Ambush Force. Don Pendleton

Ziaee’s jaw set. “You think the Taliban will come tonight.”

      “Mr. Dirk has a bad feeling.” Bolan glanced around the little valley. There were a million places to hide. “And I think they are already here. Stay with Connie.”

      Mrs. Ziaee took the pistol and drew her own Tokarev pistol from beneath her apron. “As you say, so shall it be done.” Mrs. Ziaee went back into the house with a pistol in each hand.

      “Don’t look around or anything, but—” Dirk flicked off the safety of his carbine “—you’re right. They’re here.”

      Bolan clicked the tactical radio on his vest. “Boner, I think we got company.”

      Arcelio Bonaventura was concealed up on the roof. The former Marine marksman had a full-length Beryl rifle rather than a carbine, and it was equipped with a PCS-6 passive night-vision scope. “Coop, I don’t see nada.”

      “Frame?”

      Jimmy Frame was out front watching the dirt road that led to the house. Frame was formerly 101st Army Airborne. “Nothing on the road, Coop.”

      Connie Zanotto appeared at the door cradling a Glauberyt submachine gun with a laser designator mounted beneath the barrel. “What’s going on, Cooper?”

      “I think we’re about to get hit.”

      “Anyone see anything?”

      “Nope.”

      “So…” Zanotto considered this. “What? ‘By the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes’?”

      Bolan smiled slightly. It seemed everyone in Afghanistan was quoting MacBeth these days. “Yeah, something like that.”

      Zanotto glanced around the ring of hills. Darkness was falling across the little valley like a blanket. “It’s over a thousand yards for a sniper shot. Even Dino would have a problem with this one. What’re you thinking, mortars?”

      “No, they’re not outside looking down. They’re inside already.”

      “How?”

      Bolan gazed at the lights of the village winking on a few hundred yards away. “This valley was owned by the Taliban until the boys from the Tenth Mountain Division kicked them out. I think some of them never left. They just melted back into the population. I’m thinking there’s a Taliban cell here, and they’ve been reactivated.”

      “Yeah, so how are they going to come?”

      “Hard and fast. Once the firefight starts, gunships can be here from Kabul in twenty minutes. They don’t have time for a siege. I’m thinking a storm of RPGs and then they human-wave the place. With any luck, they take Mrs. Ziaee and her children alive, drag them to some cave and make a movie while they cut off their heads. Ours, too. On the other hand, they don’t think we have any heavy weapons. A car bomb wouldn’t be out of the question.”

      Zanotto looked at Bolan quizzically. “We don’t have any heavy weapons.”

      Technically, she was right. Rifle grenades were light-support weapons, but Bolan wasn’t going to contradict her or let her know they’d been filching Shield ordnance until it became necessary. “Yeah.”

      “Well, you’re just full of good news, aren’t you?” Zanotto motioned toward the front of the house. “What are you thinking? We load up the family wagon and bolt?”

      Shield bought nothing but the best. The team had arrived in an International Armoring Corporation Ford Expedition. The SUV was armored to Threat Level V and would stop an armor-piercing 30.06 rifle round. A rocket-propelled grenade, on the other hand, would light it up like the Fourth of July.

      “No, the village will be a shooting gallery. We’d get greased in the cross fire,” Bolan argued.

      “So, what’s the plan?”

      “We kill them as they come. I counted four vehicles in the village. Two pickups, an open jeep and a VW Bug. The minute they move, we know.”

      Boner spoke from the roof. “Connie?”

      “What ya got, Boner?”

      “I got headlights. In the village. I—”

      Boner was interrupted by a dull thud and a puff of yellow flame from an alley on the edge of town.

      “Shit!” Frame shouted aloud, no longer bothering with the radio. “Connie! Someone’s fired some kind of—”

      The roof lit up in a yellow halo of fire, and Boner screamed. A pair of headlights tore out of the village, followed by another and another. Bolan raised his rifle but kept his sights on the dark recesses between the closely packed mud houses, scanning for the grenadier. Dirk’s carbine opened up, as well as Frame’s from the front of the house. Tracers streamed toward the oncoming vehicles. The VW was leading the pack down the dirt road, and a pair of pickups bounced and jolted across the rocky terrain like outriders. The jeep followed behind, completing the diamond formation.

      Connie Zanotto shouted in her radio. “Shield Home, this is Connie Z at Shorkot village! We are under heavy attack! Boner is down! Alert the military we are under Taliban attack!”

      “RPGs!” Dirk shouted. “In the trucks!”

      “Forget the trucks.” Bolan slid his rifle grenade over the muzzle of his weapon and kept his eyes on the edge of town. “The car—take the car.”

      The VW was burning toward them at fifty miles per hour. Bolan could see only one occupant crouched behind the wheel, and he was pretty sure the driver had no intention of stopping.

      “Copy that!” Dirk clicked his own grenade onto his carbine and flipped up the sight. Bullets ripped from the oncoming vehicles, seeking out the team. Dirk crouched immobile as stone, carbine leveled. He had only one shot, and he was waiting for it.

      Zanotto’s submachine began ripping long bursts at the oncoming vehicles. An RPG-7 rocket hissed from the back of one of the pickups in response, and the Ziaee family screamed within as the antitank weapon slammed into the side of the house. The ancient construction of the house was their best defense. Antitank weapons were designed to burn through the steel hulls of armored vehicles and incinerate the men within. Thick clay walls were as good a defense as any, save that they were brittle and successive hits would crumble them. Kalashnikov rifles crackled from the jeeps and trucks, and tracers streamed toward the house.

      “Taking the shot!” Dirk boomed. The rifle grenade thumped away from his carbine at two hundred feet per second and spiraled between the oncoming VW’s headlights.

      The Bug blew sky-high.

      Dirk had taken his shot at a hundred yards, but even from that distance Bolan squinted against the wash of heat from the blast wave. There was nothing left of the vehicle. Bolan figured there had to have been at least fifty kilograms of high explosive, but that was the least of his concerns. He was waiting for a shot of his own.

      Zanotto’s voice was an angry snarl. “Christ, Cooper! Why aren’t you shooting?”

      Bolan’s eyes suddenly went to slits as he caught sight of his target. The grenade’s report was drowned out by the sound of gunfire, but he caught the pale yellow flash from the village. Bolan squeezed his trigger, and the little carbine recoiled brutally against his shoulder as it hurled the grenade toward the village. He had no time to gauge its effect.