Debra was a soldier. She was stationed a few hundred miles southwest of Kabul with the rest of The Royal Logistics Corps. Her job was to coordinate supply lines from advanced positions so they could get food to and supplies to the frontline and ambulances up from backstage. She also handled COMM lines between the soldiers at the frontline and their superiors behind.

One fatal day they were out to interconnect a Joint Special Operations south of Kabul. There was an empty compound in some mountains they had planned to use as an advanced position. Debra told me how much she loved ramp riding in the Chinooks. Especially in the sunset. Of course, they were strapped in when sitting on the ramp. Any uncontrolled manoeuvre would easily make them fall off the helo if not strapped securely in.

It was probably also what saved her life when the Chinook was hit by a Russian RPG. They were only a hundred feet in the air and LZ was only half a minute away when the helo was shaken by an explosion that sent it in a fatal dive against the ground.

If there is a God he is the only one who can explain why Debra survived and thirty other men and a dog were killed in the crash. Debra explained the helo took a nosedive and the strap that held her prevented her from slamming into the cockpit like the rest of the crew. Some divine timing made her cut her strap a split second before a secondary explosion blew her all the way back over the ramp and she landed on the ground thirty feet behind the burning wreck.

As if that wasn’t enough it appeared to be some kind of independent warlord who scavenged the country for military leftovers he could steal and sell, that shot down the helo. Lev was his name. My friend Goldie knew him because his father who worked for KGB spent many years trying to find Lev, but didn’t succeed. Lev was a former KGB asset who went rogue and KGB needed to find him.

Goldie and Psycho were with me in Afghanistan on this trip. We had my ferry – The Undertaker, anchored up in the Arabian sea close to Oman. Goldie and I were in the exact same business as Lev, except we weren’t chased by any intelligence organization. Psycho had a chopper he got from the Agency once. An old but very stable Sea King. It had room for a lot of AK 47’s!

Earlier Psycho flew drugs in Afghanistan for Air America – which is The Agency, from local warehouses far away from the airports to the Herat International Airport, which was controlled by the CIA. Actually, ALL airports were controlled by the CIA, but this was the one CIA used to get the heroin out of Afghanistan and Pakistan to distribute it and sell it pretty much all over the world. Including the US! The money from the sale does not appear on anybody’s tax return. That means they are untraceable and can be used for anything that congress does not need to know about. This money is used to finance the shadow government or in other words, the rich and powerful oligarchs in the US who don’t care about anything else but themselves.

He never told anybody how he got it, but I guess he had some incriminating information on some senior officers in high places from when he was working there. And suddenly one day after a visit to Langley, he was the happy owner of a Sea King. He made some smaller modifications to the bird. An auxiliary fuel tank and a remote-controlled machine-gun between the wheels. The range of the Sea King is 1.100 miles which meant he had to bring even more extra fuel from Oman on this operation. The Sea King was designed to carry four torpedoes, but a machine gun often comes handier in for private use. Besides, torpedos are extremely expensive. Anyway – the machine gun was removed on this travel due to the weight of the cargo and they had to fly somewhat stealth anyway.

The only thing he ever said about his acquisition of the chopper was that the Sikorsky Sea Kings were on planned retirement in 2006 and this particular one was an early retirement…

We knew where Lev and his gang lived. Goldie and I found his place in the mountains by accident. It is on the side of Kohe Mondi and it’s cold and very isolated. But easy to spot from the air. We used to camp on a mountainside opposite Lev to check if he was there. It was mostly Goldie who was interested in Lev, probably because of his father. But here we were, watching his cabins hoping to see Lev and hopefully get him apprehended and delivered to the KGB.

That was the plan at least.

But in my scope, I watched something we weren’t prepared for. I had a Leupold Mark 4 telescopic sight mounted on my Barrett. Lev had a prisoner. Tied to a chair. This was the first time I truly hated another man. It was a woman who involuntarily sat in the chair and he beat her up. She looked terrible. The first day we were there he beat her up for half an hour and locked her up in a cabin afterwards. The second day – today it looked worse than yesterday so I decided to do something.

I go nowhere without my Barret. It is my companion in life and I even sleep with it. The Barrett M82A1 rifle is an extremely powerful weapon! It takes 0.5-inch bullets (equals 12.7x99mm) which is the calibre just below intercontinental missiles! It will shit molten chunks of the second amendment with a velocity and momentum, that makes sure the target will not reincarnate until somewhere in the next millennium!

Actually, this is not really a sniper rifle as the precision is much less than that of a bolt action sniper rifle. We don’t usually target personnel with this. It’s a rifle you use when hunting mammoths and 18 wheelers! It is designed to kill a truck engine at 1,000 yards! Or shoot a plane out of the sky in a burning smoking fireball! It takes the same ammo as the heavy machine gun on a tank! And it says BOOOM with such an intense volume that any nearby cockroach will die from the shock!

This is a very serious roommate!

The lasered distance was 5,089 feet (1696 yards) which is well within this rifle’s capacity. The bullet velocity is 2,800 feet/sec. So the travel distance is 1.8 seconds. That means after the shot has been fired, the target would have 1.8 seconds to remove himself from the trajectory.

Goldie was already running down the hill with his Kalashnikov and a handful of grenades. Well… there’s a reason why we call him Grenade Goldie. I took out a few more of Lev’s men. They were fifteen in total and Goldie took out the rest when he arrived. Unfortunately, Lev didn’t survive. He was about to point a loaded gun at Deb so when he cocked it, I fired and Lev was no more. Elvis left the building…

One of the mountain wonders is that the sound from my riffle was reflected back and forth between the mountains so they were never able to see where the shots came from and in broad daylight, they couldn’t see the muzzle flame.

Goldie opened Deb’s handcuffs and stole one of Lev’s jeeps to bring her back to Psycho’s chopper. We later raided Lev’s place and took every gun he had which was quite a lot.

At that time we had great connections with some of the local farmers so we were not only gun runners, we were drug smugglers too! The Cocaine Import Agency had a lot of suppliers. We only had a few.

I tried to patch Deb up a little while we flew over Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.

From that day on Deb was an integrated part of my team.