Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

After their initial success, the tide of the battle had shifted against the insurgents. They still had superior numbers on their side; the original force of one hundred and eighty-five mujahideen had been whittled down to about a hundred and thirty, while by their best estimates, the surviving Americans numbered less than a dozen. Their greatest asset however, the element of surprise, had been thoroughly expended. The Americans had suffered heavy losses in those first few minutes of combat, but once the initial sting had worn off, the Americans’ superior training and technology had swung the pendulum in the other direction.

Two groups of American soldiers, working in concert with some hidden observer, had flanked their position and destroyed the mortar emplacements before they could be used to deadly effect. One of the fire teams had been cut off and annihilated, but the damage was done. With the mortars gone, the insurgents had lost their ability to light the battlefield, to say nothing of having the capacity to rain down destruction from a safe standoff distance.

The battle had begun with a cacophony of shots and explosions, but now, as the various pieces on the chessboard moved to gain strategic advantage, silence dominated the night, with only occasional scattered gunfire—spooked insurgents, shooting at phantoms. The American rifles and machine guns had not been heard for nearly half an hour.

The insurgents, motivated more by impatience than courage, advanced to the site where the helicopters had gone down. Smoke still seeped from the burned-out remains of the Black Hawk helicopters, which had both been completely destroyed with incendiary charges. Using hooded flashlights, they scanned the area and quickly discovered the trail left by the retreating soldiers—a trail of blood from bodies dragged across the dry floodplain. The Americans were fleeing to the old lake monitoring station—the bait that had been used to lure them out into the desert in the first place. The mujahideen set out at dead run, confident that victory was nigh.

There was no sign of activity at the concrete building, but a faint glow was visible inside. The bulk of the fighters spread out, taking up over-watch positions, while a small knot crept forward, their weapons trained on the door. The leader of the group noted the deactivated tripwire, lying on the sand of the entryway. He dug a Russian-made F1 fragmentation grenade from his satchel, pulled the safety pin and lobbed it through the open doorway.

The grenade detonated with a dull thump. The concrete walls withstood the blast, but the explosion blew the metal shutters off the windows, sending them spinning like shrapnel into the night. A column of dust and smoke vomited from the door.

No one inside could have survived, but the insurgents needed to be certain. After waiting a few seconds for the smoke to clear, they rushed inside. A few moments later, one of them emerged and called out with his report.

No bodies. The building was empty.

More of the fighters came forward, as if to confirm for themselves.




That was the moment for which Jack Sigler had been waiting.

He pumped the M57 firing device three times, but once was enough to send a small electrical charge through a fifty-meter long strand of insulated wire and detonate the blasting cap in the M18 Claymore anti-personnel mine.

A storm of steel pellets obliterated the advancing group. At the same instant, the surviving Eagle-Eye snipers reached out with their rifles and started picking off targets of opportunity. The men searching the building rushed out, only to be met by a hail of bullets from the Delta operators concealed in low fighting positions less than a hundred meters away.

Primal fear momentarily overcame fundamentalist zeal; the insurgents abandoned their defensive positions and fled.

Sigler keyed his mic. “Cease fire, I say again, cease fire and move to zero.”

He didn’t wait for confirmation. Everyone knew the plan.

After Beehive Six-Four had gone down, the priorities had changed. Up to that moment, the plan had been to simply stay alive long enough to get everyone out. Survival and victory were the same thing now; staying alive meant defeating this enemy, destroying them completely.