did sound and feel like the end of the world, a crashing BANG that ended whatever sleep the gomer was enjoying. Then Driscoll went in. He was not stunned by the explosion. He’d expected it, and so his ears had adjusted to the noise and he’d closed his eyes to attenuate the magnitude of the flash. The gomer had enjoyed no such protection. His ears had been assaulted, and that adversely affected his balance. He didn’t even reach for his nearby weapon—but Driscoll had leaped inward to bat it away, and a moment later he had his pistol right in the gomer’s face. He had no chance to resist at all, but that was Driscoll’s intention.
That’s when Driscoll saw it was the wrong target. He had a beard, but he was in his early thirties, not anywhere near his forties. Wrong gomer was his immediate thought, followed by Shit. The face was the embodiment of confusion and shock. He was shaking his head, trying to get his brain initialized, but young and tough as he was, he wasn’t fast enough for the necessities of the moment.
Near the back wall of the chamber Driscoll saw movement, a shadow hunched over, sliding along the rock wall. Not moving toward them but somewhere else. Driscoll holstered his pistol, turned to Tait, then pointed at the gomer on the ground—Cuff ’em—then flipped on his NV and dropped the M4’s sights over the moving shadow. Another bearded gomer. His finger tightened on the trigger, but he held off, now curious. Ten feet behind the man, still leaning against the wall where he’d left it, was an AK-47. Clearly he’d heard the flashbang and knew the shit was coming down, so was he making a break for it? Driscoll wondered. Still tracking him with the M4’s sights, Driscoll led him, looking for an exit ... There: a five-foot-wide alcove in the rock wall. He scanned back and now saw the gomer had a grenade in his right hand. It was a 40-millimeter version of an RPG-7; locals were fond of converting the round into hand-thrown versions.
Not so fast, bud, Driscoll thought, and laid the M4’s sights across the man’s ear. Even as he was doing this the man cocked his arm back, underhand, to toss the grenade. Driscoll’s 5.56-millimeter slug entered just above the man’s ear and just behind his eye. His head snapped sideways, and he crumpled, but not before the grenade was flying, bouncing toward the alcove.
“Grenade!” Driscoll shouted and dropped flat.
Crump!
Driscoll looked up and around. “Head count!”
“Okay,” Tait replied, followed in quick succession by Young and the others.
The grenade had bounced off the wall and rolled to a stop before the alcove, leaving behind a beach ball-sized crater in the dirt.
Driscoll took off his PVS-17s and took out his flashlight. This he turned on and played it about. This was the command segment of the cave. Lots of bookshelves, even a rug on the floor of the cave. Most Afghans they’d met were only semiliterate, but there were books and magazines in evidence, some of the latter in English, in fact. One sparsely filled shelf with nicely bound leather-sided books. One in particular . . . green leather, gold-inlaid. Driscoll flipped it open. An illuminated manuscript, printed—not printed by a machine but by the hand of some long-dead scribe in multicolored ink. This book was old, really old. In Arabic, so it appeared, written by hand and illuminated with gold leaf. This had to be a copy of the Holy Koran, and there was no telling its age or relative value. But it had value. Driscoll took it. Some spook would want to look at it. Back at Kabul they had a couple of Saudis, senior military officers who were backing up the Special Operations people and the Army spooks.
“Okay, Peterson, we’re clear. Code it up and call it in,” Driscoll radioed to his communications specialist. “Target secure. Nine tangos down for the count, two prisoners taken alive. Zero friendly casualties.”
“But nothing under the Christmas tree, Santa,” Sergeant Young said quietly. “Damn, this one felt pretty good coming in. Had the right vibe, I thought.” One more dry hole for the Special Operations troops. They’d drilled too many of those already, but that was the nature of Special Operations.
“Me, too. What’s your name, Gomer?” Driscoll asked Tait’s prisoner. There was no response. The flashbang had really tumbled this bastard’s gyros. He didn’t yet understand that it could have been worse. A whole shitload