Victory Point - Ed Darack [141]
Riding in the first highback directly behind the lead vehicle in the convoy, Konnie kept a sharp eye out for activity on the ridgelines as Amrey disappeared behind a bend in the road. But while the Marines had been descending to the village, some of Shah’s last surviving men had worked to collect a handful of local men in the lower Chowkay, nonfighters to whom the militants gave AK-47s and instructed them to shoot at the infidel outsiders; their intention was to inflict whatever damage they could in a final act of desperation. Staring at the black-and-white “pred feed” flickering before him, Rob Scott noticed movement about one hundred meters from the opposite side of a blind turn the convoy was about to round. “Guy’s got an RPG!” the XO yelled at the sight of one of the enemy preparing to strike at the convoy. Rob furiously tried to raise the convoy—but the lead vehicle’s radio had gone down. The XO, completely helpless to stop what he was sure would turn into a bloodbath, stared in horror as the terrorist rose from behind a rock and aimed the launcher in the direction of the blind turn.
The fighter tracked the lead Humvee as it rounded the bend, preparing to shoot, but then the next Humvee, the highback carrying Konnie, Crisp, and eight other Fox-3 Marines, emerged, presenting a much bigger target. Put-sheeew! “MISS, YOU BASTARD!” the XO roared at the video screen. By the time the Marines in the highback heard the echoing boom of the launch, the high-explosive round—capable of penetrating almost a foot of solid steel armor with a stream of molten metal—had self-armed and was just a few tens of meters from the hardback. Konnie saw the round just before it hit his window—about eight inches from the lieutenant’s helmet—his head spinning toward it out of surprise. Then the round connected with the plate glass with a deafening clack! Rob Scott lunged toward the screen—it had hit the Humvee dead-on. “It didn’t go off. It didn’t go off!” he uttered in relief as the dud round bounced off the truck into the mountainside. Now alerted to the opening of an ambush, the Marines in the highbacks immediately locked onto the shooter, as other attackers emerged from hides above the road, and put a barrage of rounds into him, instantly killing yet another of Shah’s men.
The ensuing ambush sounded as if hundreds of fighters had opened up on the convoy at once, every burst of gunfire echoing repeatedly throughout the canyon walls. Only a few rounds actually impacted the highbacks of the convoy; however, one of them ricocheted off the vehicle’s steel plate armor and chipped the tooth and tore the lip of one of the combat engineers, Lance Corporal Ken Boyd; in addition, a nearby RPG explosion sent shrapnel into the right shoulder of Sergeant Andres Torres, one of the scout/snipers. But the enemy, disorganized and inaccurate in their shooting skills, probably numbered no more than twenty, with actual members of Shah’s cell manning the RPGs. One of the latter had already been taken out, and another, quickly spotted by an A-10 pilot working with Pigeon, saw his career as a terrorist end in a blaze of high-explosive 30 mm rounds at the top of a nearby ridge. But before he’d taken his last breaths, his RPG knocked out a narrow, precariously built-up portion of the Amrey Road, thereby effectively sealing off Grissom, Pigeon, Middendorf, and the Marines of Fox-1 from Humvee extract.
As the