Page 43 of Lars

A Humvee was already parked nearby. Five regular infantry stood in the street, waiting for the order to move.

I took a second to get my bearings as the convoy of transports and Humvees moved on.

Kabul was a dense metropolis of over 4 million people. Most of the fighting in the city had taken place well over a decade ago, after which the war had transferred to the surrounding hills and deserts. Since then, life had mostly returned to the way it was before the American invasion.

But that didn’t mean danger wasn’t around every corner. The Taliban still had plenty of operatives in Kabul, so I kept my eyes and ears open.

We were currently standing on a street filled with cinderblock buildings. The level of poverty was bad by Swedish standards, but there were still plenty of cars driving down the road – and a lot of pedestrians. As soon as they saw us, they turned around and walked in the opposite direction.

Couldn’t say I blamed them. When NATO troops came knocking, it usually wasn’t good for the person whose door they knocked on.

The apartment building we’d been dropped off at belonged to a ‘friendly,’ a local who had pledged cooperation with the Americans. The infantry guys had a translator who spoke the landlord’s language – Dari Persian. If it had been Pashto, Gunnar could have talked to him instead.

Once the interpreter got the landlord to open the stairwell, Gunnar and I ran up the steps to the roof of the four-story building.

I set up shop while Gunnar guarded the stairs. Within 30 seconds, I had my rifle out and was scanning the sidewalks and buildings around the Humvees and transports.

The convoy had come to a halt outside a crumbling building. The pockmarked walls looked like they had sustained damage from the invasion a decade ago and had never been repaired.

There were still people living in the building, though. I could see curtains in some of the windows. Squatters, maybe, or people too poor to afford anything else.

…or maybe terrorists who had taken over the slums for their own purposes.

My fellow NATO soldiers were creeping along the front of the building towards the main entrance.

“Henriksson, you there?” a familiar voice crackled over the radio.

I smiled.

“Copy, Bauer.” I figured it would be unprofessional to call her Rachel. “You set up?”

“Yes. The five-story red building to the northeast.”

I swung my scope towards the red building and saw her helmet over the edge of the roof’s retaining wall. Her rifle was angled down slightly towards the slums several blocks away.

“I see you.”

She was a good 400 feet closer to the target building than I was.

I swung my gun back over to the slums. “Why don’t you handle the street and I’ll watch the windows?”

“Copy that.”

I slowly panned my scope over the front of the building, moving from window to window, looking for anything suspicious.

“Nothing on the street. They’re preparing to go in.”

I resisted looking at the soldiers and kept scanning the windows for any sign of –

There.

Movement on the third floor.

A shadowy figure pulled back a curtain. A man.

There was something in his hand –

“Grenade,” I said calmly and pulled the trigger.

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