’t think that made him any less of a man or a warrior. In a more normal situation, he would have argued that they should provide first aid for the fighters, but it wasn’t like the four of them had enough medical supplies to help them.

  “Alright,” Nick said. “What’s don
e is done. Change your socks if you need to and get your packs ready. We’re going to be humping all out on this last leg of our journey.”

  He had to keep his team moving. It would do them no good to dwell on the past. What happened to the villagers hadn’t been fun or fair, but neither was having your hand forced and being backed into a difficult and violent decision. The way most people see it, war is meant to be a worthy struggle between mighty warriors and heavily trained armies. But what they don’t want to see is that war is a cold-hearted, nasty bitch, who neither understands nor cares anything about honor. War has never made any hero without the witnessing or participation of some horror. So when war comes knocking, there isn’t anyone who’s safe anymore. Everyone has a decision to make, and nobody gets off easy. And the worst part is that when it’s all over, nobody really walks away truly feeling like a winner.

  The men prepped for the last all-out movement, then broke down their netting. They debated leaving it and its stakes to spare some weight but decided the mission could go haywire, and it might be worth having if they needed to hide on any more mountainsides.

  Just minutes later, they were ready to go. And while it was impossible to ever get used to the weight on their backs, their bodies had adjusted as much as they ever would.

  “This will be our first movement during daylight,” Nick said, “so keep alert and be ready for contact.”

  Red stepped off on point, and the men of S3 followed him toward their target destination, the compound of Ahmud al-Habshi. They had endured ten days and nights of hell to get to this point, and their time to meet him was well over due.

  Chapter 19

  Ironically, the primary target of Shield, Safeguard, and Shelter was closer than they could have anticipated. He wasn’t shacked up, hiding in some rural province of Afghanistan, nor was he lounging in some comfortable mosque deep within the safety of Pakistan.

  No. Less than one mile away, while Nick Woods and his band of shooters made their final approach toward their secondary target, their primary target was ascending the very hill they had occupied and defended against a mob of enraged villagers.

  Rasool Deraz, the leader of the Taliban, had to take the hill slowly, but like so many Afghan men and women, he had strong legs and was surprisingly durable to be in his sixties and without any form of modern medical care. The Old Lion, as he was called, had been twenty miles away when word arrived about a bloody firefight. One of Rasool’s lieutenants had worked the radio and quickly confirmed that no skirmishes had broken out between villages, and there had been no reports indicating any trouble with the Pakistani soldiers in the area.

  The Pakistani army had recently negotiated with Deraz and the Taliban before entering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Had the Army not, they would have been sent running with their trucks piled high with body bags.

  Rasool carried a sneaking suspicion about what might have happened on the hill, but he wanted to confirm it for himself. So he and his entourage of more than two hundred hardened fighters had roared down the road in their trucks to the site and began ascending up the rough terrain on foot. Upon hearing the news, the Pakistani army had packed up and cleared the area, wary that they could be blamed for the slaughter of the villagers.

  A lot of blood had been spilled between the Pakistani army and the people in the area. The Pakistani army had fought with both the locals and the Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, who were in Pakistan seeking sanctuary while they refitted and rested.

  In this incident, however, the typical suspects had been effectively ruled out. No reported Army interference or village squabbles meant that there was a new culprit to consider, and in Rasool’s experience, new or unexpected parties equaled something much more dangerous. The unsettling nature of that realization was great enough that Rasool had resigned to see the scene for himself. But this, of course, called for a much larger production than Rasool would have liked.

  Wherever Rasool went, his men went with him, with little to no exceptions. Therefore, what should have been a simple inspection quickly evolved into a full-blown military exercise, featuring a cavalcade of two hundred plus men crammed, clinging, and piled into fewer than twenty, four-wheel-drive Toyota trucks.

  Although he appreciated the concerns of his men, Rasool also felt the precaution was largely unnecessary and ultimately frustrating due to the amount of time it took to orchestrate a simple trip down the road. Rasool had wanted to get to the hill as soon as possible in order to be with the wounded and provide what little comfort he could to the ones who lay dying.

  His impatience amplified when he was informed that he would not be permitted to ride in the lead truck. He attempted to protest, but his men “strongly insisted” that he travel in a truck far back at the end of the procession. This, in turn, meant that it would take longer for his truck to get there. Or it could very well ensure that he didn’t make it there at all, if something happened further up the line and either forced the trucks following it to stop or turn back altogether.

  Leader or not, there was not much Rasool could do as a group of his men ushered him into his truck -- one that had been specially armored with additional steel inside the doors -- and sped off far ahead of him and his driver.

  No matter how hard Rasool tried, his men went to extremes to care for him and protect him. How he wished he could make them see that his life was nearing its end and of little value. If there was only some way he could get them to understand that it was now their turn, that their young lives offered so much more opportunity to advance Islam. But they were all too stubborn and too proud to accept it.

  A personal bodyguard and long-time friend -- Mushahid Zubaida -- oversaw his protection at all times. When Deraz needed to move in the open, as few as ten men traveled with him. Although drone strikes had been almost non-existent for months, Mushahid remained cautious about large numbers of fighters whether they were in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Using his best judgment to protect Rasool, Mushahid would call as many as fifty or a hundred men to encircle the Taliban leader. However, Mushahid believed discretion provided the best defense.

  The country of Afghanistan was mostly on its own now. Its primary protector for the past decade -- America -- was, for the most part, a distant memory. There were still some American military units in Afghanistan, but the remnants were mostly military contractors now. As far as Rasool could tell, these military contractors were there to suck money that the U.S. government had transferred to Afghanistan while merely performing low-level security at bridges and dams, as well as training the Afghan army and police force. But both the military and police forces of Afghanistan and Pakistan were heavily infiltrated by Taliban members or sympathizers. Even the units that hadn’t been infiltrated were laden with men who had little dedication to the fragile government of Afghanistan. These men were in it for the paycheck, and that’s why the Taliban under Rasool were within months of fully taking over the entire country.

  Mushahid constantly berated Rasool that if he didn’t become more cautious, then he wouldn’t live to see what he had spent a decade trying to achieve: the complete collapse of the Afghan government and the re-establishment of a Taliban government. That was the first step in their grand plan, anyway.

  “You risk yourself too much,” Mushahid regularly harped at him.

  Rasool always reminded Mushahid that if Allah willed his death, there was nothing Mushahid or any of his fighters could do to prevent it. But Mushahid would always argue that Allah also gave Rasool the good sense to know better and to realize how crucial he was to the movement.

  “Your death, if it must come, will only come by natural causes,” Mushahid had once said. “No one, especially some American infidel, will ever cause your passing as long as I’m alive.”

  Rasool Deraz had no doubt Mushahid and the others would willingly take a bullet for him. This zeal for his protection -- for the cause, really -- was why Rasool tried to stay away from direct fighting. When danger had lurked near in the past
, his personal force of two hundred men had charged into it like a colony of angry fire ants.

  Rasool knew the feeling. He had been the same once, protecting older, venerable religious leaders himself. He had first fought against the Soviets back in the ’80s when the communist superpower had invaded his home country of Afghanistan. He had then worked his way up the ranks in the civil war between Afghan warlords that followed the power vacuum that ensued after the Soviets left.

  Eventually, the religious order known as the Taliban had practically won that civil war in Afghanistan except for a few provinces in the north. In fact, the Taliban had its mortal enemy -- the Northern Alliance -- on the ropes when al-Qaeda hit the Twin Towers in New York on September 11.

  Then the Americans arrived decisively. Initially, the superpower relied mostly on their planes and some advisors. The bulk of the fighting had been done by local Afghans in the Northern Alliance. Had the Americans stayed with this strategy, they may have won. But eventually, they made the major mistake of trying to rebuild the country and turn it into a democracy, sending in thousands of U.S. troops to help facilitate this. None of these American troops understood the culture, of course.

  Barely twenty-one-year-old lieutenants would demean and yell at sixty-year-old tribal elders. Soldiers would enter private homes and have women searched. They’d even go so far as to enter mosques without removing their boots.

  And with every cultural mistake against the populace, the Taliban gained support and new fighters. Loads of propaganda helped feed this.

  Now, victory in Afghanistan was within sight for the Taliban again. Just as the Soviets had been beaten down over a ten-year period, the Americans had become weary nearly fifteen years after invading the country. Only now the Taliban were led by Rasool Deraz, a humble man who somehow found himself at the top of the organization. He had never sought the spot, but the Americans had killed or captured the Taliban’s leaders through the years. And with each loss, Rasool was promoted and held in higher regard.