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  Connolly, the air officer, the battalion sergeant major, and the radio operator arrived at the lead vehicle, where the Lima Company commander was positioned.

  Connolly was almost out of breath when he reached the young captain. “How do you want to handle this?”

  “I got a good base of fire goin’, sir. I want to keep drivers here in their vics to maneuver if needed while I flank left with an assault force.”

  “Okay, you got it. I’ll grab the air-O and see what’s on station.”

  Lima Company began pushing up a rocky hill, maneuvering toward high ground adjacent to the rear side of the hill, where the Taliban attack had come from. Connolly followed behind. Lima’s captain was the one running the fight, and even though Connolly was the battalion commander, his job here was simply to support.

  He positioned his small team of four on a rocky hilltop two hundred meters away from Lima Company so he could see the battlefield. His first action was to get his air officer, a Marine pilot who’d spent the past few years on the ground with the grunts, into the fight.

  “Bill, you are danger-close range to Lima, but I’ll have him hold back a bit if you can get something overhead in the next five mikes.”

  “I have a section of fast movers itching for gun runs, sir.”

  “Copy. Deconflict with Lima and let’s nail these fucks.”

  The air officer knelt behind cover and worked up a nine-line briefing. Each line of text was chock-full of data describing the target, the location and composition of the enemy, and how the air officer wanted the aircraft to attack. After the necessary radio calls, the air officer told Connolly a pair of A-10 Warthogs was en route.

  Soon a distant but unmistakable whine signaled the A-10s’ approach. In moments a solo A-10 blasted directly over Connolly and the rest of his small team of headquarters personnel on the hilltop, its 30mm cannon spitting fire at 3,900 rounds per minute. The blast of the low-flying aircraft’s jets knocked Connolly flat as the brrrrrrrrt of the cannon slammed rounds into the insurgents’ positions.

  Some Taliban, apparently certain they would die if they remained in place, made the choice to run from their positions.

  They didn’t run far.

  Lima Company resumed their ascent onto the small, rocky peak where the enemy held out. The fight quickly became localized as smaller platoons and squads from Lima Company coordinated with the supporting aircraft. The first A-10 pulled off wide right, giving the enemy a chance to pick up and move, right as the second A-10 began its gun run, killing more of them.

  The Marines swarmed upward, closer to the enemy’s remaining fighting positions.

  The air officer signaled that the A-10s were moving off to get set for another run, giving Connolly and the men from his headquarters a break in the noise level. The lieutenant colonel pulled out his binos and watched Lima’s maneuvers with satisfaction and pride in their skills and training, but also with a gut-wrenching concern for the Marines with each daring step they took.

  Suddenly a burst of AK-47 gunfire crackled no more than twenty meters off Connolly’s right side. Next to him, the air officer cried out and fell to the ground.

  The sergeant major spun quickly and emptied a full magazine at two Taliban fighters firing over boulders lower on the hillside. His shots missed but convinced the attackers to drop back behind cover.

  Connolly pulled a grenade from his pouch and yanked the pin.

  “Frag out!”

  He threw it twenty meters out, just to the left side of the boulder.

  It bounced down and landed near the two Taliban fighters, but one man kicked it away, and it skittered farther down the hill before detonating in craggy rocks.

  This wasn’t the result Connolly was looking for, but it gave him an idea.

  “Bill, you still up?”

  The air officer replied through obvious pain, “Yes, sir. I’ll be fine.”

  Connolly glanced back from his position low in the rocks, and he could see Bill crouched ten meters back, blood pouring out of his right calf, but he held his radio up and was clearly still in communication with the A-10s.

  “Stay put,” Connolly said. “Keep the Hogs on Lima’s insurgents. But I need you and Bosse to keep up small bursts of fire to keep these two guys pinned. Sergeant Major, you got any grenades?”

  The sergeant major was closer than the air officer, just five meters to Connolly’s left. His eyes and his rifle were pointed at the boulder that the insurgents hid behind. “Yes, sir! I’m stacked.”

  “On my signal, toss one at a time, three total. Let them cook off a second or two first; buy me some time to move to the south. Once the last one blows, I’ll attack from the right flank.”

  “Got it, sir. Ready when you are.”

  “Go!”

  With bursts of fire from the air officer and radioman preventing the enemy from maneuvering, the sergeant major threw his three grenades, keeping the two Taliban low and focused on not getting blown to pieces. The first two missed their mark, but the third grenade blew close enough to kick rocks and debris over the two men crouched behind the boulder. Connolly had shifted wide to the right, and now he put his rifle’s Aimpoint sight right on the rocks. Flanking the enemy position, he saw two darkly clad forms holding AKs.

  One of the Taliban saw him at the same time and swung his weapon around to his left.

  The Marine dropped hard to his kneepads and fired twice, hitting the man in the head both times. The other fighter stood up and shot wildly, but Connolly squeezed off two more shots, knocking the man down. The Taliban groaned and climbed back up to a kneeling position, but the radio operator took him out with a head shot of his own.

  Connolly climbed back to his feet, peered around the boulder, and then noticed a suicide vest on one of the men.

  “I see an S-vest on one of these guys! Get some cover while I give him a head shot to make sure he can’t detonate it.”

  Connolly moved around the boulder and aimed his rifle, and then the suicide vest went off.

  The lieutenant colonel was blown backward and then the steep gradient of the hill sent him rolling to his right, debris and shrapnel ripping through the air around him. He tumbled end over end twice and then went upright, but he was still falling.

  With a crunching impact he landed feetfirst on a rocky footpath twelve feet down the hill.

  He ended up on his back, his knees raging in pain from the rough landing, but he checked the rest of his body and was stunned to find he had not been injured by the blast itself.

  Christ, he thought. Dumb luck.

  He struggled to stand, his knees aching still, and had to pull himself upright with the help of a nearby boulder.

  The sergeant major called from above. “You hurt, sir?”

  Connolly limped a few steps as his knees recovered slowly. “I’m good.” He took the footpath back up the steep hill to his men, still walking gingerly. He found the sergeant major standing by the two mutilated bodies.

  “You keep doing young-guy shit like that, sir, those knees ain’t gonna last.”

  “Thanks for the advice. You know of anybody around here looking to hire someone to do old-guy shit?”

  “No, sir. I’ll keep my eyes open, though.”

  They left the enemy fighters’ bodies and went back to the radio operator and the air officer, who now had his boot off and was applying a bandage from his medical kit. Blood poured from the raw calf wound, but the dressing stanched it quickly.

  “Let’s call in a medevac,” Connolly said.

  “Lima just called one. He has a few casualties, too. None life-threatening. Shrapnel wounds and a gunshot to the arm.”

  Connolly grabbed the radio as he leaned in to look over the air officer’s wounded leg.

  “Lima Six, Lima Six, this is Betio Six, sitrep, over.”

  “Copy, Betio. We have sev
enteen dead mooj. I understand you have two of your own up there.”

  “We do. Keep on the alert for more. Understand medevac birds are en route for your wounded.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. Great work, Lima Six.”

  “We’re gonna have to thank the Deuce, sir. Pretty sure he saved our asses with that intel right before the IED.”

  “Copy. Make sure you buy him a round when we’re back stateside. We’re going to grab the air-O and climb down to your position.”

  Connolly handed the handset to the operator and patted him on the back.

  The air officer was still talking to the pair of A-10 pilots orbiting nearby, keeping them on station as insurance. While doing this, he tried to stand, as if he wanted to walk on his own, bootless and bleeding, down the hill.

  The sergeant major glared at him, then grabbed him by the arms, pulling him and his heavy gear up onto his back like a human rucksack.

  As they moved down the hill slowly, the sergeant major spoke through labored breaths. “Eighteen years of fighting Taliban, sir . . . and I’d say we’ve finally just about got it down. What do you think?”

  Connolly struggled with the pain in his creaky knees and the arduous movement down the hill. “Well, it’s about damn time. But I can’t help but worry we’ve spent too much time fighting these medieval assholes and not enough time getting ready for the next fight.”

  “What’s the next fight, sir?”

  “Well, Sergeant Major, can’t say. But I figure whoever we fight next, they won’t look like our enemy now. An enemy with no air, no navy, no armor, no cyber, no reach or lift or tactics beyond hit-and-runs and roadside bombs. Trust me, we’re going to look back on the good ol’ days with a sense of wistful nostalgia, pining for the times we were just getting blown up and shot at in the mountains.”

  There was a long pause on the sergeant major’s side, then: “Have to say it, sir. You’re a bit of a buzzkill.”

  The wounded air officer riding on the sergeant major’s back chuckled at this, then winced in pain as his bloody calf brushed against a thicket.

  * * *

  • • •

  Captain Raymond Vance banked his A-10 to the left and looked down at the smoking, cratered road below. The Marine Humvees had begun picking their way over the broken terrain again, hunting for remaining Taliban.

  He called his wingman as he leveled off. “Hey, Nuts, what’s your round count?”

  “Below two K.”

  “Copy. I’m at eight hundred.”

  “We’re gonna have to call off station, but they look like they’ve got it all in hand down there.”

  “We handled it. The Marines just got our scraps,” said Nuts.

  “Yeah. Hate to be those boys, though.”

  “Why? Livin’ down in the dirt was their choice. They could’ve been pilots if they wanted to.”

  “Maybe so, but we leave theater in three days, while they have months more of this shit.”

  Captain Ray Vance, call sign Shank, saluted in the Marines’ direction as he checked off station with the unit’s air officer.

  CHAPTER 1

  SOUTHWEST OF MOMBASA, KENYA

  ONE WEEK LATER

  Major Yuri Vladimirovich Borbikov hated this hot, filthy, nothing part of Africa, but he was ready to die for it.

  And as he looked out over the jungle and down the hill to the flatlands below, he thought the odds were stacked in favor of his doing just that today.

  The forces arrayed against him were preparing to attack this very morning, and all intelligence reports indicated they would advance up the hill, destroy everything in their path, and take this position. Borbikov and his men could slow them and bloody them, but ultimately could not stop them.

  Nine kilometers distant, hidden from his view by a thick jungle wood line, a coalition of French, Kenyan, and Canadian soldiers waited with helicopters and armored personnel carriers. Their artillery was in place and their multiple-launch rocket systems were ranged on Borbikov’s position. The Russian didn’t know the enemy’s total strength exactly, but his intelligence reports indicated his small force might be outnumbered seven to one.

  Borbikov’s communications officer and a dozen troops stood or knelt with him on the roof of this two-story cinder-block building and peered out through narrow partitions in the wall of sandbags erected to protect a pair of 82mm mortars set up behind them. This fighting position wouldn’t survive twenty seconds of concentrated shelling, but Borbikov chanced coming up here because he wanted to look out over the battlefield himself: an officer’s wish for any last bit of intelligence before the commencement of hostilities.

  Yuri Borbikov was in command of a company of specially trained troops, members of the 3rd Guard Separate Spetsnaz Brigade of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Eighty-eight men in all, they were dispersed now in their defensive positions, manning machine guns, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets, and air defense weapons.

  There was a larger contingent of Russian paratroopers here as well: two companies from the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment, five hundred men strong, and while they weren’t as well trained as the Spetsnaz unit, they had spent the last five weeks digging in and preparing for the attack that had seemed more inevitable by the day, and Borbikov fully expected the boys from the 51st Guard to fight valiantly.

  But he knew it would not be enough. The major was a highly trained infantry officer; he’d graduated at the top of his class from the coveted Combined Arms Academy of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and he had been here in-country long enough to have an almost perfect tactical picture of the battlefield.

  And all his knowledge told him there was little chance he could defend this hill for more than a couple of hours.

  The Russians had been cut off for the past three weeks and were low on food, water, and other provisions, and there was no way they could be resupplied from home, because the French had brought in significant numbers of Mistral surface-to-air missiles to prevent just such an attempt.

  Borbikov knew defending this location might mean death for himself and his men, but he strongly preferred death to dishonor. He was a true believer in the Russian Federation; he’d long ago bought into the notion that the West was continuously plotting against the interests of his motherland, and he felt surrender here today would bring disgrace on himself and his troops.

  To Borbikov, this fight was about honor, but to Russia and the West, this fight was about the wide, flat, and barren strip mine that lay on the top of the hill behind him.

  Russia had sent troops to defend a few square miles of rocky scrubland and jungle in a remote part of Africa because something had been found under the dirt here in southeastern Kenya, and that something had been determined to be necessary for the survival of the Russian government, economy, and military.

  Experts said the concentration of highly valuable rare-earth minerals here was like nowhere else on earth. Fully 60 percent of the world’s known supply of eleven of the seventeen essential minerals was thought to be under the soil and rock just behind the Russian lines. Russia now held this ground because the country had discovered, purchased, and developed the mine, and even though the Kenyan government had invalidated the contract after accusations of corruption surfaced and ordered the Russians to vacate, Borbikov knew Russia would be crazy to relinquish it without one hell of a fight.

  The standoff had been ongoing for five weeks when Kenyan and French authorities informed the lieutenant colonel in charge of the mine’s defenses that time had run out. The lieutenant colonel reached out to Moscow and waited for orders.

  The Kenyans and the French soon notified the defenders of Mrima Hill that the sovereign territory of the Republic of Kenya would be retaken by force without delay.

  That call had come five hours earlier, just after midnight, and despite the fact he
and his men were seriously outnumbered, Yuri Borbikov was ready to get to it. Five weeks of waiting and talking were over. He was a man of action; at this point he considered fighting a welcome diversion from the boredom of the siege.

  In the distance now he heard engines, and his ears were tuned to listen for the sound of the inevitable firing of artillery as the softening-up stage of the attack began.

  But it was a different sound altogether that he heard: the metallic creak of the stairwell door as it opened behind him. Borbikov turned around, ready to scream at one of his men for leaving his defensive position. But it wasn’t one of his men. It was Lieutenant Colonel Yelchin of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment. While Major Borbikov was in charge of the Spetsnaz force here, Yelchin had command authority over the entire mine and all the troops.

  Borbikov caught his acid tongue before it let loose something he would regret, and instead said, “I’m sorry, Colonel, but this position is not safe. The artillery could begin at any time.”

  Yelchin stepped up to Borbikov’s sandbagged overwatch. “Good news, Yuri. There will be no attack. We have been ordered to lower our weapons and go to Mombasa to await transport back to Russia.” He grinned. “It’s over.”

  Borbikov leaned back against the sandbags, utterly stunned. “Chto?” (“What?”)

  “Da. Moscow has worked it out with the Kenyans. We have four hours to pack and vacate. We’ll obviously have to leave some of—”

  “Sir, did you explain to Moscow that we can repel the coalition attack? At least the first wave. We can hold them off, target their antiair missiles, and if we get lucky, take them out. Once we get resupply from our aircraft, additional Spetsnaz, and airborne troops, we can—”

  The colonel interrupted the major. “I did not explain any of that, because this is a political decision, Yuri. The tactics weren’t discussed.”

  “Sir, you know the Kenya Defence Forces. Even with help from the French, they aren’t ready for a fight. Their tanks are from the 1960s, their artillery is unreliable shit from Serbia, and they won’t expect the fury they’ll face when they come up this hill.”