by Dalton Fury
“Your boys took a hell of a dunking tonight,” Yost said.
“No wetter than yours,” Webber said, annoyed that he rose to the bait. It was no secret DOD was considering combining Delta and the SEALs, or even getting rid of one altogether. It was one of the reasons this joint exercise had been planned.
“So much for the training exercise,” Yost said.
Is he looking for an elbow to the teeth? He and Yost had been friends for years, but right now Webber was ready to pop him one. “I’m happy everyone is okay,” Webber said, exerting more control over himself.
Webber climbed the last set of aluminum stairs from the second deck and lowered his head as he followed Yost, stepping over the bottom of the watertight doorjamb. The hangar deck was bustling with activity as sailors and troops ducked in and out of the unit’s and the 160th’s open equipment containers. Maintenance crews were seen behind the roped-off area that held the spare AH-6 gunships, their wooden rocket cases, and the MH-6Ms, prepping to launch if the order came.
Hangar deck elevator number two lowered from the flight deck on the starboard side of the ship. Backlit by the moonlight bouncing off the dark blue sky, a dozen or so silhouettes stood on the elevator as it slowly came into view.
Webber saw Kolt’s feet first as the elevator cleared the outer edge of the flight deck and continued to lower a half foot per second. Behind Kolt, Slapshot was visible, and nearby two SEALs, one holding a K9 in his arms, and just behind them the two Little Bird pilots. Webber marveled at Raynor’s nine lives. The soldier was a lot like the USS Ponce in that regard. Two years ago the ship was to be decommissioned, but all that changed when U.S. Central Command realized they needed a floatable forward staging base to handle contingencies in the Middle East and off the coast of Africa. Now, instead of being so many car parts or flying the flag of some third-world ally, the USS Ponce was a refitted fighting machine, and had become the first ever laser weapon system.
Webber and Yost stood a few feet from Kolt as the medics went to work. They used medical scissors to cut off his horse collar and assault vest, then drew the scissors up his arms, cutting the polypropylene dry suit away from his body.
“You cut into me and I’ll sic that damn dog on you,” Kolt growled. “And I could have just taken the assault vest off. You didn’t have to ruin it.”
Webber chuckled to himself.
As Yost moved off to check on his SEALs, Webber moved in closer to Raynor. A dozen or so medics were checking the survivors’ vitals. Webber noticed the blood running down Kolt’s face.
One of the medics shone a small flashlight into his eyes and told him to blink, while holding pressure on the gash with a piece of Kerlix. A second medic inserted an ear thermometer for a few seconds, while a third medic did a full 360 of his head and upper torso. As they worked, Webber couldn’t help but notice the half dozen or so battle scars smattered over Kolt’s six-pack, pecs, and right upper arm. The cold water had turned the scars bright pink, contrasting heavily with his beach-bum-like tanned upper torso.
Kolt’s scars of war were no surprise to Webber, but the massive shoulder tattoo certainly was. It stretched from just above the base of his left bicep, captured the entire swole deltoid, and engulfed his entire left pec muscle, depicting Spartan warriors with their battle shields tactically aligned and raised in defense as arrows rained down on them. As Webber neared, he realized the tattoo was pretty fresh, maybe a few days to a week, still slightly swollen and burnt red. Then he noticed the phrase “Molon Labe” and smiled. The mark was as significant as the statement. Webber understood Kolt was covering the vicious scarring from the blue-on-blue bullet he took at Yellow Creek.
But, something wasn’t sitting right with Webber. Something was strange about Kolt’s demeanor. His eyes were distant, barely blinking naturally. He couldn’t be sure, but the Delta commander had seen this before in other operators over the years. For a second, he thought Kolt Raynor was showing the classic signs of shell shock.
“New ink, I see, Major,” Webber said.
No response. Webber took a few steps closer to Raynor, raised his right hand to wave it in front of Kolt’s eyes.
It worked. Kolt’s head shook slightly as if he had just been pulled from a deep trance. “Uh, yes, sir, sorry,” Kolt said, coming around and seemingly not worried at all. “Nice night for a swim.”
Webber tried not to smile. He knew Raynor, if anybody, had earned the right to ink his body any way he saw fit. As long as he didn’t go full sleeve, or full auto chop shop and ink his neck and face, at this point, after over a decade at war, Webber didn’t give two shits.
He also knew Kolt’s recent meetings with the unit psych, Doc Johnson, had revealed potential flaws in Kolt’s mental capacity to command a Delta squadron, something Webber didn’t plan to share with the special mission unit board members. Something he wasn’t entirely surprised about, given the trauma Raynor had suffered during the Yellow Creek debacle. But something Webber hoped like hell was a temporary condition that his top officer would soon overcome. All things considered, as long as Kolt didn’t fall off the wagon, Webber figured he could manage the trauma.
“You okay, Raynor?” Webber asked, extending his hand out to shake Kolt’s.
“Yes, sir, I’m all right, just a little cold at the moment,” Kolt said.
“No, listen to me. Are you okay?” Webber asked, speaking low and slow.
Raynor blinked and looked around the flight deck before looking back at him. “It sucked, but I’m fine. My reflexes were fast and I kept my head. Hell, I saved that squid’s mutt. I’m one hundred percent. Well, high nineties, anyway.”
Webber held Raynor’s gaze for several seconds. If Kolt was bullshitting him, he was brilliant. Webber nodded. “Right. Get yourself squared away, knock out a quick hotwash with Slapshot and the pilots, then get to my quarters,” Webber said. “I’ve got a job for you.”
“Something that is more important than hot chow first, sir?” Kolt asked, surprised at the urgency, considering he was almost dead less than fifteen minutes ago and still wet from his crotch to his toes.
“Afraid so, Racer,” Webber said. “I’ll fill you in soon enough.”
“C’mon, sir,” Kolt said as the medics started to pull his dry suit down past his ass and to his ankles, revealing Kolt’s black Under Armour Boxerjocks. “Can’t you give me a mad minute or warning order now?”
“All right, Kolt,” Webber said, knowing the old Kolt had come back to earth. “We’ve got intel on a high-priority target in Syria. It’s actionable, but only if we go now. I want you on the mission.”
Raynor didn’t react, which was impressive considering he’d nearly lost his life not half an hour ago. And now here he was asking Raynor to go put it on the line again. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
“My team—” Raynor started to say, but Webber cut him off.
“No. You’re going without them.”
“Don’t tell me you’re putting me in command of SEALs?”
Webber shook his head. “Not SEALs … and not in command.”
Afrin, Syria—April 2014
Delta Force operator Major Kolt “Racer” Raynor considered his lot in life and decided it was definitely … interesting. Only two weeks ago he’d been fighting for his life in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Now he was sitting in the back of a nondescript van deep in Syria, on the lookout for a Syrian Army officer known as the Barrel Bomb Butcher. Not satisfied with rockets, mortars, and chemical weapons, the Syrians had begun dropping fifty-five-gallon drums filled with explosives from helicopters onto civilian areas. The Butcher was a particularly zealous proponent of these massacres, and so he was now on the target list.
“You got the ass you aren’t gonna kill anyone today, Racer?” Noble Squadron commander Lieutenant Colonel Rick “Gangster” Mahoney asked, his voice filled with sarcasm.
“Just a dude in the back today,” Kolt said from six feet behind in the rear cabin seat closest to the back doors
, “strap-hanging with no dog in the fight.”
Kolt let Gangster’s smart-ass comment roll off his back like a heavy rucksack dropped after a forty-mile suckfest. He didn’t need to be reminded. He knew he wasn’t there to do anything but watch. Hell, Colonel Webber had warned him back at Bragg, several times actually, not to start any shit.
Yes, maybe Kolt could take some mental notes, but, as every operator knows, on target trouble can find you, whether you like it or not.
“SITREP, over,” Gangster said from the front seat of the panel van as he released his push-to-talk.
“This is Jackal Two, no change.”
Jackal Two, one of the sniper teams perched inside the vacant third floor of a half-finished block of flats, had scoped out the target at exactly 247 yards. The hide was good enough to easily range the old adobe-brick-and-plaster house’s huge front door, painted with odd-looking multicolored geometric patterns, and the small courtyard. Even a massive crystal chandelier, a favorite Syrian decoration even in the poorer villages, could be scoped from two and a half football fields away.
“Rog. Thirty mikes till sunrise. If the Butcher loved his mother as much as the agency said he did, he’s there,” Gangster said.
Speaking into a handheld mike connected to a coiled black cord that ran to the SATCOM radio positioned just behind the black curtain, Gangster was calm and collected. And why shouldn’t he be?
Gangster was a shit-hot Delta Force squadron commander, on the very short list to someday command all of Delta Force. In fact, the word on the street was that he was being specifically groomed for it. Kolt knew the type for sure. The kind of guy always picked first when choosing sides during a neighborhood pickup game, or the guy that scored the hottest cheerleaders in high school.
Like everyone else, Gangster had his skeletons. But nobody expected him to be perfect all the time. To most guys in the building, his flaws were manageable and easily massaged. But to Kolt Raynor, his peer Delta officer for many years, a risk-averse reputation was a deal breaker. Kolt didn’t care if the guy had won two of the last three Unit annual triathlons.
Behind the wheel and up front with Gangster sat a dirty-blond operator named Trip Griffin, one of the few guys in the Unit whose first name was so unique that it became his de facto code name. Kolt sensed Trip’s pucker factor fully pegged as he kept a keen eye on the dense bed of gray and tan adobe single- and two-story homes about a block or so away and about two hundred feet lower. The black curtain separated the front seats of the panel van from the two guys in the back, but more importantly it hid the red and green radio lights from being seen by curious locals outside.
“Let’s go to one hundred percent from here on out, over,” Gangster transmitted over his push-to-talk.
“Rog. Jackal’s up.”
“All assault elements, you roger my last?” Gangster asked, checking on the three assault teams loitering in their rolling LCCs, or last covered and concealed positions.
“This is Echo One, up!”
“Golf One, we’re up.”
“Fox is good.”
“This is Noble Zero-One, roger all, out!” Gangster said, sounding pleased his teams were set, alert, and ready to turn the target.
Bumpered on a pseudo-discreet piece of high ground, overlooking the ancient municipality of Jindires, the lemon-looking Peugeot panel van wasn’t necessarily out of place. Even though it had a finicky ignition, like an old John Deere, nobody could argue that it wasn’t local-looking enough. Syria’s northern neighbor, Turkey, only thirteen miles away, had hundreds of thousands of them. If well-paid CIA assets were good at anything, acquiring suitable assault vehicles for high-risk, high-yield, low-visibility ops topped the list.
Tilted slightly on the shoulder of a one-lane muddy road and adjacent to one of the village’s four local cemeteries, the van was located more out of necessity than choice. Not a perfect spot for Gangster’s command and control element, but it did provide excellent radio line of sight with his assault teams, just over a mile away. They had driven the hills in a light rain for over an hour, pushing their luck darting in and out of the village, checking possibles identified during the planning phase, before bumpering up. For the second day in a row the spot would have to do. As long as the tires could tame the mud-slicked road, they were good.
“Guys, hate to break it to you, but I need to lock out a SEAL team,” Kolt Raynor said from the back of the van.
“You gotta be kidding, Racer,” Gangster said in disgust, ripping the curtain open to look in the back. “A shit? Now?”
Kolt didn’t appreciate the attitude one bit, but he understood the death stare he was currently getting from Gangster, now turned around in his seat. Gangster had an op to run. The Unit, particularly Gangster’s squadron, had been on the Barrel Bomb Butcher’s trail for some time now, with a couple of near misses and several agency-provided nuggets that took them down dead ends. The dead ends, although not resulting in the loss of any mates, were becoming a running joke within the halls of the Joint Special Operations Command. To the point that the Delta commander, Colonel Jeremy Webber, had to convince COMJSOC to not push the Butcher kill/capture op to SEAL Team Six. All this led to the sketchy decision to stake the Butcher’s mother’s house two mornings in a row.
Sure, the CIA had reported that the Butcher’s mother was terminally ill. And their assets in the Aleppo Governorate likely had good intel that her days were numbered. Actionable enough for the National Command Authority to cut an oh-dark-thirty deployment order and push a troop from the alert squadron to a CIA safe house in the Turkish border town of Kilis. Whether the intel was legit or not was still to be seen.
“Man, I’m sorry, but those Turkish meatballs have me jacked up,” Kolt said, ashamed at his predicament and feeling like a jackass, especially knowing the pressure Gangster was obviously feeling to score the Butcher.
“Can’t you hold it? We’re thirty minutes from showtime,” Gangster said. “I’m not losing the Butcher like the Mossad lost Marzban.”
“Afraid not, partner,” Kolt said, realizing that Gangster was more amped up than he thought.
Bringing up Marzban Tehrani—the former leader of the Iranian dissident group the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, and now the current bane of the Israeli prime minister’s existence, was about as random as you can get. Besides, Kolt figured, they couldn’t talk much smack, as they hadn’t positively identified the Butcher yet.
“I’ll pop out the back doors and find a tree. Be back in a flash,” Kolt said.
“Unbelievable!” Gangster said. “All right, make it quick, heat tab’s almost up.”
Kolt unslung his suppressed Flat Dark Earth–colored HK416C ultra-compact rifle and laid it on the van’s carpeted floor. He tapped his Caspian .45 cal single stack placed against his appendix on the right and under his wife-beater tank and local-enough turtleneck wool sweater before reaching into a small zippered bag.
“JoJo, cover the radio lights for a second, will ya?” Kolt said to Gangster’s squadron communicator.
“Yeah, good idea.”
“Three knocks on the window and it’s me, cool?”
“Roger,” JoJo said. “You got shit paper?”
“Right here, partner, saw it coming,” Kolt said as he held up a fresh roll of foreign-made two-ply tissue paper like a panning forty-niner discovering a piece of gold.
“Hurry up, Racer!” Gangster chimed in from the front.
Yeah, asshole! I didn’t ask for this gig anyway.
Kolt was right, actually. Right-seat riding with Gangster was Colonel Webber’s big idea, and Kolt, hell, even Gangster wasn’t all that fired up about the arrangement. Kolt and Gangster knew Unit standard operating procedures required it, though. Any guy on the bubble for special mission unit, or SMU, selection for squadron command strap-hung with current commanders during an operation. No big deal to Kolt. Definitely not necessary either, as he’d been around long enough to know how to synchronize multiple troops on target and in comb
at.
Kolt pulled the inch-thick blast curtain away from the back double doors and reached for the handle. He peeked out the back window for a few seconds, making sure he wasn’t going to bump into any early-morning strollers or punctual market workers, and eased the door open. Kolt stepped out into a thick fog bank, felt the light rain hit his dark brown hair and short cropped beard, and felt his leather boots sink a full inch into the chocolate-colored mud.
Shit! Footprints!
Kolt stepped to the left to gain the tall grass, toward the two-foot-high cemetery wall made of aged and stacked gray and light brown quarry rocks. If the defaced and broken tombstones were any indication, some vandalized with spray-painted phrases in Arabic, they had to have been laid in at least two hundred years ago.
With his tracks better concealed, Kolt moved twenty feet or so to clear the corner of the rock wall and spotted a patch of thin trees just off the military crest of the hill. He moved down and in behind the second tree in line and, using the heel of his left boot, scraped the pine needles away before carving out a small slit trench. He turned his back to the tree, dropped his cheap designer jeans, careful to keep his mini-blaster from falling from its holster, and squatted.
Not a moment too soon either.
Kolt looked out to the south as he prepped the first folds of shit paper, happy to find a few of the trees not harvested by locals for timber or firewood. He remembered what the intel analyst had said about not even thinking about finding a forest to hide in. Supposedly, in ancient times, Syria was richly forested, until forest fires and basic human needs depleted the vast majority of European black pines and kermes oaks.