the distance and gain an improved fighting position. The covering team then leapfrogs ahead and takes up the next advantageous position until everyone on the objective is dead.
Downrange, if found in such a scenario against a numerically superior force, Raife and his team would have used all of their firepower, as well as whatever fire support was available, to break contact with the enemy. This was different. He had no team, no real firepower, and certainly no fire support.
Oh, to have a radio and an AC-130 gunship circling overhead right now.
He turned his body around so that his head was facing the right side of the tree and eased his way forward, ever so slightly gaining an angle on the opposing ridge. The lead figure was running obliquely downhill toward Raife at somewhere past 150 yards, AKM swinging as he sprinted forward. Raife lay prone, his abdomen flat on the ground, and his body aligned with the moving figure. He waited for the attacker to stop, since even he couldn’t hit a moving target at this distance. The man took cover behind a boulder that left only his head exposed and immediately began raining accurate fire on Raife’s position. Raife fired quickly, rushing the shot just a bit, and saw dust fly in the man’s face as his bullet impacted the rock. He fired another round and slid back behind his rapidly disappearing cover just as a burst of fire stitched the ground in front of him, sending clods of dirt and pine fragments into his face. Raife was about out of time.
Another assaulter got a little too confident as he bounded past his team member behind the boulder. Taking a knee in a spot high enough to allow him a direct line of fire into Raife’s position, he was rewarded with a hardball to the lung that quickly took him out of the fight. These men were not fanatical Fedayeen hopped up on amphetamines; they were street thugs used to getting by on bravado and intimidation. Raife didn’t know how many men he was up against, but it sounded like fewer than ten. He’d hit at least two of them. Still, the odds weren’t good. Taking advantage of the moment, Raife pulled a fresh magazine from his pouch and performed a tactical reload. He stuck the partially loaded mag in the back pocket of his pants, where he could reach it if necessary.
The fire was intense, with multiple shooters putting rounds directly into Raife’s position. Only his attackers’ mediocre marksmanship skills and a slight dip in the ground were keeping him from getting hit. He made himself as small a target as possible, hugging every inch of the terrain as rounds hissed and cracked over his head and pounded the ground in front of him. There was a lull as one of the shooter’s magazines ran dry and Raife snuck a peek; two men were bounding in to within one hundred yards at a dead sprint. He snapped off two rounds in their direction, which sent them diving for cover.
He didn’t think about the fact that he’d survived multiple combat deployments targeting Al Qaeda and ISIS and was about to get killed on his own ranch in Montana. Nor did he think about his pregnant wife just a few miles away. Instead he thought about improving his fighting position and exploiting every technical and tactical advantage he could. If this was his last stand, he wasn’t going to make it easy on them.
* * *
The Teams had a saying: “Don’t rush to your death.” There was hardly ever a good reason to go barging into a target at full speed without carefully assessing the situation. The one big exception was a hostage rescue mission, where safety was sacrificed for speed in the name of protecting the hostage. There was another exception: when your friends were in trouble. From the sound of it, Raife was in a really bad spot. Reece heard at least a half-dozen rifles firing from multiple positions, interrupted only by the occasional pop of what must have been Raife’s .45.
He slowed his progress just for a second as he reached the top of the ridge, and crawled the final few yards so as not to silhouette himself at the peak. The noise from the rifle fire rose abruptly as he cleared the rise, the sound waves no longer absorbed by earth and trees. Reece saw a group of three men ahead, bounding toward the only piece