by Dalton Fury
Obviously pleased with the setup, several of the stage hands carrying corn-bristle brooms moved to the helo touchdown points, careful to place the soles of their tennis shoes within the impressed sand lines that were left by the tires of the pickups. They delicately swept the helo tires’ impressions, leveling the sand to remove any evidence of its presence. Continuing backward, they were careful to remove the tire-tread imprints as well as their own tennis-shoe prints until they reached the hard dirt road again. Within fifteen minutes or so, the three Mercs had reached the hilltop and the ambush line.
The scene in the shallow valley floor roughly thirty-five meters to Kolt’s front and about fifteen meters below was incredible eerie. A dozen bound and hooded men, still in their prison whites, some likely relaxing, excited about the impending prisoner release, seeing their families again after years in captivity, hopeful of a productive future. Others, equally ecstatic about the surprise-release announcement by the president of the United States weeks earlier, maybe considering a little time off, just enough to catch up with family and friends, before rejoining the jihad and plotting to pay back the arrogant infidels as soon as possible.
Kolt overheard the Merc kneeling three meters to his front right and just behind the linear-arrayed, prone operators whisper into his helmeted mouthpiece.
“Blaster, check, check, check,” the obvious leader said.
Kolt tensed up, shaking his head quickly in an effort to lift the black hood a little higher on his forehead to improve his vision of the ambush area. He was fairly confident Joma couldn’t see him even if he was unhooded and awake inside the kill zone.
“Stand by, five, four, three, two, one, execute, execute, execute.” Not much of a warning, Kolt thought. But he knew the language. He figured he was the only one without ear protection and quickly raised his hands to cover his ears while holding the hood above his eyes. An operator squeezed the clacker three times, initiating the textbook ambush with the most casualty-producing weapon first—an M18 antipersonnel Claymore mine. Seven hundred steel balls traveling at just a hair under four thousand feet per second shredded the terrorists lying in the sand, peppered the thin skin doors and rear beds of the two Toyotas, and shattered the tempered-glass windows. The elevated ambush line of prone marksmen and machine gunners opened up simultaneously in classic high-noon ambush fashion. Thirty seconds of cyclic-rated machine guns, simultaneous with nearly two dozen personal M4 rifles, cut the convoy to pieces. Then, talking in sequence, first the heavier 7.62 mm M240B and then the lighter 5.56 mm LMG swapped back and forth, sending red tracers and ball ammo into the X with resulting ricochets careening into the distance until they reached tracer burnout. One operator popped up to a kneeling position, yanked both ends of a five-and-a-half-pound M72A3 antitank launcher to fully extend the weapon, and rotated it to his right shoulder. He steadied the rocket, aiming through the pop-up peep site, and slightly tilted his head to the left.
“Back-blast area clear!” he barked before pressing the DETENT button and sending the internal 66 mm warhead to the engine-block area of the dark-blue Toyota.
Except for the massive loss of life, it was really no different than training on a static ambush range back at Bragg, using wooden vehicle facsimiles and paper e-type silhouettes. In about sixty seconds, it was all over and Kolt removed his fingers from his ears.
“Cease fire, cease fire!” the leader yelled.
The operators stood very professionally, dropping their spent mags and inserting fresh ones. They began moving back down the goat path the same way they came. They deliberately left the spent brass and metal machine-gun links where they landed on the hilltop. It was just another piece of the intricate puzzle set up to alleviate any doubt in the Taliban’s eyes.
Once at the bottom of the hill, the still-hooded Kolt was moved into the kill zone and placed near the back of the white Toyota. He watched the ambush force systematically remove the flex ties and hoods from the dead former Gitmo detainees. They moved deliberately, half starting from the right, the other half from behind Kolt and to the left. They met in the center and then continued on through the other team’s sector to ensure they didn’t miss anything that would compromise the insertion.
The blue truck’s back leather seats were engulfed in flames. A thick black smog snaked out of the shattered windows and high into the air. The engine hood, thrown from the vehicle when the warhead impacted, lay mangled and pockmarked roughly forty feet off the road. The smell of leaking gasoline and engine oil hung in the air.
The mystery operators moved around the kill zone with a sense of urgency. Some opened large black trash bags as others removed the hoods from the dead and cut the plastic flex ties from their wrists. Within a couple of minutes, the kill zone was sterile.
A few seconds later, three helmeted and masked commandos approached Kolt. Two were carrying a hooded man, who Kolt figured was Joma. They set him down on the desert floor next to the lead shot-up and burning vehicle. Two operators flex-tied Joma’s ankles together and wrists behind his back before rolling him on his side. One of the operators pulled out a Glock 19 9mm while the other two positioned his leg away from his body. He aimed it at Joma’s outer leg, depressed the trigger safety, and broke the four-pound trigger. A single shot at close range gave Joma a clean, flesh wound on his thigh and a mean powder burn. It looked worse than it really was, and Joma didn’t feel a thing.
“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Kolt growled as several of the Mercs suddenly corralled him to the ground. They didn’t answer him. Instead, they flexed Kolt just as they did with Joma, wrapped a rope around his mouth to keep him quiet, and laid him on his back. They then dragged him away from Joma, back around the rear shot-up pickup truck, and placed him on the other side, opposite Joma. Kolt struggled only slightly, worried that if Joma was watching all this somehow through his black hood, then the mission was compromised already and he wouldn’t see the sun come up.
With the two guys still holding him on the ground, the gunman holstered his pistol and unsheathed his fixed blade knife. With a quick swipe, he delivered an unexpected quarter-inch gash on the back of Kolt’s head, cutting a three-inch hole in the black hood.
“Motherfuckers!” Kolt screamed as much for the pain as for the surprise. Instinctively, he turned around and lunged for the knife man, grabbing his assault vest and finding his M4 hung in front of his chest. Blind to his surroundings, Kolt maintained his grip on the operator’s vest, just below the armpit, and delivered a palm strike to the chin, but he couldn’t shake the right hand grip on his own collar.
In an instant, Kolt grabbed a handful of his opponent’s right sleeve to control his elbow while punching in a high grip with his right hand to control the left shoulder. Using both tight grips, Kolt pulled himself up and into his opponent as he planted his left foot on the operator’s right hip. Kolt launched into the air, thinking standard arm lock by simply falling backward to the ground while controlling an arm. Kolt sensed the operator was skilled in jiujitsu, feeling him crouch to counter the attack. This keyed Kolt to remain high, rotate his body counterclockwise around the man’s head, and push hard off the man’s right hip. Now practically sitting on top of the man’s shoulders, from behind Kolt leaned forward and locked in a triangle with his legs around the man’s upper body. Kolt and his opponent were locked now together, where Kolt goes, so goes his adversary.
Kolt let his body weight carry him forward, dropping his head between his opponent’s legs. With Kolt now upside down but facing his opponent, he executed a forward roll while reaching back to grab the man’s right ankle. Kolt now could control the roll as they both tumbled, executing a complete forward roll locked in unison. The flying reverse triangle is a risky move, particularly when you are hooded and in the dark. Kolt was about to stick it, but, to lock in the submission, he tightened the crook of his right leg over his left foot, pulled the operator’s leg into his body, and arched his hips forward.
It was tight—Kolt could feel it—and
he could feel the man tense up and struggle. Kolt felt the operator tap his hands frantically against Kolt’s leg, which, if they were simply rolling in the dojo, Kolt would release the hold . He was going to put him to sleep, no matter how many times he tapped. Kolt was pissed.
Thinking ahead, as soon as the operator went limp, Kolt would reach up and remove the rope from his neck and tear the hood off. But the surprise impact of a rifle butt on top of his head kept him on his back, causing him to release the triangle and open the man’s airway again. Kolt felt the hands of several operators pouncing on him before being rolled over to his stomach. He felt at least three knees in his back and a foot or two on his legs, pressing him to hard dirt road.
“Relax, man,” a deep authoritative voice whispered in his ear.
Kolt started to struggle again as soon as he felt the muzzle of a firearm against the fleshy part of his rear right hip. Unable to free himself to do a damn thing about it, Kolt heard the shot and felt the excruciating pain simultaneously.
Lying facedown, now under an operator’s dingy tennis shoe pressing on his upper back, he applied direct pressure with his right hand to his wounded hip. Kolt wanted to go ballistic, he wanted to roll over and snap the asshole’s leg in half, he wanted to get up and beat the shit out of every one of those jackasses. The knife wound was bad enough, but a bullet to the ass was way over the top.
He knew that would end the mission to locate Nadal the Romanian; find the terrorist cell before it attacked the United States; maybe locate Ayman al-Zawahiri; and, just as important as the first three combined, rescue Cindy Bird, or, find her body.
Kolt stopped resisting, letting the operators understand he probably had figured out on his own what he was up against and what he was about to blow.
His wounds, like Joma’s, were effective, not deadly. Kolt realized they were part of the plan all along to protect their true identities and provided legitimacy to the mock ambush. Nobody in the North-West Frontier Province would believe only an American and one Muslim would have miraculously survived a near ambush like that one. No, nobody would buy that. They’d be tagged as spies right away, beheaded in short order. The plan to wound them hadn’t been briefed back at Tungsten headquarters in Atlanta, but at least the wounds wouldn’t keep them from walking.
“God bless you, man,” the same voice whispered in Kolt’s ear as he maintained pressure on his hip wound.
“Allah u Akbar! Allah u Akbar!” Kolt yelled, overtly signaling to the operators from the Department of Special Services that he was good to go and they could initiate their exfil plan.
Eight minutes later, the ambushers were lifting off in two black helicopters and heading west. The only witness to the anarchic carnage, Kolt Raynor—Embed 0706—was bleeding out all over his white Gitmo prison uniform from two flesh wounds among a dozen or so martyred brothers.
Kolt’s insertion operation had begun. He was pissed that, without warning or explanation, they wounded him and Joma on purpose. At least Joma was unconscious when he was shot. That certainly wasn’t briefed in any of the numerous mission briefs he attended. But, as he lay in the sand listening to the sound of whipping helo blades fade away, he realized that even though the wounds were painful, and a pain in the ass, they just might let him keep his head.
Kolt understood it wasn’t something that he could really plan for or rehearse. He figured Carlos, the Mercs, and everyone else in Tungsten read on to the operation knew that as well. And reading Kolt’s file, they knew there was high risk that Kolt would be pissed enough to abort the mission himself.
Fucking Carlos!
Besides the hip wound, Kolt reasoned the cut on the back of his head held merit. It was a real bleeder, but it didn’t affect his vision. Blood wouldn’t run into his eyes. Moreover, it kept his mind off the pain of his leg and required him to hold a dirty rag over the wound to control the bleeding. If there was early doubt about Kolt’s legitimacy by his finders, the blood might be necessary.
Alone with the dead, Kolt caught himself cussing not only Carlos but also Colonel Webber a little. Moreover, he realized that he was in a strange situation. He had been on dozens of raids where the blood and guts and aroma of death were part of the landscape. This time was different. He wasn’t accustomed to being left behind in rubble. That part of the raid was usually passed to the conventional army unit that owned the battle space. Those guys usually showed up an hour or two after Delta had serviced the target to conduct what some referred to as “sloppy seconds.” The military, though, in its typical acronym-rigid fashion, prefers the term SSE—sensitive-site exploitation. Essentially, anything of potential intelligence value was rounded up and bagged, itemized, and photographed. Large caches of money, pictures, cell phones, computer hard drives, weapons, ammunition, explosives, and various IED-producing parts like boxes of old wind-up clocks, key fobs, garage door openers, and toy-car remote controls topped the list. The SSE force would question the family members left behind, women and children really. All fighting-age males were either smoked immediately or, if of potential intelligence value, marked as PUCs—person under custody—ostensibly to appease the political winds and the picky lawyers. PUCs would have been removed already by Delta and delivered elsewhere for questioning.
Kolt’s thoughts wandered back to the guys responsible for all the destruction. Who were those guys? The tan masks didn’t hide all the gray hair and salt-and-pepper goatees. Besides the leader giving the commands on the hilltop and the whisperer behind the truck, they didn’t talk at all. They were synchronized, efficient, focused, and certainly moved with the purpose and precision characteristic of America’s most elite Tier One commandos.
They weren’t Delta, though, since he didn’t recognize any of their body styles or their movements in the darkness. Delta operators move on target in a very distinct way, and these weren’t Unit guys. He also wondered how in the world a guy comes by a slot on their team. He also figured they wondered who in the hell Kolt was and how he worked himself into such a unique gig. A gig they most likely weren’t too jealous of after seeing him wounded and left behind as they flew away. To Kolt, though, whether they knew the details about Embed 0706’s mission wasn’t anything to waste time worrying about now. What was important was that the mysterious operators were willing to kill men in cold blood and face the demons later. Just like Carlos said they would.
Operation Shadow Blink had survived the first phase.
TWENTY-THREE
Tungsten headquarters, Underground, Atlanta, Georgia
Several thousand miles away in the Atlanta underground headquarters of Tungsten, a half-dozen eyes were glued to the plasma screen. The persistent eye in the sky turning circles at twenty-five thousand feet above ground level, the Predator RQ-1 reconnaissance drone, provided real-time video downlink to Carlos and the other senior leaders of Tungsten. Even during inclement weather, or haze, clouds, or smoke, its onboard synthetic-aperture radar still communicated via satellite thousands of miles away.
“Three hours and counting,” Carlos said to the group seated around the large oval mahogany table. “Forty-six minutes and negative movement.”
“Are you sure he isn’t dead?” the attractive female intel analyst who had accompanied Carlos and Kolt to Gitmo asked the group. “Could his wounds be so bad that he would have bled out?”
The ones who remained seated and standing nearby and who were still focused on the three large plasma screens secured to the wall wondered how long it can take to respond to a torrent of gunfire and a dozen dead guys. Surely someone heard something. The locals always did.
The others, busy working other future or ongoing Tungsten ops in other parts of the world, had migrated back to their cubicles.
“Wait a second. One of them is moving,” Carlos stated excitedly before turning around to one of the analysts working the current operation. “Chat the drone operator and direct them to zoom in.”
“That’s gotta be 0706 or Joma; everyone else is confirmed dead by the
insert force.”
Western Pakistan
Kolt startled awake to complete silence, his body responding to the trauma and loss of blood. He wasn’t sure how long he had been asleep. An hour? Maybe two? After at least a couple of hours waiting for a passing vehicle to discover the ambush and having gone through his story a hundred times in his head, Kolt had fallen into deep sleep.
Now awake, he pushed to a knee, gained his balance, and stood up straight. He repositioned the makeshift tan head bandage he had stripped from one of the dead terrorist’s clothing and positioned it correctly. A second bandage, taken from a pant leg of the same terrorist and torn in two using the sharp edge of some broken glass still in the window, was tied around his right leg, deep in his crotch and routed around his lower right buttocks.
Walking with a limp, he did a complete 360 around the ambush site. Nothing looked different or combed over from earlier. There was nothing that the Mercs might have overlooked earlier that might compromise him or raise undue suspicions by the Taliban once they arrived.
A stream of warm blood ran down Kolt’s neck just as he heard a blood-curdling gargling sound. He quickly dropped to a knee, assessing whether an animal or human was responsible for the noise, and tied a second knot on the head bandage to help stop the bleeding.
“Shit!”
Kolt couldn’t tell if the ambush had been discovered by a local or if one of the terrorists from Gitmo wasn’t actually dead yet. Anyone alive certainly risked compromising the mission. He figured the operators responsible for the bloody mess would have ensured everyone was dead before they hastily departed. Had something gone terribly wrong? Only Kolt and Joma were to survive the ambush. Joma was still out of it, the drugs not having worn off yet.
Allah was expecting everyone else.
Staying on his knees, Kolt crawled closer to the white pickup. Who knows what the mysterious operators of the insert force might have left behind. Kolt vectored in on the stifled gurgling. Only a few shards of glass were still present in the back window. The claymore mine and subsequent gunfire had taken care of the rest.