Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, November 2010
The valley looked wrong from the moment they entered it.
She felt it before she could name it — something in the geometry of the hillsides, the way the shale formations clustered at intervals that were too regular to be natural, the funnel shape of the floor drawing them forward and narrowing as it went. She was third in the file behind Paterson and an operator named Briggs and she was already reading the high ground when the first shots came.
They came from both sides simultaneously.
Six, maybe eight shooters on the hillsides, no more than 600 meters up, the shale and boulders giving them natural hides that would have taken hours to plan. The team hit the deck and returned fire and the valley floor became a place where standing upright was a decision you only made once.
She was already moving.
Not down — laterally, toward the eastern hillside, staying low behind a boulder line that gave her an angle the funnel floor didn’t. Nobody told her to go. Nobody needed to. The geometry was a problem and she could see the solution and the solution required someone to stop shooting from the floor and start shooting up.
She went up.
The shale was loose and loud and she moved across it anyway, fast and flat, the M4 up and her eyes already sorting the hillside into sectors. First shooter was behind a boulder at roughly 400 meters, muzzle flash giving him away every time he fired. She put two rounds into the gap beside the boulder and he stopped firing.
Moved to the next position. Same calculation. Same result.
The left flank went quiet first. She heard the team below register it — the volume of incoming dropping, Paterson’s voice cutting through with target callouts, the operators adjusting to the changing pressure. They didn’t know where she was. They knew what was happening.
Right flank next. Three positions spread across 200 meters of hillside, the shooters better concealed than the left side, more patient. She worked them from south to north and took her time because taking her time was faster than rushing and missing.
She was on the third position when the round grazed her left shoulder.
She felt it the way you feel a burn — immediate, sharp, localized — and noted it and kept moving because the third position still had a shooter in it and the shooter was the problem not the shoulder.
The trigger broke.
The third position went quiet.
She was scanning for the next target when she saw them — two men on the north end of the eastern ridge, both carrying radios, both trying to raise someone who wasn’t answering anymore because the ambush was falling apart and they needed to know why.
She understood immediately.
Cut off the head.
First radio operator went down before he finished his transmission. Second turned at the sound — not toward her, toward the valley floor, looking for the threat in the wrong place — and she let him turn completely before the trigger broke.
Two shots. Four seconds.
Below her the remaining shooters were firing at nothing, at shadows, at the place they thought the team was and wasn’t. Leaderless. No coordination. No information coming in from the ridgelines because the ridgelines had gone silent one position at a time and nobody had explained why.
They started making mistakes.
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