Behind him, Manny coughed feebly followed by a groan that turned to a low growl. They couldn't hang here forever. Manny needed medical attention, that was certain.

  Another glimmer of movement ahead. Then a brilliant glare filled Heath's field of vision for an instant. The sudden flash was tamped down digitally by the NVD's auto-gating feature. The glare was now a white lance of light moving in the gloom. One of those cocksuckers had a flashlight and was looking for them. The beam traversed toward them from the left.

  Priest waited until they were nearly washed by the glare and opened up with a controlled burst. Heath couldn't see the target for shit but sent tracers down range in support. Streaks of white zipped away from them into the black. More tracers returned their way from shooters unseen. Stone shards whipped over Heath from rounds caroming off the walls around them. The bits rattled against his borrowed helmet. Never plant yourself against a wall of any kind. Bullets tracked along hard surfaces.

  Heath rose to stand and emptied his magazine with a final two-round burst and dropped down to switch out mags. He looked around for Priest. The man was gone.

  He swung his view around to find Priest charging down range into the forest of pillars. Priest fired as he moved. Controlled three-round bursts. He was hound-dogging someone

  "Shit damn," Heath grunted and followed after, eyes focused on the world beyond his front sight.

  Priest seemed to vanish in front of Heath from the feet up until he was gone. Heath felt, rather than saw, the ground falling away at a sharp angle beneath him. It was a long slope of loose stone pitched at a thirty degree angle. A crumpled shape lay below him. It was a headless corpse in man jams and no shoes. The Beowulf was a badass round. Turned the man's head to chunky soup. The glare of a still-lit flash attachment beamed from the forestock of an AK that lay by the dead man's curled hand. On his feet were an incongruous pair of Chuck Taylors.

  Heath moved his sights back and forth in search of targets. The footing was treacherous and noisy here. His boots sent loose scree tumbling down the pitch in streams. His foot slipped as a whole section of pebbled stones came away and he was on his ass and sliding, hands clawing for purchase. Below him, he saw that the slope ended suddenly. There was nothing visible beyond but emptiness. Heath swiveled as he slid. He got a tenuous grasp on the curving surface of a column jutting from the floor. Digging a shoulder into the loose stones, Heath twisted to increase his purchase on the rock and pulled himself upright once more.

  He made sure the M4 was secure and operational. A turkey peek around the column. He saw that the slope ended at a ledge thirty feet further down, and dropped God-only-knew how deep beyond that.

  Braced against the column, he scanned for signs of Priest or any bad guys. Nothing. The cave was quiet except for his breathing. He pushed off and moved low on a lateral path across the slope, sending a tumble of small stones skittering away. Heath kept up a crab walk that compromised speed and dignity for traction. He reached a broad, angled terrace of rock that allowed him to stand full height. The footing was sure here. The way ahead wasn't.

  As far as he could see in any detail, the shelf he stood on followed around the curved wall of a natural cathedral. A sound of shifting stone. A boot heel grinding on loose scree. Heath whirled and snugged his rifle into his shoulder to find Priest astride a fallen figure twenty feet along the terrace. The man under Priest was belly down with hands frozen to rictus claws. Priest braced a hand on the corpse's scalp. He withdrew the thin blade of his Fairbain dagger from the spot where the spine meets the base of the skull.

  Priest wiped the blade on the back of the man's t-shirt and replaced it in the sheath on his boot. Priest joined Heath at his position.

  "That was the last of them," Priest said.

  "I counted two. Thought you said there was three or four of ‘em."

  "Three. I blew one off the ledge into the chasm."

  "You sure he's dead?"

  "He screamed a long time. I never heard him hit bottom."

  "You had that last one," Heath said. "Why not keep him as a prisoner?"

  "He didn't speak Chechen," Priest shrugged.

  "Don't lie to me," Manny said, sipping air.

  "What are you talking about?" Heath said.

  They had Manny up in a sitting position with his back to the wall of the cave. Heath had the NVD off and was examining Manny as best he could in the glow of an LED Maglite from his Molle vest. The prisoner was still bound and seated against the opposite wall. Priest stood, holding a second Maglite on Manny.

  "He's doing the combat calculus right now," Manny nodded toward Priest. "We're in a fucked-up situation with a man down. You have to be honest with me."

  "You feel like you have broken ribs?" Priest asked.

  "Hurts when I inhale. I coughed once and nearly passed out."

  "Then we can assume you have fractures." Priest crouched by Manny and handed the second flashlight to Heath. "If it's actual breaks on more than five ribs then it's flail chest and you die here. I could examine you closer but that would mean taking off your armor. That would allow your ribs to shift more. Not a good idea. That enough truth for you?"

  Manny nodded.

  "Can we juice him up with painkillers to make him ambulatory?" Heath asked.

  "No," Priest said. "That would suppress his cough reflex. He'd build up fluids in his lungs. We have no idea how long we're going to be down here. He starts to bleed into his chest cavity or gets a lung infection and he's done."

  "I'm walking out of here," Manny said through clenched teeth.

  "We stand you up," Priest said. "And we cinch your armor as tight as you can stand it to keep things in place. Then we'll see how far you can walk. Until then you take it easy."

  Manny nodded once.

  "And where are we gonna walk to?" Heath asked.

  Without answering, Priest took back his Maglite and turned to their prisoner. He tore off the man's gag. The prisoner was bearded with wild dark hair. He looked to be in his twenties, despite his drawn face. Priest locked on his eyes and the prisoner returned his gaze with purest hatred.

  "This isn't our guy. This isn't Charborz Ilyas Muhammed," Priest said it in English and noted the change in the prisoner's eyes. They opened a bit wider at the sound of the Dude's given name. He lowered them slightly before raising them again to glare at Priest with new venom.

  "Maybe he's one of the guys we kakked," Heath said.

  "No. These guys were left behind. Backbenchers. The Dude is out there directing ops. This guy is probably a second since he was left to run the radio."

  "Ask him the big question," Manny said. "Ask him about another way out of here."

  The prisoner looked from one to the other of the ferangi trying to understand what they were saying.

  "What's your name?" Priest asked in Russian.

  The prisoner narrowed his eyes. His lips were pressed in a tight line.

  "I'll call you Golovorez," Priest said. It was Russian for ‘throat slitter,' and the common slang for Chechens in that language.

  The prisoner's mouth curled. His chin trembled with bottled rage.

  "You like that?"

  Silence.

  "How about Petookh? You like that better?" Prison bitch.

  The prisoner recoiled at that.

  "Too close to home? You take it up the ass at Butyrka? Catch AIDS from an Uzbek?"

  The prisoner tried to spit but with his mouth so dry it was a pathetic attempt.

  "You don't want to talk. I get that," Priest said. "But if you don't, then you die here with us. Bound like an animal. Dead of thirst or starved. You think you'll be welcome in paradise for that kind of death? You think you'll get to fuck any virgins for dying like a dog in the dark?"

  "I will have killed you," the prisoner said. His Russian was fluent, with a harsh accent. Maybe he went to school in Moscow. "I will watch you die."

  "Or I kill you right now and me and my friends leave you here."

  "You will never find the way out!" the prisoner seethed between his teeth.

  Priest smiled and the young man realized his error.

  "So there is a way out," Priest said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  VEXATIONS

  Move and stick. Move and stick.

  Pig sent a stream of fire downhill to take a muji high in the chest. The guy flipped out of his sandals and tumbled down the steep incline. Answering fire, seeking Pig's position, erupted. But he was already gone.

  He was changing positions from cover to cover while working the SAW with controlled bursts at the pissed off men on his ass. His course was taking him uphill and out of the basin in stages. Fifty yards or more above him, Woody was helping Chili make for the ridgeline ahead. Pig's task was slowing down pursuit while not getting himself killed.

  It sucked to leave the rest behind. But there was nothing to be earned by staying here with more and more bad guys racing back home to Pumpkin. Even if Manny, Heath and Priest survived that RPG igniting the ammo dump and dropping a mountain on top of them it would take a month of digging by Army engineers to reach them. It sucked hard but that was the reality. If they lived through the exfil they'd have the rest of their lives to regret it. And they would. But for now, right in this moment, it was move or die.

  The mujis in the basin were increasing in number. The whine of dirt bikes increased. The grade was too steep to allow them to use the bikes to pursue their unseen enemy. They milled about raising dust clouds until Pig drilled a few of the riders. Now they were on foot making their way up the hill. There were pros in the crowd. They were moving in stages in twos and threes under suppression fire from their brothers; leap-frogging up the incline using the rocks and thorn bushes for cover.

  The rest were wannabe warriors who just humped forward emptying magazines as they stumbled along in the dark. Angry dudes in man jams and sandals. Pig ignored them to concentrate on the paramilitary dudes coming slow but steady to try and flank him. A textbook assault pattern from another era.

  To Pig, their attempts to conceal themselves would have been comical if there weren't so damned many of them. They crawled and rolled and maneuvered in plain sight, all the while thinking their ninja tactics were keeping them hidden from the eyes of the Great Satan. In Pig's NVD array it was all lit up like a car lot.

  Pig threw fire downrange and rolled behind a clutch of scrub pines. He lay on his belly and unstrapped a modified Claymore from a pouch on his Molle. These were custom jobs for use by the SEALs, identified as M18A1-X. A tiny radio receiver was wired to the blasting cap which Pig now jacked into the detonator well. His fingers touched the raised letters on the mine's curved face. FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. He unfolded the spindly legs and aimed it toward the approaching bad guys.

  The mine set, Pig rose to his feet and hared off at an angle to minimum safe distance and dropped to a knee to spray tracers downrange. Then he was up and running again with rounds chewing the ground behind him. They were firing by guess and by God. No one down there had night vision. As long as he could stay ahead of them he had the advantage.

  He dropped to the ground and keyed his PRC. He already had it tuned to the same frequency as the tiny receiver on the Claymore.

  The hillside was illuminated by a brilliant white flash. The Claymore threw 700 steel balls out in a spray pattern at four thousand feet per second. The baddest shotgun in the world. Lethal to a factor of ten per cent at a one hundred yard range. Those odds improved with proximity to 100% within twenty yards. Screams emerged from within the thick pall of dust raised by the mine; long, keening animal howls of pain and horror. That would slow their asses down a step.

  Pig raised himself up and drove his aching body up the hill behind the other two SEALs, now out of sight over the ridgeline.

  Bear was troubled. Vexed even.

  He sat in a camp chair behind Cam and Mitch at the comm array. Elbows on knees. Fingers templed before his mouth.

  The blowtorch transmitter relaying orders to the terror brotherhood went suddenly silent in the middle of a transmission. That sparked confused crosstalk and chatter from the cells out on ops across the northern tip of the province. Cam and Mitch dialed in on the noise, hearing Dari, Pashtu and short barks of Chechen. One by one they faded to silence as there was no response to their call-outs.

  The most likely scenario was the SEALs of Broke Gopher took out the signal somehow. But where was the heads-up from them over the SAT? Where was the call for air support or back-up or an air strike? They had so many options open to them and chose to continue radio silence. Vexing. Bear as not a fan of their open-ended game plan. He prided himself on not being a micromanager. He preferred to leave the tactical decisions to the men whose asses were on the line.

  Only, there was no tactical advantage to radio silence at this point. The mujis had realized they'd been punked. Any gunhands from the White Ghost's band would be heading home. As each minute passed, the SEALs exfil was growing more and more complicated. The threat level in the country around Pumpkin would redline as the hadji population grew in that AO.

  "Get me eyes on," Bear said. "Beg, borrow or steal, I want a drone over the mission area."

  Chili was moving, which was good. But he was still mostly deaf and disoriented and fighting to keep from blacking out. He was near-blind as well. His night gear and helmet were lost in the blast along with his rifle, radio and other gear. Woody was in his face, urging him forward with shouts and shoves and tugs. He shook his head to clear it and made the vertigo worse.

  Together, they topped the ridge and followed a short slope down to a goat path that led back to the roadway and the ghost village. That was their best bet right now; make it back to where they were dropped off. Iron Man would look for them there. Eventually.

  Woody turned at a deep sound of a thud coming from back the way they came. Claymore. Pig was giving the hadjis hell. Chili didn't react to the shots. He never heard them. They moved on down to the trail that snaked between hummocks of land to end down at the road and the abandoned ville. Time was an element. They had to reach the cover of the ghost village before the mujis worked out their escape route and cut them off.

  Their communications reach was limited to the PRCs that Woody and Pig carried. They'd never reach Iron Man with their weak signal. The only option, a poor one, was keeping the freqs open in case a passing aircraft came in range. The most likely scenario was a long night in Indian country until Bear sent in trucks or helos to pull their asses out.

  As a plan, it was bullshit. But as the old SEAL saying goes, "A bad plan is better than no plan at all."

  They came into this insisting on minimal support for the purposes of mission security and now they'd have to live with it. Or die with it.

  Chili was doing his best but losing focus. His pace would slow to an uncertain gait as if he'd forgotten where they were and where they were heading. Woody had to stop then and take him by the arm to pull him along.

  The ripping sound of Pig's SAW reached them, followed by the man himself topping the rise and sprinting down to join them on the trail.

  "You guys need to be further ahead!" Pig was gasping after the long uphill run under seventy pounds of gun, ammo and gear.

  "Chili's not a hundred percent," Woody said. "He's not even thirty percent."

  Chili stood wobbling and looking from one of his teammates to the other with sleepy eyes.

  "He's got a bruised brain," Pig said. "But fuck it. He's gotta keep moving."

  "Fuck it," Chili said in a monotone, with knees buckling.

  "You heard the man," Pig said. "Get your ass moving and give me some slack."

  "Roger that," Woody said and slipped Chili on his shoulder and moved off at a trot under the weight.

  Pig waited on the trail, allowing himself more drag behind his withdrawing brothers.

  From over the hump of land to his six came the sounds of men calling to one another in foreign tongues.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE MOUNTAIN'S HEART

  The prisoner's name was Umalt.

  Priest untied his hands and tied a length of det cord around his waist as a lead. Umalt would walk point and lead them toward the light. He needed his hands free to do that. Priest gave him a Maglite and secured a glo-stick around his neck. Priest would follow wearing NVD gear.

  "Fuck with us and get a bullet in the back," Priest said.

  Umalt grimaced at him in the ghoulish light of the lenses.

  Heath would follow behind with Manny. Each of them had glo-sticks around their necks and Heath would use night vision when needed. He had found his own helmet and rifle. His lenses were whacked in the blast. He switched NVD with Manny and secured Manny's own helmet tight on his head.

  Manny was hurting but holding it in. He didn't make a sound when they stood him up and cinched his armor tight. He could walk but it was going to be slow and he'd need help over any rough spots. Heath was there for that. Plan B was for Priest to go on ahead if Manny couldn't hack it. Priest had the SAT phone and could call for medevac once he was in the clear. Manny was determined to keep his shit together so Plan B remained just a contingency.

  They followed the ledge around what appeared to be an enormous cathedral. Their footsteps echoed into the dark to give them the sense of a huge open area lying unseen beyond them. Heath could see the glow stick on Priest's back turning to a pinpoint ahead of him.

  Heath squelched his PRC.

  "Priest, you read me?"

  "Roger."

  "We're losing you."

  "Follow the ledge. When there's a change in options I'll drop a stick to mark it."

  "Roger that."

  Priest was going with Plan B without telling them. Heath was grateful to him for not crushing Manny's spirit out of the gate.

  Heath turned back to Manny coming along the ledge with a hand to the wall. The ledge was mostly level but floored with loose scree.

  "How they hangin', bro?" Heath said.

  Manny sipped air before answering.

  "Don't worry about me," Manny said evenly.