CHAPTER 7
The skin on Sergeant Ali Montero’s neck crawled, warning her of danger. She lay on her belly on the slope just below the top of the hill, the pebbles biting into her lower body. Her Kevlar vest protected her upper body so the irritating, sharp stones wouldn’t distract her. She lay with a .300 Win Mag sniper rifle, the barrel resting on a bipod, the butt of it nestled deeply into her right shoulder.
Even in July in Afghanistan the night air was freezing, sweeping off the mountains surrounding them. Keeping her eye an inch away from the special infrared, she continued to slowly pan the area a mile in front of where the SEAL team lay in wait. Tonight, they were tasked with a snatch-and-grab mission. The barrel of her Win Mag was draped with special cloth to prevent any enemy in the area from seeing the possible glint off the long barrel beneath the quarter moonlit sky. Sighting, she watched a small Taliban encampment that had just stopped for the night. There were three caves behind them, with a grove of trees and bushes separating them. She counted ten tangos, sitting around in a circle. They had dug a hole in the earth to start a small fire, hoping it couldn’t be seen. There was a round metal grate over the hole and an old blackened copper kettle setting on top of it to heat water.
Her job was to watch the SEAL team members get into placement, searching for any problems they might run into, checking if the horses were either lying down on the line or sleeping with heads hanging. They all had their NVGs in place, and patiently waited for orders to be given to start the op.
“They’re making tea,” she said in a low voice. The other seven SEALs lying on either side of her wore earpieces, and were in constant communication with one another. “I count ten Taliban sitting in a circle. They’ve put their AK-47s down and are getting ready to have tea.”
“Roger that,” Wyatt drawled. “Can you make out any of their faces?”
Frowning, she said, “I’ll try.” They were after four top-level Taliban leaders from the province that their intelligence people said were a part of this group. If possible, they wanted to take them as prisoners for interrogation. If not, the enemy was going to die in the heat of battle with the SEAL team. Mouth tight, Ali panned around the group, stopping at each face. Her scope used starlight and moonlight effectively and as she moved around the circle, she studied each enemy’s face. It took five minutes to complete the sweep.
Lifting her face away from the scope, she looked to her right where Wyatt was lying close beside her, watching the group through a pair of specialized night binoculars. “All four of our targets are there. Confirmed.”
“Good.” Wyatt’s Texas drawl came out pleased and low. “Now we wait.”
Yes, Ali knew that order. Nights were colder than hell, heavy snow still clogging some, but not all, the mountain passes and valleys. Knowing the drill, Wyatt would order the rest of his team to encircle the unsuspecting Taliban. They had chosen a low slope off a mountain that rose far above them. There was a rounded hill a thousand feet high behind where they were lying that had the three caves.
Ali had spotted three cave openings, dark maws, behind where the tangos were camped. Their horses were tied on a rope line between two scrub trees, the saddles removed. It was typical of the Taliban to stop traveling at dusk. They had no night vision goggle capabilities and always packed it in when it became dark to have hot tea, eat, and then sleep. Come dawn, they’d be on the move again, creating carnage at the next village they encountered. It was clear to her that this small group was pretty arrogant, since they had only one guard out on watch. They obviously felt safe—which would work to the team’s advantage.
“I’m worried about those caves,” she confided to Wyatt. “We arrived here half an hour ago. How do we know there aren’t Taliban in those caves sleeping through the night?”
“We don’t,” he admitted. “And usually, when they go into caves, they go as far back from the entrance as they can get—for good reason.” He lifted the binoculars, studying each opening. “And if there are tangos in those caves, it doesn’t seem like this outside group knows about it.”
“But that’s not unusual,” Ram spoke up. “These groups may or may not know one another until they set eyes on each other. They don’t have the communication links we do.”
“Yeah,” Wyatt growled unhappily, “you’re dead on, Ram.”
“But that doesn’t mean there’s Taliban in one or all of those three caves,” he said.
“Roger that. They only have to be in one, and if someone is in there we’re compromised.”
Ali scowled. “And there’s no way to know if there is or isn’t?”
“If one of those horses snorts in a cave, you can bet the horses outside it will hear them. They might raise their heads and look in a particular direction,” Wyatt said. “Or nicker a greeting in return. All we can do is keep an eye on the horses on the picket line. They’ll be the first to hear a noise or recognize a sound that gets their attention. Keep your scope on them, too.”
Ali knew this type of situation was dicey as hell. Taliban routinely used caves. “Then if someone was inside the cave, why wouldn’t they hear these other guys ride up?”
“They could be far back. You know how sounds are muted in a cave system,” Wyatt murmured. He sighed. “All we can do is watch. It’s a 50-50 chance there’s someone in those caves. If there is and we try to snatch and grab, they’re gonna come pouring out of the cave with their AK-47s.”
Ali knew what that meant. They were a small team. Taliban sometimes were twenty or thirty men to a group and there was no way the SEALs could take them on, much less grab their targets. No, it would be a busted op, for sure. Wyatt would give them orders to return to where they were, and they’d disappear over the hills to catch an MH-47 home. The price of any SEAL dying, she knew, weighed heavily on Wyatt if they were discovered. She could feel him measuring the unknowns of the mission.
“Torres and Allen, take the left flank,” Wyatt ordered the SEALs quietly. “I want all three teams to try to get within a quarter mile of our targets.”
Ali heard a lot of clicks on the radios acknowledging his orders. Speaking was kept at a bare minimum. The clicks would acknowledge that the SEAL teams had heard Wyatt’s order.
“Cousins and Felix, you’re opposite me and Ali.”
Two more clicks on the radio.
“Cerney and Ledlow, right flank.”
Two more clicks on the radio.
Ali was aware of their slow movement down the slope and then, in pairs, the SEALs left the command area heading silently for their assigned positions. They would move slowly and quietly. Horses, as they all knew, were super sensitive, picking up on the slightest sound or movement. If the animals detected them, their mission was blown. It would take them at least an hour to reach their assigned destinations, and that would be after crawling over gravel, and around rocks and brush so as not to disturb anything—plus the biting, freezing cold constantly assaulting them at this eight-thousand-foot altitude.
This wasn’t their first rodeo on a snatch-and-grab op. Since coming to J-bad, Ali had been assigned to one of the most active teams, battling the Taliban on a nearly bi-weekly basis. SEAL Team One and Three had many such operational teams positioned at the northern airport and base in J-bad. They had been following this particular group from the higher reaches of the mountain, remaining hidden in the forest groves dotting the area, paralleling them, waiting for the right time to close in and grab the tangos. It was her job, at the right time, to shoot to kill the unwanted Taliban, leaving the three teams out in the field to draw closer and then capture the suspects. Lockwood would be with her at all times, directing and choreographing the snatch.
Tension thrummed through her. She lay on the slope, legs slightly spread, her .300 Win Mag resting on a bipod, its butt familiar, even comforting against her right shoulder.
If only Lockwood’s ‘talk’ with Ram Torres had continued to change his behavior toward Ali. He had been halfway decent on the truck mission, and on several other ops as well. But for some reason, not on this one.
Lockwood continued to observe the tango group through his binoculars, unmoving beside her.
A bit of anger flamed deep within her as Wyatt continued to sweep the area. At J-bad, just before they boarded the MH-47 flown by Night Stalker pilots, Ram had arrogantly approached her.
“Don’t fuck this up, Montero. Not like you did the last two times.”
She’d winced inwardly, refusing to let him know how much his words hurt her. The glitter in his eyes, his hands imperiously resting on his hips as he lorded over her, made her even more furious. It seemed Lockwood’s talk with him had only gone skin deep and lasted less than a month.
“Go fuck yourself, Torres.”
He stood there, his mouth a hard, single line as he held her glare. “You screw this op up and all hell’s gonna break loose.”
“You got a bitch about me? Go to Lockwood. Don’t come to me.” She moved away from him, picking up her gear bag and holding the .300 Win Mag rifle by the strap across her shoulders.
Torres was right—on the last two missions, she had made mistakes. But they were small ones, not costly ones. Wyatt was with her at all times, continuing to teach her the finer points of snatch-and-grab—and he expected mistakes. Ali knew Torres was aware that she was a ‘cherry’ in the group, and that Wyatt was training her. What the hell had made him regress? Did he get an email from his family? Did someone die that he loved? She just didn’t know and it frustrated her.
She had plenty of confidence that was sometimes misinterpreted as pride by others. In the past, he was forever getting in her face before a mission, reminding her she was newbie to their team. So far, she’d not brought the most recent situation to Wyatt, although she could have. Torres was not going to drive her off.
As a Marine, she’d had plenty of provocative and mean spirited coercion slammed against her among the male Marines to try to get rid of her, too. She didn’t quit boot camp and that was years earlier. And when she showed her marksmanship skills, she was sent directly to the best school in the world: The Marine Corps Sniper School.
And while it was true she screwed up on the two earlier snatch-and-grab ops, Wyatt praised her for all the things she did right—not what she’d done wrong. Later, back at J-bad he discussed where she went wrong, but also how to correct it on the next op—and that’s what she did. She only made a mistake once. Ali was a perfectionist and when Lockwood brought her to his office he didn’t make a big deal about it. Instead, he said that it was just part of fitting in, learning the way his team performed, the tempo of the mission and compensating when things went FUBAR. It was a learning curve, he’d told her, nothing more. It irritated her that Torres had come up to her and rubbed salt in her wounds just before boarding the MH-47 helicopter. He’d been so great on that child-kidnapping op. And for the last month, she could see him really trying with her.
Even better, Mazzie, the little dog he’d rescued, had become the SEAL mascot at the compound. Her broken foot healed, she’d filled out to her true weight of twenty-five pounds, and was frisky and loving. She was everyone’s best buddy. Sometimes, she’d see Mazzie leap into Torres’ lap as he was watching TV with a couple of other SEALs, and he would pet and hold her. Everyone loved Mazzie and everyone told Torres that they liked having the dog around. It reminded them of home and family. But then, he suddenly turned on her again and she felt like she was dealing with a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Her gut told her something had set him off. It wasn’t her, it had to be something else—at home perhaps. She’d noticed the last three weeks he’d become more snarly and snippy with the men on their team, as well. Something was wrong but she couldn’t pinpoint what had set him off.
Ali slowly panned rifle from left to right, keeping tabs on where everyone was located, giving Wyatt a meter distance of each team to their target insertion point. Once the teams were in place, they would slowly, silently, move directly toward their targets.
Each team had been assigned one of the Taliban leaders they wanted to capture. She wasn’t surprised to learn at the ops briefing back at their SEAL compound that Torres and Allen would be responsible for taking two of the tangos down—not one—and cuffing them up. Torres was regarded as the best, most efficient, shooter in the team and Allen was second. If anyone could handle two tangos, it would be them.
That was another reason why she wasn’t going to tattle on what Torres had pulled with her back at base. She didn’t want to see him kicked off the team by Wyatt. Maybe he was just having a bad day, and tomorrow, or on the next mission he’d be semi-friendlier, as he had been before this. Ali wanted nothing more than a white flag of surrender between them.
So far, she had never seen any of their ops go according to the briefing they’d had at J-bad. The wind was sharp, her nose numb, the tops of her ears covered, but the lobes were numb, as well. She wore a checkered black and white keffiyah, an Arab-style scarf made of wool, around her neck and ears to help protect her to a point. The Kevlar helmet strap was tight, cutting uncomfortably into her chin.
She wanted to loosen it a little but wasn’t about to remove her hand from the trigger or stop tracking the area, looking for enemy that might be out there in the night coming their way. It wasn’t the first time the Taliban had set up a trap to get Delta Force, Rangers, or SEALs compromised in such a situation. And there had always been deadly consequences for the Americans when they didn’t realize it was an ambush. No, they’d learned to always have a sniper with a night scope to continually watch the area from a higher point to protect those teams going into any type of op.
Wyatt, too, was using his binoculars to see through the night, a backup for her. Tension momentarily ratcheted up within her as she heard Torres’ dark, angry words echoing, “Don’t fuck this up!”
None of the other SEALs seemed disturbed she’d made op errors. After all, Wyatt was there at all times with her, if needed. Tinker Ledlow had come up to her after the first snatch-and-grab op, placed his arm around her and gave her a quick hug.
“Hey, shit happens out there, Montero. You’re learning on the fly, so don’t worry about the mistakes you made out there, okay? This team is tight and we’ve been together for a long time. Even if you do make a mistake, we can compensate for it out in the field, so stop looking so glum. Don’t be so hard on yourself, okay?”
Tinker had flame red hair and a wild, frizzy beard to go with it. He was the joker of the team, his blue eyes pale and always glinting with merriment when he was playing a joke on one of his SEAL buddies. Nothing seemed to bring him down. He’d given her a second squeeze and then released her.
“Okay?” he demanded, wriggling his thick red eyebrows.
“Okay,” she laughed. “Thanks.”
“We all screw up.” Tinker looked up across the largest room in their compound where they often met to read, watch TV re-runs, or just check out for a while. His eyes narrowed. “And stop worrying about Torres. He’s the best shooter in the team, but don’t listen to his bitches toward you. I overhead him giving you a ration of shit earlier about screw-ups on this last op. If anyone is gonna chew your ass out, it’ll be Wyatt. He’s the team leader. So tell Torres to go find a hole to bury himself in and leave you the fuck alone. Okay? Fight fire with fire—or maybe, put Mazzie in his lap when he’s watching TV. That always seems to make him relax and he’s not so grumpy.”
How many times had she replayed Tinker’s words? She was just as much a professional warrior as he was. This was her first time being sent to a SEAL team, that was true, but she had worked with Delta Force and Army Rangers and knew their op mission templates as well as their tempo. Now, she was learning SEAL operations, which were considerably different, and so she had to throw her old, memorized playbook on missions away and start all over—and the learning curve was steep out in the sandbox.
She had been a field operator and hadn’t been given a chance to attend SEAL school on mounting missions and operations simply because, Wyatt had informed her, her two skills as a translator and being a sniper, were too desperately needed in the field to allow her the time to learn their methodologies at school. Most going into a SEAL team attended this school before going out into the field.
Wyatt had told the team from the get-go that she would be trained “on-the-job.” No one seemed to have a problem with that except Torres, who had immediately voiced his concern. Then, she started making mistakes. But still, she only made a few. Lockwood took them in stride and so did the rest of the team members. Sometimes Ram would wait and catch her off by herself. Sometimes he embarrassed her in front of other team members.
Once, she’d cried in her room later, the pillow stuffed against her face so no one could hear her sobs. It hurt her deeply that Torres kept saying that one day, she’d cost one or more of their lives out on one of these ops. That insult hurt worse than anything else he could say to her. He treated her as if she were some johnnie-come-lately pretending to be a battle-hardened warrior when she wasn’t.
Three clicks of the radio came back into her earpiece.
“They’re in place,” she told Wyatt.
He clicked.
She felt the biting cold, glad she’d put on a double pair of socks to wear in her combat boots and the Kevlar vest, along with her cartridge vest, kept her warm from the waist up. Now, the waiting would begin. They’d have to be patient as the enemy ate and then bundled up in a blanket to go to sleep. The team would strike around 0300, when sleep was the deepest, the tangos less likely to wake up.
In the meantime, the team would be freezing their asses off out here in the flat plain below. Ali had found good camouflage—desert brush growing in large clumps, to hide behind and wait.
And wait. Hoping that afterwards, they would all be around to congratulate each other.