by Dalton Fury
Two Mississippi.
Each bucket weighed a good forty pounds, heavy enough that they didn’t scatter like tenpins, but they nevertheless shifted and tottered as she blundered on hands and knees across the room.
Three Mississippi.
The SureFire’s beam danced crazily as she moved, throwing light in random directions like a disco ball. It flashed on the dead woman, creating the illusion of motion, then showed the dull gray-green of the frag grenade wobbling on the floor. Hawk leapt for it as the light shifted again …
Four Mississippi.
She landed atop the grenade, the hard metal lump pressing against her armored vest, and curled up around it like a hedgehog. It was too late to attempt kicking the antipersonnel device away, and there was nowhere to kick it anyway. No, Hawk knew full well she was going to eat it. The most she could hope for now was to contain the blast with her body and redirect some of the concussive force away from the buckets; enough, she hoped, to prevent a secondary explosion that would bring down the entire building. Her vest might stop some of the frag. Maybe there would even be enough left of her to ship home.
Five Mississippi.
Six.
Amped on adrenaline, there was no way to know if she could trust her internal clock. She didn’t dare let go. Not yet.
Seven.
She was dimly aware of voices coming over the radio, her fellow assaulters calling in their status. It was all a jumble of noise until one word reached through the din.
“Hawk!”
Eight.
She opened her eyes and looked up to see someone peering through the hole in the wall. “Hawk. You okay? Are you hit?”
She couldn’t make out his face behind the protective kit, but the voice belonged to Shaft.
“Ummm…”
Nine.
She unclenched her arms, revealing the grenade, cradled like an egg against her chest. The spoon was still snugged tight against the spherical casing, the ring attached to the safety pin dangling harmlessly from it.
Ten.
She swallowed, her mouth almost too dry to form words. “I’m good.”
EIGHT
Kolt Raynor felt numb as he made the phone call to Colonel Webber, reporting a lost eagle—his mate, his friend, Sergeant Major Clay “Stitch” Vickery.
Every operator—every soldier—knew that getting killed in action was a possibility, and every commander of combat troops knew that losing men was an inevitability. Raynor had attended more than his share of funeral services in Section 60 of the Arlington National Cemetery, and knew that the odds were good that one day he would join his fallen mates there, but that didn’t make dealing with the reality of loss any easier. He was still in denial now, but he knew later, he would feel angry.
It had been a fluke, really. Stitch’s armor had stopped three rounds from the terrorist’s MP5, but the fourth had sliced through Stitch’s brachial artery. In the madness of the fire-drill evac, it had taken a few minutes for the rest of the assault team to get the wounded operator down from his rope, only realizing then that he had sustained a mortal injury.
“That’s rough,” Webber said. Raynor knew the Delta commander felt the loss as acutely as he did. “Did Stitch have any family I don’t know about?”
“The Unit was his family,” Raynor said. It sounded cliché, but for Stitch, it was the truth. After two failed marriages, Clay Vickery had given up trying to build a life for himself outside the Delta compound. “He went out like he lived,” Raynor added. “A warrior.”
Webber grunted, signaling that no further discussion on the topic was required. “Three dead crows. And three in a cage. You leave anything for EKAM to take credit for?”
“We’ve back-briefed them, sir,” Raynor said. “They’re all over the taking credit thing.”
A pat on the back from Webber was about all the praise Kolt could hope for. Police Colonel Drougas and EKAM were taking credit for stopping the attack, and that was fine with Raynor. The Greek commander was still a little butt-hurt over picking the wrong target for his team, which wasn’t really Raynor’s problem, but the plan was always to let the Greeks have the spotlight on their home turf. None of the Delta operators had signed up looking for glory anyway; they knew the protocol, and Raynor needed to stay on Drougas’s good side in order to get a look at the intel recovered from the suspect’s apartment.
“Standard stuff, Kolt,” Webber said, “and kudos on stopping the plot to blow up the state funeral.”
“I’m not sure we really stopped anything,” Raynor replied. “Their plan was pretty half-assed.”
Raynor wasn’t being self-deprecating. Although the three surviving Revolutionary Struggle members weren’t talking, the evidence recovered from the apartment suggested the sort of plan that might be concocted by bored college kids whose body of operational knowledge was derived entirely from watching videos on the Internet. “I doubt they could have gotten those explosives within a mile of the funeral.”
“A lot of innocent people might have gotten hurt if they had gotten the chance to try. It’s a win.” He paused a beat, then added, “And despite losing Stitch, it could have been a lot worse.”
“Thank Hawk for that.”
“I heard what she did, and I intend to,” Webber said. “That Tier One wild stunt seemed vaguely familiar. I hope you’re not having a bad influence on the next generation of assaulters.”
Raynor sensed a subtle dig in the comment, a reminder of his current administrative role within the Delta organization.
“We’re pushing the video of her one-man wrecking crew to you now, sir,” Kolt said. The cameras had captured every second of the action. Kolt knew Hawk’s performance would give the old man a hard-on, since the female pilot program was his baby from the start. “You should probably watch it before it hits YouTube.”
“We’ll look for it, Raynor,” Webber said with a slight laugh. “I’m also looking forward to sharing it with the rest of the building. Pass along my compliments and condolences to Major Barnes and his troop, as well. And then bring Stitch home.”
“There are a couple things I’d like to wrap up before I leave, sir,” Kolt said.
“It should already be a wrap, Kolt. What ‘things’ are unsettled?”
Raynor hesitated to answer. He still didn’t have definitive proof that Rasim Miric was still alive, only a gut feeling that they had not seen the last of the sniper. “I think this whole thing with Revolutionary Struggle was a feint. Something to distract us from the real threat.”
“The real threat,” Webber echoed.
“They’re working with someone else.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. ISIS maybe. Revolutionary Struggle has spoken out against Western involvement in the Middle East. Maybe they’ve partnered up. I’m hoping that when the locals finish processing all the evidence we’ve recovered, we’ll have a thread to tug on. We’ve still got a couple more days until the funeral.”
“No, you don’t. I know this will come as a shock, but you’re off PPD. In case you’re wondering, that comes directly from VPOTUS himself.” This time there was no mistaking the sarcasm in the colonel’s tone. If anyone had a full read on the extent of the hostility between Kolt Raynor and Vice President Mason, Webber did.
Raynor worked his jaw. He had not been looking forward to the prospect of safeguarding Mason either, but he resented the implication that he would be anything but professional in carrying out his duties. “Are you serious, sir?”
“Damn serious,” Webber snapped. “The JSOC commanding general doesn’t want you or anybody else in the command to be within a thousand miles of that funeral. Get your ass back here, pronto.”
“Shiner’s still alive,” Raynor blurted. “He’s going to hit again.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Finally, Webber spoke. “Noble isn’t alert squadron. Not for another forty-three days. Your people need to get back to their training
and family time. If your mythical one-eyed sniper pops up again before that, he’s somebody else’s problem. Are you receiving me?”
Kolt took a deep breath before answering. “Loud and clear.”
* * *
Switching gears gave Raynor some much-needed perspective. As he focused on the logistical challenges of demobilizing an entire squadron of operators, along with headquarters and support personnel, he allowed his subconscious to work over the problem of how to run Shiner to ground. By the time he was wheels-down at Pope Field, he was certain that the state funeral in Athens was the least-probable target for Shiner or any other terrorist.
With more than a dozen world leaders attending, each one bringing along their own protective detail, security would be several layers thick, and with the recent attack still fresh in the memory of both the police and the proud citizens of Athens, paranoia would be at an all-time high. International news agencies were already reporting a spike in hate crimes, particularly against Muslim immigrants, this despite the fact that there was no explicit connection between Revolutionary Struggle and radical Islam. Trying to attack the funeral would be an act of utter futility. Amateurs like the would-be terrorists of Revolutionary Struggle might have been willing to make a mistake like that, but not an experienced killer like Miric.
Raynor also knew that one of the basic rules of survival for a sniper was to never stay in one place for long, especially once your presence was revealed with a kill shot. Shiner was long gone, on his way to his next target, but now that Raynor knew for certain that he was real—that he wasn’t just an invention of Kolt’s own overactive imagination—finding him was actually within the realm of possibility.
Kolt dropped his kit bag in the Noble Squadron bay, grabbed a beer from the fridge, then headed over to the squadron memorial wall, adorned with color eight-by-tens of Noble’s lost warriors. Stitch’s photo would be added by tomorrow. Kolt raised the beer to the memory of his fallen brother and took a long pull. He dropped the can in the trash, made good on his bar tab, and then headed to the SCIF.
The sensitive compartmented intelligence facility was the nerve center of Delta, where a team of analysts pored over data, everything from drone footage to wire service reports to documents recovered from raids on terrorist safe houses, looking for triggers and indicators, setting targets for the operators, and providing detailed information critical to mission success. Most were seasoned active duty intel analysts, and Kolt thought the world of them. A few were civilian contractors with prior military service, but even they had undergone intensive security vetting.
Throughout his career, Raynor had made a point of cultivating good relations with the support staff, and in particular, the analysts who worked in the SCIF. Their job was to digest and process data, but Raynor knew from experience that they also had hunches and gut feelings that they weren’t always willing to include in their briefs. Raynor was a big believer in listening to gut feelings. Some operators fell victim to the common us-versus-them mentality, treating anyone who couldn’t break a plate at four hundred meters or bench press their body weight as beneath contempt, but Raynor knew that reliable intel could mean the difference between bagging a high-value target or coming home in a body bag. A little validation went a long way, which was why he spent a lot of his down time hanging out in the SCIF, listening and asking questions, and generally treating the intel specialists like human beings.
Sometimes the effort paid off in spades. When he had made his return to the Unit after three years in exile, Raynor’s partnership with Kenny Farmer, a young former USAF intelligence officer now working as an imagery analyst under contract with Booz Allen Hamilton, had been pivotal in tracking down a Yemeni terrorist training camp, which in turn alerted Raynor to a plot to blow Marine One out of the sky. Kenny Farmer, however, had moved on—where exactly he was working now, Kolt couldn’t say for certain, but he still got a Christmas card from him every year—and Raynor wasn’t having much success finding anyone as willing to help.
The man Raynor wanted to speak with today, a targeting/counterterror analyst named Brian Kelly, had proven to be an especially tough nut to crack.
Kelly was rail thin, which Raynor guessed owed more to a genetic predisposition than his diet and exercise habits. Like many of his peers, he seemed to subsist on energy drinks and snack foods, and barely moved at all. Kelly was balding but kept what little hair he had cropped short, except for his beard, which was thick and full, and evidently a source of great pride to him. Hawk, who generally shared Raynor’s positive attitude toward the support staff, had disdained Kelly as a hipster—which evidently didn’t mean what Kolt thought it did. Kelly’s work was adequate but uninspired, and he rarely yielded the kind of insights that Raynor had come to expect from people like Kenny Farmer.
But Raynor also believed that you had to make the best of what you were given.
He brought Starbucks coffee down from the Unit chow hall—black, which Hawk assured him was probably Kelly’s drink of choice—and set it down in front of the other man.
The analyst looked up and regarded Kolt with all the enthusiasm of a Novocain shot. “Lieutenant Colonel Raynor. Welcome back.”
Kolt had given up trying to convince the young man to use his code name. “Thanks, Brian. So…” He nodded at the oversized flat-screen monitor on Kelly’s desk. “Anything interesting happening out there?”
Kelly blinked. “I guess it depends on your definition of interesting.”
Raynor managed a grin. “Try me.”
The other man gave a succinct, by-the-numbers rundown of global hotspots and recent intel scoops, none of which seemed particularly newsworthy to Raynor. He wondered if Kelly was being purposefully obtuse.
“Great,” he said after enduring several minutes of this. “Hey, I need a favor. Do you know if there are any photos of the guy who capped the Greek PM?”
“Nikos Roupa? Sure. They’ve been showing his picture on the news.”
That was news to Raynor. Sixteen years of hunting Shiner had not yielded a single photograph of Rasim Miric. “Can you show me?”
Kelly affected a put-out expression, but turned to his computer and launched a browser window that opened with the MSNBC Web page. A few mouse clicks brought up what appeared to be a still image from the security camera at some kind of retail store. The image was low-res, but Raynor instantly recognized Shiner.
“That’s the only picture of him?”
Kelly cocked his head sideways as if the question confused him. “It’s the only one I’ve seen. My guess is that it’s the best they’ve got.”
“No driver’s license or passport photos on file?”
“JSOC is working on it. CIA is still a little slow.”
“See if you can get that.” Raynor doubted the search would yield any results. If Miric had possessed any sort of identifying documents, they would almost certainly have been forgeries. The real Nikos Roupa was probably a victim of identity theft, and might even have been Miric’s unwilling body double. “And get as many pics of him as you can find. Whatever it takes to build a facial recognition profile.”
“Why? He’s dead.”
“Humor me,” Kolt said as he slid the Starbucks a little closer to Kelly’s keyboard.
Kelly’s lips twitched up in a humorless fuck you smile. “I’ll get right on that.”
* * *
After the frustration of dealing with Kelly, the post-mission hotwash seemed less of a chore. It was, in typical Delta fashion, a brutally honest self-assessment, but one of the many changes that came with acquisition of a Zero-One call sign was that Raynor now found himself in the role of facilitator and referee, rather than participant. He sat next to Webber, arms folded across his chest, and listened as Slapshot had each operator own up to what they could have done better. It seemed to Kolt like they had to dig deep to find something worthy of criticism.
Despite what amounted to a catastrophic breakdown of security, nothing the squadron had done or failed
to do would have prevented the assassination of the Greek prime minister. Raynor himself took responsibility for not insisting that Drougas’s men shut down and sweep Mount Lycabettus, but he doubted that would have made a difference either, not with a determined killer like Shiner stalking his prey.
Raynor did not mention Shiner specifically, or provide background on his prior association with Rasim Miric. As he looked around the room, he realized that nearly everyone who had been with him back then was gone. Of those present, only Webber and Slapshot had been in the Unit that long, and neither of them had been directly involved. Everyone else who had been there was retired, promoted out, or dead.
The discussion next turned to the raid on the Revolutionary Struggle hideout. The mood darkened as the assaulters had to revisit the memory of Stitch’s death, but all agreed that nothing could have been done to mitigate the risk. It was just one of those things that happened sometimes.
Raynor withheld comment when Barnes mentioned how glad he was that he left Hawk out of the initial assault, because her quick reaction and novel solution to the crisis had probably saved them all. The statement seemed a little disingenuous; Barnes seemed to think of Cindy Bird only as a female who needed to be protected, not a fellow assaulter.
Kolt looked for Hawk’s response. She simply nodded and said, “Good to be a part of it all.”
The particulars of the assault were picked apart. Digger, who had been back at the JOC with Raynor, thought that Barnes had been too quick to rule out an explosive breach or the use of flash-bangs, but he admitted that he was Monday-morning quarterbacking.
After a couple hours, Slapshot concluded the debrief and gave the troop sergeant majors their marching orders. A date was set for Stitch’s service, after which Barnes’s troop would head back to Key West to finish their cycle of civilian boat training. The other troops were headed for Wyoming and Nevada, respectively.
The PPD deployment had seriously cut into the readiness plan, and everyone was going to have to double-time in order to meet the expectations, but Raynor saw that as a blessing in disguise. Although the overseas mission had been a net success, Noble Squadron morale had taken a serious hit. After six weeks of hard-core training, alert status would seem like a vacation.