Deuce made it to safety, but his effectiveness would be right around zero unless he could find a way to get to a more strategic piece of ground. She, on the other hand, was finally in a position to assess their situation. The Afghan was about seventy-five meters to the north, lying behind two boulders tipped against each other. The gap between them was low and just large enough to get his rifle through, making him impervious to gunfire from below, but affording him only a narrow field of vision.

She saw a flash and Grant took another hit, rocking backward with the force of the round against her body armor. For a moment, she didn’t think he was going to be able to right himself, but he threw a hand back and managed to stabilize before flashing her a courageous grin. His teeth were tinted pink with blood.

There was no way she was going to let him die. She’d lost too many friends already.

Randi dropped her M16 and pulled what Deuce called “the new toy” off her back. There was a fist-sized chunk blown off the butt and she couldn’t help wondering what Heckler & Koch was going to charge to fix it. The combination of the XM25’s thirty-five-thousand-dollar price tag and thirteen-pound weight had made her consider leaving it at home, but Deuce convince her otherwise. It seemed that his sixth sense for combat had come through again.

Randi was chambering the twenty-five-millimeter digital round when another shot sounded, quickly followed by the now-familiar thud of an impact against Kevlar.

“I think that one cracked a rib,” Grant said just loud enough for her to hear. “I would really appreciate it if you’d kill that guy.”

“Working on it.”

The Afghan didn’t have an angle on her so she rose up and sighted through a scope that she prayed hadn’t been knocked out of alignment when the butt had been hit.

A laser judged the distance to the boulders the man was hiding behind at seventy-nine meters. Based on the few inches of barrel she could see protruding from the gap, it seemed likely that the rocks were a little less than a meter thick and that he was lying straight out behind them.

She clicked a button near the trigger and added one meter to the range, which would be right around his shoulder blades. Then there was nothing to do but see if the thing was worth the money the CIA had paid for it.

She aimed just over the top of the boulders and squeezed the trigger, feeling the painful jolt of the broken butt against her shoulder. Inside the bullet, a computer calculated the distance it traveled by counting rotations and, at exactly eighty meters, it exploded, sending deadly shrapnel down to earth.

Randi remained motionless, watching the barrel of the gun between the rocks waver and finally tip to the ground.