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

positions. I could see one guy, the nearest of them, just standing and pointing at
me, yelling at two others, who were out to the right. Before I could make any
kind of a decision, they both opened fire on me again. I did not have much of a
shot at them, because they were still maybe a hundred yards up the cliff face and
the trees were shielding them.
Trouble was, I could not stand properly, and aiming the rifle was a problem,
so I decided to make a break for it, on my hands and knees, and wait for a better
spot to take them out. I crawled, not fast but steady, over terrible terrain, full of
little hills and dipping gullies. It could hardly have been better country for a
fugitive, which I now was, except I could not walk down the gullies, and I sure
as hell couldn’t get down those steep slopes on all fours, not having been born a
freakin’ snow leopard.
So every time I reached one of those small precipices, I just threw myself
straight off and hoped for a reasonable landing. I did a lot of rolling, and it was a
long, bumpy, and painful ride. But it beat the hell out of getting shot up the ass
again.
I kept it up for about forty-five minutes, crawling, rolling, and falling,
staying out in front of my pursuers, gaining ground on the downward falls,
losing it again as they ran up on me. And nowhere on that snaking route down
the hills did I find a decent spot to get rid of the gunmen who were hunting me
down. The bullets kept flying, and I kept moving. But finally I hit some flatter
ground and all around me were big rocks. I decided this would be Marcus’s last
stand. Or theirs. One way or another. Although I did not know exactly how many
of them there were.
I remember thinking, Now, how the hell would Morgan get out of this? What
would he do? And it gave me strength, the massive strength of my sevenminutes-older
brother. I decided that in this position, he’d wait till he saw the
whites of their eyes. No mistakes. So I crawled behind this big rock, checked my
magazine, then flipped off the safety catch of my Mark 12. And waited.
I heard them coming but not until they were very, very close. They were not
together, which was unnerving, because I could not account for them all. But I
could see the spotter now, the guy who was literally tracking me down, not
trying to shoot me; he didn’t even carry a rifle. His job was to locate me and then
call the others to bring fire down on me. Cheeky little prick.
But it’s the Afghan way. This Sharmak was an excellent delegator. One guy
carries the water, another the extra ammunition, and the marksmen don’t have to
spend their time searching the terrain. They have a specialist to do this.