Chapter 7
“They’re safe!” Miller yelled, his hands shaking so violently he dropped his radio onto the concrete pad. “The slab stopped! It’s locked up!”
But the celebration lasted less than half a second.
A distant, terrifying sound began to rumble from the high eastern ridge. It wasn’t the sound of the wind, and it wasn’t the sound of collapsing rock. It was a rhythmic, mechanical thudding that made the air vibrate with a sickening frequency.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
My blood ran cold. I knew that sound. Every man on that ridge knew that sound.
The mortar platoon had just launched their initial registration project. The heavy eighty-one-millimeter high-explosive shells had left the tubes, and they were already high in the sky, arcs of death curving through the upper atmosphere, tracking directly toward the exact coordinates of the old observation bunker.
“The mortars are airborne,” Jackson said, his face turning an ash-gray color as he looked up at the empty blue sky. “They have a twenty-four second terminal descent. They’re going to obliterate that entire sector.”
Miller grabbed his radio, screaming into the static with a desperation that was painful to hear. “Abandons! Abandons! Cease fire on the mortar line! We have civilians in the impact zone! Turn it off!”
Nothing came back through the speaker but the dry, uncaring hiss of the desert interference. The shells were already on their way, and there was absolutely no way to call them back.
CHAPTER 3
The distant, metallic thudding from the eastern ridge didn’t just vibrate through the air; it slammed into my chest like a physical blow.
Four distinct, heavy thumps.
To anyone else, it might have sounded like distant construction or heavy machinery shifting in the desert. But to the men standing on that ridge, it was the sound of an impending execution. The mortar platoon had initiated their automated live-fire sequence, launching eighty-one-millimeter high-explosive shells into the upper atmosphere. They were tracking along a perfect mathematical arc, destined to turn the old concrete observation bunker into a cratered wasteland.
Master Chief Miller dropped his tactical radio into the gravel, the plastic housing cracking against a stone. He didn’t bother to pick it up. He knew the electronic silence coming from the speaker meant the repeater tower was dead. There was no radio signal getting through that mountain iron ore. There was no way to command a cease-fire.
“Jackson,” Miller’s voice was barely a whisper, completely stripped of the booming authority that had defined him all morning. “What’s the terminal countdown?”
Jackson didn’t look up from his handheld vector binoculars. His face had gone completely white, the sweat on his forehead cutting clean lines through the layer of fine desert dust. His hands, usually as steady as granite, were vibrating against the rubber housing of the optics.
“Twenty-one seconds,” Jackson said, his voice cracking slightly on the number. “They’re using standard registration increments. The shells reached their apogee seconds ago. They’ve flipped. They are in their terminal descent phase right now, Annie. They’re coming down at a near-vertical angle.”
“The coordinates,” I said, my cheek still pressed tightly against the adjustable riser of my McMillan TAC-50. “Are they dead-on?”
“They’re worse than dead-on,” Jackson muttered, his fingers tightening on the focus wheel. “The automated targeting matrix is tracking the center point of the old bunker plaza. The child and the dog are sitting less than fifteen yards from the primary impact coordinate. The lethal fragmentation radius of a single eighty-one-millimeter shell is thirty-five meters. The blast wave alone will collapse the remaining masonry and drop that entire ledge into the test shaft.”
My right eye remained locked into the Nightforce scope. Through the shimmering heat distortion, the scene was agonizingly clear.
The German Shepherd had stopped digging. The animal had shifted its weight, wrapping its heavy, muscular body over the torso of the little girl in the pink jacket. It was an instinctive act of absolute sacrifice. The dog was trying to shield her from the sky. The little girl had her face buried deep into the animal’s thick fur, her shoulders shaking with silent, terrified sobs. They were completely unaware of the iron rain falling from the clouds, but they knew they were trapped in a place where survival was slipping away.
“We can’t run down there,” Miller said, his boots grinding into the gravel as he took a desperate step toward the edge of the ridge. “It’s a twenty-minute descent by vehicle. Ten if we threw ourselves down the cliff face. We’d be halfway down when the first shell impacts.”
“Then we watch,” one of the other SEAL operators whispered, his voice heavy with a profound, sickening helplessness. He looked away, his eyes dropping to the dirt, unable to keep his gaze fixed on the distant valley.
