Cover design by Robin Ludwig, Inc.
Author’s Note
A human cannot physically fight a demon. The only way to defend against a demonic attack is to put on the full armor of God as described in Ephesians 6:10-18, and to pray. Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. James 4:7. But for the sake of writing an action-packed suspense novel, I temporarily altered the rules of engagement. I hope you understand and forgive me.
Prologue
Eastern Afghanistan
Date: Classified
“This mountain presents challenges like no other peak in the Hindu Kush. Even the Pashtuns avoid it. They think Allah has cursed it,” Navy Lieutenant Commander Jonathon Stoltzman told his SEALS earlier at the mission briefing.
Petty Officer First Class Andrew Maddix didn’t believe in curses until today.
Bleak and forbidding, the windswept mountain would never grace a postcard or calendar. Its towering spires poked into the clouds like deformed fingers reaching up from a collapsed grave. Swift and sudden death often visited this glacier-carved mountain, and only a few hardy goat herders ventured out onto its lonely ramparts.
Inside the mountain’s belly, a manmade tunnel snaked westward for nearly ten miles. Equipped with electricity, a fifty watt light bulb hung from the low ceiling every one-hundred paces and provided murky illumination. Maddix and his SEAL fire team penetrated the cavern using deliberate movements designed more for stealth than speed. Step, stop, listen, and repeat. They didn’t want to betray their presence. The Taliban warlord patrolling this hardscrabble region in the Hindu Kush dispensed cruelty at the tiniest provocation.
Maddix pulled rear security for the four-man team. Ahead of him two SEALS covered left and right flanks, while First Lieutenant Damon Kirkland served as lead man of the diamond formation.
Not wanting to risk a cave-in, Maddix and his teammates carried silencer-equipped M11 handguns as their primary defense weapon, caching their M4 assault rifles among the rock piles outside the cave entrance.
Maddix positioned his back to the other team members as he skulked inside the manmade cave. He kept his eyes glued to the entrance from which they came, on the lookout for Taliban fighters setting an ambush. Every three steps he looked behind him to make sure he didn’t trip.
Maddix allowed his eyes to drift periodically along the cave walls and floor. The metamorphic rock glowed phosphorescent green beyond his night-vision goggles. He crept like a ghost, his boots treading lightly on a dirt floor imprinted by dozer tracks and other heavy mining equipment.
Intelligence gathered from the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan led to the whereabouts of this mammoth cave, long suspected to be used by the Taliban to travel undetected back and forth from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The tunnel was a mindboggling engineering feat. But more amazing was how the Taliban transported a tunnel boring machine up the mountain without being photographed by keyhole satellites. Intelligence analysts will be unraveling this mystery for many years to come, Maddix thought.
He focused his eyes onto a spot on the cave floor. He thought he spotted an anomaly jutting up from the silvery-brown mixture of dirt and schist two steps to his left at 9 o’clock. He went over to that area and squatted down. “Checking out something on the cave floor, guys. Looks suspicious,” Maddix whispered into the boom mike attached to his helmet.
“We’ll wait for you, Mad Dog,” Lt. Kirkland replied back.
“Roger that,” Maddix said as he gently dragged a hand along a metallic projection poking out from the dirt. A warning to be careful rippled up from his subconscious. In a booby-trapped nation of a million landmines, he couldn’t be too cautious.
But this object didn’t look like any landmine he’d ever seen. Most anti-personnel mines are cylindrical. This metallic object had a ninety degree angle to it.
Maddix pulled a trenching tool from his pack and began to shovel dirt away from the buried object. In less than a minute he uncovered a lid belonging to a weapons crate. Judging by the crate’s size, he guessed that RPGs or rifles rested inside. Maddix lifted the lid, pushing it to the side. He peered inside the crate. A couple dozen or so AK-47s met his gaze. His pulse rate accelerated.
“Each of you blockheads needs an eye exam. I just found a crate of Kalashnikovs sitting out in plain sight,” he said into his helmet mike.
“Grab one for me, Mad Dog. I’ll add it to my collection of enemy artifacts,” Petty Officer Coleton Webb replied back.
“Sure thing, C-Dub,” Maddix said. He perused the old rifles left over from the failed Soviet campaign, looking for the one with the least scratches. He lifted a likely candidate out and leaned it against the cave wall. He then slid the lid back onto the crate. Later, they would wire up the crate with explosives and detonate it on their way out of the cave.
Maddix slung the AK over his left shoulder and took a step away from the half-buried crate, unaware it would be his last step on two legs.
His right foot contacted the pressure plate of an M-14 anti-personnel mine, causing the firing pin to push down onto the detonator, igniting the Tetryl explosive. The superheated fireball overwhelmed the darkness. And for a brief moment the cave became hotter than the sun. Like a scene from an action movie, Maddix felt himself catapulted into the air. He flew through an acrid cloud of dirt and smoke, landing hard on his back about five yards from the flashpoint.
The jarring thud siphoned the air from his lungs. He tried to sit up, but could only lift his head a few inches. His face burned, and his lips felt like they were melting. He wanted to look at his right leg in the worst way. Something about it didn’t jive. He couldn’t feel his foot.
As he gathered his strength for another attempt at sitting up, he heard Lt. Kirkland’s authoritative voice crackle in his helmet. “We’re coming, Mad Dog! Hang tight!”
Maddix suddenly felt weak. His eyes glazed over even as glacial coldness crept up his torso, pushing away his body heat.
Using the last of his strength, he lifted his head high enough to see his right leg resembled a bloody stump. The explosion had sheared off his lower leg at the knee and scattered it somewhere in the cave.
The rest of the SEAL team arrived at his side seconds later. Just before he blacked out he looked into their eyes. Their worried looks told him all he needed to know.
****
Petty Officer Daniel Pettis hurriedly opened his medical kit and pulled out a C-A-T tourniquet. “Webb, I need you to apply pressure to his femoral artery while I put the tourniquet on.”
“Gotcha,” Coleton Webb said, applying his knee to Maddix’s upper thigh region.
“How are his vital signs?” Pettis asked Lieutenant Kirkland, who had a pressure cuff wrapped around Maddix’s right arm.
Kirkland shook his head. “Not good. His pulse rate is only 38. I counted a respiration rate somewhere around nine breaths per minute, and I’m getting a blood pressure reading of 76 over 53. I haven’t taken his temp yet, but he feels cold already.”
Pettis nodded. “We need to get a medevac to Bagram immediately or he’s not going to make it,” he warned as he routed the tourniquet band around Maddix’s leg, passing the red tip of the band through the slit on the buckle, pulling it tight.
Lieutenant Kirkland pulled out his radio. “I’m on it.”
“Come on, Mad Dog. Don’t check out on us. You’re the toughest SEAL in the Navy,” Webb pleaded to his closest friend.