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Rachel
CRACK!
I heard a body fall somewhere behind me as Henriksson finished his sentence:
“…the new priority.”
Overwhelming relief and gratitude rushed through me as I realized, He’s not going to leave me.
I was used to working alone. Rarely did I have somebody else to rely on.
The knowledge that Henriksson had my back… it was a rare luxury.
I intended to make the most of it.
I’d been in worse situations than this – like when I got shot in Bangkok. Or that time I was trapped under the rubble in Tehran.
I kept reminding myself of that as I peered around the air conditioning unit and aimed my pistol at the stairwell.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Ingmar’s body splayed out on the roof. He wasn’t moving.
The last thing he’d done before he got shot was to scream out a warning to me.
Years ago, when I was first starting out, I would have felt overwhelming survivor’s guilt. Now I just focused on staying alive –
Which meant ignoring Ingmar’s body and concentrating on the stairwell.
Suddenly, there was movement inside the doorway – the flicker of a shadow –
I opened fire.
BANG BANG BANG!
Another body fell backwards down the stairs, screaming as he went.
Another one down, I thought.
God knows how many more to go.
27
Lars
It was a hard-fought battle, and an ugly one.
Rachel fired her pistol from behind the air-conditioning unit while I took out anybody stupid enough to poke their heads out of the stairwell.
I’d been right to warn Gunnar we might have company. At least five gunmen came up our stairwell; Gunnar dealt with it by dropping grenades on them.
Down on the street, the firefight raged for 15 minutes until Special Forces breached the building through a side entrance. It took them another 30 minutes to clear out the rooms one by one. By the time they were finished, Abdullah Shah Massoud was dead, along with 37 Taliban operatives.
After it was over, I radioed the guys in my unit that some assholes had taken out Ingmar and that Rachel was in trouble. I spoke to them in Swedish so none of the other NATO troops knew what I was saying.
My guys took off at a run for the red building. Five minutes later, any remaining insurgents inside the stairwell were dead, and Rachel was safe.
My guys counted ten corpses on the red building’s roof and in the stairwell. Of those, I’d killed five. My unit had killed two, Rachel had shot another two with her sidearm, and Ingmar must have taken down one before they got him.
Gunnar and I took our time making sure our own stairwell was safe. It was full of body parts and a lot of gore, but no more Taliban. At least, no living ones.
