The Kill List Read Online Free Page B

they came storming back for CPO Roberts. As they did so, they called for help. The battle of Shah-i-Kot had begun. It lasted four days. It took the lives of Neil Roberts and six other Americans.
    Three units were near enough to respond to the call. A troop of British SBS came from one direction and the SAD unit from another. The largest group to come to help was a battalion from the 75th Ranger Regiment.
    The weather was freezing, way below zero. Flurries of driven snow stung the eyes. How the Arabs had survived the winter up there was anyone’s guess. But they had and they were prepared to die to the last man. They took no prisoners and did not expect to be taken. According to witnesses later, they came out of crevices in the rocks, unseen caves and hidden machine-gun nests.
    Any veteran will confirm that battles quickly descend into chaos, and Shah-i-Kot was faster than most. Units became separated from the main body and individuals from the unit. Kit Carson found himself alone with the ice and driven snow.
    He saw another American—the headdress, helmet against turban, gave the identity away—about forty yards distant, also alone. A robed figure came out of the ground and fired an RPG at the camouflaged soldier. This time the grenade did go off. It did not hit the American but exploded at his feet, and Carson watched him fall.
    He took out the rocketeer with his carbine. Two more appeared and charged him, screaming,
“Allahu-akhbar.”
He dropped them both, the second one barely six feet from the end of his barrel. The American, when he reached him, was alive but in a bad way. A white-hot shard from the rocket casing had sliced into his left ankle, virtually severing it. The foot in its combat boot was hanging by a sinew, tendon and some tendrils of flesh. The bone was gone. The man was in the first no-pain, stunned shock that precedes the agony.
    The smocks of both men were crusted with snow, but Carson could make out the flash of a Ranger. He tried to raise someone on his radio but met only static. Easing off the wounded man’s backpack, he pulled out the first aid wallet and shoved the entire dose of morphine into the exposed calf.
    The Ranger began to feel the pain, and his teeth gritted. Then the morphine hit him and he slumped, semiconscious. Carson knew they were both going to die if they stayed there. Visibility was twenty yards between gusts. He could see no one. Heaving the injured Ranger on his back in a fireman’s lift, he began to march.
    He was walking over the worst terrain on Earth; football-sized smooth boulders under a foot of snow, every one a leg breaker. He was carrying his own one hundred and eighty pounds, plus his sixty-pound pack. Plus another one hundred and eighty pounds of Ranger—he had left the Ranger’s pack behind. Plus carbine, grenades, ammunition and water.
    Later, he had no idea how far he slogged out of that lethal valley. At one point the morphine in the Ranger lost effect, so he lowered the man and pumped in his own supply. After an age, he heard the whump-whump of an engine. With fingers that had ceased to feel anything, he pulled out his maroon flare, tore it open with his teeth and held it high, pointing it at the noise.
    The crew of the Casevac Black Hawk told him later the flare went so near the cabin they thought they were being shot at. Then they looked down, and in a lull saw two snowmen beneath them, one slumped, the other waving. It was too dangerous to settle. The Black Hawk hovered two feet off the snow as two corpsmen with a gurney strapped the injured Ranger down and pulled him aboard. His companion used his last strength to climb aboard, then passed out.
    The Black Hawk took them to Kandahar, now a huge U.S. air base, then still a work in progress. But it had a basic hospital. The Ranger was taken away to triage and intensive care. Kit Carson presumed he would never see him again. The next day the Ranger, horizontal and sedated, was on a long haul to USAF