Chapter 8
Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan
October 14, 2001
“We came here thinking we’d be with the Shura Nazar until April, getting them up to strength. Well, good news. They’re already there. With a little more money, more ammo, and supplies, they’re actually quite fierce. They just need a little extra oomph.” Ryan briefed the team as they sat in the nerve center, struggling against exhaustion.
Ryan grinned, the Special Forces warrior rising within him, poking through the CIA officer. “So, we change the war. We strike first, and we strike now.”
Everyone sat up, suddenly awake, focused on what Ryan was saying.
“CENTCOM is going to begin bombing the areas we’ve designated on all fronts.” Ryan deigned to nod toward Kris and David, sitting together at the back of the semicircle next to the radios and Phillip. They’d mapped the northern front like they’d mapped the Shomali Plain, ducking mortar fire and artillery rounds for three days as they snaked through the mountains with General Hajimullah. “When the first bombs drop, the war will begin.”
George took over. “CENTCOM’s strategic plan is to bomb the Taliban into such an obliterated state that the Shura Nazar can walk right over them. Estimates put the capture of Kabul occurring within days of the first push by the Shura Nazar and General Khan.” He fixed each of them with a long stare. “Which means we need to be ready to move fast. Stay ahead of the fighting and make sure we’re identifying, targeting, capturing, and/or killing senior al-Qaeda members. We capture anyone who can lead us higher for interrogation. We kill the leaders.”
“We fight now, or we’re stuck here through the winter.” As Ryan spoke again, icy wind whistled through the cracks in their compound. Frozen mud clung to their boots. They were all in their warmest clothes, dressed in layers, but it wasn’t enough. The concrete box they were living in was a freezer. They could see their breaths, big puffs in front of their faces.
It would be a long, miserable winter locked in the valley, with no evacuation and no resupply until the snows melted.
Unless they won the war early.
“Is everyone ready? Really ready for this?” George went around the room, asking everyone individually. Twelve people, George’s team and Palmer’s, deciding to start a war.
Kris was the last to speak. “Yes.” George gave him a ghost of a smile.
“Then that’s it. I’ll tell Langley we are ready for CENTCOM to begin combat operations.”
Excitement flooded the valley, electrified the Shura Nazar. Khan drove up personally and shook George and Ryan’s hands, inviting them to feast with him and to watch the bombs fall. George accepted, and after Khan left for the afternoon, he pulled Kris aside and asked for specific advice on how to be a better guest and friend of Khan’s.
Ghasi and Fazl appeared later in the afternoon, buzzing about the imminent combat. “Would you like to watch the bombs? The news reports? We can build a satellite to capture the TV signal,” Fazl offered. Reporters were embedded with the Shura Nazar forces along the front and in occupied Kabul, and just like in the Gulf War, there would be grainy video footage of the bombs falling and flaming clouds rising into the dark night.
Ryan’s eyes boggled. “What took you so long to ask? Hell yes! Here, I’ll help you make it!”
Within hours, Ghasi and Fazl taught Ryan, who’d brought in Jim and Phillip, how to make an Afghanistan satellite dish. Flattened beer cans, completely illegal in the country, were bent around Chinese rebar left over from half-finished reconstruction projects into a crude metal saucer. Odds and ends of wires were strung together, loops tied and twisted into a spaghetti array. Phillip managed to get it linked to their power system, creating a power cord from scratch and connecting it to the generator.
Khan arrived just after evening prayers with his staff and a banquet for the team. They ate together, everyone jovial and exuberant at the thought of the war finally beginning in just a few hours. It seemed impossible that it was all coming together.
They all gathered around the satellite and the boxy, static-filled TV after dark on the roof. Khan’s men watched with binoculars to the south. British commentators from the BBC narrated the anxiety-filled darkness, the patch of black that was Afghanistan on the grainy TV, as everyone waited for the first strike.
“It will be the end of the Taliban,” Khan said. “My forces are ready to move at dawn. Afghanistan will be liberated at last.”
The first flash appeared in the sky, a yellow blink that seared the clouds. Another. And another. Cheers rose, and the team clapped and hugged as Khan’s men cried Allahu Akbar to the sky and held each other as they cried tears of joy.
David wrapped an arm around Kris’s shoulders and held on, not letting go. Kris rested his head on David’s shoulder.
No one said a word.
The revelation of Kris’s secret, the sharing of his burden, his anguish, had bridged them together in a way he hadn’t expected. He’d thought David would discard him, drop him like the trash he was, pull back in revulsion. He was a monster, a murderer. No better than the hijackers themselves.
David had held him through every tear, through every “but”, until he’d exhausted himself, was nothing but a bag of bones and snot. When the moon had set, he’d started to whisper, breathing into Kris’s ear. “I felt like this before. When I was a kid. Something happened. And, I knew it was my fault, all of it. I knew it. If I’d been better, if I’d done something different. But I had to convince myself, I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.”
He’d stared at the line of David’s jaw, the scruffy beard there.
“I thought the same after Mogadishu. How many died because I wasn’t good enough? Didn’t do my job right? I failed, and those deaths are on me. Right?”
“That’s not true—” Kris had sputtered, between his sniffles.
“Then it’s not true for you, either. Not in this.”
David had held him until dawn, when the intrusion of the sunlight forced them out of their shared sleeping bag.
Every night since, David had cradled him as they slept.
Kris didn’t know what that meant. He knew what he wanted it to mean. But he was exhausted, run through with the invasion, strained until he was nearly broken. He didn’t have any bandwidth left to wonder about David, about the way David looked at him. About how his face curled into Kris’s neck in the middle of the night, and how their hands found each other’s when their eyes were closed.
Was it comfort? Simply human need, the pull to connect to someone in their upside-down world? God knew he’d read lip-biting stories when he was a high schooler about soldiers seeking illicit comfort in the arms of their brothers. He’d jacked off to fantasies like that when he was a teen. But now that he was living it—
He just couldn’t puzzle through the mystery of David, not while bombs were lighting up Afghanistan and David was holding onto him like he was a shield against the darkness.
“A month after September eleventh. Here we fucking are.” Ryan and George shared their own hug, muttering into each other’s ears as they hugged like they were grappling.
Khan’s radio chirped.
The first reports from the front trickled in, anxiety-filled Dari from the Shura Nazar spotters.
Khan’s disappointment, his frustration, his look of disgust tinged with exhaustion, hit Kris like a punch to the gut. Even George froze.
“Your bombs have hit only their storage depots! Old staging grounds! Empty compounds! Your bombs have hit nothing!” Khan bellowed in his stilted English. Rage silvered Khan’s eyes, made them shine in the night. “After your mapping! Your insistence that you would destroy the Taliban!”
“They were supposed to hit the front line!” George went pale, as white as the moon.
“Nothing on the front has been hit! The Taliban, al-Qaeda, they are rejoicing at your stupidity!”
“General, this is not what we were told. Our bombers were supposed to strike front line targets. Take out everyone in your way.”
“More American duplicity! Lies!” Khan cursed, but the fight seemed to go out of him. He sagged, sighing as he shook his head. “I put my trust in you Americans time and time again. Always, the same outcome. You never keep your word. Never.”
“No, not always. We’re friends.” George scrambled, reaching for Khan’s hand. Khan didn’t accept. He stayed still, a silent statue. “We brought food. The aid drop, it went great. We can bring more. I’ll schedule more food, more supplies for your people. We are friends, General.”
Khan stared him down. “You will do that, and you will destroy the Taliban like you said you would. Or you will leave my country.”
Days later, and the nightly bombing runs from the US fighters were still weak. Taliban radio intercepts laughed uproariously at the pitiful might of the Americans, the unintelligence of the most powerful nation on earth bombing dust-filled, abandoned shacks into oblivion.
George and Ryan railed at Langley on the satellite, almost every hour. George had Kris on the calls, too, since he was still the main liaison with General Khan. “The Shura Nazar expect our bombs to raze the earth, Clint! They expect the sun to be blocked by the number of our bombers!”
“They are going to have to adjust their expectations, perhaps permanently.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Look, the Russians, the Pakistanis, and the Iranians are making noise about the Shura Nazar taking over Kabul. They think General Khan and his fighters are going to slaughter the Pashtun minority once they’re in power. Your Shura Nazar forces are mostly ethnic Tajiks. You ready to put a different ethnic tribe in power? History shows what happens next.”
“General Khan has absolutely no plans to engage in ethnic cleansing.” Kris’s voice shook as he spoke up. “The Tajiks and Pashtuns have existed together for centuries. The Pakistanis just don’t want to lose their influence in Kabul. ISI in Pakistan props up the Taliban, you know that!” Oh, the twisted web of international relations: Pakistan was America’s ally today, the Taliban’s yesterday. Maybe their ally still.
“The president is working to ensure the UN takes control of Kabul. You have to get your Shura Nazar forces to stay outside of the city. We won’t move forward unless they agree to stop advancing on Kabul.”
Kris’s stomach sank. Khan would be furious. More than furious, he would be betrayed. His entire life had been forged around securing Kabul, on saving his country and his people. The team, Kris, and by extension the Americans, were there to help him do just that.
There was no way he could tell Khan that he wasn’t allowed to take Kabul. That men in briefing rooms on the other side of the world were changing his fate, curtailing his destiny. Kris shook his head at George, not saying a word.
“We’ll discuss that here, Clint. That’s a big fucking ask, though. For someone we’ve spent Goddamn weeks convincing we’re his allies that he can trust.”
“We can find another warlord, George. There are dozens. He’s a tool, a means to an end. We can find a new tool.”
Kris walked away, frustration building in him until he wanted to lash out, cut Williams down, kick a chair, scream about the trickle-down effect of constant American lies and a foreign policy of duplicity and double-talk, of changing sides when it suited their mercurial mission. This is why the world hates us. This is why Khan is waiting for our betrayal.
George growled something and ended the call. “Kris…”
“We can’t turn on General Khan. We just can’t.”
“I know.” For a moment, George looked like he’d been stabbed, like he was facing the worst possible decision in his life. “I think I have another way.”
Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan
October 20, 2001
Snow flurries blasted Kris’s face as Derek spun up their helo. He squinted. David shifted, sliding the bulk of his shoulder in front of Kris, as if he could block the onslaught. As Derek lifted off, David and Kris sat with their legs dangling out of the open cargo door, the wind and the snow blitzing past them. David’s arm wrapped around Kris’s waist, out of sight and hidden beneath Kris’s jacket.
Afghanistan’s weather had turned, shifting from the chill of autumn to a frigid winter that locked the country in an icy stalemate. Snow fell in the Panjshir, storms that left inches on the ground and turned the dirt to sucking, ice-filled mud. In the mountains, blanketed peaks closed the pass to Tajikistan by land and by air.
As they flew to the Shomali, descending in altitude, the snows grew lighter. At the front, the snow had softened the harsh mountains and craggy hillsides, blunted the bare, desiccated earth. From the air, it almost looked serene, peaceful.
Derek dropped them near Khan’s compound. Khan wasn’t there to meet them. One of his deputies, a major who spoke only Russian, guided them to a jeep that bounced and slid down the snowy track to the front. The snow slowly vanished, stretching until it turned to frozen dust.
Khan was in a forward-fighting position between two of his soldiers, peering across the Shomali Plain through a pair of binoculars. “Gul Bahar,” he called, not looking back. “Do you see what I see?”
“I see the Taliban, General.”
“Exactly!” Khan twisted, glaring at him and David. “They are all there, hundreds of Taliban positions and foreign fighters, al-Qaeda embedded within them! Your bombs have hit nothing! The Taliban laugh every morning when they wake and nothing has been damaged.”
He climbed out of the fighting position and strode right up to Kris. “Gul Bahar… My men are ready. I am ready. We can take Kabul as soon as you break the Taliban lines. My men, they will not last another winter in these snows, in these mountains.” He looked up and down his lines at his fighters. “If your country does not fulfill your promise, we will attack the Taliban. We will not wait. We cannot wait, not any longer.”
Kris swallowed. David shifted, pressing into his side, silent support. “General, that will be suicide.”
“What choice do I have? Your country has abandoned me and my men.”
“No, we haven’t. We have a plan to help.” Kris squared his shoulders. “We need to start laser-targeting the Taliban positions, General.”
Khan frowned.
“We’re here with a laser-guided targeting system that communicates directly with our pilots. We can paint each target with this laser, and then—” He smiled, patting the backpack David held. “The bombs will go exactly where they are supposed to go.”
A new light glittered in Khan’s gaze. “How soon can we begin?”
“Take us to Bagram. To the very front, General.”
Khan piled them into his truck, but he dismissed the fleet of vehicles and the guards who had ridden with them before. “We will be riding through the Shomali. The Taliban attack anything they can down there, and they hold a ridgeline to the south. I won’t give them too many targets.”
Khan’s driver pushed the pedal to the floorboards. The old engine whined, coughed, and spewed dirt as the truck’s wheels spun, sliding on melting snow and mud. Door panels rattled, windows shivered and shook almost hard enough to fracture. They slipped down Khan’s front lines, down the hillside, and dropped into the Shomali.
Desiccated earth, the dust of a ceaseless famine, blustered by the truck. Snow blown down from the mountains mixed with the dust, creating an alien landscape, a desolate expanse of dead land. Crops had long withered, whatever vegetation long shelled by bombs and turned to craters and ash. Broken villages and the remnants of homes littered the windswept land.
“The Taliban punished the Shomali when they first took power. The Plain, it resisted. So the Taliban smashed the farms, destroyed the homes. Burned villages to the ground. They blew up the water pipes and dams and poisoned the wells. Murdered anyone who did not fall into line.” Khan nodded to the devastation.
David was ripcord taut next to him.
“Even Allah has forgotten Afghanistan,” Khan rumbled. “Now there is no water, no food. The people starve and the animals die.” Weariness weighed heavily on the general, etched into the growl of his voice.
An hour later, Khan guided his driver to the northern side of Bagram Airfield. It rose from the Shomali like a concrete ghost town, decrepit bunkers and shattered buildings, twisted rebar and broken glass, an apocalyptic nightmare.
Khan’s driver stopped at a line of low bunkers reinforced with sandbags along the front. He stayed in the bunkers’ shadows.
Kris poked his head around the side of one. A long runway stretched toward the south end of the airfield. More bunkers hovered at the end of the runway, sandbags and a dirt berm beside them.
“That, Gul Bahar, is the Taliban. We are one runway away, here. The front line goes across this airfield.” He pointed to the northern end of the base, where the ravaged pillar of the air traffic control tower still stood, windows long blown out. “But we have the high ground.”
Three cracks sounded, fast snaps that broke the cold air. Whizzes whistled by. Dust sprayed off the bunker wall.
“Careful, Gul Bahar. We trade fire here often.” Khan guided Kris and David into the bunker, a former Soviet military office. The broken windows were blocked with sandbags, only narrow firing slits open at the very tops. Soldiers peered through binoculars at Taliban positions. One soldier passed his binos to Khan.
“They are watching us. Wondering who you are and what you are doing. They will be attacking this afternoon.”
As Khan spoke, the dull thump of a mortar round launching from the Taliban’s line rumbled. It whistled, flying low, and hit the top of their bunker. The walls shook, dust and sand falling from the ceiling. David grabbed Kris with both hands.
“Do not worry. The roof, it is reinforced. We are hit many times. We will patch the damage tonight.”
They slipped out of the bunker and back to the truck. Khan’s driver wound through the remnants of buildings, rotten metal and twisted frames collapsed in on themselves. Destroyed aircraft decayed on the tarmac and in front of hangars, tires long gone flat, frames dented, metal missing, wings torn off. But each wreck was still in a neat line, famous Soviet military discipline still on display, even in an abandoned base at the end of the world.
They idled for a moment at the edge of a long runway, hidden behind a hangar. “You both should duck,” Khan said.
His driver floored it, whipping around the hangar and hauling down the runway. The engine roared, and David pushed Kris down across the back seat, covering him with his body. Kris felt David’s breath against his cheek, felt his fingers dig into Kris’s arms. Bullets pinged off the runway, snapping like firecrackers. One shattered the rear glass.
“The Taliban hold the village in the hills above the base!” Khan shouted. “They can fire on this runway from there. Unfortunately, this is the only way we can drive to the control tower! You will have to take out that village with your lasers!”
Finally, they pulled behind two bunkers, riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes, and parked in the shadow of the tower. The upper radar dish, the overhang, and the antennae were gone; only the observation deck remained. There was no door on the tower. It had been destroyed long ago. A spiral stairway went up to the observation deck and more bullet holes ringed the inside of the tower. The tower had seen a hell of a fight.
Inside, Shura Nazar forces had telescopes set up for targeting and range finding. Maps covered the floor, marked up with Taliban posts and positions.
Khan introduced Kris and David, and the Shura Nazar fighters eagerly looked at David’s pack once Khan explained what they were there for.
“You can destroy them from here?”
“Between the scope, the coordinates, and the laser, yes. We definitely can.” Kris smiled.
Kris had spoken too soon.
George called on the satellite phone that evening. “Targets on deck for the night are situated around Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e-Sharif. They want to pound al-Qaeda strongholds and loosen up the Taliban around Mazar for Hajimullah’s forces.”
“We’ve got a village infested with Taliban. They’re picking off Khan’s men at the airport. We’ve got the coordinates mapped and a laser on them as we speak.”
“CENTCOM is refusing to release a fighter for your targets unless you can triple guarantee that there are no civilians in the village. We’re not flattening a village of women and children at the start of the war.”
“Khan assures us the Taliban have moved all civilians out. It’s only fighters.”
“Not good enough. They need visual confirmation before they’ll approve the mission.”
Kris saw David shake his head. His eyes pinched, concern warring with determination. Sneaking behind enemy lines, infiltrating enemy positions? That was David’s bread and butter. He and his Special Forces team were trained to do just that.
But David was alone, with only Shura Nazar forces to back him up.
Alone, except for Kris.
“We’ll have visual confirmation tonight, George. Tell CENTCOM to have their fighters ready.”
“Are you sure?”
David squatted on a pile of crumbled cinder blocks in front of Kris, holding a compact of camo paint. Half of Kris’s face was darkened, the shading breaking up the lines of his humanity, enough to blend in with the darkness.
“Very sure.”
Sighing, David painted a long streak of black over his nose, across his cheek. He wouldn’t look Kris in the eye. “Kris—”
“Out of everyone, you have never doubted me. Not once. Are you doubting me now?”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it?”
Finally, David looked at him, really looked at him. David had applied his own camo paint first, streaks of brown and black across his face until just his eyes were visible in the dim light of the bunker, in the corner where they had set up their sleeping bags.
The air shivered, hovering around them, weighted with whatever David was about to say next. Expectancy was thick, pressing on Kris.
But David looked away, and in that moment, he closed up, rolling up the expectancy and his hesitation as he cleared his throat. The air in the bunker seemed to suck into David, vanishing with a pop. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” David said. He dabbed brown paint on his fingers and reached for Kris’s cheek.
“Neither of us will get hurt. We’re in this together.”
David nodded. Kris watched a barrier go up in his gaze, watched him shift, start piling up block after block within him, barricading the world away. He was going operational, putting himself into the mindset of the mission. Kris could feel him disappearing within, going deep into the center of himself.
Closing his eyes, Kris followed, tipping back and falling into his training. The mission plan, their objective, played over in his mind. Their route, how to get to the village. Time on station, and a rehearsal of their actions, their moves, step-by-step in his mind. His breathing leveled out, going flat, going even.
“Done.”
They waited until the dead of night. Other than a few fires lit by frozen Shura Nazar fighters, well off the front lines or buried in bunkers, there was no light after dark in Afghanistan. Certainly not at Bagram. Only the stars gleamed above, beneath a quarter moon.
Kris crept behind David, stepping exactly into his dusty footprints. They were on a grazing path that goats and horses had used before the fighting. To the left and right of the narrow dirt track, buried mines and unexploded ordnance littered the ground. Spent shell casings and dirty brass covered the dust, reflecting a glinty green in Kris’s NVGs.
Neither the Taliban or the Shura Nazar had night vision capabilities. Both sides were blind after dark. Kris and David were ghosts, slipping unseen into the Taliban’s village.
Fixed gun positions pointed down at the airport, manned by sleeping Taliban soldiers. Heavy machine guns, mortars, and larger artillery pieces were covered in rough camouflage. Broken homes, their mud roofs caved in and walls shattered, blown apart by years of bullets and bombs, squatted behind the guns. Soft Dari wound out of the wreckage, carried on the low light of banked fires.
They slid silently through the village, moving house to house, quiet as smoke. There, a group of soldiers slept. There, guards, huddled around the fire. Beyond, in a house set off the center of the village, what looked like a group of mullahs, the senior leaders of the fighters, sat together around a pile of orange coals. Radio antennae cluttered the roof of their hut, and weapons leaned against the side walls.
A convoy of trucks waited behind the village. Two Russian tanks lingered beyond the gun positions with fresh tracks in the dirt. Soon, they’d be firing on the airport with tank rounds.
No civilians. Not a hint of life, other than the infestation of fighters. Who had lived there before? Where had they been taken when the Taliban moved in?
David shifted, sliding around a mudbrick home, the last in the village. Its roof had caved in more than the others, and its walls had crumbled almost to the ground. Burn marks and soot licked up the sides of what remained. Crouching, David scanned the ground, peered inside. Kris followed, hovering beside him. Something must have caught David’s eye,
He spotted it a moment after David did.
Bones.
Chipped, brittle bones, burned and snapped in half. Small bones, the size of a child’s. The size of a young woman. Kris could pick out femurs and jawbones, ribs and shoulder blades. He tried to count them by twos. At least twelve—no, fourteen, eighteen—
Too many. Too many for this to be an accidental fire, a tragedy of fate.
If they sifted through the ash, they’d no doubt find a bar that had held the door closed, locked from the outside. They might find a grenade, or a canister of fuel.
David stayed down, kneeling beside the burned wall as he reached for a bone. It fit in the palm of his hand, gently curved. Once, it must have wrapped around the chest of a child, a young boy or girl’s rib.
Footsteps, coming out of the house where the mullahs had been. One of the leaders walked their way, toward the edge of the village, the darkness just beyond this house. He carried a rifle, but lazily, slung over his shoulder like a teenager would slough a backpack at school.
Kris ducked, his back to David’s, one hand on David’s thigh. Freeze. Beneath his touch, David went completely still.
He lifted his rifle, the folded stock pressed to his shoulder, sights tracking the mullah’s every footfall. They were in the darkness, in the shadows, completely blacked out. But if a star happened to shine on the lens of his NVGs, if a flicker of flame winked across their bodies, arced around their presence, the game was up. Kris’s finger half squeezed the trigger.
The mullah sighed as he faced the darkness, feet from Kris. He fumbled with his robes, eventually adjusting to relieve himself. They heard everything, the splash and spray, the mullah’s stream as it hit the dirt and then petered off. After, he muttered a quick word in Dari, prayers of the ultra-faithful following urination, and headed back.
David’s hand covered Kris’s, still on David’s thigh. He squeezed.
Time to go.
They didn’t speak until they were out of the village and back down the path, lying against the dirt berm beneath the Taliban’s gun positions. From where they lay, they could hear Taliban fighters speaking in Dari in their foxholes.
David pulled the laser targeting array out of his backpack. “Call it in,” he breathed in Kris’s ear. “I’ll hold the target.”
Kris skidded down the berm, to the very base. He was maybe sixty feet from the Taliban. He pressed his radio to his lips. “Eagle Eye, this is Jammer Three. Request priority strike on confirmed enemy position with senior Taliban leadership. Target is laser designated.”
Static whistled in his ear. He pressed on the earbud. “Jammer Three, confirm. Are civilians present?”
“Confirmed. No civilians present.”
Static. He waited.
“Jammer Three, two aircraft inbound. ETA, twenty minutes. Standby.”
He clicked his acknowledgement and crawled back, sliding in beside David. “Two inbound,” he mouthed along David’s ear. “Twenty minutes. Probably Navy.”
“Quick strike then,” David breathed. “They have to get back to the carrier before they bingo fuel.”
Kris nodded. He settled in to wait, leaning into David, almost on top of him. He felt the rise and fall of David’s back, each inhale and exhale. They were close enough that they only had to turn their heads and they would be speaking in each other’s ears.
The first whoosh, the deep scratch against the night sky that was the fighter honing in, screamed in above. Kris’s earbud whistled with an incoming radio transmission. “Jammer Three. Aircraft on deck. Patching to pilot now.”
A whine, and a new voice came on, a woman. “Laser target locked on,” she said. “Bombs away.”
“Now,” Kris breathed. He and David flicked off their NVGs, plunging the world into pitch black. Kris counted, barely breathing. David pushed his face against Kris’s, their cheeks pressed together.
They could hear the Taliban laughing at the sound of the jet, cursing the sky and the inept American fighters who had yet to hit them with their bombs.
A fireball bloomed, erupting with a crack and rolling thunder rising over the berm and enveloping the Taliban-occupied village. The shock wave followed, rushing wind like a slap, burning heat pushing him and David into the dirt. Debris rained, smashing down like hail. A shattered turret from one of the tanks landed straight up, embedded in the hillside, still smoking.
Broken bodies and screams split the night in every direction. An inferno raged, consuming everything blown apart by the strike.
“Jammer Three, R-T-B,” the pilot said. “Good luck.”
“Good strike,” Kris replied. He didn’t have to whisper, not anymore. Not with the screams of the Taliban loud enough to hear all the way in Kabul. “Finally.”