Without Fear by Col. David Hunt

Author:Col. David Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

55

Bait

SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

“Red One One, Hook Seven Five. Two minutes out. Homing in on your beacon. Any hostiles?”

Vaccaro had lowered the volume of her MBITR to a mere whisper, hoping that the whistling wind would mask it from any approaching insurgent. She lacked the throat mike and earpiece accessories used by elite marine or Ranger units to maximize concealment.

She peeked beyond the edge of her cliffside hideout and saw nothing but moonlight dancing over the clay dust kicked up by the wind sweeping the clearing. And she heard nothing but the rustling of branches.

“Hook Seven Five, Red One One. Negative. Coast looks clear.”

“Roger that.”

The whistling gusts gave way to the sound of the Chinook’s double rotors echoing across the mountainside, and a moment later she spotted its red and green navigation lights.

The MK-13 flare consisted of a cylindrical tube roughly ten inches long. One end of the flare contained red smoke for day signaling. The opposite end held a red flare for night ops.

Holstering the semiautomatic and securing it with the Velcro strap, she crawled out of her hideout and up to the edge of the clearing, where she pulled the rings at both ends of the MK-13 and tossed it a dozen feet downwind from her. The flare ignited, bathing the clearing in pulsating red light while smoke oozed from the other end, rushing away from her.

“Red One One, Hook Seven Five has your flare in sight.”

“Roger, Hook Seven Five. Great to see you guys.”

* * *

Pasha set his new Dragunov rifle by his feet before inserting a PG-7VL HEAT grenade into the smooth-bored barrel on the front of the RPG-7 launcher one of his men had just handed him. He did this with practiced ease, making sure the shell was properly aligned with the firing mechanism. Shouldering the three-foot-long launcher, he held the pistol grip with his right hand and the secondary grip eight inches behind it with his left hand, keeping it taut against his chest.

Cocking the external hammer with his right thumb and lightly pressing his index finger against the single-action trigger, he positioned his shooting eye behind the PGO-7 telescope sight, which provided a 2.7x fixed magnification.

He brought the incoming helicopter’s center of mass to the center of the sight’s crosshairs before slowly shifting his sight to the left along the horizontal windage scales to adjust for what he estimated to be a ten-knot crosswind.

And he waited, aware of the weapon’s limited range, especially in a crosswind. At fifty meters, he should expect a clean shot, but the probability of a first-round hit dropped to the vicinity of 70 percent at one hundred meters and to below 40 percent at two hundred meters.

He had already passed the word to his men: no one was to fire until he did. And no one was to make a move on the pilot, which he now recognized was a woman, standing tall, red hair swirling in the wind, waving her hands at the rescue craft while surrounded by matching reddish and pulsating smoke.

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