Dwyer knew the team wasn’t getting out of there anytime soon. They were going to be pinned behind the cluster of boulders, backs literally to the wall, unless they could thin out the opposing force substantially.
“All right,” Dwyer said, “they know if they come directly down the slope at us, we’ll pick them off from behind these rocks. So any second now, they’re going to start fanning out to try to flank us. We can’t let that happen. You see them move laterally, you take them out. Got it?”
Cipriano and McKnight nodded.
“Maintain fire discipline,” Dwyer continued. “No matter how hot it gets. Make each shot count—”
Dwyer was cut off by the thunderous noise of gunfire from dozens of AK-47s reverberating off the canyon walls. Shards of rock torn from the boulders screamed past them like swarms of jagged dragonflies.
Dwyer spun to his left and fired single shots at two Taliban trying to flank the team’s left, felling both. Cipriano and McKnight, manning the right flank, each fired bursts at enemy moving to the right. Two more fell.
Even though the enemy’s ranks had been reduced, their fire increased. The SEALs had to pivot from behind the rocks, acquire their targets, fire, and return to cover within seconds. All in the face of withering, incessant fire.
Yet they were doing so with lethal accuracy. The Taliban were determined to outflank them, but every attempt was thwarted.
Even so, the enemy was inching closer down the slope. If they couldn’t outflank Dwyer’s team, they would eventually charge them en masse. And Dwyer knew that the enemy’s sheer numbers would overwhelm three shooters, no matter how accurate they were.
But the three warriors kept fighting, steadily and methodically acquiring targets and taking them out.
The fight had raged for nearly two hours when the rate of fire increased, as if they’d just landed at Omaha Beach. Dwyer was braced against the rock wall, slamming a new magazine into his weapon, as McKnight edged out to see what was going on.
“I got good news and bad news, boss,” McKnight said.
“Give it to me.”
“The good news is, cavalry’s here. Bad news is, it’s theirs. Maybe another fifteen to twenty.”
A bullet ricocheted off the back wall and passed through Cipriano’s left shoulder, leaving a shallow wound. He emitted an angry growl and kept firing. At the same time, two Taliban, firing furiously, charged across the floor of the crevasse. Dwyer spun from behind the rocks and cut them down with two torso shots each, but not before catching some shrapnel in the meat of his left biceps. He dropped his M4 momentarily but willed himself to raise it and fire several more rounds to keep the Taliban at bay.
Four more men charged, screaming loud enough to be heard over the cacophony. Cipriano fired a fusillade, killing them all, and retreated behind the boulders.
Cipriano caught Dwyer’s eye and nodded toward McKnight. Though upright, he was leaning hard against the boulders and appeared dazed, on the cusp of losing consciousness. He was soaked in blood. He’d been hit several times during the course of the fight but was determined to keep going.
Dwyer and Cipriano glanced at each other. The math wasn’t hard. They didn’t have comms. No one knew their position. They’d spent most of their ammunition, and the Taliban seemed willing to sacrifice as many bodies as necessary to get the job done. It was just a matter of time. But they would never quit fighting.
Dwyer winked at Cipriano and moved over to McKnight, patting him on the shoulder.
“Take a blow for a minute, Bobby. We got this.”
He lowered McKnight to a sitting position on the ground and propped him up against the wall.
McKnight stared straight ahead. “Just for a minute, boss. Then I’m back in the fight.”
Dwyer stood and prepared to reengage when Cipriano, providing cover, looked back to him with a puzzled expression.
“Hear that?”
Dwyer did. Interspersed among the cracking sounds of the AK-47s were several single shots from a different weapon, followed by wails of agony.
Dwyer and Cipriano darted their heads around opposite sides of the boulders and saw several Taliban falling. The two SEALs turned back toward each other with quizzical expressions. Then more single shots, more cries of pain, accompanied by frantic shouting.
Again, the two glanced around the boulders. Dwyer couldn’t see where the fire was coming from—the glare from the sun’s corona sinking behind the slope obscured the view. And once more, the two turned to each other.
“What the hell?”
“They’re dropping like flies, boss,” Cipriano declared with a hint of a smile. “Gotta be a whole squad of our guys up there. Maybe more. And not missing. Not missing at all.”
“Maybe Delta. Or Six.” Dwyer looked at McKnight. “Hear that, Bobby? Hear that? Hang in there, buddy.”
McKnight smiled and nodded painfully.
Cipriano whooped and spun around the boulder, firing. Dwyer did the same. The Taliban had broken cover trying to evade the shots coming from the top of the slope, and were now sandwiched by Dwyer and Cipriano below.
Dwyer and Cipriano were jacked. The momentum had shifted dramatically. Fire discipline was out the window. They were pumping rounds at the enemy with glorious abandon.
And then they saw him.
Cipriano noticed him first. At the very top of the ridge, silhouetted against the sunlight. Not a squad. Not even a team. Just one man, on one knee, in a firing position. Exposed, yet obscured by the blinding sunlight. Calmly taking out one, two, three—six, seven, eight Taliban in a matter of seconds, then pausing to slap in a fresh magazine, seemingly indifferent to return fire, and then taking out more.
Cipriano pivoted to Dwyer. The two blinked at each other with expressions of disbelief. Cipriano began laughing almost maniacally, then turned, gave another triumphant yell, and resumed firing.
The attention of the Taliban now was focused almost exclusively on the threat from the top of the slope. Dwyer watched as the man rose, his figure framed but still obscured by sun glare, and began slowly descending toward the Taliban, firing as he went. Confident, as if he believed himself indestructible. Under any other circumstances, Dwyer would have considered the move inexplicably reckless, almost suicidal. But Dwyer conceded that to the Taliban, who were being slaughtered apace, it probably looked ominous. Dozens of them lay strewn across the slope.
The figure continued down the slope, picking off the enemy with deadly efficiency. Merciless. Whoever this guy is, Dwyer thought, he’s badass, stone-cold.
The remaining Taliban, now numbering no more than eight or nine, took off at a full sprint to Dwyer’s right down the crevasse, firing everything they had while making their escape. Dwyer and Cipriano fired after them. A couple more went down.
Less than a minute later, the echoes faded; the crevasse was silent. The Taliban were gone and the spectral figure continued his descent, stopping to check the Taliban lying on the ground with his HK416, making sure they were dead. He looked to Dwyer like a farmer checking to see if his tomatoes were ripe.
As the figure approached, Dwyer and Cipriano moved tentatively toward him from their position behind the boulders. When they were about twenty paces apart, Dwyer came to a dead stop.
“I don’t effin’ believe this.”
“What?” Cipriano asked.
“Mike effin’ Garin.”
Cipriano was incredulous. “You know this guy?”
“Mike?” Dwyer called. “Mike Garin?”
The man’s face, shrouded by long curly hair and a thick black beard, was deeply tanned and weather-beaten. But there it was—the unmistakable intensity in his eyes. Garin acknowledged Dwyer with an almost imperceptible nod as he scanned their wounds.
Dwyer rushed forward and gave him a bear hug, then turned to Cipriano and in a voice that sounded like he was announci
ng the winner of the Ms. America Pageant said, “Mike effin’ Garin!”
In a quiet voice, Garin responded, “Let’s get you squared away and out of here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MOUNT VERNON, VIRGINIA
JULY 15 • 4:41 P.M. EDT
Olivia realized she was leaning forward in her chair while listening to Dwyer, her forearms resting on her knees. She straightened self-consciously. “He must’ve been more than a little surprised to see his former BUD/S instructor and football recruiter. What else did he say?”
“Nothing. All business. He looked at our wounds and knew we needed evac, pronto. But we needed to get out of the canyon to higher elevation so our comms could work. He didn’t have any. He’s up there by himself in some of the most hostile territory in the world and the son of a bitch doesn’t even have a radio. Says it got hit by fire a while back. Anyway, he puts Ron’s body over his shoulder and we start climbing the slope.
“Now, it’s about four hundred feet—steep—to the top, and we’re already at altitude. Thin air. But he’s carrying Ron, plus gear, and not even breathing hard. The only thing he didn’t do was hum ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
Olivia laughed, which prompted Dwyer to laugh in turn. The reason for Dwyer’s protective behavior toward Garin earlier in the day was becoming clear. The former BUD/S instructor didn’t merely respect his former pupil; he seemed almost in awe of him.
“It took us a while to get to the top. We were in pretty bad shape. But we get there and I radio in and a little while later, in comes a Chinook. We get loaded up and ready to go and Mike just walks away. The rest of us are yelling at him, asking him what the hell he’s doing, and he just says, ‘Gotta go.’ I tell him to at least take some comms and toss a radio to him. He just nods and takes off. Said maybe sixteen words the whole time. Everybody in that bird just looked at each other.”
Olivia glanced at the photograph of Dwyer in a hospital bed.
“Yeah, that’s me at Bagram right after all of this,” Dwyer acknowledged.
“Did he ever tell you what he was doing up there?”
“No. Playing avenging angel, I guess.”
“Michael the Archangel.”
“Mike never talks about any of those stories. But I suspect he was hunting high-value targets.” Dwyer put down his glass of Long Island iced tea. “Well, I’m sure you thought that story was totally useless.”
“Well, it doesn’t tell me anything about Garin’s connection to the Iranian/Russian matter, but it did give me insight into the man. He’s certainly not your standard-issue cog in the country’s war machinery, is he?”
“I tried recruiting Mike again a year later, this time successfully,” Dwyer said. “I left the teams shortly after my recovery at Bagram. My leg was messed up pretty bad and I couldn’t hack it anymore. So, while recuperating, I got the idea to form DGT and convinced Mike to be one of my partners.”
“Garin helped found DGT?” Olivia asked. “I remember reading in the materials that he went to work for a military contractor. I didn’t know it was DGT.”
“Yep. Like I said, the man’s got more than a few working brain cells. I guess he got tired of sightseeing in the Hindu Kush. My original idea was to provide logistical support for diplomatic missions. I saw that fighting a couple of wars had stretched the military’s capacity pretty thin. So we went to the Department of Defense, and then State, and someone decided to give us a try.” Dwyer shrugged his shoulders.
“A small contract at first that kept Mike, Ken Thompson—our other partner—and me busy for only about sixty days, providing an escort detail for some State Department people who were helping the Iraqi parliament get on its feet. Then, just as that contract was about to expire, we got another one to do the same thing for the USAID folks in Kabul.
“We were limping along for another month until Mike got the idea to go big. He somehow secured us a line of credit and bid on a big DOD contract to provide security for civilians in several locations throughout the world. We won and were off to the races. Then he got us to start diversifying—providing materiel, personnel, making ourselves indispensable to the global war on terror. We grew fast. It didn’t take long for Thompson to cash out. He’s sunning himself on a tropical island somewhere. Not long after, Mike left too, but not before making a pretty decent bundle of cash.”
“Why did he leave?”
“His grandfather had just died,” replied Dwyer. “Mike revered him. Said he was twice the man Mike was.”
“I thought operators don’t generally engage in hyperbole,” Olivia said.
“Yeah. I had to think about that one for a while too. But around the time of his grandfather’s death, the country was going through another period of self-flagellation. A large part of the media and political class claimed that the US was the locus of evil in the world, that we’d brought all the bad stuff, all the terrorism, on ourselves by being so imperialistic, chauvinistic, and racist. Blame America First.”
“I saw it among some of my colleagues. Individuals who didn’t realize how good they had it and, more importantly, why it was they had it so good. Disparaging the things that gave them their security, their privileged status, their very ability to criticize,” Olivia said.
Olivia smiled upon seeing Dwyer’s surprised reaction. It was rare to encounter a civilian with a cold-eyed understanding of the real world.
“I think Mike felt bound to defend the country he and his grandfather loved. As I said, he’s a Boy Scout. He wanted to be in the fight. He wasn’t content with supporting it. The things the talking heads were saying about America were what his grandfather had actually experienced in the Soviet Union.”
“Wait,” Olivia interjected, letting it sink in. “His grandfather was a Soviet émigré?”
“Right. As I understand it, he was an officer in the Red Army, fighting in Germany during World War II. When the war ended, the political officers adjudged him to be anticommunist, or at least an insufficiently zealous communist, and he was arrested, destined for death or a labor camp. Somehow, he escaped and made his way to the American sector in Germany. A few years later, he came to America.”
“Garin’s family is from Russia,” Olivia said as if pondering an unfinished puzzle.
“Mike still has some distant relatives there,” Dwyer said, hoping to add a piece.
“Go on.”
“Mike thought it was his obligation to both his grandfather and his country to serve the latter as best he could,” Dwyer said.
“So he became part of the counter-WMD strike force.”
“It was pretty clear diplomacy wasn’t containing the spread of WMD,” Dwyer said. “A.Q. Khan was selling nuclear know-how to anyone with enough cash; the North Koreans were doing the same. Chechens were trying to get their hands on uranium. Every thug between Syria and Burma had nuclear designs.”
“And the UN does nothing but pass toothless resolutions,” Olivia added. “The IAEA is at best worthless and at worst enabling. There’s no meaningful penalty for violating nonproliferation treaties.”
“The administration—the one preceding Clarke’s, that is—understood that negotiations to prevent the development of WMD have only been used by rogue regimes to play for time until they acquired WMD capability,” Dwyer said. “The administration also knew that even if tough sanctions were imposed, they would find a way to circumvent them. So direct covert action was needed.”
“And the strike force was created,” Olivia finished. “But why not simply use Delta or SEAL Team Six to do the job? They’re already trained in nuke detection, recovery, and disposal.”
Dwyer said, “The strike force isn’t designed for detection and recovery. Its sole task is to seek and destroy.”
“Does it have a name?
“I don’t know. I can tell you that I’ve heard the name Omega once or twice. I’m not sure if
that’s the unit’s official designation or if it’s what the unit members called themselves.”
“Omega,” Olivia repeated. “Makes a perverted kind of sense. The last resort before oblivion.”
Before Dwyer could respond, the piercing sound of a commercial-grade security alarm startled Olivia. A gun materialized in Dwyer’s hand and the compact bodyguard appeared at his side in an instant, weapon drawn. The guard outside had his rifle up at the ready.
Dwyer seized her elbow and pulled her roughly in the direction of the hallway.
“Come with me,” Dwyer commanded. “Now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CENTRAL NEW YORK STATE
JULY 15 • 5:40 P.M. EDT
Garin parked the Crown Victoria at the edge of a crowded shopping center lot in Binghamton, New York, and surveyed the parking area across from a convenience store that sold lottery tickets—a liquor store next door—and waited, counting on the beneficence of human nature. It would take a while, but inevitably someone in a hurry would park outside one of the two stores to get a ticket, a few sundries, or maybe some spirits—leaving their car unlocked and relieving Garin of the problem of breaking into a vehicle in broad daylight.
Sure enough, within mere minutes a stout, lumpy man in his forties, wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a stained white T-shirt, struggled laboriously from a Volkswagen Jetta that was much too small for him and that he parked in the fire lane in front of the liquor store. A bonus: The man was gracious enough to leave the car running. Just a quick pop into the store for a pint of Jim Beam, maybe a pack of Marlboros from the convenience store, and then back home to finish the tile grout in the bathroom. No worries.
Garin, carrying his gym and rifle bags, was already halfway between the Crown Vic and the Jetta by the time Lumpy had disappeared into the liquor store, its windows placarded with ads obscuring the view from the inside. Garin casually scanned the lot before sliding smoothly into the driver’s seat and driving out of the lot. He was already on the access ramp to Interstate 81 southbound by the time Lumpy emerged from the liquor store and stared blankly at the space where he’d left the vehicle, as if it would magically reappear if he just concentrated hard enough.
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