Osama by Chris Ryan

sounds at once. The first was the hum of a helicopter up ahead. He couldn’t see it yet, but he knew it was arriving. The Yanks must have called in a pick-up. Where the hell were they? Why weren’t they giving him fire support?
    The second sound was gunfire.
    It came from the crowd of kids, and it had the unmistakable bark of a Kalashnikov.
    Joe cursed under his breath and rolled onto his back. He could only see one kid with a gun. He had raised it in the air above his head to fire a burst. No doubt he’d seen adult insurgents do the same thing any number of times in his young life. Now, though, he was lowering it and, egged on by his mates, preparing to fire in Joe’s direction.
    Joe estimated the distance at between 400 and 500 metres. He was at the edge of the Kalashnikov’s effective range, but he wouldn’t bet his boots on the kid missing him . . .
    The rounds from the second burst landed over an area of about ten square metres, twenty metres from Joe’s position. Unable to control the recoil of the rifle, the kid had staggered backwards and turned to grin at his mates. More shouting from their direction; the boy raised the Kalashnikov again.
    Joe had to do something. He hadn’t signed up to nail kids, but these were insurgents in the making. He pulled a white-phosphorus grenade from his ops vest. He squeezed the detonation lever and pulled the pin with his teeth. Then he tensed his stomach muscles, forced himself into a half-sitting position, and hurled the grenade with all his strength. A thick curtain of white smoke would give him chance to swastika it out of there.
    But the explosion that followed was ten times louder than he expected. The ground shook; the air rang; the earth between Joe and the kids erupted, and the bang echoed across the desert, shredding Joe’s nerves. There was a cloud of smoke all right, but a whole lot more than he’d have expected from a white-phos grenade. He could only assume that the canister had hit another pressure plate.
    ‘Run,’ he hissed at himself. ‘Fucking run!’
    Pushing himself to his feet, he stepped over the trip wire. Distance to the drop-off point, half a klick. If he wanted to extract with that chopper, he needed to get there fast.
    He sprinted. He knew he was risking his life, that he still had ten to fifteen metres of the minefield to clear, but he couldn’t let the Yanks extract without him. People other than the kids would have heard the explosions; people better armed and with greater skill; people Joe didn’t want to get into contact with all by himself, especially now that the smoke from the grenade was dissipating. Each time his foot hit the ground, he expected to feel the telltale spring of a pressure plate, to hear the blast that was going to kill him.
    But it didn’t come.
    He cleared the minefield in five seconds. Behind him, the noise of more gunfire, but he knew he was fully out of range now. All he could do was leg it back to the chopper.
    Even weighed down by his gear, he’d never run so fast. No point shouting at the others that he was coming, he realized – they’d never hear him over the noise of the chopper, and his energy was better expended on moving quickly.
    He bolted round the curve at the base of the hill. A hundred metres. Two hundred. The chopper came into sight. It was kicking up the dust, and even in the daylight he could see a faint glow where the particles of sand were sparking against the rotors. The Americans were there, but they were little more than shadows in the cloud that surrounded the aircraft. It was 250 metres away. A hundred and fifty. The figures had disappeared inside the Black Hawk.
    He could see the outline of the tail rising. Overhead, a second Black Hawk screamed across the sky: Team Bravo, extracting.
    Fifty metres. A change in the quality of the noise coming from the chopper’s engines. Higher-pitched. It was preparing to lift.
    Joe stopped just short of the dust cloud, twenty metres from the aircraft,