Foreign and Domestic
Page 1
Advance Praise for Foreign and Domestic
“Foreign and Domestic delivers . . . absolutely fantastic! It captures the pulse-pounding intensity of Lone Survivor and wraps it in a brilliant, cutting-edge plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat . . .
Tata truly is the new Tom Clancy. Turn off your phone, lock your doors, and jump into the phenomenal new book that everyone is going to be talking about.”
—Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Black List
“Tata writes with a gripping and a gritty authority rooted in his matchless real-life experience, combining a taut narrative with an inside look at the frontiers of transnational terrorism. The result is so compelling that the pages seem to turn themselves.”
—Richard North Patterson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of In the Name of Honor
“General Tata’s story mixes high-threat combat with an intriguing and surprising mystery.... Vivid and complex characters make this a fascinating read.”
—Larry Bond, New York Times bestselling author of Exit Plan
“Grabs you and doesn’t let go . . . Written by a man who's ‘been there,’ this vibrant thriller will take you to places as frightening as the darkest secrets behind tomorrow’s headlines . . . bound to be a breakout book for a gifted storyteller who served his country as splendidly as he writes!”
—Ralph Peters, New York Times bestselling author of Lines of Fire
Praise for A. J. Tata’s Sudden Threat, Rogue Threat, Hidden Threat, and Mortal Threat
“An explosive, seat-of-your-pants thriller!”
—W. E. B. Griffin and W. E. Butterworth IV, #1 New York Times bestselling authors
“Topical, frightening, possible, and riveting!”
—James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author
“Powerful and timely. Great stuff!”
—John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author
“Electrifying!”
—Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Black List
“Tata masterfully weaves a plot.”
—Jeremy Robinson, author of Island 731
“Every military thriller writer wants to be compared to Tom Clancy, but to be called better? That’s what A. J. Tata is hearing . . . very realistic.”
—Paul Bedard, U.S. News and World Report
“Riveting entertainment at its best!”
—The Military Writers Society of America
“Captivating, riveting . . . you won’t want to put it down.”
—Grant Blackwood, New York Times bestselling author
“I highly recommend Foreign and Domestic and Mortal Threat.”
—Dick Couch, New York Times bestselling author
FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
A. J. TATA
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Copyright © 2015 Anthony J. Tata
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3540-3
First electronic edition: March 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3541-0
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3541-2
For my beautiful wife, Jodi,
as always.
Table of Contents
Advance Praise for Foreign and Domestic
Praise for A. J. Tata’s Sudden Threat, Rogue Threat, Hidden Threat, and Mortal Threat
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
MILITARY OATH OF ENLISTMENT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
MILITARY OATH OF ENLISTMENT
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Chapter 1
September 2014, Nuristan Province, Afghanistan
The generals had labeled the mission “Kill or Capture.”
Though Captain Jake Mahegan refused to consider anything but capturing the target.
With one hundred mph winds whipping across Mahegan’s face, he was running through the checklist in his mind: insert, infiltrate, over-watch, assault, capture, collect, and extract.
Mahegan knew his men were fatigued from days of continuous operations. They couldn’t afford any mistakes this morning. He felt the mix of emotions that came with knowing they were close to snaring the biggest prize since Bin Laden: The American Taliban, the one man who had posed the gravest threat to United States security since Army aviators and Navy SEALs had killed Osama. Concern for his troops gnawed at the adrenaline-honed edges of excitement. Mission focus was tempered with empathy for his men.
This morning’s target was a bomb maker and security expert named Commander Hoxha, who would lead them to The American Taliban.
Mahegan and what remained of his unit were flying in on the wing seats of an MH-6 Little Bird aircraft to raid Hoxha’s compound. Doubling as both expert bomb maker and the primary protection arm for The American Taliban, Hoxha had weathered wars in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Mahegan’s review of Hoxha’s dossier told him this could be the toughest mission he’d ever faced.
No mistakes.
The generals gave Mahegan this mission because they were on a timeline for withdrawal and he was the best. From the start of his special operations career, his Delta Force peers had called him the “Million-Dolla
r Man.” The other twenty-nine of the thirty candidates in his Delta selection class had washed out. Each selection session cost the Army one million dollars.
For a year, Mahegan’s outfit was casualty-free with impressive scalp counts of sixty-nine Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders. The better and more consistently he’d performed, the more Mahegan’s legend had begun to take on mythical status within the military.
But that had mysteriously changed two months ago. A twenty-man unit had been whittled to eleven men over the past eight weeks, during which they had conducted twenty-two missions. The pace had been relentless and Mahegan knew his team was sucking gas.
The brass, however, had insisted on this early morning mission. They had told him that the President wanted The American Taliban captured before the final troops withdrew. His senior officers directed him to press ahead based on what they called “actionable intelligence.” Translated to Mahegan and his men: They were on their third night with no sleep as they kept pressure on the enemy like a football team blitzing on every play with the added threat that their lives were at stake.
In the two helicopters, Mahegan’s team whipped through canyons so tight the rotor blades appeared to be sparking off the granite spires of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Through his night-vision goggles, Mahegan could see the static electricity produced by the rotors painting a glowing trail, like a time-lapse photo. The helicopters, called Little Birds, were nothing more than a light wind through the valleys. Two canvas bench seats on either side were supporting him and his three teammates with a similarly configured one in trail.
As a backup extraction plan, Mahegan had his pro-tégé, Sergeant Wesley Colgate, leading a two-vehicle convoy from the ground a couple of miles away. The lead vehicle carried Colgate and two more of their Delta Force teammates. In the trailing Humvee was a contract document and detainee exploitation team, known as Docex, from private military contractor Copperhead, Inc. Mahegan had fought Copperhead’s inclusion, but the generals had insisted.
The Task Force 160th pilots skillfully flared the aircraft and touched down into the landing zone at a twenty-degree angle like dragonflies alighting on grass blades.
“Blue,” Mahegan said into the mouthpiece connected to a satellite radio on his back, giving the code word for a successful offload in the landing zone. He expected no reply, and received none, as they were minimizing radio communications. The two helicopters lifted quietly out of the valley and returned to the base camp several miles away in Asadabad.
It was nearly 0400, about three hours before sunrise. As always, as on every single mission it seemed, the fog settled into the valley as if the helicopters had it in tow. He considered Colgate and his two vehicles a few miles away. Moving quickly through the rocky landing zone, Mahegan found the path to their target area.
“Red,” he said, as they passed the ridge to be used by the support team. He watched through his night-vision goggles as Tony “Al” Pucino and his three warriors from the trail helicopter silently chose their support-by-fire positions.
Moving toward the objective, Mahegan noted the jagged terrain and ran the remainder of the checklist through his mind: assault, capture, collect, and extract. Eyeing the darkened trail above the Kunar River a half mile to the west, he paused. His instincts were telling him it would be better to walk away from this objective than to have Colgate risk the bomb-laden path to the terrorists’ compound.
Registering that thought, Mahegan knelt and adjusted his night-vision goggles. He spotted the enemy security forces milling around. They were not alert. To Mahegan, they looked like a bunch of green-shaded sleepy avatars. The offset landing zone had kept their infiltration undetected. They were good to go.
Mahegan gave the signal; they had rehearsed the assault briefly in the compound a few hours ago. From over fifty meters away, he put his silenced M4 carbine’s infrared laser on the forehead of the guard nearest the door, pulsed it twice, which was the cue to the rest of the team, and then drilled him through the skull. He heard the muffled coughs of his teammates’ weapons and saw the other guards fall to the ground, like marionettes with cut strings. Motioning to his assault team, he led them along a defile that emptied directly into the back gate of Commander Hoxha’s adobe compound. With a shove of his massive frame against the wooden back door of the open compound, Mahegan breached the back wall just as the target was yanking his tactical vest up around his shoulders and reaching for his AK-74. Mahegan knew questioning Hoxha was key to the ultimate mission, so he shot him in the thigh, being careful to miss the femoral artery. Hoxha fell in the middle of the open courtyard between the gate and the back door. Several goats bleated and ran, bells around their necks clanging loudly.
“Target down,” he said. “Status.”
“Team One good,” Pucino reported.
“Move to the objective. Help with SSE,” Mahegan directed to Pucino. Not only had they come to capture Hoxha, but Sensitive Site Exploitation usually garnered the most valuable intelligence through analysis of SIM cards, computer hard drives, and maps.
He led the assault team into the courtyard and Patch, one of his tobacco-chewing teammates from Austin, Texas, strapped the terrorist’s hands behind his back using plastic flex-cuffs. Two more men were already making a sweep through the compound, stuffing kit bags full of cell phones, computer hard drives, and generally anything that might be used to kill American forces or provide a clue as to The American Taliban’s location. Mahegan’s agenda included searching for something called an MVX-90, a top-secret American-made transmitter-receiver he believed had fallen into enemy possession.
Mahegan pulled out a picture and a red lens flashlight to confirm he’d shot the right man. He felt no particular emotion, but simply checked another box when he confirmed they indeed had Commander Hoxha, the leader of The American Taliban’s security ring.
With the fog crawling into the narrow canyons, Mahegan confirmed his instinct to call off the Little Birds and Colgate’s team. They were walking out.
With the terrorist flex-cuffed in front of him and the place smelling like burned goat shit, he radioed Colgate, “We are coming to you. Do not move. Acknowledge, over.”
“Roger.” He recognized Colgate’s voice.
On the heels of Colgate’s reply, Pucino radioed, “Team One at checkpoint alpha.” This was good news to Mahegan. Pucino’s team had completed their portion of the sensitive site exploitation and was now securing the road that provided for their egress toward Colgate’s vehicles.
Mahegan checked off in his mind the myriad tasks to come. They were in the intelligence collection phase. He entered the adobe hut, saw his men zipping their kit bags, and then moved outside where Patch was guarding Hoxha.
He heard Hoxha speaking in Pashtun at about the same time he noticed a small light shining through the white pocket of his payraan tumbaan, the outer garment.
Mahegan thought, Cell phone.
He also thought, Voice command. Like an iPhone Siri.
“Patch, shut him up!”
He went for the cell phone in the outer garment, while Patch stuffed a rag in the prisoner’s mouth, tying it off behind his head. Fumbling with the pockets, Mahegan grabbed the smartphone, but saw the device had made a call.
His first thought was that the adobe hut was rigged with explosives. He pushed the end button to stop the call and wondered if he had prevented whatever the phone was supposed to trigger. He smashed the phone into a nearby rock, knowing the SIM card would likely be undamaged and still valuable.
“Everyone inside, get out of the house! All outside, get down! Now!” he said to his men in a hoarse whisper. Mahegan landed on top of the bomb maker, crushing him beneath his 6’4”, 230-pound frame. He saw Patch and two others digging into the dirt, wondering. Patch silently mouthed the letters, “WTF?”
A few seconds later, he heard an explosion beneath the house as the rest of his team came pouring out of the back door.
“There was a tunnel. Put a thermite in it,” Serge
ant O’Malley, from southeast Chicago, said.
“Roger,” Mahegan replied. A thermite grenade would have only stunned anyone in the tunnel, but Mahegan didn’t want to risk going back inside. Two minutes passed with no further activity.
Mahegan stood, pocketed the crushed smartphone, lifted the terrorist onto his back, and said to his team, “Follow me.”
Colgate
About ten minutes before Mahegan said, “We are coming to you,” Colgate was getting eager. He inched his way forward from the rally point along the raging waters of the Kunar River, assuming the worst when he noticed the weather would most likely prevent aircraft from conducting the extraction.
Colgate kept easing forward, pulling the contractors along behind him. The trail they were on was rocky, filled with potholes. It made the Rubicon Trail look like the Autobahn. His gloved hands gripped the steering wheel, sensing the tires on the Ground Mobility Vehicle pushing dirt into the raging waters fifty meters below as he crept toward his mentor.
He and Chayton Mahegan had been together in combat for two years now. To Colgate, Mahegan was a brave warrior, a throwback to his Native American heritage. Chayton and Mahegan were Iroquois names for “falcon” and “wolf,” and Colgate had no doubt Mahegan possessed the ferocity of both predators.
He was proud to be one of Mahegan’s Quiet Professionals. Colgate adhered to his boss’s motto: “Keep your mouth shut and let your actions do the talking.” After two months as Ranger buddies and then being one class apart in Delta selection, Colgate and Mahegan had bonded. Combat had made them closer, like brothers.