Light troops—an Eleven-Bravo light infantryman, according
the United States Army’s MOS (military occupational
specialty) system—are supposed to be “pretty” spit-and-polish
troops with spotless uniforms and clean-shaven faces, but
First Sergeant Sam Driscoll wasn’t one of those anymore, and
hadn’t been for some time. The concept of camouflage often
involved more than patterned BDUs. No, wait, they weren’t
called that anymore, were they? Now they were called “Army
combat uniforms,” ACUs. Same, same.
Driscoll’s beard was fully four inches long, with enough
flecks of white in it that his men had taken to calling him
Santa—rather annoying to a man hardly thirty-six years old,
but when most of your compatriots were an average of ten
years younger than you . . . Oh, well. Could be worse. Could
be “Pops” or “Gramps.”
He was even more annoyed to have long hair. It was dark
and shaggy and greasy, and his beard coarse, which was useful
here, where the facial hair was important to his cover and the
local people rarely bothered with haircuts. His dress was
entirely local in character, and this was true of his team as
well. There were fifteen of them. Their company commander,
a captain, was down with a broken leg from a misstep—which
was all it took to sideline you in this terrain—sitting on a
hilltop and waiting for the Chinook to evac him, along with
one of the team’s two medics who’d stayed behind to make
sure he didn’t go into shock. That left Driscoll in command
for the mission. He didn’t mind. He had more time in the
field than Captain Wilson had, though the captain had a
college degree, and Driscoll didn’t have his yet. One thing at
a time. He had to survive this deployment still, and after that
he could go back to his classes at the University of Georgia.
Funny, he thought, that it had taken him nearly three decades
to start enjoying school. Well, hell, better late than never, he
supposed.
He was tired, the kind of mind-numbing, bone-grinding
fatigue Rangers knew only too well. He knew how to sleep
like a dog on a granite block with only a rifle stock for a pillow,
knew how to stay alert when his brain and body were screaming at him to lie down. Problem
was, now that he was closer
to forty than thirty, he felt the aches and pains a little more
than he had when he was twenty, and it took twice as long to
work out the kinks in the morning. Then again, those aches
were offset by wisdom and experience. He’d learned over the
years that despite it being a cliché, it was in fact mind over
matter. He’d learned to largely block out pain, which was a
handy skill when you were leading much younger men whose
packs undoubtedly felt much lighter on their shoulders than
Driscoll’s did on his own. Life, he decided, was all about trade-
offs.
They’d been in the hills for two days, all of it on the move,
sleeping two to three hours a night. He was part of the special
operations team of the 75th Ranger Regiment, based permanently at Fort Benning, Georgia,
where there was a nice NCO
club with good beer on tap. By closing his eyes and concentrating, he imagined he could
still taste the cold beer, but that
moment passed quickly. He had to focus here, every second.
They were fifteen thousand feet above sea level, in the Hindu
Kush mountains, in that gray zone that was both Afghanistan
and Pakistan, and neither—at least to the locals. Lines on maps
didn’t make borders, Driscoll knew, especially in Indian country like this. He’d check his
GPS equipment to be sure of his
position, but latitude and longitude really didn’t matter to his
mission. What mattered was where they were headed, regardless of where it fell on the map.
The local population knew little about borders, and didn’t
especially care. For them reality was which tribe you were in,
which family you were a part of, and which flavor of Muslim
you were. Here memories lasted a hundred years, and the
stories even longer. And grudges even longer than that. The
locals still boasted that their ancestors had driven Alexander
the Great out of the country, and some of them still remembered the names of the warriors
who had bested the
Macedonian spearmen who had up until then conquered every
other place they’d wandered into. Most of all, though, the
locals spoke of the Russians, and how many of those they’d
killed, mostly by ambush, some with knives, face-to-face. They
smiled and laughed with those stories, legends passed on from
father to son. Driscoll doubted the Russian soldiers who made
it out of Afghanistan did much laughing about the experience.
No, sir, these were not nice folks, he knew. They were scary-tough, hardened by weather,
war, famine, and just generally
trying to stay alive in a country that seemed to be doing its
best to kill you most of the time. Driscoll knew he ought to
feel some sympathy for them. God had just dealt them a bad
hand, and maybe that wasn’t their fault, but it wasn’t Driscoll’s
fault, either, nor his concern. They were enemies of Driscoll’s
country, and the powers-that-be had pointed the stick at them
and ordered “Go,” and so here they were. That was the central
truth of the moment, the reason he was in these goddamned
mountains.
One more ridge was the other central truth, especially here,
it seemed. They’d legged it fifteen klicks, almost all of it uphill
and over sharp rock and scree, since they’d hopped off the
CH-47 Chinook helicopter, a Delta variant, the only one at
their disposal that could handle the altitude here.
There . . . the ridgeline. Fifty meters.
Driscoll slowed his pace. He was walking point, leading the
patrol as the senior NCO present, with his men stretched out
a hundred meters to his rear, alert, eyes sweeping left and right,
up and down, M4 carbines at ready-low and trained at their
sectors. They expected there to be a few sentries on the ridge-
line. The locals might be uneducated in the traditional sense,
but they weren’t stupid by any measure, which was why the
Rangers were running this op at night—zero-one-forty-four,
or a quarter to two in the morning—according to his digital
watch. No moon tonight, and high clouds thick enough to
block whatever light came from the stars. Good hunting
weather, he thought.
His eyes traced more down than up. He didn’t want to make
any noise, and noise came from the feet. One damned rock,
kicked loose and rolling down the hillside, could betray them
all. Couldn’t have that, could he? Couldn’t waste the three days
and fifteen miles it had taken them to get this close.
Twenty meters to the ridgeline. Sixty feet.
His eyes searched the line for movement. Nothing close. A
few more steps, looking left and right, his noise-suppressed
carbine cradled to his chest at ready-low, finger resting lightly
on the trigger, just enough to know it was there.