Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

uncompromising, steady, hard-eyed, and professional. I could see the guys on
that left flank dropping down in their tracks as they raced toward us. On my side,
over on the right, the ground was just a little flatter, with trees, and there did not
seem to be so many of them. Every time they moved, I shot ’em.
It was probably clear to them that Mikey and I could not be dislodged as
long as the big logs covered us. And that’s when they went to their biggest
barrage of RPGs yet. These damn things, trailing that familiar white smoke,
were unleashed at us from farther up the mountain. They landed to the front and
the side but not behind, and they caused a tidal wave of dirt, rocks, and smoke,
showering us with the stuff, robbing us of our vision.
Our heads went down, and I asked Mikey where the hell were Axe and
Danny, and of course neither of us knew. All we knew was they were up the
mountain, not yet having jumped, as we had.
“Guess Axe must have dug in and kept fighting out on the left,” he said.
“Danny’s got a better chance of radio contact high up than he would down here.”
We risked a look up through the gloom, and we saw a figure plummeting
down the mountain, just to the left of where we had fallen. Axe, no doubt, but
could he survive that fall? He was on the first slope before the trees, and a
second later he hurtled over the ski jump, flipped, and crashed on down the
almost sheer cliff face. The gradient saved him, as it had saved Mikey and me,
the way the steep mountain saves a ski jumper, enabling him to continue down at
high speed without a terminal collision with flat ground.
Axe arrived in one piece, stunned and disoriented. But the Taliban could see
him now, and they opened fire on him as he lay on the ground. “Run, Axe...right
here, buddy, run!” yelled Murph, top of his lungs.
And Axe recovered his senses real quick, bullets flying around him, and he
cleared those logs and crashed into our hide, landing on his back. It’s
unbelievable what you can do when the threat to your own life is that bad.
He took the far left, slammed a new magazine into the breech, and started
fighting, never missed a beat, hammering away at our most vulnerable point of
enemy attack. The three of us just kept going, shooting them down, hoping and
praying their numbers would lessen, that we had punched a hole in their assault.
But it sure as hell never seemed like it. Those guys were still swarming, still
firing. And the noise was still deafening.
The question was, Where was Danny? Was that little mountain lion still
fighting, still trying to make contact, as he pounded away at Sharmak’s troops?
Was he still trying to get through to HQ? None of us knew, but the answer was