fist as he did so. Behind him, the rest of the team halted in near unison and crouched down. They were five hundred feet from the valley floor. Another forty minutes, Driscoll estimated, then another two klicks along the valley floor, then head to the LZ, or landing zone. He checked his watch: making good time.
Tait sidled up alongside and offered Driscoll a hunk of jerky. “Prisoners are starting to drag ass a bit.”
“Life’s a bitch.”
“Then you die,” Tait replied.
Handling prisoners was always dicey, and even more so in terrain like this. If one of them snapped an ankle or decided to simply sit down and refuse to get up, you had three choices: leave him behind, haul him, or shoot him. The trick was convincing the prisoners that only one fate—the last one—awaited them. Probably true in any case, Driscoll thought. No way he’d put two gomers back into circulation.
Driscoll said, “Five minutes and we’re moving again. Pass the word.”
The boulder-strewn terrain slowly leveled out and gave way to barrel-sized rocks and gravel. A hundred meters from the valley floor, Driscoll called another halt and checked the way ahead through the night vision. He followed the trail’s zigzagging course to where it bottomed out, pausing at every potential area of concealment until he was certain nothing was moving. The valley was two hundred meters wide and bordered by sheer rock walls. Perfect place for an ambush, Driscoll thought, but then again, the geography of the Hindu Kush made that more the rule than the exception, a lesson that had been passed down through the millennia, starting with Alexander the Great, then the Soviets, and now the U.S. military. Driscoll and their now- leg-broke captain had planned this mission backward and forward, each time looking for a better exfiltration route, but had found no alternatives, at least not within ten klicks, a detour that would have put their extraction into the daylight hours.
Driscoll turned around and did a quick head count: fifteen and two. Coming out with the same he’d taken in, a victory in itself. He signaled to Tait—moving—who passed it down the line. Driscoll stood up and started down the trail. Ten minutes later they were within a stone’s throw of the valley floor. He paused to check that nobody was bunching up, then started out again, then stopped.
Something not right . . .
It took a moment for Driscoll to nail down the source: One of their prisoners, the one in the number-four position with Peterson, no longer seemed as tired. His posture was stiff, his head swiveling left and right. A worried man. Why? Driscoll called another halt, brought the column into a crouch. Tait was there a few moments later.
“What’s up?”
“Peterson’s gomer is nervous about something.”
Driscoll did a scan ahead with the night vision but saw nothing. The valley floor, level and clear of debris save the occasional boulder, appeared empty. Nothing moving, and no sound except the faint whistling of wind. Still, Driscoll’s gut was talking to him.
Tait asked, “See something?”
“Not a thing, but something’s got what’s-his-face jumpy.”
“Grab Collins, Smith, and Gomez, then backtrack fifty yards and pick your way along the hillside. Tell Peterson and Flaherty to put their prisoners in the dirt and keep them quiet.”
“Roger.”
Tait disappeared back down the trail, pausing to whisper instructions to each man. Through the night vision, Driscoll watched Tait’s progress as he and the other three snaked their way back up the slope, then off the trail, moving from boulder to boulder, paralleling the valley.
Zimmer had moved up the line to Driscoll’s position. “Little voice talking to you, Santa?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Fifteen minutes passed. In the green, washed-out glow of the NV, Driscoll saw Tait suddenly stop. Over the radio: “Boss, we got an open space ahead of us—a notch in the rock. I can see the peak of a tent.”
Which explains the nervous gomer, Driscoll thought. He knows the camp is there. “Life signs?”
“Muffled voices—five, maybe six.”
“Roger, hold pos—”
To the right, fifty meters up the valley, came a pair of headlights. Driscoll turned to see a UAZ-469 jeep skid around the corner and head in their direction. Throwbacks to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, UAZs were favored among the country’s sundry bad guys. This one was open-topped and equipped with another piece of Soviet Army equipment, a mounted NSV 12.7-millimeter heavy machine gun. Thirteen shots a second, 1,500-meter range, Driscoll thought. Even as he recognized it for what it was, the muzzle began flashing. Bullets thudded into