The fire never slackened for five minutes. They had sustained, nonstop, that opening volley, the one fired way back up the mountain when they could not see their target. They had blasted away at us all the way down to these logs, and they had augmented their fire with aimed rocket-propelled grenades. These guys were not being led by some mad-eyed hysteric, they were being led by someone who understood the rudiments of what he was doing. Understood them well. Too well. The fucker. And now they had us pinned down behind the logs, and, as ever, the bullets were flying, but we were somehow getting the better of the exchanges.
Mikey was ignoring his wound and fighting like a SEAL officer should, uncompromising, steady, hard-eyed, and professional. I could see the guys on that left flank dropping down in their tracks as they raced toward us. On my side, over on the right, the ground was just a little flatter, with trees, and there did not seem to be so many of them. Every time they moved, I shot ’em.
It was probably clear to them that Mikey and I could not be dislodged as long as the big logs covered us. And that’s when they went to their biggest barrage of RPGs yet. These damn things, trailing that familiar white smoke, were unleashed at us from farther up the mountain. They landed to the front and the side but not behind, and they caused a tidal wave of dirt, rocks, and smoke, showering us with the stuff, robbing us of our vision.
Our heads went down, and I asked Mikey where the hell were Axe and Danny, and of course neither of us knew. All we knew was they were up the mountain, not yet having jumped, as we had.
“Guess Axe must have dug in and kept fighting out on the left,” he said. “Danny’s got a better chance of radio contact high up than he would down here.”
We risked a look up through the gloom, and we saw a figure plummeting down the mountain, just to the left of where we had fallen. Axe, no doubt, but could he survive that fall? He was on the first slope before the trees, and a second later he hurtled over the ski jump, flipped, and crashed on down the almost sheer cliff face. The gradient saved him, as it had saved Mikey and me, the way the steep mountain saves a ski jumper, enabling him to continue down at high speed without a terminal collision with flat ground.
Axe arrived in one piece, stunned and disoriented. But the Taliban could see him now, and they opened fire on him as he lay on the ground. “Run, Axe...right here, buddy, run!” yelled Murph, top of his lungs.
And Axe recovered his senses real quick, bullets flying around him, and he cleared those logs and crashed into our hide, landing on his back. It’s unbelievable what you can do when the threat to your own life is that bad.
He took the far left, slammed a new magazine into the breech, and started fighting, never missed a beat, hammering away at our most vulnerable point of enemy attack. The three of us just kept going, shooting them down, hoping and praying their numbers would lessen, that we had punched a hole in their assault. But it sure as hell never seemed like it. Those guys were still swarming, still firing. And the noise was still deafening.
The question was, Where was Danny? Was that little mountain lion still fighting, still trying to make contact, as he pounded away at Sharmak’s troops? Was he still trying to get through to HQ? None of us knew, but the answer was not long in arriving. From high up on the right on the main cliff face there was a sudden, unusual movement. Someone was falling, and it had to be Danny.
The flailing body crashed through the high woods and flipped at the ski jump, tumbling, tumbling, all the way to the bottom, where it landed with a sickening thump. Just as we all had. But Danny never moved, just lay there, either stunned or dead. And the folklore of the brotherhood stood starkly before both Mikey and me: No SEAL was ever left alone to die on the battlefield. No SEAL.
I dropped my rifle and cleared the log in one bound. Mikey came right after me. Axe kept firing, trying to give us cover, as we ducked down and ran fast across the flat ground to the base of the cliff. Mikey was still pouring blood from his stomach, and I felt like I had a broken back, low down, base of my spine.
We reached Danny together, hoisted him up, and manhandled him back to the logs, dragging him into what passed for safety around here. They fired at us from the heights all the way across that lethal ground, but no one got hit, and somehow, against truly staggering odds, we were all still going, all in one piece, except for the shot Mikey took.
As the resident medic, I should have been able to help, but all my stuff had been ripped away in the fall, and there was no time to do anything except shoot these bastards who carried AK-47s and hope to Christ they’d give up. Or at least run out of those RPGs. They could hurt someone if they weren’t careful. Fuckers.
Right then, I was confident we were going to make it. The ground fell away quite sharply behind us, but way below was our target village, and it was on flat ground, with sturdy-looking houses. Cover, that was all we needed, with our enemy caught flat-footed on flat ground. We’d be all right. We’d get ’em.
Danny fought back, cleared his head, and tried to get up. But his face was rigid. He was in terrible pain. And then I saw the blood pouring out of his hand.
“I’ve been shot, Marcus, can you help me?” he said.
“We’ve all been shot,” replied Mikey. “Can you fight?”
I stared at Danny’s right hand. His thumb had been blown right off. And I saw him grit his teeth and nod, sweat streaming down his blackened face. He adjusted his rifle, banged in a new magazine with the butt of his hand, and took his place in the center of our little gun line. Then he turned to face the enemy once more. He was a bullmastiff, glaring up the mountain, and he opened fire with everything he had.
Danny, Mikey, and Axe blasted that left flank while I held the right. The fire was still fierce on all sides, but we sensed there were more dead Afghans to the left than there were to the right. Murph shouted, “We’re going for the higher ground, this side.” And with all four barrels blazing, we tried to storm that left flank, get a foothold on the steep slope, maybe even fight our way back to the top if we could kill enough of them.
But they also wanted the higher ground, and they reinforced their right flank, driving down from the top, anything to stop us getting that upper hand. We must have killed fifty or more of them, and all four of us were still fighting. I guess they probably noticed that, because they were prepared to fight to the last man to hold our left, their right.
There were so many of them, and we found ourselves slipping inexorably back down the hill as the turbaned warriors closed in on us, driving us back by sheer weight of numbers, sheer volume of fire. When they loosed off another battery of RPGs, we had no other option but to retreat and dive back behind the crossed logs before they blew our heads off.
God only knew the size of whatever arms cache they were drawing ordnance from. But we were just finding out what a force Sharmak and his guys really were: trained, heavily armed, fearless, and strategically on the ball. Not quite what we expected when we first landed at Bagram.
Back behind the logs, we kept going, mowing them down on the flanks whenever we could get a clear shot. But again, the inflexible, unswerving progress of Sharmak’s forces coming down the escarpment after us was simply too overwhelming. Not so much due to the volume of fire but because of their irresistible drive down the left and right of our position.
The logs gave us good cover from the front and not bad to ninety degrees. But once they got past that, firing from slightly behind us, on both sides — well, that was the reason we jumped from the heights in the first place, risking our necks, not knowing when or even if we would land on reasonable ground.