Sam Wick Ultimate Boxset

by Chase Austin

  Ignorance was bliss as far as the agency was concerned. The agency had to feel safe. And Wick made sure of that by making them believe that the collective heads in the agency were smarter than him. He didn’t know what would happen if they knew he was usually miles ahead of them in the game, even when not on active duty. The reason was that he didn’t want them to try new tactics which he would then have to waste time deciphering. That was trivial shit he cared nothing about. He just cared about sitting still as a sculpture for as long as he could. It was his way to test his limits. And knowing his limits made him win battles and rise to the occasion when he needed to.

  He had had a meeting with Helms after his hearing and it had been uneventful, at least from his side. He was not perturbed by the radio silence that followed.

  He knew that if he was to be terminated from the agency, there would be a target painted on his back, with all the agency’s assets aiming to eliminate him ASAP. If he was reinstated, then his next mission would be one that he would have to fight hard to come out of alive. Either way, he would have to wrestle to survive, and he was ready for both.

  It was all part and parcel of this job.

  He was lost in his thoughts when his cell phone vibrated.

  This was the first sound he had heard coming from his cell in several days. He gently picked up the phone. 1 new email.

  He plugged in his access code and opened the application.

  There was a one-liner email waiting for him. Acknowledge mission specifics.

  There was a file attached. He opened the file and gave it a cursory read. Once satisfied that he had everything he needed to know, he typed two words—On it—and pressed the send button.

  Two minutes later he received another email. In thirty minutes, his transport would be waiting for him in the back alley of his apartment building.

  He didn't care what was in the final inquiry report, or how he had gotten out of it unscathed. All he cared about was that his next mission had just begun.

  The End

  Singular Force

  The Impossible Shot (A TF-77 Short)

  ABOUT SINGULAR FORCE

  Homing on his target, Eddie realized two things.

  First, he only had one shot.

  Second, it was an impossible shot.

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  SINGULAR FORCE

  War Torn Iraq

  Now

  Zeroing in on his target through the glass, Eddie realized two things.

  First, he only had one shot.

  Second, it was an impossible shot.

  60 minutes ago

  The rocky wall was soothingly cool and felt a tad bit reassuring behind his aching back. He rubbed his back gingerly against it to relieve the pain. But his eyes remained trained on the target village spread thinly below the vantage point. There was not a cloud in sight in the bright sky, nothing but the few eagles gliding over the desolate land.

  Eddie Vicar was an El Paso stock, with black hair and vital green eyes. He wasn’t muscular like the other officers in his unit. His short height and wiry physique marked him out for ridicule from his colleagues and commanding officer.

  He had been deployed in the long-drawn Iraq war that began in 2003 with the invasion of the country by a U.S.-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The war had ravaged the country and its cities, towns, and villages to their bare bones. 600,000 Iraqis had been killed in the conflict and that was just the figure for the first four years. No official data had been released after that. Maybe they had stopped counting because of the unprecedented numbers, or to avoid attracting flak from the human rights warriors.

  Eddie shouldn’t have been here. U.S. troops had been officially withdrawn from Iraq in 2009. But following the spread of radicalism in Iraq, the Syrian civil war and the territorial gains of ISIL, the U.S. government had re-deployed most of the withdrawn troops back in Iraq by 2014. Eddie was among those who got re-deployed. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to serve his country in whatever way he could. That had always been his long-cherished dream. What he hadn’t considered, though, were the dire consequences of being perceived as “different” by a bunch of boys barely out of puberty, sent to a place like Iraq, far away from the safe surroundings of their homeland, and allowed to shoot and kill people with minimal supervision. It was that dark side of army life in a war-torn country like Iraq that no one spoke about and certainly no one had warned Eddie about.

  The trigger-happy finger gave a different kind of high and very few people were able to control that power. When the fodder for their perversion started to thin in the field, they turned their sights to those among their own who were perceived as weak. That’s when Eddie found himself at the receiving end of this dark side. And by the time he realized the depth of it, he was neck-deep in it. The situation deteriorated rapidly for him, thanks especially to one of the other snipers—Russell Wilson, who was the lead point man for taking out U.S. enemies in Iraq. Wilson was a big hunk from the redneck wilds of north-central Florida who had grown up hunting boar with his dad. His passion for hunting had made him a good sniper, but his daddy issues had turned him a bastard.

  24 hours ago

  Eddie balanced his falling body, face inches away from the dirt, in a push-up position.

  It was 2 a.m. and the temperature was under thirty degrees. Summer days in Iraq were at the mercy of a relentless sun, but nights were generally freezing. Fortunately, air humidity was low.

  Even in that cold, sweat poured from his face like rain, turning dirt into mud. He inhaled dust and muck every time he sucked in air. His muscles burned. Every inch of his body trembled with the effort. His rage wanted him to get up and square off with Wilson who’d spent the last eight weeks trying to bully him, break him. But his mind knew that would result in more such beatings from the rest of Wilson’s platoon watching the bout. And frankly, he’d grown tired of those.

  Soldiers in military fatigues, some without shirts, some in cargo shorts and polos, a few in nothing but boxers stood in a circle around the fighting pit.

  The spectators, his commanding officer Morgan Heath among them, hurled obscenities at him. “You sonovabitch, get up and fight!”

  Wilson’s boot slammed into Eddie’s ribs. “You don’t belong to this team.”

  Eddie cried out in pain and hit the ground hard.

  Wilson raised his knee and brought his boot down on the middle of Eddie’s back like a victor posing for a photo.

  Eddie struggled to breathe. His nostrils and lungs felt like they were full of dirt. Wilson was massive and heavy.

  “Leave him,” Heath said, finally.

  Wilson shot Eddie a look of disgust but obeyed the direct order. Eddie remained on the ground, trying to control his breathing.

  Wilson spat on the ground near his face. “Fuck you queer,” he said and turned to leave. The rest followed him. The last one to leave was Heath.

  Eddie lay there for a while and when everyone was gone, he slowly got up and sat on the ground staring at the spot still wet from Wilson’s spittle.

  Now

  How do you take an impossible shot?

  By getting the math right.

  55 minutes ago

  Perched on a high vantage point above the village and the compound, Eddie looked lost. The almost permanent grin on his boyish face was missing. A cursory glance at his face would have told any casual observer that Eddie had barely any feelings about this war, about his b
eing there, about his environment. He was just there because he was ordered to be there.

  But a closer look would reveal much more. His eyes had a lot to say. His shoulders were slouched. A faint bluish tinge covered most of the left side of his face. His left eye had a red clot. His rifle rested beside him. He cleaned it every day, though he had not yet had to use it in the six months since he had landed in Iraq.

  But Eddie wasn’t thinking about any of that. He was thinking about the village he was tasked to watch. Almost all the houses in the village were now deserted. The houses, where somebody—whole families—must have lived at some point in time.

  What had happened to those people?

  What had happened to those families?

  Eddie brushed his thoughts aside. This was not the time and the place to think about such things. He still had some way to go in life before he had the luxury of pondering over such questions.

  A gunshot not far away startled him from his reverie. His right hand instinctively went to his rifle. The gun’s grip felt cool and reassuring in his hand, though he was careful to minimize his body movements. He was in a lot of pain, both physical and mental. But he couldn’t let the pain show. His body wanted to, but his mind wouldn’t allow it. He wasn’t alone on the rocky roof. There were three other men, including Wilson and his CO, Morgan Heath.

  Now

  Eddie stretched his body carefully on the rocky surface. The pain intensified as he moved and the burning surface made it almost impossible for him to get into position, but he had to do it.

  Below the village was deathly still. The wind was strong, blowing from left to right as Eddie crept up to a vantage point about thirteen hundred yards from the target.

  Martinez Rovan, his sniping partner, lay beside him.

  Rovan was small, slim, razor-sharp, without a wasted ounce of meat on his body. When he worked out in shorts and no shirt, he looked like a drawing of the human anatomy, each muscle group carefully delineated. Rovan had already zoned in on the target, hidden behind a fortified wall in a secure position some 1300 yards away, ready to shoot at anyone wearing a U.S. uniform.

  There was no way Eddie could snare the enemy with the single shot that he had.

  Eddie knew this as a fact. And he knew that his enemy knew this too.

  5 Hours ago

  “Gentlemen, this is a suicide mission.” The resounding voice of Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Heath boomed in the hanger. “And that’s why they chose us. We are the best in the business and now is the time to prove it.”

  Sitting at the back of the room, Eddie cringed inwardly at Heath’s clumsy attempt at motivating his men.

  Twenty others like Eddie were in the hangar. The team was a mix of Delta, Marines and the U.S. army. Eddie moved little throughout the briefing. He was in intense pain, but he was one of the three snipers at the base, so he had to be here. The lead sniper was Russell Wilson. The person Eddie hated the most apart from Morgan Heath.

  Eddie tried to focus on gathering key insights from the briefing. The most important was that the mission was difficult—but not necessarily suicidal.

  Morgan Heath was as hands-on and gung-ho a commander as there could be. He was not yet forty years old, and it was clear that the army was not the end of the line for him. Heath had rocketed up to his current rank, and his ambitions seemed to point toward a higher profile. He was handsome, fit, and over-the-top eager. That wasn’t unusual for an army officer. But he also talked too much. And that wasn’t Army at all.

  Eddie looked at the TV screen behind Heath. A young man in a white bandana and stubbled face appeared on the screen. His eyes were striking—one brown and one green.

  “This is our target,” Heath said. “We don’t know his real name, but in the video released by ISIS, he is called Torpedo. Our intel says that he represented Syria in the rifle shooting at the Summer Olympics. He is believed to have been born sometime around 1980 among a tribe of nomads in eastern Afghanistan or the tribal regions of western Pakistan; his family probably crisscrossed the border like it wasn’t even there. ISIS runs in his veins. During the last few months, ISIS has released multiple videos of anti-US attacks and he features in several of them.”

  Heath flicked a button and a video appeared on the screen. It soon became clear why this video was being played. The clip started with Torpedo saying, “I have a gift for the U.S. President. I am going to kill American soldiers encroaching on our land, and millions around the world will watch. God is greater! God is greater!”

  The sketchy video showed him making his way from a vehicle, and a series of separate scenes followed showing several individuals being shot with a rifle that seemed to be a Dragunov. Torpedo could shoot targets at a distance of anywhere between a few hundred to thousand-odd yards with extreme precision. Videos included parts of the actual clips taken during anti-US sniper operations with digital cameras mounted over the sniper rifle. Some of the shots executed by Torpedo were clearly beyond the capabilities of an ordinary shooter.

  “It is still not proven completely whether Torpedo is a name given to this man in the video, or is it now a role shared among multiple individuals. It could also be a propaganda/media creation with a solid back story. The man became known after ISIS posted these online videos showing him shooting American soldiers. We have got intel that he is now in our region, and for the success of our upcoming missions he is a thorn that we need to take out.” Heath paused for effect. He eyed everyone in the room. “This guy is bad news. Getting him will be the next best thing to taking down Osama bin Laden. Do you guys want to be heroes? Well, this is your chance.”

  Heath clicked a button on the remote. The photo on the screen changed. A split image appeared on the screen—on one side of the vertical border was an aerial shot of a compound just outside a small village; on the other side was a 3-D rendering of a house. The house was three stories tall, made of stone, and built against a steep hill.

  Heath launched into a description of how the mission would go. “We will hit two targets today, and based on the intel we believe that our search for one will lead to another. This compound is target #1. The man who protects this compound, Torpedo, is our target #2. Our A and B teams will go in two choppers, eight in one and nine in the second. The choppers will set down in a field just outside the village, unload teams A and B, and then provide aerial support. Team C will include Wilson, Rovan, Eddie and me, and we will try to take out Torpedo from here.” He pointed at a hill on the map.

  “The village road that leads to this compound is narrow and we believe that Torpedo will be stationed there to stop us. We will take him out and then raid the compound. Once we get past Torpedo, A-Team will breach the walls, enter the compound, and assassinate any hostile inside. B-Team will hold the walls and the approach to the compound from the village. The choppers will then touch down again and extract all three teams. If for any reason the choppers cannot land again, the three teams will make their way to an old abandoned American forward firebase on a rocky hillside less than half a mile outside the village. Extraction will take place there, or the teams will hold the former base until extraction can occur.”

  #

  35 minutes ago

  Eddie was still sitting behind Wilson, Heath, and Rovan, the other three members of Team C. Wilson was leading the team which wasn’t surprising; he was Heath’s go-to sniper.

  Heath’s presence was explained by the fact that killing Torpedo would be the highlight of the mission, not raiding an almost empty compound, and Heath had an excellent instinct for being in the right place at the right time in high-profile missions like this.

  Wilson’s spotter was Rovan, lying beside him, trying to zero in on the target. Once he had a lock on the target, it was Wilson’s job to take Torpedo out.

  Eddie was in the team as a backup sniper. He knew what he was and how he wouldn’t be getting a shot. This was going to be a Wilson show.

  Still, he took mental stock of his weapons. His weapons included an M24 S
niper Weapon System and an MP5 for close-quarter fighting. The guns were loaded, and he had extra magazines stuffed in his pockets. Besides, he had a SIG P226 sidearm, four grenades, a cutting, and a breaching tool.

  His eyes scanned the unforgiving terrain before him, set against the backdrop of windswept mountains. The place seemed frozen in time like it had not progressed beyond the Stone Age. People occupying these terrains truly existed in a forgotten corner of the earth. The only technology this entire valley had was probably the automatic weapons and rockets snatched from the enemy.

  The team was ready. The A and B squads had been dropped off at the designated locations. Now all that remained was to get Torpedo in the crosshairs, which was Rovan’s job.

  25 minutes ago

  Teams A and B were now in position. No one was shooting at anyone yet. Heath’s radio crackled to life. Team A’s squad leader transmitted, “Ready to enter the village out-buildings.”

  Heath looked at Wilson, the man on whose shoulder this mission depended.

  Wilson and his sniping partner Rovan were still looking for any sign of Torpedo.

  “I need more time,” Rovan hissed to Wilson.

  Wilson nodded, his eyes fixed to the scope. “Tell ’em we got nothing yet. They have to wait,” he told Heath.

  Heath checked his comms as if pondering whether he should relay the message or not. Wilson was in charge of this situation. His shot would decide the next course of action. Sensing Heath’s reluctance, Wilson looked up from his rifle optic.