by Dalton Fury
Abdiwali frantically tried to turn his weapon back around from its butt-forward position, but the puke-covered infidel was too fast. The American stepped closer, still using the sling to choke the rifle’s owner. The barrel of the AK pressed against Abdiwali’s forehead, and it shoved him backward to the bow’s railing. One more strong push and Abdiwali would fall two stories to the water below.
The Somali pirate leader dropped his weapon and raised his hands quickly.
* * *
All the pirates were shouting now, save for the leader, who looked wide-eyed at the barrel pressed just above his eyes, and the one who hung by his neck off Kolt’s back. Raynor could not see the other men, but their screams and shouts indicated their location behind him and, more important, their indecision.
Kolt looked at the man at the end of his gun barrel.
“If you say anything, anything at all, other than ‘Get back in the boats,’ I will blow the top of your head out to sea!”
The Somali hesitated, started to speak, but Kolt cut him off.
“Remember, anything but ‘Get back in the boats,’ and you are fish food, asshole!”
The pirate leader’s forehead sweat dripped on the blued gun barrel. A fat drop trailed down past the front sight. The kicking of the strangling man on Raynor’s back caused the rifle to jerk back and forth, and the sweat dripped off the underside of the barrel with the motion.
Abdiwali moved his eyes down the barrel, past the American’s sunburned hands and arms, to his face. Into his eyes. They were watery and bloodshot, and Abdiwali was certain he could smell the sickly sweet scent of liquor in the rancid stench of bile on the man’s face and clothes.
After a moment he said, in English and then Somali, “Get back in the boats!”
Kolt stepped back and raised the rifle just enough to let the choking man behind him drop to the hot deck, where he gasped for air like a fish pulled from the hot green waters.
The pirates climbed back over the side. They kept their weapons with them, but Kolt did not take his rifle’s sights off of their leader’s forehead until all of his men were back on the speedboats two stories below. Then, without a word, Raynor pushed Abdiwali to the railing, and he went over. Adroitly he climbed down the rope ladder they’d used for their ascent, and a wooden skiff pulled forward to meet him at the waterline.
The three boats began to accelerate away from the ship, the officers on the deck scrambled to attend to their wounded captain, some of the deckhands came forward to cheer and pat Raynor on the back, but he pushed them back, told them to run. They did not understand, grew more confused when the vomit-covered security man went down onto his knees under the railing, then lay prone with the pirate’s rifle in front of him.
The boats were leaving. Why was he still concentrating on them?
Captain Thomasson lay nearby, moaning in shock and pain.
The blade sight of Kolt’s AK weaved in front of him. He concentrated on the sight as best he could, but switched focus from time to time to the pirate leader in the middle boat. At one hundred yards, just as Raynor expected, the boat slowed and turned broadside of the cargo ship. Kolt concentrated all his diminished faculties on the front sight post now, tried to line it up with the jet-black man standing in the little boat. He ignored the waffle-patterned deck’s heat as it reddened his skin, and he watched Abdiwali lift a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in the air in front of him, heft it to his shoulder, and point it at the ship.
Kolt knew the pirate could not sink the huge freighter with a few lousy RPGs, but he could kill crewmen and damage the vessel and cargo. Kolt did his best to aim for the distant man’s head, thought he had him lined up in the sights, and fired a single round.
The pirate did not move, just held the RPG at the ready and took aim himself.
Kolt fired another round.
Another miss.
He could tell the Somali was about to let his rocket fly.
“To hell with this,” said Kolt, flipping the selector switch to full-auto fire. He sighted perfunctorily on the speedboat and let it rip. Five, ten, twenty, twenty-five rounds blasted forth. The pirate leader lurched back, the RPG launcher raised, and a rocket streaked high into the air and flew harmlessly over the ship ahead of a white smoke trail.
The Somali pirate leader fell back into the water with the metal launcher still in his grasp. All but one of the other pirates on board the skiff jerked and spasmed and dropped dead along with him. Collateral damage. The sole survivor crawled low to the outboard motor and turned his splintered and bullet-ridden boat away. The other two speedboats left their leader and the others behind as they raced back to the safety of the coast.
Kolt climbed back up to his feet, staggered again a moment, and suffered a short bout of dry heaves. Captain Thomasson was being tended to by a ship’s officer with a medical kit. The white-haired Norwegian captain stared angrily at the American while prostrate on the hot deck.
“You fool! Typical American cowboy! We have insurance to deal with these matters. They would have been reasonable if you had just offered them the money!”
Kolt turned away and toward the first officer. “Get the crew to throw the bodies and the guns overboard. Then I want you to show me how fast this boat will go,” Raynor said. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Getting drunk?” shouted Thomasson. Icy derision in his voice.
“Damn right, Skipper,” mumbled Kolt as he headed alone back toward the superstructure.
FOUR
Raynor unlocked the door to his mobile home, stepped inside, and tossed his keys and wallet on the peeling Formica kitchen counter. He crossed the tiny living room and plopped down roughly on the mattress on the floor, grabbed the half-empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad he’d left there, and took a violent swig.
It had been a long afternoon with his shrink, and Raynor needed this drink. He was careful to avoid smelling like a honky-tonk bar when he went in to meet with Dr. Rudolph in his office just off base of Fort Bragg. He knew the interminable session would only become more insufferable if Doc got a whiff of the whiskey, and Kolt would do anything to just get in and get out, and get back home, where Old Grand-Dad, his true therapist, would be waiting for him.
As he swigged another mouthful, making up for lost time, he surveyed his worldly possessions. Kolt’s mobile home looked like it had been ransacked around him, but in actuality it had been trashed by the occupant himself. Every dish in the trailer was filthy, stuck to tables or stacked high in the sink. Empty, nearly empty, and soon-to-be-empty whiskey bottles lay strewn around the kitchen and den. Adventure gear lay on the couch and floor, and backpacks with dirty clothes were scattered about, as if Kolt had just returned from one of his overseas security postings.
In fact, Pete Grauer had fired Raynor a month earlier, almost immediately after the pirating in the Gulf of Aden. Kolt didn’t blame him. He knew Grauer had no choice in the matter. Most of the witnesses said that Raynor had doubtless saved lives with his actions, but every last one of them admitted he’d likely done it while intoxicated. Wounding the captain and then firing a full magazine into a boatload of pirates, all but one of whom were little or no threat to the freighter, didn’t set well in maritime security circles, though Jorgensen Cargo Lines had done its best to cover up the matter. They removed Grauer’s firm from future crossings and voided their contract with him.
Consequently, Grauer saw no alternative but to let Kolt go.
Kolt returned to the States and went back to his dingy trailer, his home since he had rented it with his best friend and Delta teammate T.J. seven years prior. It sat on a poultry farm a few miles from the north gate of Fort Bragg, away from the busy Fayetteville side of the post. The farmer who’d rented out the mobile home asked only two hundred a month, but that would have seemed a criminal rip-off to anyone not accustomed to the austerity of a special operations unit. The nearby chicken coops filled the air with the dander of old feathers and the musky stench of bird droppings, and training a
t the artillery range just across the road used to shake T.J. and Raynor off their mattresses at night. Still, the two friends had outfitted their pad with a big-screen TV, cardboard boxes full of clothes and canned food, and a computer. They trained together in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the dirt yard behind the trailer, they competed for hours on end overhanding throwing knives from distance into a head-sized target fashioned into a gnarled oak tree just outside the door, and they watched movies on the big screen.
And though it looked more like a dorm room at a Third World junior college than a home base for two of America’s most elite commandos, once a month or so when T.J. and Kolt ordered a mixed-martial-arts fight on Pay-Per-View and filled the fridge with cheap beer, their dump of a home became party central for themselves and their Delta mates.
Raynor considered moving away when he left Delta — there was no reason for him to stay so close to Bragg. But he never really felt like he had anywhere to go, so he remained, waiting on some new direction or new plan to carry him away.
For the past month the former Delta major had done little but lie around and brood, avoid phone calls from his parents and from the media who had gotten wind of his shootout with the African pirates, and drink himself to near oblivion.
And he was drinking now. He lay back on the mattress, looked at the clock, and wished like hell that the night would not come so soon.
Most nights he had the dream. If he was drunk enough before the dream, the images would be muddled, less crisp, less real, less nonfiction and more fiction. But it was evening already, he’d fall asleep before successfully pickling his brain, and he knew that this inability to be sufficiently shitfaced before bed, plus Doc Rudolph’s persistence in discussing the events of three years prior during today’s session, all but ensured that tonight’s dream would be stone-cold authenticity. History, not fantasy. Kolt would hear the sounds, feel the fear, smell the death.
Relive the guilt.
He chugged the Old Grand-Dad and began to cry. And he wished like hell he could stay awake all night so that he could avoid the motherfucking dream.
FIVE
Three Years Earlier
Four pairs of hiking boots dug for purchase on the narrow mountain spur. Four pairs of wary eyes searched the dark distance for threats. Four men climbed onward and upward, sucked lungs full of thinning air, and ignored the churning snow that wetted beards and clothing, adding to the bone-soaked chill of their own sweat. Heavy packs and load-bearing vests, buckles and straps straining with gear, compressed spines and hampered balance.
Though it was perilously steep and poorly marked, discovering this goat track had been a windfall for the team, even if using it was a gamble. Certainly crossing the mountains via an established trail was preferable to just humping overland, but the men had no illusions they were the only two-legged creatures on this path between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban, al Qaeda, donkey caravans of opium poppy or assault rifles, anyone with an illicit requirement to travel from one side to the other undetected, might well be just beyond the next rise.
With a craggy limestone wall on his left and a sheer drop-off to oblivion on his right, the lone officer in the silent procession stopped. Thirty-four-year-old Major Kolt Raynor looked ahead into the darkness and surveyed his team. Master Sergeant Michael “Musket” Overstreet clambered up the trail twenty meters on, decked head to toe in high-tech mountain clothing in blacks and browns. He sported an impressive salt-and-pepper beard and wore a pakol, the local wool cap favored by Pashtun men in the region. Though heavily burdened with equipment, Musket showed no obvious strain. He pulled himself up the incline, his gloved hands grabbing and then pushing off the mossy rocks on the wall to his left, and then he looked back over his shoulder. Noticing his major’s halt, the master sergeant dropped to a kneepad and turned his attention to the wide valley arrayed off his right shoulder.
Looking back now through the darkness and precipitation, Major Raynor could just make out Sergeant First Class Spencer “Jet” Lee moving up the mountain trail fifteen meters behind. He climbed carefully, reaching out to steady himself as he stepped onto an icy stone in his path. Jet wore a Heckler & Koch 416 rifle over his chest and a fat Combat Casualty Response Kit on his back. A pouch on his chest rig sported a.40 caliber Glock 23 pistol. Jet served as the team medic, but he could shoot his long gun or his pistol as well as any of his colleagues. His beard, in contrast to Musket’s, was short and scruffy and obviously hard-earned, and he kept his North Face cap pulled down below his eyebrows. He looked up and saw the halt in front of him, so he lowered himself and his sixty pounds of gear to the cold earth, took a knee on a broken piece of shale.
Raynor knew Rocky was up ahead on point, just out of sight but leading the way with his rifle cradled in his arms. Even though he was fifty meters ahead of his team leader, with his new third-generation NVGs, Sergeant First Class Carl “Rocky” Price would be able to cover the trail all the way back to Jet, at least when the trail was straight enough to get line of sight.
Kolt Raynor pressed the Talk button on his inter-team radio. “Rock, you good up there?”
The reply took a moment. The labored breathing was audible in the transmission. “Just chillin’. Why we stoppin’, Racer?” As expected, Rocky did have eyes on the team. Raynor was not surprised to hear the man struggling in the thin air. Although Rocky was the best pure mountaineer in the squadron, a serious sinus infection had sent him back to the States for recovery, and since his return he’d not yet fully reacclimated to the altitude.
“Let’s break out the O2,” Raynor suggested to all the men. “Huff ’em if you got ’em, boys. It’s thinning out fast up here. We’ll be heading down below eight thousand in less than a klick.”
“Roger that, boss.” Though he could not see him, Raynor knew Rocky would now be on a knee, pulling a tiny aluminum tank from his pack and inhaling heavily from its attached mouthpiece.
Raynor, Musket, and Jet had been in the mountains for nearly three months, and altitude sickness for them at this elevation was highly unlikely. Still, a few inhalations of pure oxygen sounded good to the major. He’d played it like he was making the offer for Rock’s benefit, but he took this opportunity to reach for his own tank as well.
Raynor leaned his rucksack against the wall behind him to take some weight off his legs and hips. Though his fitness level was that of a professional athlete, this was no ball field. This was war. His conditioning of late had been of slight concern to him, but he hid it well back at base. He had no doubt whatsoever that he could fulfill this mission, and he would have done anything to avoid being left behind. Yes, he had let his training lapse — he was an officer, and his focus had been on the maps and the intelligence reports and the gear and the personnel and the logistics, and not sufficiently on his fitness. But Kolt Raynor had always considered himself a game-day player. He knew he’d rise to the occasion and suck it up, even if that meant sucking wind along the way.
This hit was too important.
Though they all held military rank, these were not soldiers. These were operators. Members of First Special Forces Operational Detachment — Delta. The public and the press called them Delta Force; the Department of Defense called them Combat Applications Group; inside Delta they often just referred to their organization as “the Unit.” And when America needed hard men for hard duty in a hard land, America called Delta.
With all the shit holes and shit heads in this world, these days Delta did not go wanting for work.
When his men again stood at the ready, Raynor prepared to move out. He adjusted the sling on his short-barreled HK416 rifle so that it would scrape against a different patch of skin on his neck, and he took a swig from the nipple on the end of the tube running to the water bladder in his backpack. He checked his GPS, found his location, and noticed he was literally straddling the border. Though that was probably significant to some politician or diplomat far away, it did not really matter to him, because the border here was just a fanta
sy. The mountains held no signposts, no fence line, no markings at all. The British had drawn a stroke across a map over a hundred years earlier and named it the Durand Line after some meddlesome English foreign secretary, and since then it had been all but ignored by the millions of Pathans and Baluchis who lived on either side of it, and by smugglers of weapons and drugs, jihadists, and, on extraordinarily rare occasions, American commandos.
For Raynor and his three men sharing this stretch of trail there was no cause to be more vigilant now, entering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, than there had been at any point during the previous three hours of their insertion. No, there was just as much danger five klicks behind them, in the hills of Afghanistan, as there would be five klicks ahead, in the hills of Pakistan. The Taliban did not consult a GPS, did not check their maps or check their fire. This entire region, deep verdant valleys and jutting snowcapped peaks alike, was the homeland of the enemy, and they outnumbered Raynor and his men one thousand to one.
Major Kolt Raynor, code name “Racer,” turned his eyes back to the east, away from his procession of operators and toward his objective, though it was still hours off. He moved out and his men followed suit.
* * *
Nine seconds later in a darkened trailer at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the thirty-year-old pilot of an unmanned aerial vehicle spoke into her headset without looking away from the flat-panel screens in front of her.
Her voice was smooth and soft; a hint of Ohio infused her vowels. “Hunter 29 is over the border at Waypoint Charlie. Incursion time Zulu nineteen-nineteen.”
In her headphones came an abrupt reply from her commanding officer. “Hunter 29 at Charlie nineteen-nineteen Zulu. Okay.”
Air Force Captain Pamela Archer watched the feed from her variable-aperture infrared camera, tracked the four operators moving along the trail fifteen thousand feet below her MQ-9 Reaper drone as news of the cross-border incursion came from the GPS coordinates on the moving map panel mounted above the real-time image monitor. The Delta element showed as white hotspots on the monochrome display, hotspots with arms and legs, climbing and pulling themselves arduously up a mountain trail snaking along a wide canyon.