Victory Point - Ed Darack [70]
“I don’t feel good about this, not at all,” Tom Wood uttered under his breath.
Then, after what seemed to Long like just a few minutes from the soft-compromise call, icy chills ran down his spine as the next of the recon team’s transmissions echoed through the room: “CONTACT! We’re hard-compromised!” No longer simply discovered by unarmed locals, machine-gun, RPG, AK-47, and possibly 82 mm mortar rounds tore downrange from members of Shah’s cell, who focused on killing all four of the SEALs, howling “Alla-u Akhbar! [God is the Greatest!] Alla-u Akhbar! Alla-u-Akhbar!” repeatedly between trigger pulls. A call from the team crackled through the COC again, but their PRC-148’s five watts just couldn’t kick a sufficient signal from Sawtalo Sar to Jalalabad to carry an audible voice. The transmission melted into splintered pops and squeals of static noise, indecipherable to Long and everybody else in the room. Do a call for fire from Doghouse! Long mentally screamed as every muscle in his body flexed. Do it now! Get rounds impacting on the ACM! Long practically shouted aloud as the liaison SEALs crowded around their comm gear. They shot message after message to the recon team. “Your transmission’s breaking up. It’s breaking up! Can’t READ YOU!” they yelled.
Then the Iridium rang. Long stepped closer to the SEAL liaison crew as the COC fell vacuously silent. “We’re in heavy contact, commencing our E-and-E [escape and evasion], going down the gulch below the OP.” The lieutenant heard the words as well as the chilling crack! crack! crack! of gunfire buzzing from the handset’s tinny receiver. They’re in the gulch, no wonder their MBITR doesn’t work, he thought. The SEAL liaison then asked for a ten-digit grid marking their position. “Do you hear us!” came the transmission from the recon team. “We’re in HEAVY CONTACT!”
“WHAT’S YOUR POS?!” the SEAL liaison roared.
“HELLO!” Screamed the voice from the lonely mountain over a background of explosions and clatter of automatic weapons. Long instantly realized that the sat-phone had hit a partial blackout spot, allowing just one-way communication—the SEALs on Sawtalo Sar couldn’t hear a single word from the liaison officers at JAF. Like Kinser and the Blessing Marines had discovered in the area, the phone required perfect placement when operated in the steep mountains and deep valleys of that part of the Hindu Kush, something the recon team didn’t have the luxury of seeking at that desperate moment. Long, his eyes bugging out, stared in silent horror as the SEALs at JAF ended the call, then immediately called the four-man team back. The call went through, and maybe the recon team could hear them, but the liaison officers couldn’t hear the SEALS on the ground. They hung up; seconds later, the phone at the COC rang again, the SEAL liaisons answered, but heard just the booms of RPG impacts and the distant rattles of automatic weapons, then nothing but a terrible, bleak silence. Those poor souls, Long thought, cracking his knuckles.
Meanwhile, the four SEALs of the recon team lunged down the chutelike northeast gulch of Sawtalo Sar—leapfrogging with bursts of covering fire to protect one another during their egress—as RPGs exploded around them and interlocking PK machine-gun rounds cracked just inches overhead. Shah, loosing bursts of 7.62 × 54 mm rounds from his PK, directed his RPG gunner and two other AK-47-toting fighters at his side as well as controlling a small number of his other men at different positions