Dead or Alive Read Online Free PDF

didn’t sleep all the way, like civilians did, but hovered just below full wakefulness. And he wanted this one alive. Okay, fine, he’d killed a handful of people so far this night, just in the last ten minutes, but this one they wanted alive . . . if possible . . .
    All right. Driscoll switched his pistol to his right hand, and with his left pulled a flashbang off his chest web gear. Tait and Young saw this and froze in place. The cave was about to change. Driscoll held up one finger. Tait gave his senior sergeant a thumbs-up. Time to rock and roll. Gomer was about to get his wake-up call. Tait looked around. One small candle that lit up the chamber nicely. Driscoll took a step or two back, flipped off his NV, and pulled the pin on the grenade. He let the safety spoon fly free, let it cook for a beat, then he tossed it, counting, a thousand one, a thousand two, a thousand three . . .
    It sounded like the end of the world. The ten grams of magnesium powder bloomed like the noonday sun, but even brighter than that. And the noise. The noise did sound and feel like the end of the world, a crashing BANG that ended whatever sleep the gomer was enjoying. Then Driscoll went in. He was not stunned by the explosion. He’d expected it, and so his ears had adjusted to the noise and he’d closed his eyes to attenuate the magnitude of the flash. The gomer had enjoyed no such protection. His ears had been assaulted, and that adversely affected his balance. He didn’t even reach for his nearby weapon—but Driscoll had leaped inward to bat it away, and a moment later he had his pistol right in the gomer’s face. He had no chance to resist at all, but that was Driscoll’s intention.
    That’s when Driscoll saw it was the wrong target. He had a beard, but he was in his early thirties, not anywhere near his forties. Wrong gomer was his immediate thought, followed by Shit. The face was the embodiment of confusion and shock. He was shaking his head, trying to get his brain initialized, but young and tough as he was, he wasn’t fast enough for the necessities of the moment.
    Near the back wall of the chamber Driscoll saw movement, a shadow hunched over, sliding along the rock wall. Not moving toward them but somewhere else. Driscoll holstered his pistol, turned to Tait, then pointed at the gomer on the ground —Cuff ’em —then flipped on his NV and dropped the M4’s sights over the moving shadow. Another bearded gomer. His finger tightened on the trigger, but he held off, now curious. Ten feet behind the man, still leaning against the wall where he’d left it, was an AK-47. Clearly he’d heard the flashbang and knew the shit was coming down, so was he making a break for it? Driscoll wondered. Still tracking him with the M4’s sights, Driscoll led him, looking for an exit ... There: a five-foot-wide alcove in the rock wall. He scanned back and now saw the gomer had a grenade in his right hand. It was a 40-millimeter version of an RPG-7; locals were fond of converting the round into hand-thrown versions.
    Not so fast, bud, Driscoll thought, and laid the M4’s sights across the man’s ear. Even as he was doing this the man cocked his arm back, underhand, to toss the grenade. Driscoll’s 5.56-millimeter slug entered just above the man’s ear and just behind his eye. His head snapped sideways, and he crumpled, but not before the grenade was flying, bouncing toward the alcove.
    “Grenade!” Driscoll shouted and dropped flat.
    Crump!
    Driscoll looked up and around. “Head count!”
    “Okay,” Tait replied, followed in quick succession by Young and the others.
    The grenade had bounced off the wall and rolled to a stop before the alcove, leaving behind a beach ball-sized crater in the dirt.
    Driscoll took off his PVS-17s and took out his flashlight. This he turned on and played it about. This was the command segment of the cave. Lots of bookshelves, even a rug on the floor of the cave. Most Afghans they’d met were only