Full Assault Mode: A Delta Force Novel

by Dalton Fury

  A noise made Kolt turn. Bravo guys were hooting and pointing at something on the screen. Kolt squinted to get it into focus, then shook his head. Based on the blurred heat signature, it appeared as if one of the donkeys was getting it on with another one.

  Kolt checked his watch and figured they had about another hour or so to go. One more hour of this mind-numbing sitting and waiting for something to happen before dusk fell and Thunder Turtle turned and headed back to their FOB. This was his life at J-bad. Hours followed by days of boredom, punctuated by sporadic short-notice, quick-strike missions in the more dangerous and unforgiving parts of Afghanistan. It had been that way since their first deployment after 9/11. Even with a decade of Groundhog Days behind them, and Osama bin Laden taken out two years earlier, not much had changed.

  In Afghanistan during the twenty-first century, just as during centuries before when Alexander’s legions were there, adrenaline rushes could be served up in a moment. One minute the troops could be watching a column of armored vehicles crawl across a lunar-like landscape, and the next they could be engaged in a bitter firefight with insanely reckless insurgents. If it came to that, Kolt knew he had a hell of an advantage.

  There was a lot of experience inside the tent that night. Four of the five members of Bravo Team had spent close to twelve years rotating back and forth from the States to Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. The newest operator on the team had just done over four years of combat time. Moreover, in between the months of hunting the ghost-like Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, they all had seen years of harsh urban combat in Iraq and had eaten plenty of brownout in east Africa. Along with the valor awards, most had TBI (traumatic brain injury) from eating too many IEDs or wall-breaching charges to prove it. And most, if not all, figured they were sure-bet candidates as future sufferers of PTSD.

  Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was an operator’s paradise. There was always something to blow up, someone to rescue, someone to kill. Intel nuggets uncovered from one raid dominoed to the next raid and then the next raid and so on. More times than not, almost before they returned to their sleeping quarters, savvy intel analysts had added some previously unknown individual to the link-analysis poster of foreign fighters and Shia militia leaders. For most the war, pace in Iraq was missed, but for some the lines between right and wrong were blurring, and killing had become either too sport like or numbing.

  Now, on this cold late-winter night in northeastern Afghanistan, all but one of the team members sat on their asses. The only one earning his hazardous-duty pay, Shaft, was three hours and forty-five minutes away.

  Unlike the rest of them, Shaft was working the sexy Tier One target—the one with National Command Authority attention.

  “Shaft make his last comms window?” Slapshot, the burly troop sergeant major asked Kolt.

  “Last check he was still looking for jackasses,” answered Kolt, barely turning from the screen. He tilted his head, placed his upper lip delicately over the open end of the empty water bottle, and deposited a stream of Red Man leaf-tobacco juice.

  Without looking up from the latest copy of Maxim magazine, Digger jumped in. “Shouldn’t have trouble with that in the Hindu Kush.”

  “Dude, the four-legged kind. It’s a long walk down the valley,” Slapshot answered as he shook his head in mock disgust. “Although if that pair become a ménage à trois, who knows?” he said, pointing at the flat screen.

  “A ménage à what?” Digger asked.

  “A frickin’ three way, dumbass!”

  “Yeah, the number of appendages is about the only difference,” Digger quipped back as he dropped the magazine to his chest to steal a look at his troop daddy.

  Kolt chuckled, careful not to appear to take sides between two assaulters exchanging jabs.

  “Think Ghafour is there?” Slapshot asked Kolt with an obvious change in tone. He was referring to the sixty-four-year-old Pashtun elder Haji Mohammad Ghafour, a terrorist they were keen to get their hands on.

  “Who the hell knows, Slapshot? I guess I better believe it, or I should never have sent Shaft,” Kolt answered.

  “My money says he ain’t, but don’t start second-guessing your instincts now, boss.”

  “If you didn’t think sending Shaft was smart, why didn’t you pipe up?” Kolt asked.

  “I’ve known you too long, Racer. It wouldn’t have mattered what I thought,” answered Slapshot.

  Kolt didn’t answer, turning his attention back to the plasma screen and Thunder Turtle. He knew he pushed it more than most. It had gotten him in trouble more times than most, and many an operator could credit their Silver Star or Purple Heart to one of Kolt’s impetuous command decisions. He knew some of his calls hadn’t played out as planned. Several of his mates whose names were engraved on the unit-memorial wall in the garden were daily reminders to everyone who walked the Spine of Delta compound. Even so, his men knew he was an action magnet, drawing fire exponentially more times than most troop commanders, and if you were still in Delta after ten-plus years of war, you pretty much recognized two absolutes: you were either divorced or about to be, and running with Kolt would guarantee trigger time or a body bag. It was still a volunteer organization, and selection was an ongoing process.

  With the war in Afghanistan still going after twelve years and counting, and with the most wanted man in the world, the al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden so much fish food, the targets for Tier One outfits like Delta had changed. The new number 1 on Delta’s target list was the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, Z-man as he was known in SOF circles. He’d taken the reigns of al Qaeda soon after bin Laden was killed and was still at large. Ghafour, a relatively unknown entity until recently, had rocketed up the list because of his long-term relationship with Z-man.

  Despite the intelligence, no one knew where either man was. Rounding up former acquaintances of targets had long been an operational method for American special operations forces. Some referred to the targets as the “low-hanging fruit.” The hope, and it often was more hope than anything else, was that they would reveal something about the targets above them. Over the years, the technique had mixed results.

  Finding Ghafour could very well mean finding Zawahiri, but recent intelligence had revealed that finding Ghafour was becoming crucial for an entirely different reason. The CIA no longer considered Ghafour simply low-hanging fruit.

  After nearly a year of combing through the treasure trove of computer files, hard drives, thumb drives, and handwritten documents in Arabic that SEAL Team Six had taken out of bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, information about Ghafour had surfaced. Hidden within Osama’s extensive pornography collection, an analyst with insomnia discovered encrypted general plans linking Ghafour to the planning of attacks on commercial nuclear power plants. Two of the plants were located in Europe, but three others were only referred to by a crude code using the letters X, Y, and Z. The analyst and Kolt agreed one hundred percent, figuring X, Y, and Z were almost certainly in the U.S. of A.

  It was enough to get the president’s attention, as well as the attention of every leader of America’s allies. And since the recent international uproar, when the rogue Syrian regime used sarin gas on its own citizens, showed that there was only a limited appetite from the “coalition of the willing” for responding to international incidents, POTUS couldn’t afford to be soft on a potential attack on American soil. Unlike much of what was discovered in Abbottabad that night, which was declassified and shared with the world, every important acronymed organization or agency that listed national security as one of its core responsibilities agreed that the MTSAK files, curiously pronounced “empty sack,” should remain top secret. Truth be told, just as he didn’t with the civil war in Syria, Kolt didn’t give two shits about Haji Ghafour, until the connection to the homeland was uncovered. Otherwise, he would never have asked Shaft to hang it out on a singleton mission in the Pakistani badlands.

  “Maybe we should roll up and squeeze those donkeys,
” Kolt said, watching as the animals finished their afternoon delight and set off on a path that would intersect with the column of armored vehicles. “Did they get a good look at those animals?” Kolt asked Slapshot, knowing he had an earbud in while monitoring the Thunder Turtle radio transmissions.

  “Yeah, Racer,” Slapshot said. “Just three run-of-the-mill donkeys. Nothing strapped to them, and there’s no way they’d get enough explosives in them and have them move around like that.”

  “Rog, I guess not,” Kolt said, growing uneasy all the same as the donkeys wandered down from their rocky rendezvous and out onto the road being cleared. The Huskies, fifty yards away, slowed, not that you could really tell.

  The lead Buffalo edged over to the right side of the road, no doubt because of the top gunner’s begging to get in a shot at the animals, at least to scare them off. The image on the flat screen blossomed into a roiling white cloud, obscuring the entire column.

  “Fuck!” Kolt shouted, gripping the water bottle so hard it cracked, spilling the tobacco juice over his fingers. As the cloud dispersed, the Buffalo could be seen nose down in a large crater a full five yards wide.

  “Damn, that one is gonna hurt,” Digger said, easing forward until his nose almost touched the screen. “The Buffalo looks intact, I mean, probably lost the right front wheel, but the tub looks solid. Any casualties, Slapshot?”

  “Stand by. They’re trying to unfuck it now.”

  Slapshot was bent over, his right hand pressed against his ear as he listened in. He looked up a half minute later. “No criticals or KIAs. Driver probably has a broken ankle, and the rest are pretty banged up, but otherwise they’re good to go.”

  Kolt relaxed. A thousand yards behind this column was a second one composed of three more Buffalos and a pair of twenty-nine-ton MRVs, mine-resistant recovery vehicles. They were essentially wreckers on steroids, each heavily armored and sporting a huge thirty-ton lifting boom in addition to recovery and drag winches. Thunder Turtle might not be fast, but it was well prepared.

  The second explosion marked the last moments on earth of the three donkeys.

  “Damn, the donkeys were rigged. Triggerman must have gotten jumpy and hit the button too soon,” Slapshot said.

  Kolt was about to agree when tracer fire crisscrossed the screen. A lot of tracer fire. Several smaller explosions appeared among the column of armored vehicles. One appeared on top of a Buffalo. Several secondary explosions from within the Buffalo followed, ripping the armored beast to shreds.

  “They’re dumpin’ mags and frags,” Kolt said, confirming to the others that they’d met their trigger to launch.

  “Christ, it looks like they landed a mortar round right through the gunner’s hatch!” Slapshot said as he scrambled out of his bunk.

  Kolt was already racing out the door. “We launch in ten!”

  TWO

  “Kit up!” Kolt shouted, already moving to the door to get back to the ready room.

  Slapshot held up a hand as the men of Bravo Team began to move. “I’ve been keeping tabs on the flight status, and we’re in for a wait. They launched the ready birds an hour ago on some support mission for the ANF. And then a CASEVAC flight took fire and one of their Black Hawks declared lame duck and had to sit down. Flight ops launched two Black Hawks to assist. They are saying it’ll take at least an hour to get a couple more preflighted and spooled up.”

  Kolt stopped and turned to face Slapshot. “I don’t care if they have to use duct tape and rubber bands, but I want another Black Hawk ready.”

  “On it, boss!” Slapshot said as Kolt left the tent, the rest of Bravo Team in his wake.

  He ignored the cold as he quickly trudged across the compound to the ready room. He started to bitch about the half-baked planning that had left Thunder Turtle in this predicament, but he stopped himself before he got worked up. Recriminations could, and did, come later. Right now, he had to focus; he had to get switched on.

  Kolt stepped through the door and made his way to his plywood cubicle at the far end of the room. He chose that spot because it let him look over his mates as they got ready. If anything, or anyone, was having trouble or having second thoughts, he’d spot it. He quickly began the ritual his muscles knew by heart. It didn’t matter if it was training or the real deal like tonight, kitting up was always done the same, and with intense focus. It was a bit like a superstitious ball player who always laced up his cleats the same way while chewing four pieces of spearmint gum, tapped his cleats with the bat barrel, or opened and closed the Velcro on his batting gloves between each pitch. The big difference in a Delta operator’s case, however, was that lives, not batting averages, were on the line.

  Kolt took a moment to survey his kit, making sure everything was where he placed it after the last mission out the door. Sitting upright in the middle of the cubicle were his assault vest and body-armor plates, which, like a Roman soldier’s breastplate, were heavy and sturdy. They didn’t shine, but they were impressive all the same.

  His rifles and hoolie tool were leaning against the back of the cubicle, rifles muzzle up with the Magpul rifle magazines loaded and stacked neatly against the sidewall. His tactical tan Gen4 Glock 23 pistol sat unloaded on its side with tan hard-ball-loaded magazines next to it. Handheld OD green smoke canisters, thermite grenades, frag grenades, and nine-bangers were stacked on top of each other in cardboard boxes. It wasn’t pretty, but it was practical, and after all these years it still brought a smile to Kolt’s face.

  His two radios in their chargers blinked green, indicating fully charged batteries. The quickest way for a Delta troop commander to step on it was to launch with tits-up radios. To Kolt, that was almost as bad as having a weapon with no ammo. If you couldn’t communicate with your assaulters or snipers on target, you weren’t leading shit.

  Spare batteries for everything from the weapon optics to NVGs to GPS to Peltor (ear pro) were neatly taped or otherwise secured to the appropriate piece of gear or stuffed in a pocket on the vest. Door charges, both rubber-strip charges and an eighty-four-inch ECT charge, were rolled neatly and secured with a rubber band. Fuse igniters were on the opposite side of the charges until ready to be connected. Kolt made sure to put the igniters in pockets opposite the strips, just to be extra safe.

  He paused, letting his eyes unfocus as he listened to the bustle of Bravo Team kit up. This wasn’t the loud, flashy scene of a sports team. The men were quiet, their conversations low and to the point. Hollywood and the moviegoing public would definitely be disappointed if they saw this. Satisfied that shit was straight, Kolt patted his left shoulder pocket, making sure there was at least a third of a pouch of Red Man tobacco there. He also felt the CAT tourniquet and hoped he wouldn’t need it again. Letting his hand slide down his body, he felt in his left trouser pouch for the silk escape-and-evade map of the surrounding area, along with three hundred dollars in gold coins and his “blood chit,” written in a half-dozen local languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Russian, and Hindi. In the age of jihad, you had no idea whom you might run into, and depending on their affiliation, the prevailing winds, and the mood of whatever god they prayed to, it could all go south in the blink of an eye. Gold, however, had a tendency to put a twinkle in any man’s eye.

  Kolt unfastened his black nylon utility belt and retucked his shirt into his Crye combat trousers before retightening his belt. Next, he secured the looped end of his elastic safety line to his belt buckle and ran the nylon around his waist before securing the snap-link end to the belt loop in his lower back area. In the event of a helo crash, hard landing, or abrupt maneuvers by the pilot of whatever aircraft he was in, Kolt was assured he’d ride that baby all the way to the ground, as long as he clipped in.

  He heard the door to the ready room open and the sound of running boots. Slapshot arrived, a smile on his red-bearded face. “We got a bird! We launch in six minutes!”

  “Good deal,” Kolt said, before thinking about Master Sergeant Jason “Slapsho
t” Holcomb’s physical condition. It had been about a year since the two of them had wrecked the Durango SUV during a high-speed chase of Daoud al-Amriki in northern Mexico. Slapshot took the brunt of it, leaving him with a broken cheekbone and left arm, as well as massive internal injuries. He spent six months in a medically induced coma, and nobody was entirely sure he would pull through.

  “You wanna sit this one out, Jason?” Kolt asked.

  “Kiss my ass, Racer,” Slapshot shot right back. “If I wanted to sit it out, I would have stayed in Fayetteville and been closing down Huske’s Hardware House about now.”

  “Your call, bro.”

  Kolt nodded his approval and went back to his kit. He didn’t want to launch without his troop sergeant major, but he wanted to be sure Slapshot was good with it. Putting the thought behind him, Kolt picked up his call-sign patches with their luminous letters and affixed them to the Velcro on his shoulder pockets. He bent down and picked up his assault vest by the shoulder pads and spun it around. He pushed on the CamelBak water-reservoir sleeve to ensure it was full and then lifted the vest over his head, sliding his arms through the armholes. He grabbed the Fastek buckles on either side and connected them before pulling the running nylon ends tight to snug them to his body. He wondered if all those centuries ago Roman centurions experienced the same reaction he did when the armor went on. He suspected they did.

  Kolt grabbed his two MBITR AN/PRC-148 radios, pulling them from their chargers and checking to ensure the frequency of the one he placed inside the radio pouch on the left side of his vest was on the troop internal net, or lower frequency, while the one he slid into his right-side pouch was set for the upper squadron command frequency.

  “I could be an astronaut after this gig,” Slapshot said, scrambling into his gear.