True Faith and Allegiance

Chavez dropped to his right onto the wooden-slat floor of the attic as the window burst in completely, showering him with glass, and he heard a Kalashnikov dumping rounds at his position. There was someone else in the woods he’d not seen, and they were letting him have it.

He shouted over the gunfire. “Two down, but I’m compromised up here and falling back! Unknown number of hostiles in the trees. Be advised, the north side is now open to the enemy!”

Chavez spun around and moved on his knees and elbows through the black crawl space, trying to get back to the south as fast as he could, hoping to get eyes on any targets there.

* * *

Abu Musa al-Matari reloaded his AK-103, after just expending an entire magazine at someone shooting from a window inside the cabin. He’d not expected the President’s son to have a weapon, or any security, but it was clear now he had one or both. He’d seen his two men on his right fall into the open ground next to the house, and he cursed the Saudi’s intelligence product. The folder had suggested this would be an easy kill. Al-Matari considered pulling back, but he and Omar were just twenty-five meters from the cabin now, and he had four more mujahideen around the property. He stood and ran forward, and Omar followed with his Uzi.

They’d made it only halfway across the grass to the side of the building when al-Matari heard a loud grunt behind him. He kept running but looked back over his shoulder, and saw Omar stumbling forward, his entire forehead had been blown off and away. The man’s body skidded in the grass and lay still, the Uzi sliding to a stop next to it.

Al-Matari slammed against the side of the log cabin, looked to his left and right, wondering what the fuck was going on here. He knelt down low, then looked back to Omar. From the direction he’d fallen, it was clear he’d been shot from someone firing from the front of the house, so al-Matari carefully and quietly headed around to the back.

* * *

Clark racked a fresh round from his five-round magazine into the chamber of his rifle. He then centered his scope back where the one man had fallen, looking for others. He tapped his transmit button. “Target eliminated, north side. One hostile made it to the cabin on the north. I do not have eyes on. Say again, one squirter made it to the north side of the building.”

Sudden cracks of gunfire below him to his right surprised him. He spun to the source, looked over his ledge and saw the flashes of a fully automatic rifle to the south, lower on the same hill he was on, some two hundred yards away. As the fire continued he heard Jack transmit.

“Taking fire from the west! Tearing up the downstairs windows below me. John?”

Quickly Clark centered his bolt-action rifle’s scope on the flashes, and squeezed off a .308 round at the gunfire.

The flashes stopped instantly.

* * *

Algiers had been ten feet away from the twenty-year-old Pakistani from Caltech when the man stood on the hillside and opened fire on the windows of the cabin, and then, before he’d gone through his first magazine, Algiers saw the man take a round from a high-powered rifle straight through the upper back.

He lay dead on his face in the dark now, skidding a few meters down through the grass.

Algiers spun around to scan up the hill, brought his binos to bear, but it was too dark for him to see anyone there until they fired again.

He transmitted on the walkie-talkie to the rest of the group. “Shooter at the top of the hill to the west. Four hundred meters from the cabin. Tripoli, can you see him?”

* * *

Tripoli was the only attacker still in the woods. He was on the south side, while his partner, a kid named Parvez who was from Pakistan by way of medical school in California, had made it to the cabin and was now moving around to the front. Once Parvez heard through the walkie-talkie that there was a shooter on the hill with a view to the front of the cabin, the young man dropped flat on the ground, terrified to move.

Tripoli aimed his RPG-7 at the hill, pointed it directly at the top, and waited. He took his hand off the front of the weapon and transmitted through his walkie-talkie’s headset. “Algiers, if you can find cover, I want you to fire at the hilltop to give me a target.”

In seconds the flashes of gunfire lower on the hillside started, along with the echo of an AK firing cyclic. Algiers kept shooting, but Tripoli just looked through the iron sights of his big rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, holding steady on the hilltop.

Finally there was a muzzle flash just below the crest of the hill, and Tripoli pressed the trigger on the RPG-7. As soon as he fired he threw his big weapon into the air away from him, and he ran toward the cabin with empty arms as fast as he could.

He didn’t want to be anywhere near the source of the incredible flash his RPG-7 created in case someone saw it.

* * *