“Left,” came Perry’s whisper over the wireless headset.
Keeping his body perfectly still, Kemper glanced left. A large man—six feet tall, two hundred pounds—was striding toward them, an AK-47 slung at the hip. Kemper tensed, a predator waiting for prey to enter the kill zone. He slowed his breathing and played out kill options in his mind. The Iraqi was two meters away now, and Kemper could see the man’s attention was focused on lighting the cigarette he carried in his left hand. He shuffled along the tree line, oblivious to the threat lurking in the tall grass.
With his right hand, Kemper silently drew his SOG knife from the scabbard secured to his kit. When the terrorist turned his back, Kemper rose into a crouch. The man took a drag on his cigarette, while retrieving a mobile phone from a pocket with his free hand. Banking on his distraction, Kemper closed the gap in a heartbeat, wrapped his left arm around the terrorist’s neck from behind. With his right hand, he drove the black blade into the space between the base of the jihadist’s skull and the top of the first vertebra—severing the connection between brain and body. The big man jerked, then collapsed the instant Kemper withdrew the knife. He eased the limp body to the ground and dragged it backward into the cover of the palm trees, where Perry and the others waited.
He looked down at his fallen foe.
The terrorist’s face was awash with fear; his brain confused why the call for oxygen now went unheeded. His eyes, controlled by cranial nerves and not dependent on spinal cord connections, darted back and forth in panic. His mouth hung open in a limp, silent scream.
Kemper left the body where it lay and scanned the compound for motion. Seeing none, he whispered into his mike, “Clear.”
A click of acknowledgment came in his headset.
Then he heard Perry: “Choctaw Variable, this is Choctaw Actual—On time, on target.”
“Choctaw, check—You’re a go,” came the call from Captain Jarvis on base.
Perry used a double-click of his transmit button to let Jarvis and the other officers back at the TOC know he had heard and acknowledged the instruction. The NCO then signaled with his left hand.
The four SEALs and the spook spread out silently in the brush in preparation for converging on the compound.
“Choctaw Two, One—All set?” Perry radioed to the team on the north side of the compound.
A double-click came back.
“Go,” Senior whispered into the mike.
The two teams converged on the target building from opposite directions, four men from the north, five from the south. Each man moved in a tactical crouch, leading with his M4. Kemper scanned for targets over his rifle, following the targeting dot from his PEQ-4 infrared designator. The dot—visible only in night vision—glided over the structure: clearing the walls, door, corners, and roofline. Kemper had danced this dance so many times it was almost as if the little green dot had a mind of its own—searching for threats while Kemper only watched.
Within ten paces of the compound, his olfactory sense kicked in. The smells here were familiar—aromatic cooking spices, cigarette smoke, body odor, and an earthen scent he had never been able to identify but that was prevalent in western Iraq. Just as he could no longer stomach the smell of oysters after a bad bout of food poisoning as a teenager, this cocktail of odors had a primal, overpowering effect on him. This was the smell of danger. The smell of violence.
The smell of death.
Kemper and the other operators fanned out as they drew closer—drifting into tactical positions on both sides of the front door. He crouched low beneath a window obscured by a heavy wool blanket hanging on the inside. He glanced right and watched Special Operator First Class Sanders—Sand Man to his teammates—attach a small explosive charge to the door frame beside the latch. Kemper knew a similar scene was unfolding in mirror image on the other side of the house, the only difference being that the north-side team would use a much larger breacher charge to blow a man-size hole in the stucco wall.
“Roof is clear,” a voice said in Kemper’s headset. The voice belonged to the overflight drone operator, who was probably stationed thousands of miles away in an air-conditioned room, drinking a cup of hot, fresh coffee. This person—whom Kemper imagined as a clean-shaven twentysomething Air Force nerd without a single scar on his soft, pale body—would go home after his shift. He might grab a burrito at Taco Bell, watch a baseball game, and then fall asleep on the sofa with ESPN SportsCenter playing on his TV. No moon dust in his eyes. No risk of bodily harm. No blood on his hands.
What a weird fucking world.
A burst of laughter from inside the house broke the silence, and Kemper tensed.
“My thermal shows three bodies clustered in the front room—seven in the back,” said Thiel, who was leading the team on the north side of the compound. This information was helpful, but blooded SEALs knew better than to trust it as gospel.
Perry looked at Sand Man, who was ready and waiting, holding the remote detonator in his hand. Sand Man met his gaze. Perry nodded, then flashed everyone the thumbs-up signal. Kemper pressed his back against the wall. As he turned his head away from the door, he tilted his NVGs up onto his helmet and squeezed his eyelids shut tight. A flash of light, the deep baritone whump, and the acrid smell of sulfur left no doubt that Sand Man’s charge had just blasted a manhole-size opening in the door.
Inside the house, someone shrieked in pain.
Kemper spun to face the door, brought his rifle up, and followed Romeo through the gap and into the house.
Romeo moved right, clearing right.
Kemper moved left, clearing left.
With the left corner clear, Kemper moved forward, drifting toward the left wall and opening the gap between himself and Romeo. Perry, Sand Man, and Jones entered behind them and pushed forward into the gap. The vestibule was clear, except for a single body writhing on the floor. Kemper glanced down. The poor sonuvabitch must have been reaching for the doorknob at the exact wrong time, because he was screaming and cradling a bloody stump where his right hand had once been. Kemper stepped on the man’s uninjured left forearm with his Oakley boot—securing the threat, but leaving his weapon free to sweep. He felt someone move up beside him, and from the corner of his eye he saw Jones crouch down. The spook pressed a knee into the jihadist’s chest while covering with his M4.
“I got him,” Jones said. “You’re clear.”
“Thanks,” Kemper grunted. He moved forward, toward the arched doorway leading to the larger room at the back of the house. He heard a double tap to his right but kept his focus over his own rifle.
“Clear,” Romeo called from his right.
“Clear,” he answered and fell in behind Sand Man and Perry, who were now leading into the archway.
“Allahu Akbar!” screamed a voice from the other room.
A single crack from an AK-47 followed but was drowned out immediately by the chorus of pops as Perry and Sand Man fired their SOPMOD M4s in unison.
“Two down, the rest are moving back toward you,” Perry said over the wireless to Thiel and the north-team SEALs.
Kemper heard a whump as Thiel’s breacher charge blew a hole in the back wall of the house. The explosion was followed immediately by the sounds of gunfire and shouting. Kemper advanced through the doorway into the back room. He sensed motion to his left and spun on his heel, but found only a swinging gray blanket hanging over a glassless window. He moved toward the window. Chunks of cheap cement and stucco sprayed the side of his face as AK-47 rounds peppered the building from somewhere outside.
“Choctaw, this is Ghost—You have three squirters, just exited the west side of the house and moving west toward a tree line.” The drone operator’s voice was soft and calm in Kemper’s ear, in stark contrast to the primal screams and gunfire erupting in the back room.
“Three and Five—pursue the west-side squirters,” came the order from Perry, in a voice as calm and cool as the drone operator’s.
Kemper felt a hand slap him on
the back.
“With me,” Romeo said.
Kemper did a one-eighty and followed Romeo back through the vestibule and out the front door, snapping his NVGs back into place as he did.
“On your left,” an unfamiliar voice said beside him.
Kemper glanced left and saw Jones advancing with them. The combat crouch position, the rifle carry, the way the spook held himself in the kit—there could be no doubt, Jones was a former operator. The only question left was whether Jones had been a Team guy or an Army SOF man in his previous life, but that information could wait. Right now, all that mattered to Kemper was the fact that Jones was blooded and that he would not be a liability if things got hot.
“At the tree line,” Romeo said, angling his trajectory right.
Kemper scanned where Romeo was leading with his rifle barrel and spied two men crouching on the ground in front of the palm trees.
Romeo screamed in Arabic at the two figures, “Facedown on the ground or I’ll shoot.”
They closed three more meters, and Kemper noted the men were kneeling, not crouching.
The figure kneeling on the right side tilted his head back, raised his arms to heaven, and yelled, “Allahu Ak—”
Romeo’s SOPMOD M4 spat fire, and the jihadist’s head disappeared in a puff of blood and flying bone fragments.
Kemper was about to shoot the other terrorist, when Jones hollered, “Wait! We need to take Bin Jabbar alive.”
“Is that dude Bin Jabbar?”
“Don’t know.”
“Ghost said there were three squirters,” Kemper said, shifting his aim to the stand of palm trees. “Where the fuck is the third guy?”
“I don’t see him,” Jones said. “You look here, I’ll search south.”
“Roger that.” From the corner of his eye, Kemper saw Romeo advancing on the remaining terrorist.
“Put your face on the ground or I’ll shoot you, too,” Romeo barked.
Too close, Romeo, Kemper thought, shifting his attention from the trees to his teammate.
Suddenly, the kneeling jihadist propelled himself facedown into the dirt, hands in front, prostrating himself on the ground.
The night went still.
There was a tink, and Kemper watched a grenade roll out of the terrorist’s hand and wobble to a stop at Romeo’s feet.
Romeo looked at the fragmentation grenade and then at Kemper. The young SEAL’s expression was sheepish. He flashed Kemper an awkward grin. Oops—I fucked up.
There was a flash of mind-numbing white light, a blast of heat, and a punch in the chest. Kemper felt himself flying backward. He hit the ground hard but quickly scrambled into a combat crouch. He scanned the place where Romeo had been, but his friend was gone—evaporated. What was left they would be able to send home in a ziplock bag instead of a coffin.
Jones was yelling—the voice painfully loud in his earpiece—but Kemper ignored the spook. His right calf burned like fire, but he ignored that, too. He donned his NVGs—which had been knocked off by the blast—and with his night vision restored, he scanned the tree line. Through a gap in the palm trees, he saw a distant figure turn and run away. He never saw the man’s face, but that didn’t matter. He knew exactly who the runner was: Mahmood Bin Jabbar, their mission objective, a Mujahideen coward who’d just ordered his men to martyr themselves so he could slip away into the night.
Kemper took a stride forward in pursuit, but his right leg screamed in protest.
“You need to get a tourniquet on that leg,” Jones said, appearing suddenly beside him. “Looks like you caught some shrapnel.”
Kemper shrugged off the spook and hobbled toward the tree line.
“You won’t catch him with that injury,” Jones called. “And neither will I.”
Kemper spun, ready to read the OGA bastard the riot act, but the words caught in his throat.
Jones was drenched in blood and pressing a rag against his right eye socket.
Staring at the now one-eyed spook, Kemper keyed his mike. “Choctaw, Three—We’re gonna need MEDEVAC . . . ASAP.”
PART I
There is a destiny that makes us brothers:
None goes his way alone:
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back into our own.
—Edwin Markham
CHAPTER 1
Joint Special Operations Task Force Compound
Irbil, Iraq
October 12, 1730 Local Time
Present Day
John Dempsey sat bolt upright in his cot.
He wasn’t screaming; he never did that anymore.
His heart was racing, though, and he brought his pulse rate down with slow, measured breaths. When he felt ready, he opened his eyes and let consciousness chase the remnants of the old, familiar nightmare from his mind’s eye. Absently, he stroked the jagged, lumpy scar on his right lower leg where shrapnel from the frag grenade that erased Romeo had also torn a chunk out of his calf.
That was Jack Kemper’s nightmare, he told himself.
That was Jack Kemper’s scar.
I’m John Dempsey now.
Kemper was dead to the world—killed in an explosion in Djibouti during Operation Crusader almost six months ago and buried in Arlington National Cemetery with his Navy SEAL brothers.
All that remained of Jack Kemper were his nightmares.
All that remained of Jack Kemper were his scars.
Dempsey rolled his head in a circle and then arched and twisted his spine—cracking the stiff and aching vertebrae to relieve a night’s worth of pent-up tension. Next, he rolled each wrist and ankle, and finished with a crack of his knuckles. Damn his ancient SEAL body. With a grunt of relief, he swung his legs off the side of the cot and checked his watch: 1732. Just enough time for a piss and a cup of coffee before kitting up and joining SEAL Team Ten for the big op.
Tonight, he was going back to Al Qa’im.
He scratched at his beard and sighed.
Fucking Al Qa’im.
The mission would be very different this time around. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria owned the Wild West now. The dozen US bases that had provided support and security in theater ten years ago were gone. There would be no Quick Reaction Force providing backup, no fire support from a giant AC-130 Spooky gunship, and no CASEVAC to get them to advanced trauma care minutes away. His boss had arranged for support from the JSOC surgical team, but no Level One surgical hospitals were left in Iraq to help if the mission went south and he got shot to hell. After more than two decades with the Teams, he was no stranger to operating under unpropitious conditions, but tonight’s dynamic would be a first for him.
Tonight, he was a fucking Jones.
He had not made it two steps from his cot when his satellite phone rang. “Damn it,” he grumbled, turning around. He fetched the phone off the plastic chair he had been using as a nightstand. His bladder would have to wait.
“Dempsey,” he said.
“Anything you need?” asked a voice from six thousand miles away.
He couldn’t help himself. “Is that a question or a proposition?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” replied Shane Smith, heavy on the sarcasm. “You’re the one down range.”
“In that case, the list is long and obscene.”
Smith laughed. “I warned Jarvis that you Tier One SEALs were prima donnas, but he wouldn’t listen and hired you anyway. Then, on your very first Ember mission, he let you ride on the VIP 787 and ruined you.”
“Never feed a junkyard dog steak unless you plan to feed him steak for the rest of his life,” Dempsey fired back. “You guys created me; now you have to live with me.”
The words resonated too close to home. He really was a creation of sorts. He shook the odd feeling off.
“Tell you what, I’ll pay for a night’s stay in the Burj Al Arab and book you a business-class seat on your flight back from Dubai. How’s that sound?”
“Ah, I’m just fucking with you,
Shane,” Dempsey said. “That’s not necessary. Right now, I’d settle for a hot shower, some decent chow, and a computer with a faster VPN connection.”
“I can’t help you with the first two items on your list, but I’ll talk with Baldwin about trying to improve your connection speed to the Ember servers.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that. Hey, speaking of Baldwin,” Dempsey said, getting back to business, “anything new from Ian and his geniuses in Signals? Are we still looking good here?”
“They’ve been monitoring some chatter, but nothing that’s moved the needle. As far as we can tell, the meeting is still on.”
“Good,” Dempsey said with a nod. “That’s good. Do I have the green light?”
The line was silent.
“You still there?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Look, Shane, I want to nail this bastard. I don’t care what it takes, or what strings you have to pull, just get me the green light, okay?”
He heard Smith sigh. Then, the Ember Ops O said, “Have you considered the possibility of leaving him in play?”
“This guy has been in the wind for a decade, he finally resurfaces in Iraq while I’m here, and you want me to leave him in play? Are you crazy?”
“Hear me out, John. Have you asked yourself the question, why has he resurfaced? Why now? Why take the risk? My instincts tell me that this meeting is a precursor to something big. Maybe Al-Mahajer is planning a major offensive. If we could collect intelli—”
“No,” Dempsey barked, cutting him off. “That’s a dangerous game, and one I don’t play. In my experience, leaving psychopaths in play results in dead innocent people. No way, Shane. We grab him, interrogate him, and find out what evil shit he has planned. Then we lock him up and throw away the key.”
Smith sighed again. “All right. Jarvis got the green light from the DNI. You’re a go.”
Dempsey exhaled with relief. “Thank you, Shane.”
“Just don’t fuck it up. We need this guy alive.”
“Understood,” he said. “Is CIA ready to help out when I nab the bastard?”
War Shadows (Tier One Thrillers Book 2) Page 2