Full Assault Mode by Dalton Fury

in a second as soon as the kid realized the noise of the helicopters weren’t just routine Pakistani resupply runs crisscrossing the mountain passes. Shaft stopped thinking and started to execute.
    He quickly grabbed his backpack with his left hand, reached into the top flap with his firing hand and found the familiar handle of his Glock 26. Without taking his hand out of the pack, he shoved it with both hands hard against his minder’s mouth. He tried to line up his aim, forced to guess the correct angle to the minder’s face. Rapidly, he broke the Glock Ghost 3.5-pound trigger twice.
    Two Remington HTP 9mm lead bullets tore through everything in their way inside the pack before slamming into the Paki’s face. One entered just above the left eye orbit. The other one went through the right cheek. Both bullets pinballed around his skull but failed to exit out the rear. The man’s body went limp in a second. The backpack hadn’t muffled the gunshots as well as Shaft thought it would. He had never actually tried that before. But it did the job.
    Shaft yanked the badly frayed wool blanket off the dead Paki, revealing his folded-stock AK-47 lying next to his torso. He grabbed it, placed the stock tight under his right arm, and dropped the banana magazine with his left hand. He press-checked the mag to see how many bullets he had, then rocked and locked the familiar metal magazine into the mag well and tugged firmly to ensure it was fully seated. Shaft tilted the weapon, took the safety off, and dropped his left hand underneath the receiver, finding the charging handle. He power-pushed the handle to the rear before releasing it, driving the top 7.62 × 39 full-metal-jacket round of the mag into the chamber. Better safe than sorry, he pulled the handle back just over an inch until he saw shiny brass, confirming the weapon was loaded, before releasing the handle.
    Shaft patted the dead man’s pockets, looking for any identification that would show affiliation with the Pakistani Taliban, Haqqani network, or Hezb-i-Islami. He felt something small but hard in his front breast pocket and pushed two fingers in to secure it. He looked at the white plastic-covered thumb drive, debated whether or not to take it with him, then decided to keep it and slid it in his backpack along with the Glock 26. Shaft threw on his wool hat and reached deep into his pack, fishing for the buried PVS-14 night vision monocular and the IR laser pointer.
    “Shit!”
    Shaft felt small pieces of sharded glass inside his pack. He opened it wider and saw the damage. Before both 9mm rounds tore into the minder’s head, they had bored through the iPad 4.
    Shaft closed the pack and pulled the drawstring tight. Holding both items in his left hand, he right-shouldered his pack and held the rifle in his right hand as he moved toward the doorway. He left the medical supplies he had brought all the way from J-bad sitting in the neat piles separated by type and size. He slung open the rusted door just in time to see the dark purple shapes of two low-flying helos against the snow-covered ridgeline overshoot the landing zones by two hundred meters or so.
    “I’m late!” Shaft whispered.
    Shaft watched as the helos started into a hard left-hand turn. Without an identifying laser marker and with the extra foot of fresh snow on the ground that hid dangerous landing obstacles, he knew the helo pilot had little choice. Shaft knew they were positioning to execute a go-around and make a second attempt to find his laser mark and the landing zones.
    Shaft began slogging across the snow-covered ground like a man in molasses. He was surprised at how difficult it was to run in the freshly fallen snow. It had been snowing since they returned from the complicated birth hours earlier, and he thought about dumping the AK or the pack, or both, before quickly reconsidering. The fierce and raw high winds pushing against his chest only made it all the more difficult with each step