Axe shot one of them, but it was bad to the right. They were shooting in a kind of frenzy but, thank Christ, missing. I guess we were too. And suddenly I was taking heavy fire myself. Bullets were slamming into the tree trunk, hitting rocks all around me. The bullets were somehow coming in from the sides.

I called down to Mikey, “We’ll take ’em, but we might just need a new spot.”

“Roger that,” he yelled back. Like me, he could see the speed at which they were moving up into the attack. We’d been shooting them for all of five or six minutes, but every time we cleared that ridge high above us, it filled up again. It was as if they had reinforcements somewhere over the ridge, just waiting to come up to the front line. Whichever way we looked at it, they had a ton of guys trying to kill four SEALs.

At this point our options were nonexistent. We still could not charge the top of the mountain, because they’d cut us down like dogs. They had us left, and they had us right. We were boxed in on three sides, and there was never, not even for a couple of seconds, a lull in the gunfire. And we could not even see half of them or tell where the bullets were coming from. They had every angle on us.

All four of us just kept banging away, cutting ’em down, watching them fall, slamming a new magazine into the breech, somehow holding them at bay. But this was impossible. We had to give up this high ground, and I had to get close enough to Mikey to agree on a strategy, hopefully to save our lives.

I started to move, but Mikey, like the brilliant officer he was, had appreciated the situation and already called it. “Fall back!”

Fall back! More like fall off — the freakin’ mountain, that is; a nearly sheer drop, right behind us, God knows how far down. But an order’s an order. I grabbed my gear and took a sideways step, trying to zigzag down the gradient. But gravity made the decision for me, and I fell headlong down the mountain, completing a full forward flip and somehow landing on my back, still going fast, heels flailing for a foothold.

At least I thought I was going fast, but Murphy was right behind me. I could tell it was him because of the bright red New York City fireman’s patch he’d worn since 9/11. That was actually all I saw.

“See you at the bottom!” I yelled. But right then I hit a tree, and Mikey went past me like a bullet. I was going slower now, and I tried to take a step, but I fell again, and on I went, catching up to Mikey now, crashing, tumbling over the ground like we were both bouncing through a pinball machine.

Ahead of us was a copse of trees on a slightly less steep gradient, and I knew this was our last hope before we plunged into the void. I had to grab something, anything. So did Mikey, and I could see him up ahead, grabbing at tree limbs, snapping them off, and still plummeting downward.

In a split second I knew that nothing could save either of us, we’d surely break our backs or necks and then the Taliban would shoot us without mercy, as we would expect. But right now, entering the copse of trees at what felt like seventy miles an hour, my mind was in overdrive.

Almost everything had been ripped away from me in the fall, everything except my ammunition and grenades — all my packs, the medical stuff, food, water, comms, phone. I’d even lost my helmet with the flag of Texas painted on it. I was damned if I wanted some fucking terrorist wearing that.

I’d seen Mikey’s radio aerial ripped off as we crashed downward. And that was not good. My gun strap had been ripped off me and my rifle whipped away. The trouble was, the terrain beyond the tree copse was completely unknown to us, because we could not see it from above. If we had, we might never have jumped; the ground just swept upward and then ducked away downward, inverted, like a goddamned ski jump.

I rocketed up the lip of that back slope making about eighty knots, on my back, feetfirst. In the air I made two complete backflips and I landed again feet first, on my back, still coming down the cliff face like a howitzer shell. And at that moment I knew there was a God.

First of all, I appeared not to be dead, which was right up there with Jesus walking on the water. But even more amazing was I could see my rifle not two feet from my right hand, as if God Himself had reached down to me and given me hope. Marcus, I heard Him say, you’re gonna need this. At least, I think I heard Him. In fact, I swear to God I heard Him. Because this was a miracle, no doubt in my mind. And I had not even had time to say my prayers.

I didn’t know how far down we’d fallen, but it must have been two or three hundred yards. And we were both still going very fast. I could see Mikey up ahead, and I honestly did not know whether he was dead or alive. It was just a person crashing through the dirt and boulders. If he had not broken every bone in his body, that too was a miracle.

Me? I was too battered to hurt, and I could still see my rifle tumbling down beside me. That rifle never strayed more than two feet from my hand throughout this death-defying fall. And I’ll always know it was guided by the hand of God. Because there is no other explanation.

We hit the bottom, both of us landing with terrific impact, like we’d jumped off a goddamned skyscraper. It shook the wind out of me, and I gasped for breath, trying to work out how badly injured I was. My right shoulder hurt, my back hurt, and on one side of my face, the skin had been more or less scoured away. I was covered in blood and bruised to hell.

But I could stand, which was actually a really bad idea, because then the RPGs began to arrive, landing close, and I went down again. They exploded more or less harmlessly but sent up clouds of dust, shale, and wood shards from the trees. Mikey was next to me, maybe fifteen feet away, and we picked ourselves up from the ground.

He still had his rifle strapped on. Mine was resting at my feet. I grabbed it, and I heard Murphy shout through the din of explosions, “You good?”

I turned to him, and his entire face was black with dust. Even his goddamned teeth were black. “You look like shit, man,” I told him. “Fix yourself up!”

Despite everything, Mikey laughed, and then I noticed he’d been shot during the fall. There was blood pumping out of his stomach. But just then there was a thunderous explosion from one of the grenades, too close, much too close. We both wheeled around in the swirling dust and smoke, and there behind us were two large logs, actually felled trees.

They were crossed over at the ends, like a pair of giant chopsticks, facing up the mountain, and we turned simultaneously and sprinted for cover. We cleared the logs and crashed down behind them, safe from gunfire attack for the moment. We were both still armed and ready to fight. I took the right-hand side, Mikey center left, guarding both the head-on approach and the flank.

We could see them plainly now, swarming down the flanks of the cliff we had just crashed down. They were moving very fast, though not nearly as fast as we had. Mikey had a pretty good line on them, and mine wasn’t bad. We opened fire straight at them, picking them off one by one as they moved in on us. Trouble was, there were so many, and it didn’t seem to matter how many we killed, they just kept coming. I remember thinking that the two hundred estimate was a lot closer than the eighty minimum we had been advised.

And this must have been Sharmak’s work. Because these guys were not really marksmen, were using marginal rifles pretty recklessly, but nonetheless followed the military rules for this type of assault. They advanced down the side of the battlefield, trying to outflank their enemy, always attempting to get a 360-degree cover on their target. We were surely slowing their progress down, but we weren’t stopping them.