Never Surrender. Lindsay McKennaЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Snorting, Khogani said, “Tonight? Look at where they are! It would be easy to ride down into the wadi, undetected. We could get so close that a mere two-minute gallop would reach all of them. We’d catch them all off guard.”

      “It’s daylight, my lord,” Zmarai rasped. They had always raided a village at dusk. He studied each young child waiting patiently beside their mother as the American military woman doctor treated them. Barely able to stand what would happen to any of them who were kidnapped, Zmarai closed his eyes for a moment, trying to get a stranglehold on his disgust. He was Muslim. And because he was one, the sale of children as sex slaves made him sick.

      Pulling the binoculars away, Mustafa scratched his long, black beard. His mind seemed to consider the possibilities. Unlike Sangar, his cousin who had been murdered by SEAL snipers last year, Mustafa had more original ideas. Sangar had been too conservative and careful. Mustafa liked to keep his enemy off balance. He seemed sure that the Special Forces team in the village below them wouldn’t be expecting an attack in broad daylight.

      “There’s a cave about two kilometers from here. We could reach it before the Americans could ever react with Apaches.”

      Zmarai said, “Yes, there is a cave.” He worried about a drone high above, watching the whole attack. That wouldn’t be good for them.

      Mustafa smiled. “And it goes back a long way, and we can come out the other side of the hill into another wadi, maintaining our cover.”

      Nodding, the Taliban soldier looked over at his lord. “That is so. You want to strike hard, grab some of the children and then ride for that cave?” He wished for the thousandth time that Mustafa would lose his obsession with stealing young children. It was sick and perverted and against Islam. Otherwise, he was a brilliant, tactical Taliban leader.

      “Yes.” Khogani sat up and crossed his legs. “But I want that woman doctor, too.”

      Black brows raising, Zmarai stared in disbelief at him. “Her?”

      Shrugging, he growled. “The bulk of my forces are ten miles from here up in the mountains. We have a lot of wounded men who are desperate for a doctor. She could treat them. We could have our own, personal American doctor.”

      Compressing his lips, Zmarai thought long and hard. True, there were many Taliban soldiers who were wounded or in dire need of immediate treatment at their main cave right now. Although they could get bandages and drugs from the Pakistan hospitals across the border, they had no real medic among them. Their last medic had been killed when a B-52 bomber had dropped a laser-guided JDAM bomb on them during a night firefight a week ago. It had killed twenty of Mustafa’s finest soldiers as well as his own personal bodyguard. And without a medic riding with them, they would lose more men to bacterial infection than any amount of American bullets. The soldiers would die a slow, painful death, blood poisoning setting in and killing them.