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us?” Kolt asked from under his nods, wanting Slapshot to activate the IR laser on his rifle and put the narrow unseen beam on the enemy position.
    “Marked. You got it?” Slapshot asked.
    “Got it.”
    Kolt kept scanning the ridge, but if the Taliban spotter was there, he’d gone to ground.
    “Fuck it. Let’s move,” Kolt said, pumping his legs to climb the last sixty yards to the top of the ridge where Slapshot had focused his IR laser. If there had been a spotter there and he’d seen them, then there was no time to lose.
    The snap of rifle fire echoed over his head, and he knew it wasn’t a stray round from the firefight on the other side of the ridge.
    “Three Turbans on the ridge—your ten o’clock!” Slapshot shouted as Digger opened up with the M249 LMG. Expended links and brass from the rapidly fired 5.56mm rounds zipped through the air above Kolt’s head, the copper bullets stitching the ridgeline, which was now just eight yards above him.
    Kolt dropped to his knees and grabbed a frag grenade. He yanked off the tape tab, pulled the circular pin, counted to two, and airmailed it up and over the ridgeline to where the Taliban should be.
    There was a sharp bang and the whir of stone and dirt flying through the air. “We’re moving up the ridge,” Kolt said into his mike, standing up into a crouch and running the last eight yards. He didn’t go directly at the Taliban position but angled to the right, hoping to flank them, reaching the ridgeline fifteen yards to the right. He flopped down onto his stomach and stuck his HK416 over the edge and looked over.
    The bodies of two Taliban fighters lay sprawled on the rocks. Brain matter hung out of the back of the head of one of the fighters while the other was faceup, his sightless eyes staring into space. Kolt thought about eye-thumping the other one but opted instead to hold what he had and put two suppressed rounds into him for insurance before turning to scan for the third Taliban. He spotted him thirty yards away, scrambling down the ridge like a scalded ape, his left hand clutching his right shoulder. Out of the corner of his NVGs, Kolt saw Digger fire a short burst, all three shots hitting the fighter between the shoulder blades. The fighter went facedown and didn’t move, impressing Kolt given Digger’s main job in the troop was medic.
    “Slapshot, three crows down. We’re good,” Kolt reported as he studied the two lightly clad dead fighters nearby. It always amazed Kolt how the Taliban were acclimated to the freezing temperatures—how they lived and fought in the same thin layers of clothing, seemingly oblivious to the seasons.
    “Rog,” Slapshot whispered back.
    “Push up a hundred yards to the north on the ridge. That’ll give you cover and a good view of the road and the gully behind us.”
    “Got it, Racer, moving!” Slapshot said.
    “It’s like a fucking circus!” Stitch said, cutting in over the net as he deployed the bipod legs underneath his custom semiauto sniper rifle and settled in behind it.
    Kolt saw what he meant. The road below was awash in light from flaming wreckage. The Buffalo that took the mortar round had ripped in half, strewing its contents over forty feet in every direction. There was no way the crew survived that, and Kolt knew it must have been something a lot nastier than a single mortar round. The Buffalo that tripped the IED tilted nose down in the crater caused by the explosion, but a gunner was manning the weapon in the turret, so that crew looked as if they’d be OK. The rest of the vehicles appeared intact and were pouring out a heavy stream of fire as tracers zipped over their heads.
    “Those guys obviously brought a shitload of ammo with them,” Kolt said, surprised that the troops in Thunder Turtle were still firing a cyclic rate well into the ambush.
    “Sounds like they brought their balls, too,” Stitch said, obviously impressed with the combat tenacity and guts of the American troops below