Tier One (Tier One Series Book 1)

by Brian Andrews

  Whiskey squadron had deployed by HALO drop and was now on foot, moving down from the mountains into position north of the AQ compound. Scotch squadron had deployed by sea, but they had closed the distance to shore a little too quickly in their quiet boats. Scotch was now burning time in a holding pattern before making their final approach to the rocky shore. Together they were Crusader—an appropriate, though politically incorrect, name for the op. After the kick, both teams would fall under Thiel’s direction as Crusader One and strike the compound from opposite directions.

  Kemper looked around the TOC, taking the emotional temperature of the room. The environment was quiet and confident. Military calm. Only he was frenetic. Only he was an engine revving at redline rpm with the transmission stuck in neutral. Across the room, Commander Dietrich and Commander Perez—the squadron commanders for the Tier One SEAL teams—sat forehead to forehead in quiet discussion. Kemper watched the two men for a moment. Words couldn’t express the admiration he held for these two officers—men whose mettle and fidelity had been tested hundreds of times and never faltered. Dietrich laughed at something Perez said and patted his compeer on the shoulder. Then, he stood and began his signature pre-op stroll around the TOC. Like a pilot conducting a preflight checklist, Dietrich verified every detail and mission parameter before putting his squadron in harm’s way. First stop, the air-support and med guys, who were constantly on secure phones. Next stop, the “eyes guys,” who were responsible for coordinating the satellites and drones. His third stop was Kemper’s station.

  Kemper stopped pacing and anchored himself to his desk—leaning forward and placing his palms down on either side of his computer keyboard. Intel flash populated his monitor, but the feed had gone stale, the latest being fourteen minutes old. He felt a hand on his shoulder just as his wireless headset crackled. Dietrich started to ask him a question, but Kemper held up a finger, hushing the senior officer.

  “Crusader Main—Scotch Actual. Feet wet.”

  Thiel’s hushed voice brimmed with excitement. “Scotch,” Kemper said into his mike, “call feet dry.” He heard two clicks in reply and then looked over his shoulder and grinned at Dietrich. “Scotch is in the drink,” he said. “Feet dry on the rocks in twenty-five minutes—plenty of time for the guys to make the kilometer-and-a-half swim.” He was still amazed at the thought of the whole squadron moving in together.

  “Whiskey?” Dietrich asked.

  “In position and holding,” Kemper answered.

  Even the emotionally flat Peter Dietrich could not keep his grin bottled up. “The head count from the thermal on the drones suggests all the guests have arrived. You can see it on the middle monitor. Every goddamn one of them is inside that compound.”

  “I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t staring at the imagery with my own two eyes,” said Kemper. The situation was so insanely perfect, it was starting to make him paranoid. “Nothing new from our OGA friends?”

  Dietrich shook his head. “Everyone who was supposed to be here showed up, and they all moved in predictable ways. It’s the first bona fide AQAP convention in Yemen.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Anything to add, Spaz?” the officer asked.

  “Watching and learning, sir,” the younger SEAL said.

  Dietrich nodded and moved on to his next stop, leaving Kemper alone with his computer and his anxiety.

  Predictable ways?

  Maybe that was what bothered him. That and something he hadn’t yet put his finger on.

  He shrugged. Worst-case scenario, different terrorists show up than the ones they were hoping to nail. Did it really matter when hell’s fury was about to rain down on every-damn-body in that compound? A dead shithead was still a dead shithead. He wished he could be there to see it go down. The operator side of him hoped the bastards fought to “the last soldier of Allah,” as the jihadists always promised. He would love for Thiel and the boys to send every one of them straight to hell. The calmer, practical side of him hoped that, instead, the SEALs would nab a bunch of key guys with intimate knowledge of AQ operations and future terror plots. If Shane Smith was right, then the intelligence yield alone from this op could drive a stake into the heart of Al Qaeda.

  Kemper looked around. Where the hell was Smith anyway? It wasn’t like a spook to miss the big surprise party. Then again, spooks were weird dudes. He wouldn’t be surprised if Smith had already been tasked to sniff out the next big stinking plot to kill Americans. It could be months, even years, before they crossed paths again.

  The dull ache in his spine reminded him that he was still hunched over the desk. He straightened, feeling the impulse to twist his shoulders and crack his back like he always did. But that was before the injury; he didn’t dare try that now. He’d made that mistake once and paid dearly for it with debilitating spasms for the rest of the day. He cracked his knuckles instead and looked around for someone to bug.

  “Air?” he called out to the flight suit–clad soldier at the console across the desk from him.

  “Good to go,” the pilot from the 160th SOAR answered with a thumbs-up. “Times two,” he added, referring to the backup team on the USS San Antonio, circling offshore in the Gulf. They had an additional Marine air attachment, AV-8B Harriers for air support if the shit hit the fan, and two additional CH-47s in case they struck gold and had an assload of crows—aka insurgent prisoners—that needed to be hauled out of the compound for interrogation.

  “Med?” Kemper asked the SEAL medic beside him.

  “All set.” The Senior Chief Eighteen Delta medic was just as pissed off as Kemper to be running med ops from the TOC and not out there kicking in the door with the team. “JMAU is fully staged aboard the San Antonio. I got the CASEVAC birds farped there as well, but they’ll be airborne at the kick.”

  Kemper nodded.

  Yes, he was irritating as hell asking people questions he already knew the answers to, but damn it, what else was he supposed to do? He started pacing again and felt eyes on his back. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Dietrich gesturing for him to relax and take a seat. Kemper shook his head, too amped up to sit. He checked the clock. Ten minutes had ticked by. He looked at the real-time thermal imagery from the Predator drone displayed on the center flat-screen. After a few minutes of that, he shifted his gaze to the separate feed from the dedicated drone following Whiskey’s movement. Whiskey team was dug in like ticks on a deer, scattered across the rocky face of the closest hill outside the compound. He saw very little movement—just the occasional shifting of numb feet, a routine he knew intimately from cramming himself in cracks and dugouts for hours on end. Scotch didn’t have dedicated drone coverage at the moment—no real reason to watch them swim. The primary Predator would pick them up once they were “feet dry” on the beach.

  He looked back at his computer screen and wasted a few more minutes scanning through the intel bullets.

  Time passed.

  Slowly.

  Thiel’s voice crackled in Kemper’s ear, taunting him from the field: “Main, Scotch Actual—feet dry. We’re Crusader Actual.”

  Thiel was now Crusader One, the voice of two squadrons merged under his leadership. Kemper pictured Thiel switching his radio over to check in with Whiskey and bring the other squadron on a single frequency—one big, happy, lethal team. He turned to the drone feed and watched multicolored silhouettes moving among the rocks at the water’s edge. Scotch thermals held much more blue and green than the operators to the north, their bodies cool from the water approach. Only the center of each man glowed with a tiny yellow-and-red bull’s-eye. But that would change. By the time they reached the compound, their thermal signatures would match their brothers’.

  Angels of death, glowing hot like flames in the cold, black desert.

  “Main—copy. On time,” Kemper said, acknowledging Thiel’s report. After the teams performed buddy checks on gear and weapons, they would begin the swift but silent move toward the target. It wouldn’t be long now.
>
  “Little birds are up,” Air Ops called out. “CASEVAC up in ten mikes.”

  “Scout Two is back in orbit. Standing by,” the drone coordinator called out, informing everyone in the TOC that they were on single drone coverage because he had moved one drone to a higher altitude orbit. This was done both for contingency and to conserve fuel.

  Kemper glanced at the monitor with the satellite feed. The imagery was so crisp, they might not need the drones, but for tonight’s op, he was glad to have three independent sources of coverage. He tapped his foot on the floor, aware the sound was annoying, but he couldn’t help himself. The nervous energy was like a bomb in his gut, ready to explode. He never felt this way in the field—only now, trapped in the TOC, forced to worry and watch “through the window,” like an old lady in her rocking chair.

  A hush fell over the TOC. Kemper turned and saw Commanders Dietrich and Perez standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the wall of monitors.

  “Go?” Perez asked.

  This was the last chance for anyone on support to call out a problem. Whenever Kemper was in the field, there was always something that delayed the op. A drone glitch, loss of satellite imagery, comms problem with a helo. Something. Tonight, the room was miraculously silent. Kemper scanned the room, looking for new faces, but Shane Smith was still AWOL. And where the hell was the unit CSO, Captain Thomas? Kemper couldn’t believe—

  “Go,” Dietrich said, breaking the silence.

  Perez nodded.

  Dietrich looked at Kemper.

  Kemper met his gaze and said, “All green. No changes. We’re go.”

  Dietrich nodded. “All right, gents, let’s go make some history we can’t tell anyone about.”

  The room responded with nervous laughter. Kemper was finally getting pumped. He balled his hands into fists and had to restrain himself from barking out a Fuck yeah! Beside him, Spaz mumbled just that under his breath.

  Still looking at Dietrich, he keyed his mike and said the words, “Crusader Actual, Main—all green.”

  “Main, Crusader Actual—roger that.”

  The second hand of the clock began its painfully slow sweep, torturing everyone in the TOC for the next two and a half minutes while the teams closed on the compound. Kemper heard a shuffle in the back of the room. He turned and saw Captain Thomas crossing the threshold.

  About fucking time you showed up, Skipper, he thought.

  Thomas entered the TOC with none of the fanfare his O-6 rank and command would demand elsewhere in the Navy. They were all SEALs here. That was enough. Thomas nodded at Kemper first, then at Dietrich and Perez. Kemper nodded back and returned his attention to the center screen. He watched two clusters of colorful heat signatures rise in unison, then like a choreographed ballet, the silhouettes spread apart, only to converge a moment later as the SEALs advanced on the target compound. From the bird’s-eye view of the drone camera, their movements looked slow and graceful, but Kemper knew this was a deception. The SEALs were moving fast and working hard.

  The drone operator cleared his throat.

  Air Ops made a hushed call to his helo teams.

  Kemper shifted his gaze to the left monitor and watched the scene unfolding all over again in the distinctive green-gray imagery of the satellite feed, which lagged a few seconds behind the drone feed. He tapped his foot with increasing tempo as the teams converged on the perimeter wall of the compound. The overhead perspective was misleading; Kemper guessed the wall was much taller than the imagery suggested. Three meters high. Maybe four. Inside the compound perimeter, there were only a couple of notable thermals: a security patrol moving along the wall, and the yellow glow of a pickup truck engine—the last vehicle to arrive and still cooling down. As far as thermal imagery was concerned, there were no guards patrolling outside the wall. And from the detailed satellite imagery, the wall lacked sniper towers. The compound proper had three windows on the second story with line of sight on the team approaching from the northern mountains. It was difficult to tell in vertical 2-D whether any of the dozens of thermals milling around inside the main building were on the second floor or the ground level. Almost certainly, the shitheads had spotters at the window, but without night vision, he doubted they would spot the assault team. Even if they did have night vision and they did spot the northern squad, it wouldn’t change the outcome. This wasn’t a normal mission with only a handful of SEALs. They weren’t worried about footprint here—speed and size and firepower would rule the night.

  “That’s it, looking good,” someone murmured, but Kemper didn’t look up to see who’d said it. The two teams were along the north and south walls now. The most dangerous part of the approach was over and seemingly without compromise. The half-dozen figures in the yard of the compound were still milling casually about. The heat signatures inside the main building were typical social aggregate. No one was panicking. No one was running for weapons or taking defensive positions.

  The two teams spread along the north and south perimeter walls, bunching to the sides and leaving a gap in the middle. In the gap, a single silhouette remained. These were the breachers, setting charges to blast access holes for the SEALs to penetrate the compound perimeter. Time slowed to a crawl, and Kemper became aware of his breathing, his pulse thumping in his eardrums. He watched. He waited. Charges set, the two breachers cleared their respective blast zones, and in unison, rejoined their teammates on opposite sides of the compound. On the north wall, two unlucky fuckers had stopped their patrol to chat and smoke a cigarette—the spot they chose was directly opposite where the charges were set.

  Three heartbeats later, two bright flashes appeared on the drone feed, the two guards on the north wall disappearing in the light. For Kemper the experience was eerily unnatural, watching the explosions on the monitors in complete silence. Lightning without the thunder. In the field, you felt the power. It hit your chest. You expected it. You wanted it. The satellite feed flashed then—the same blast in time lag, erupting in bright light-green hues. The monitors refreshed and Kemper watched his teammates pour through the gaping holes in the walls on both sides of the compound. As the SEALs streamed through the northern breach, they stepped over blobs of orange—what remained of the jihadists who had been smoking. Kemper figured they were the lucky ones, considering what was about to happen to their brothers inside.

  The image on the center screen became momentarily obstructed as two helicopters from the 160th streaked over the compound several thousand feet beneath the drone. The helos circled, then settled into complementary orbits to provide air support. On the ground, the picture had changed. The SEAL force was now divided. As the assault teams closed on the main building, two smaller groups remained behind outside the perimeter wall, ready to fend off any Al Qaeda QRF in the event the enemy called for help.

  Gunfire flashed as the four remaining guards in the yard tried to return fire, but within seconds the figures lay still, sprawled out on the dirt, their thermal imagery cooling.

  “Get some,” growled Spaz from beside him.

  “Fuck yeah,” Kemper mumbled to himself. Across the room, both squadron commanders had begun pacing, but their eyes were glued to the screens on the wall above them. Beside them, Captain Thomas stood perfectly still, arms folded across his chest. Kemper realized that the CSO was the only man in the room wearing an actual uniform—desert digital khakis with an embroidered black trident above his name. Thomas looked iconic. Archetypal. The image hung with Kemper, and he had to shake his head to snap out of it.

  Back on the center screen, he watched the thermal images of at least two dozen high-level bad guys moving to the center of the building. They appeared now to all be standing on the same floor. Strangely, they were lining up, putting themselves in symmetrical rows, and then their images seemed to become compact—in unison. Kemper felt his heart skip a beat.

  They’re kneeling.

  His throat went tight.

  Oh shit.

  “They’re kneeling!” he ye
lled, pointing at the center screen. “They’re praying. Pull the team. Pull them back!”

  Perez and Dietrich both turned and stared at him. Dietrich’s eyes went wide with comprehension. He reached for the headset on the console beside him. The center screen turned white. For a moment, Kemper thought they’d lost the drone feed, but then the left screen—the satellite feed—flashed bright yellow.

  Perez dropped his headset.

  “What the fuck?” someone shouted.

  “What was that? What just happened?” Captain Thomas belted.

  “Crusader Actual, Crusader Actual—SITREP.”

  The voice was Dietrich’s, calm and flat, in Kemper’s headset.

  Kemper did not key his mike. There was nobody left on the other end to answer the call.

  The image in the center screen refreshed. A bright ball of red streaked across the frame and then abruptly stopped. That was one of the two Night Stalker helicopters crashing and bursting into flames north of the compound. When the screen refreshed again, Kemper was looking at nothing. No structure. No stone wall. No scattered body parts. Just clumps of yellow and red that had been his teammates. His best friends. His family. Instead, the entire area glowed a homogeneous orange, the heat from the massive explosion turning what had once been a terrorist compound in the Yemen desert into a burning Hell on Earth.

  “Crusader Actual—Crusader Actual.”

  “Night Stalker Zero One—Zero Two—this is Homeplate.”

  Someone in the room began to sob.

  Kemper stumbled, dropping to one knee. He rose and walked away from his station; he felt a tug as his headset jerked off his head and fell to the floor. Spaz grabbed his sleeve, but he shook the hand off without looking at his teammate and barreled into the double doors. He was going to be sick. His boots found the dirt, and his stomach lurched. He heaved, vomiting as he stumbled into the darkness outside the TOC. He became acutely aware of the stench enveloping him. The stank of puke on his beard. The stank of the Horn of Africa.