Fifteen minutes before they reached their targets, he saw the jumpmaster stand by the jump door and point a finger at the ceiling as the ramp lowered. The sky was full of stars. Preacher Johnson gave him a thorough going over, fastened a green Cyalume chemlight to the back of his helmet and cracked it until it glowed, detached his oxygen mask from the central console and reattached it to his portable system, checked to make sure it was working properly, and then gave him a thumbs-up.
“You’re good,” he told DeLuca. “I guarantee you I’m going to get you down. Okay? I guarantee it.”
“Alive?” DeLuca said.
Johnson just winked at him, strapping an eight-foot length of bungee cord to DeLuca’s right arm, just above the elbow. “This is so I don’t lose you. I’ll cut you free just before it’s time to deploy. Just watch the others and do what they do.”
The jumpmaster pointed all five fingers toward the ceiling, and then he straightened his arm to point out the door.
Sergeant Pink went first, followed by Blue, and then Yellow, the three men stepping backward off the ramp to let the force of the air streaming below hit them on their chests. Purple went next, tethered to Goliath, then Dan and Sergeant Red, and then, before he knew quite what was happening to him, DeLuca backed off the ramp with Preacher Johnson next to him, flying out into the sky.
It took him about ten seconds to reach terminal velocity, at which time he experienced an adrenaline rush unlike anything he’d ever known before.
“Arch, DeLuca,” he heard Johnson’s voice in his headset. “Arms out, legs apart. You’re doing great. Try to relax. Pink, Blue, form up and maintain intervals. Sergeant DeLuca, I’m going to turn you a bit so that we can see each other, all right?”
DeLuca felt a gentle tug on his arm. The earth below seemed black and featureless, not a light to be seen, until he remembered that he was looking at the top of a vast cloud cover. He looked at his altimeter. It read five thousand feet. The clouds looked as flat as the desert. He checked his altimeter. It read zero.
“Cloud deck is thirteen thousand more, right?” he asked.
“Correct. Sergeant Pink,” Johnson said calmly, “why don’t you go on ahead and tell us when you’re through, okay?”
“Roger that,” Pink said. DeLuca watched as Sergeant Pink brought his hands in to his side and dove headfirst, accelerating as he reduced his wind resistance.
“Two thousand above deck and falling,” Johnson said. “Maintain awareness. Keep your intervals. Sergeant DeLuca, prepare to get hit in the face with an ice-cold hose.”
The cloud deck approached rapidly. For a second, DeLuca imagined that it was the ground, that he would die, that this was it, his life was over, a good life all in all, no regrets . . .
“Pink in,” he heard.
“Blue in.”
“Yellow in.”
Then he hit.
Nothing had ever felt as bracing. In the darkness, he could see nothing. He felt a gentle tug on his arm. “That’s me, Sarge,” Johnson said in a soothing voice. “I’m right here. I’m not going to let you go.”
DeLuca heard a ringing sound. He heard it again. An alarm? Had something gone wrong?
“Sergeant DeLuca,” Johnson said. “When we get down, would you kindly remember to turn off your cell phone? Thank you.”
DeLuca knew, without having to check, who had called—Bonnie had an absolute God-given knack for always calling at the worst possible moments.
Then he was out of the clouds. It was dark below.
“TLs out,” Johnson reported. “Newbies, watch your wrists. When you see your altimeters flashing, pull your D-rings and check for deployment. Mr. David, you’re going to be on your own but I’ll be right above you, giving you directions. We’ll count down from ten. I’ll pull at five and you pull at zero, please. From . . . ten, nine, eight . . .”
When he got to zero, DeLuca grabbed his D-ring and shot his right arm forward.
He felt his body flip as his chute deployed.
“You’ll want to toggle about three-quarters right and rejoin us,” Johnson instructed him. He found his toggles and pulled down on the right one. “Careful not to spiral. Let up. Okay. Steady. Come on back to me. Good.”
“Pink is good,” DeLuca heard in his headset.
“Blue good.”
“Yellow good.”
“Red good.”
“TLs are good.”
There was a pause.
“Sergeant Purple,” Johnson said. “Sergeant Purple,” he repeated. “Report, please. Has anybody seen Sergeant Purple or Mr. Bakub?”
“Negative, Blue.”
“Negative, Pink—vectoring right.”
“Keep your intervals,” Johnson said. “Stack looks good. Mr. David, toggle right just a tad. There you go.”
“Smoke deployed,” the navigator said. “Wind speed three knots blowing due east. Setting up right.”
DeLuca understood what was going on. Something had gone wrong with Goliath and Sergeant Purple, but no one was talking about it.
Then his headset crackled.
“Purple is good,” a voice said. “Sorry to worry you. Jabba the Hutt had a problem with his main so I had to cut him free. He’s on his reserve . . . somewhere.”
“Somewhere?” Johnson asked.
“Lost him,” Sergeant Purple said. “I was at eight hundred when I pulled.” DeLuca remembered his instructor telling him it would take superhuman strength to brake a chute that opens below one thousand feet.
“Mr. David,” Johnson said, “you’re a bit wide, so let’s spiral at half-toggle right and bring you back into the wind. A little more. A little more. Looking good. Hold it. Do you see the ground? Three-quarters. Okay, slow but steady, a little more . . . now full brakes.”
DeLuca pulled his toggles all the way down, his arms straight and pressed against his sides, his knees bent. He hit the ground softly and ran three or four steps forward before stopping. He cut his chute loose and saw it collapse behind him.
The group gathered where a small clump of scrub oaks formed a small copse at the north end of the field. The night was as dark as they could hope. There was no sign of Goliath.
“Don’t worry, Purple,” Johnson said. “By this time next week, he’ll be back sitting on his mama’s lap. Meanwhile, everybody pay up.”
As the team stripped off its jumpsuits and insulation layers, each TF-21 member approached Johnson and handed him two hundred-dollar bills.
“We like to pay our bets before the mission starts, in case we have next-of-kin issues,” Johnson explained to DeLuca.
“What was the bet?”
“A hundred that I couldn’t get you down in one piece, and then when they met you, we made it double or nothing you’d stick the landing.”
They were crouched low, removing the duct tape from their weapons and rechecking their equipment while Johnson downloaded the latest falcon view to his PDA. Imagery indicated two guards on the roof and one in the courtyard, where the generator was located. DeLuca and Johnson studied the photograph.
“There’s no backup generator?” DeLuca asked.
“Not one that’s running,” Johnson said. “They might have backup.”
The plan they’d discussed during the briefing looked solid. Sergeants Blue and Pink were to scale the roof, take out the guards and the communications equipment. From the roof, they’d have command of the courtyard below. Sergeants Red and Yellow would enter through the kitchen and clear the living quarters before proceeding to the main sanctuary. Purple and Sykes would secure the barn, entering from the north side and working through to the courtyard doors opposite, where they would take out the guard in the courtyard and the generator next to him. DeLuca and Johnson had the main gate, guarded by decorative barbicans and spanned by a pair of thick wooden doors that were currently open. The monastery had been built on a promontory, with two of the main building’s outer baileys flush to the cliff walls, an overhang to the east, and a steep, nearly vertical two-hu
ndred-foot drop to the south—no wonder Saladin hadn’t had much luck assailing the fortifications.
“Crack your necklaces, boys,” Johnson said. “Stay tight.”
They moved stealthily down the tree line where the woods dropped off along the mountain’s eastern slope. They came to a barbed-wire gate, and beyond it a lower field. A wide lane opened up at the southwest corner of the lower field, leading to the barn.
They stayed off the road, picking their way through dwarf pine and scrub oak until they reached the crest of a small rise, affording them a view of the buildings about a hundred yards below. Sighting through the NVG-assisted scope on his Steyr, Sergeant Red offered to pick off the guards on the roof, an idea that had some merit but one DeLuca had to veto—it would give the others too much warning. Sergeant Blue proposed a complete stealth attack, taking out the guards in silence and then whoever was asleep downstairs, but there was too much risk involved. Instead, a little more “shock and awe” was called for, an attack that created chaos and confusion and one that DeLuca hoped would be over quickly. Johnson sent Blue, Pink, Red, and Yellow off to circle left, while the rest of the team crossed the road one at a time on DeLuca’s signal.
“Let me know when you’re in position,” Johnson said.
“How many Hellfires have we got again?” DeLuca asked him.
“Six,” Johnson said. “And a couple Warthogs that can be here in ten minutes. All you gotta do is ask.”
“You guys willing to cue this to the Hellfires? I’m thinking one on the generator and two on the roof. It means we’re going to have to be sitting pretty close.”
“We can paint the generator with infrared, but I don’t know about the roof,” Johnson said. “That’s the problem with lasers. They tend to go in a straight line.” He surveyed the surrounding hillsides. “I could send someone up the mountain, but that’s going to take time and he might be too far away. Aw, what the fuck—they gotta have the damn coordinates zeroed in by now.”
He instructed his men to advance to their positions and wait for the rocket attack before beginning the assault, then called the flight office in Kirkuk controlling the Predators and told them what he wanted.
DeLuca and Johnson crouched along a ravine, moving west to approach the front gates, stopping in a wooded gully, and crawling on their stomachs to the crest of a rise, from where the gates lay directly in front of them, about sixty yards off, the last forty open ground. The fact that the gates were open suggested they certainly weren’t expecting company.
“Blue Team in position,” he heard on his headset.
“Red team, too,” a second voice said.
Then a dog started barking.
“Aw shit,” Johnson said. “Why didn’t we figure that? They got sheep, they got sheepdogs. Any time you’re ready, Kirkuk.”
DeLuca hoped that the dog barking in the night was a commonplace occurrence, but he feared the opposite, and that inside the monastery, men were waking up and reaching in the darkness for their weapons.
Then there was no more darkness, the air split by a spectacular blast as a Hellfire missile screamed down from above and detonated in the courtyard. A moment later, two more blasts shook the ground, missiles striking the communication equipment on the roof and sending fragments over DeLuca’s head.
“Go go go!” Johnson radioed to his men.
DeLuca and Johnson ran to the gates, where a large fire burned in the courtyard, flames rising above the casements, smoke filling the air.
Dan and Sergeant Purple rushed the shed, firing as they went to clear the way, the building smelling of straw and sheep shit and chemicals. They raced past a pair of vehicles, then took cover as someone fired on them from the courtyard door. They fired back and the figure fell.
DeLuca saw flashes in the cloister windows opposite the gates, where he and Johnson took cover at opposing gatehouses. The power was out. So far so good. He flipped his NVGs down as three more explosions shook the roof, probably grenades from Sergeants Blue and Pink.
Two men ran into the courtyard from the main building and were cut down in a hail of fire as Purple opened up with his Tec-9 and Johnson engaged with his Street Sweeper, catching the enemy in a withering crossfire. When DeLuca saw a man running from the colonnade to the main portal, he pointed his machine pistol at him, the weapon roared in his grip, and the running man fell.
“Red—are you good?” Johnson called out when he saw a particularly large fireball roll from the far windows of the cloister.
“Good good good,” Red shouted back. “We’re clear here.”
“Move on the main. The main!” Johnson told them. “Blue, Pink—where are you?”
Someone fired from one of the windows of the main building, a staccato roar from what DeLuca guessed was a large-caliber machine gun.
“On the roof—clear here.”
“Can you get down?”
“Repeat?”
“Can you get in? Trap door, staircase, something.”
“Staircase. Taking fire.”
DeLuca crossed into the courtyard and took cover behind what appeared to be an old well. He saw the double lancet windows flash twice, Sergeant Blue dropping grenades down the staircase, and ducked as the glass blew out. They’d tried to get intel on the Monastery of Saint George (a set of thousand-year-old blueprints would have been nice) but could collect only general information, that similar abbeys of the era featured simple living quarters or cells, a building for the animals and the equipment they used, a place where food could be prepared or stored or consumed, and a larger sanctuary for group worship, with perhaps an office attached and a place for the abbot to reside—that was where DeLuca expected to find Al-Tariq.
Someone fired out the window again.
He ducked his head and ran for the central portal, slamming into the wall with his back and pausing to catch his breath.
Johnson slammed into the wall next to him.
“You’re faster than you look,” Johnson said.
“Only when I’m getting shot at,” DeLuca said.
“Blue, ready?” Johnson said.
“Blue ready,” Blue replied. “I left Pink on the roof.”
“I’ve got the can-opener,” Purple said, raising his grenade launcher.
“We’re in the foyer,” Red called in. “The sacristy. Whatever it’s called.”
“Eyes, boys. Don’t shoot anybody with a necklace on,” Johnson reminded everyone. DeLuca ducked reflexively as something in the barn exploded, probably some kind of gasoline storage tank. “On three. One, two . . .”
Purple blew the doors in with his grenade launcher.
They rushed the main building, firing into it as they went. DeLuca saw Dan take a window. He dove and rolled through the door as someone fired from the chancel rail. Yellow fired back, and the man was dead. A second man fired from the transept. Preacher Johnson returned fire with his Tec-9, shattering tile and glass, a chandelier dropping to the floor as the man died.
When someone scrambled for the door, DeLuca turned with his machine gun, squeezing the trigger, only to find his clip was empty. He drew his .38 and followed the figure out the door. The man shot twice as DeLuca ducked back, then kept running, firing his AK-47 a third time behind him before being clotheslined fiercely by a giant figure in the courtyard. It was Goliath. The giant wrapped his right arm around the man’s neck and dropped to the ground, snapping the man’s spine. DeLuca helped Goliath to his feet, whereupon he noticed the big man was limping.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I flew into the mountain,” Goliath said, dusting himself off. “I lost my rifle.”
“Poor mountain,” DeLuca said. “Take his.”
He returned to the sanctuary, where he saw, in his NVGs, six men with glowing rings around their necks, but nothing more, no one moving, and three bodies on the floor, none of them large enough to be Al-Tariq, unless he’d lost a lot of weight since the war began. Johnson shone a flashlight on their faces.
&nb
sp; “He’s not here,” DeLuca said.
“We got two in the cloisters,” Red said. “Two on the roof and two in the courtyard. That’s nine. Isn’t that everybody?”
“That was approximate,” Johnson said. “Is there a basement? Anything down below?”
“It’s clear,” Yellow said. “Just a wine cellar. Completely empty.”
“The roof is clear,” Pink said, descending a corner staircase. “What have we got?”
“We got nine,” Johnson said. “You see anything?”
“Just King Kong Bundy,” Pink said, referring to Goliath, who stood in the doorway.
DeLuca felt his heart pounding. He heard sheep bleating, a dog still barking, a fire burning in the courtyard where the generator had been, and then the quiet was shattered as a white Toyota pickup truck sped from the barn, a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the back spitting fire at them as the vehicle made for the front gate. DeLuca dove out the door and hit the floor, firing from between the balustrades of the arcade railing. Johnson and Blue managed to get off a few bursts as well, but then the truck was gone, bouncing down the hill and toward the woods below.
“There’s another car in the barn,” Dan called out.
The keys were in it, a soft-topped Humvee DeLuca suspected had been stolen or otherwise appropriated from coalition forces.
Sergeant Blue drove. DeLuca rode shotgun, literally, for the first time in his life, borrowing the 12-gauge Striker from Sergeant Yellow. Johnson was in the back. Dan was in the gunner’s sling, though without a gun mounted for him to use. DeLuca handed him his M-12 and two fresh clips.
The road dropped precipitously, a winding gravel lane that was rutted and grooved where the runoff had eroded deep cuts in the surface. Humvees were built for neither speed nor comfort, but they were built for stability, and Blue drove like he’d been running moonshine on West Virginia back roads since he was twelve, running without headlights and using his NVGs to see. The taillights of the pickup truck appeared and disappeared up ahead as the road hugged the curves of the mountain, the truck perhaps a quarter mile off, but it soon became apparent that the Hummer was gaining.
“TF-21,” DeLuca heard in his headset. “This is Kirkuk. Do you need assistance?”
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