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landing; the rest of the floor was divided into two rooms, gunfire banging away from my left and right. I cased both rooms quickly. Room on the left had one shooter. Room on the right had two. The floors in both were littered with spent casings and magazines.
    The Taliban fighter in the left-hand room was old – mid-fifties – and dressed in black. Pops was making so much noise that he didn’t realize I was behind him until the Ka-bar took out his windpipe and partially severed his spinal cord. Blood went everywhere. I gently laid him down among all his brass trash as he gurgled and shook, then I took his AK and replaced the mag with a fresh one from a satchel sitting on a broken chair. There was no food in the bag, suggesting that this gig was unplanned – good to know. Propped against the wall behind the door were an M16A2 and a bag full of mags. I picked up the rifle. It was brand new, still with that showroom shine. The serial numbers on its receiver had been ground off. Where does a Taliban fighter get one of these? I hooked the weapon over my shoulder and took the satchel with the mags.
    Had I killed Pops with the M4, everyone would know that Uncle Sam was making home deliveries. To head off any concern, I fired a couple of bursts from the guy’s AK out the window to reassure his buddies that the old man was still on the job. Then I dropped the weapon and walked across the landing into the room on the right. The door was wide open. Both targets, also dressed in Taliban black, were in their late teens or early twenties. They had their backs to me, firing on full auto on the crippled Landcruisers, wasting ammo, washing my buddies in lead. From the sound of it, one of the targets was firing an M16.
    Then a couple of rounds tore into the ceiling above my head. Gray powder drifted down, dusting my shoulders. My guys across the street were zeroing in.
    ‘Yo, fellas,’ I called out, raising my voice above the din. ‘S’up?’
    The shooters glanced over their shoulders, eyes wide. The fighter with the M16 had an orange beard and large blue-green eyes, maybe a throwback to when Alexander the Great arrived here with his army to subdue the local population and get in a little R&R. I didn’t have to think about what to do. Both men got three rounds in the chest. The force of it pushed Ginger out the window, ass first. He fell in silence, already dead.
    The shooter on the floor above me stopped firing. He knew something was up, probably when he saw his Islamic brother take the big step backward into the street below. He started calling to his friends. When no answer came, he began firing down through the floor. I made myself small against the wall and changed mags. Plaster, wood splinters, and lead rained down, which gave me some idea of his position. I fired upwards – single shots – emptied the mag, then waited for an answer. I stood on the spot for ten seconds or so, changed mags, listening, looking up. No one was walking around up there, and the shooting had stopped. Blood clogged the bullet holes in the ceiling and began dripping down onto the floor.
    I climbed up to the second floor to confirm that only one fighter occupied it, and that he was now dead. I searched him quickly for the benefit of folks back at intelligence but found nothing of interest. I picked up his AK, released the mag, emptied the chamber, and swung it against the wall a couple of times, splintering the stock. Then I went back down to the other rooms, collected the M16, and put those AKs out of action for a while also.
    Moving over to the window, I gave my people a whistle. Movement up the road attracted my attention. Shit, half a dozen armed, bearded men were running toward us, black robes flapping in the breeze. Three of them ducked into one of the houses thirty meters away. I lost sight of their friends. Time to go. I searched the corpses and their satchels but came up empty-handed. Sporadic firing was beginning again. Exactly how many more