by Dalton Fury
So did the crow at the other end.
In that instant, Kolt and his assailant were the only two people in the universe. He knew that there was a lot going on around him. He recognized that the enemy had been lying in wait, ready to ambush them, which meant the original mission was already dead on arrival. And he knew that single shot, while failing to take off his head, had just removed the element of surprise and would be just the first of many more to come.
But all of those considerations would have to wait until this immediate problem was under control.
He pulled the rifle again, drawing himself toward the gunman who was reflexively clinging to the weapon as if his life depended on it. Before the man could realize the futility of this effort, Kolt threw his arms around the man’s neck, pulling him in close and trapping both the Kalashnikov rifle and the hands that held it between their bodies.
If his head had been a little less foggy, Kolt probably would have been embarrassed by his half-assed jiu-jitsu. Against a fighter with any grappling experience, it would have been an easy hold to slip, but evidently Raynor’s foe didn’t know that. He struggled and thrashed, but his moves only served to let Kolt lock his left fist into the crook of his right elbow. He squeezed, pressing his biceps into the man’s exposed neck, cutting off the flow of blood through the carotid artery. It would be over in a second or two.
Through the pounding of his own heart and the rush of blood in his ears, Kolt heard more reports, some very loud. Too loud, in fact. Almost deafening. He guessed that the initial blow to the head he’d taken had knocked his helmet—and his ear pro—askew.
Suddenly, in a bizarre reversal, the thunder was followed by lightning.
“Shit!” he gasped, squeezing his eyes shut against the blinding flash. It was already too late. His AN/PSQ-20 enhanced night vision monocular device had completely whited out, overloaded by the intensity of the light. He wondered at first if it had been a flash-bang, but he hadn’t heard the corresponding bang. No, it was probably something simpler. Floodlights, he guessed. The enemy trying to shed a little light on the night-shrouded battlefield. If he’d had his hands free, Kolt would have simply switched to thermal mode, and joined his mates in targeting the floodlights, restoring the night and one of their advantages over the enemy, but he didn’t, so blindness was something he would have to tolerate a few seconds longer.
He squeezed tighter.
“Racer!” Slapshot’s voice sounded weird, like he was shouting into a pipe. A hand clapped onto Kolt’s shoulder, gently shaking him. “Quit fucking around with that dead guy. We need you.”
Raynor wasn’t sure if Slapshot was trying to be funny, but it did occur to him that his foe had stopped struggling.
He unlocked his arms, shoved the body away, and then groped for his NODs, working the select switch to full thermal mode. It sort of helped, but the initial flash had left a big green blob burned into his corneas. He tried to straighten his helmet and readjust the ear cups of his Peltor headset, but for some reason, the Kevlar brain bucket didn’t feel right in his hands. He gave up and focused instead on getting his hands on his weapon.
The battle seemed to have momentarily stalled, but he had no idea whether that was a good thing or not. He could just make out Slaphshot’s silhouette, white against the cooler background of the concrete wall, looming before him.
“Sitrep,” he said, a little surprised by his breathlessness.
“They threw us a surprise party,” Slapshot said, with palpable disgust. “You made the right call. If we hadn’t come in the back way—”
“I want a sitrep,” Kolt growled, “not an ass kissing.”
“Roger. We’ve secured the south end of the yard and the exterior of the house. We took some fire from that shed at the north, and gave back accordingly. Looks like they’re down, but it’s hard to say. They were all hiding under blankets to hide from thermals. Counting your buddy there, we’ve got six crows definitely KIA.”
“And?”
“Three Eagles with boo-boos. Crawler took a round in the arm. It’s a bleeder, but he’s got it tied off. Shaft sprained his ankle on the landing, but he says he can gut it out.”
Kolt waited a moment before speaking. “You said three.”
“Our fearless leader bounced a point-blank round off the side of his Kevlar. Probably has a concussion.”
“Oh.” Kolt raised one hand to the side of his head. Now he understood why his helmet didn’t seem to fit correctly anymore. The protective equipment had done its job, saving him from an otherwise fatal injury, and the padding underneath had helped absorb some of the impact, but by design, the shell of Kevlar fibers had cracked even as it deflect the 7.62 mm round. The left side of the helmet shifted and wiggled with gentle probing. It was trashed and Kolt considered tearing it off and going bareheaded, but decided to leave it on just in case. If nothing else, he needed it to hold his NODs up.
Something moved in front of him. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“How the fuck should I know? I can’t see a damn thing.”
“Personality changes could indicate traumatic brain injury.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Not really.”
Kolt turned away. “What about the house?”
“Crows inside. No idea how many.” Slapshot paused a moment. “We’ve also got activity outside. JOC reports at least six crows, across the street from the gate. Looks like they’re waiting for something. Maybe for us to come out.”
That update must have come in while Kolt was literally fighting for his life.
There seemed little question now that the red hot intel about Abu Sayyaf al-Baghdadi had been nothing but bait, designed to lure American forces into an ambush. It was an obvious ploy, so obvious the White House or Langley or who-the-fuck-ever should have seen right through it. Kolt could only assume that they had willfully chosen to ignore the warning signs. “Crap. Well, I doubt we’re going to find any cheese in this mousetrap, but we’re going to have to clear the house.”
“Your party hat’s busted. Have Shaft check you out.”
“I’m good,” Kolt replied, waving a hand dismissively.
“If doc says you’re good, then you’re good. Regardless, you’re bringing up the rear, got it?”
“Roger that.”
Slapshot held him at arm’s length a moment longer—one final check to make sure that he was still nominally combat effective—and then clapped him on the shoulder and turned away, prepping the team for the takedown of the house. JoJo, the squadron communicator, would take Crawler’s place in Shaft’s element, while Slapshot himself would fill Shaft’s slot leading the team.
While this was happening, Raynor sought out his wounded teammates. Sergeant First Class Jake “Crawler” Lopez was lying flat on his back, knees up, while Master Sergeant Ken “Shaft” Knight prepped an injection site for IV fluid replacement in Crawler’s uninjured right arm. Kolt noted the thick black band of a one-hand tourniquet around the supine man’s left arm. The fabric of Crawler’s desert pattern Digicam uniform was dark below that line, saturated with blood, but the assaulter was conscious, gritting his teeth against the pain and gripping his holstered M1911 in his good hand. “Be right with you, boss,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Gotta relax, man,” Shaft said. “At least until I get the catheter in.”
With visible disappointment, Crawler opened his right hand, splaying his fingers across his chest plate. Kolt waited until the saline was flowing to ask Shaft for a professional diagnosis. Every operator received extensive combat lifesaver training, but Shaft was a former med student and Special Forces medic, and knew his stuff better than the rest of them put together.
“Nicked his brachial artery,” Shaft said in a low voice. “He’s down a pint or two. Non-ambulatory, but stable for the moment. He’ll live if we can get him to the doc, but the clock is ticking on that arm.”
Kolt nodded. Injuries, even life-threatening ones, came
with the territory, but that didn’t make the pill any easier to swallow. “How ’bout you?”
“Ready to hobble on.”
Kolt suspected the medic was downplaying the extent of his own injuries, but let it slide. If Shaft said he was good to go, then Kolt would take him at his word. Before he could comment, however, Shaft returned the question. “I heard your Kevlar stopped a round. Any symptoms I should know about? Ringing in the ears? Double vision? Whiplash?”
“A little of all of the above,” Kolt admitted. “But I can manage.”
He adjusted his earpiece again, and heard Slapshot readying the assault element for movement. With two shooters out of action, clearing the house was going to stretch the team’s resources to the limit, so despite Slapshot’s very strong admonition that he stay out of the line of fire, Kolt had no intention of sitting on the bench.
“Make sure he’s ready for transport,” Kolt said, unnecessarily, then rose and made his way forward to join the line of men preparing to assault the building.
The next few minutes were excruciating for Raynor. This was the job that he and every single man in the Unit trained for relentlessly, but even the most arduous and comprehensive training couldn’t cover all the ways things could go sideways in the real world. As the din of the assault reached his ears, his brain supplied the images. The thump of the door blasted off its hinges . . . the distinctive rapid-fire burst of noise from a nine-banger tossed into the front room . . . the crack of at least two Kalashnikov rifles signaling multiple hostiles inside . . . He knew the assaulters were already inside, braving the return fire with a calm determination born of experience. Then, silence.
“Room clear,” Slapshot announced. “Door, front. Stairs, right.”
“Coming in,” Trip announced.
Kolt followed the line of men into the smoke-filled interior of the house. The first group of assaulters were already poised to continue down one hallway, while Trip’s team was providing security at the base of the enclosed stairwell leading to upper story. As soon as the second element was set, Slapshot’s crew was on the move again.
Kolt gave the front room a cursory glance, picking out the unmoving forms of three dead jihadists. Two were sprawled out behind an overturned couch. The third was slumped against the wall to the left of the stairwell.
Three crows KIA, adding to the half dozen outside.
A few seconds later, there was another unsilenced shot—one only—and then a few seconds after that, Slapshot declared the first story cleared and secure.
The count was now up to ten crows, and there was still half a building to clear.
There was not a doubt in Raynor’s mind that they had been lured into an ambush, that the op had been a bust from the get-go, and the more he thought about it, the more pissed off he got. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have seen the sketchy intel for what it was, but somebody in authority—maybe POTUS himself, or maybe one of his shit-for-brains advisors—had taken the bait, and put Kolt and his team on the hook.
Trip’s team started up the stairs, and Kolt followed, peering down the holographic site of his MP5SD as he moved carefully up the steps. A pair of flashes registered in the display of his NODs as Digger, in the number two position, moving backward up the stairwell, fired a controlled pair at an unseen target above them all. There was no return fire.
Eleven.
Kolt reached the landing a moment later, and stepped over the motionless figure of the crow Digger had just dropped. The landing formed a T-junction with a hallway, and Trip’s crew was covering both directions.
Raynor made a snap decision. “Clear the right side. I’ll watch left. Slap, we need some more bodies up here.”
“Roger,” came the immediate reply. “Coming up.”
Kolt trained his weapon down the left section of the hall, putting the red dot on the door at the far end, while Trip and the rest of the team began moving down the opposite side. He was only there to cover the rear, not to engage, but when the door at the far end opened, Raynor did not hesitate. His finger tightened on the three-pound trigger, and when he saw the familiar shape of a Kalashnikov rifle muzzle brake framed in the still-only-partially opened doorway, he called out “SHOT!” to freeze his teammates and squeezed twice.
The suppressed weapon in Raynor’s hands made almost no noise at all, at least it seemed that way thanks to his ear pro, but there was an invisible flash of heat from the business end. The rifle and the barely-glimpsed figure who held it toppled back, out of view.
“Contact rear,” Kolt shouted, and then he was moving, advancing down the hall, weapon still up and ready.
He heard Slapshot’s urgent shout in his ears. “Racer! Wait, damn it!”
Raynor had no intention of clearing the room himself, and truth be told, he knew better than to even start moving without someone to back him up, but he was an object in motion, and stopping would have required too much effort.
The door swung all the way open, giving him an unobstructed view of only a small portion of the room beyond. The dot of his reflex sight moved back and forth in a short arc, ready to engage if another target appeared, but the doorway remained empty. He took another step forward.
Slapshot called out again. “At your six. Coming past.”
Kolt felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder, halting his advance, forcing him down and to the side, and then Slapshot and someone else—JoJo maybe—were moving past him.
The two men swept through the open door. There were no reports, and no thermal flashes of weapons being discharged, but Raynor heard Slapshot’s commanding voice shouting, “Get down! On your face!”
Raynor rushed forward into the room, and saw his senior NCO kneeling over a struggling but unarmed figure, while JoJo stood to the side, his weapon trained on the not-quite-subdued captive. Slapshot slammed the crow down onto the bare wooden floor hard enough that Raynor felt it through his boot soles, gave the guy a quick pat down, and then stuffed the man’s hands through the loops of a pair of flexi-cuffs.
Trip called over the radio. “Second floor, all clear, but we got a ladder going up to the roof.”
Kolt exchanged a glance with Slapshot. They had not taken any fire from the roof, and the Reaper monitoring the site had not reported any activity there earlier, but the enemy occupying the building had employed countermeasures to conceal their presence in the yard, so it was possible there were still a few more crows hiding there. Climbing a ladder was just about the worst scenario an operator could face.
Slapshot keyed his mic. “Hold there. Coming your way.” He stood up, pushing the captive down again forcefully in the process. “All yours, boss.”
“Is that our guy?”
Slapshot shook his head. “Doesn’t look like him, but he wasn’t armed. Maybe he’s someone.”
As the sergeant major headed out, Kolt took out the photograph of Abu Sayyaf al-Baghdadi and held it out in his left hand as he knelt beside the trussed-up captive and flipped him onto his back. Raynor tilted up his NODs and triggered the SureFire tactical light mounted to the rails of his MP5SD, illuminating the man’s face with six hundred lumens of blindingly white light.
The captive flinched and squeezed his eyes shut, but it was plain as day that the man on the floor in front of Raynor and the man in the photograph were two different people. It was an old photograph, but the captive was older and leaner than Abu Sayyaf, and had the grizzled look of an inveterate desert dweller.
“Definitely not our guy. So who the hell are you?” Raynor stuffed the photograph into his pocket and took out his camera-equipped Iridium satellite phone. “Smile, asshole.”
As Kolt snapped a couple digital photos, the man grimaced as if he had understood every word.
Raynor dropped a heavy cloth sack-hood over the man’s head, then rocked back on his haunches, uploading the images to the JOC.
Slapshot called out a status update. “Roof’s clear, boss.”
“Roger,” Kolt replied. “Get the STARS ready. I’
m bringing the PC your way. Start clearing the site. Digger, make us a back door in the wall. I want to be out of here in five mikes or less.” He looked up at JoJo. “Let the bird know we’ll have one ready for pickup.”
“Got it boss.”
Kolt grasped the captive by the biceps and dragged him toward the doorway. The question of who the man was no longer concerned Raynor; all that mattered now was getting him up to the roof where the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system—or STARS—would make him somebody else’s problem.
The STARS system—sometimes called “Skyhook”—was pretty much the opposite of parachuting onto an objective. Developed during the Cold War as a way to extract personnel from deep behind enemy lines, STARS employed a weather balloon to raise a high-test line five hundred feet into the sky. The line, marked with IR-visible flags, would then be snared by a specially equipped plane—in this instance, the MC-130H that had delivered the Delta operators to the objective—lifting whatever or whoever was secured to the other end of that line—in this instance, one unidentified ISIS asshole—into the sky. Improvements in helicopter stealth technology and armament had largely made the STARS system obsolete, but it remained an available tool in the kit for Delta, especially useful in an instance like this, where the environment made a helo pickup too risky, but where dragging an uncooperative prisoner a few miles to the offset exfil site wasn’t practical.
JoJo called out to him. “Boss, call for you.”
Kolt grabbed the handset. “This is Noble Zero One. Send it.”
The voice that came over his earpiece did not belong to Colonel Webber. It was a female voice. “Racer? Your prisoner is Abu Hamam al-Suri. He’s the senior commander of Jaysh al-Jihad.”
“What?” Raynor was still trying to process the fact that the person talking to him wasn’t Webber. It was Lauren Gellar. He shook his head. “You need to stay off the net.”
“Racer, listen to me. Al-Suri isn’t somebody we want to capture. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”