by David DeLee
If there was Hell on Earth, this was it. Starling threw his Humvee in reverse as the 5-ton ahead of them barreled backwards, desperate to get out of the kill zone. Starling slammed on the brakes and spun the Humvee around. The roadway behind them exploded in a geyser of macadam, dirt, and smoke.
“Get out!” he shouted to La Rosa. “Get out!”
The overly talkative specialist did as he was ordered, taking his M16 with him. They ran for the gully beside the road and dove for cover.
The 5-ton struck Starling’s Humvee, upending it a split-second before another RPG-launched missile destroyed the cab of the truck, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke. From inside it, Starling and La Rosa could hear the dying men scream.
The engine compartment burned. The flames inside the cab roared out though the shattered windows, reached the canvas cover stretched over the ribs of the truck’s cargo compartment, and soon it was burning hot, too.
From the bed of the truck, voices cried out.
Starling scampered out from the gully. “Cover me!”
He raced for the vehicle, providing his own one-handed cover fire as he ran.
“Sarge! Josh! What the hell are you doing?”
Starling ignored La Rosa. He reached the back of the truck. It was upended at an angle, having crushed the Humvee under its two tires on the one side of rear tandem dual axle. He climbed up on the hood of his crumpled vehicle and unhinged the tailgate of the 5-ton. He let it slam open and jumped back as the Middle-Eastern men trapped inside the cargo space leaped and scrambled off the Humvee to escape the burning truck.
They tumbled to the ground and ducked as bullets pinged off metal and chewed chunks out of the macadam, spitting dark pebbles around them like shrapnel. The men were dressed in drab green and brown baggy clothes. Most wore a taqiyah. All were handcuffed behind their backs with black zip-ties. In all, two dozen men fled from the back of the truck.
Ahead of them another vehicle in the convoy explodes. More rocks and shrapnel rain down, pelting them. Starling ducked and covered his head.
One of the men from the back of the truck, a tall, dark-skinned man, stumbled over to Starling. He was very thin with a scraggily black beard and wore a soiled turban. He turned his back to Starling. The sergeant cut off the zip tie restraints with his Ka-Bar knife.
The others approached him and Starling did the same for them.
When all the prisoners were freed, the tall man in the turban reached out and covered Starling’s hands with both of his, cupping them, shaking them. He patted them.
“You saved our lives. You saved my life. You have been a good friend to me through troubling times, Josh Starling. Your compassion shall not go unrewarded.”
The sound of approaching attack helicopters filled the air. The fighting around them was fierce. The cries of the dying echoed over the barren emptiness of the desert. More RPGs landed and exploded around them.
“You must go, Ghaazi!” Starling shouted over the latest explosion. “Run! Now!”
Ghaazi Alvi nodded and took off running, joining the other escapees as they ran low and quickly, soon disappearing behind the rolling berms of desert and rocky ridges. Starling watched them go with a grim, but satisfied smile. He heard the roar of waiting vehicles and saw a cloud of dust billow up from behind their well-placed concealment. He nodded once and ran back to where La Rosa anxiously waited.
Starling slid back into the safety of their dusty, ad hoc foxhole.
“Christ, Sarge. What’d you do? You aided those prisoners in escaping.”
Starling stared at him for a moment and then said, “I did.”
He aimed his Beretta M9 at La Rosa’s forehead and pulled the trigger, killing him.
To the corpse, he said, “Let me know if Hell’s got a dry or tropical heat.”
CHAPTER ONE
Dressed casually in tan slacks, a short sleeve polo shirt, and boat shoes, Brice Bannon walked through the kitchen of his seaside bar, the Keel Haul. A hole-in-the-wall dive located on the strip in the small town of Hampton Beach, a small jewel on the eighteen-mile New Hampshire seacoast. The Key Haul was Bannon’s pride and joy.
At least it had been until three weeks earlier when a group of terrorists attacked the bar in the middle of the night, shooting up the place with automatic small arms fire and grenades. Fire, smoke, and a lot of bodies later, the resulting damage had made a soup to nuts renovation all but unavoidable. A process the Keel Haul was currently undergoing.
Paint splattered metal scaffolding was pressed up against one wall near the front of the bar. A worker in painter overalls was taping and plastering the ceiling. There were sawhorses and gang boxes, ladders, and big rubber garbage cans with brooms and shoves stuck in them all around the place. The floor was covered in sawdust. Painters, carpenters, electricians, and laborers filled the bar with more people than Bannon typically served on a Saturday night.
He stepped through the propped open kitchen door just as a table saw buzzed into operation behind him. The noise vibrated his back teeth. He flipped back and forth through papers on a clipboard as hammer guns and power drills added to the cornucopia of construction sounds.
In the bar area, the tables and chairs were stacked in one corner, a canvas tarp draped over them. The booths were all covered in plastic sheets, taped down with duct tape. He walked toward the bar, greeted by more banging and the colorful shouting of construction workers and Garth Brooks singing about his friends in low places.
Bannon glanced up from his clipboard in time to see his best friend, John “Skyjack” McMurphy step through the open front door. It was open because there was no longer a door there.
Before the attack, the door had been a conversation piece. Salvaged by Bannon from an 18th Century British frigate he’d discovered during a dive off the coast of Rye Beach, just a few miles north of Hampton Beach. He’d lovely restored the door to near pristine condition and even installed an authentic brass porthole in it, complete with dog ears and nuts.
To gain entry into the bar, the terrorists blew the door to smithereens. What little that was left of it was in the thirty-yard dumpster out back.
McMurphy paused in the doorway and looked around. His expression was one of amused bewilderment as he made his way to the bar. He wore gray running shoes, blue jeans, a plaid work shirt, open and untucked, and underneath it, a black T-shirt that reads: 603 LIVE FREE OR DIE. The state’s area code and motto.
At six-feet tall, McMurphy was as wide as a linebacker and could be twice as mean, when he wanted to be. But his unprovoked demeanor was jovial and as self-deprecating as they come. A former career Chief Warrant officer with the Coast Guard, he had dark red hair which he worn longer now that he was out of the service full-time. As was normally the case, he puffed on a thick stogie jammed into the corner of his mouth.
The stools along the bar were all covered with plastic except for one.
On it sat Captain Floyd, an ancient regular with rounded shoulders who as near as anyone could tell came with the bar when Bannon bought it. Floyd was never seen without his sea captain’s hat. He looked to everyone like those carved wooden statues of a sea captain they sell in every seaside novelty shop throughout the New England seacoast.
When he wasn’t drinking, Floyd covered his mug of beer with a liver-spotted hand to keep the dust from it.
McMurphy grinned. “Should’ve known you’d be here, Floyd.”
“That’s cap’n to you, young man, and you can’t smoke in here. It’s against regulation.”
McMurphy gave the old man a mock salute, ignoring his request regarding the cigar. “Aye, Aye, Cap’n, sir.”
Floyd grinned approvingly. “More like it.”
Bannon stepped behind the bar and dropped the clipboard next to a stack of tumblers also under plastic.
“Some mess you’ve got here, brother,” McMurphy said.
“Tell me about it. These change orders are going to cost a fortune and they just keep rolling in.”
&nbs
p; Bannon was a ruggedly handsome man in his mid-30s. As tall as McMurphy, his was a trimmer physique, one tailored made for surfing which Bannon did a lot of in his younger days and running which he still did with religious regularity. Like McMurphy, a former commander in the Coast Guard, he remained in the reserve, but he no longer cut his dark wavy hair to strict military regulation either. A fine coating of sawdust covered it presently.
McMurphy leaned his elbows on the bar, planted a foot on the brass foot rail, and looked around. He reminded Bannon of a cowboy in the old west.
“When do you expect to be done with all this?”
“A couple or three days, according to my contractor, who I just met with.” He looked around the bar, too. “Yeah, color me skeptical. Beer?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
Bannon reached down under the counter and dug through ice to come up with two icy bottles of Coors Light. Bannon handed one to McMurphy.
“Gracias, sir.” He tipped the bottle toward Bannon and then sucked half of it dry.
“What’re ya thanking ’im for?” Floyd asked. “Service in this joint’s been crap for weeks now.
“That’s because we’re closed, Cap’n. For renovations.”
“Didn’t ya notice all the construction going on around ya?” McMurphy asked.
Floyd looked around as if seeing it all for the first time, a sour expression on his face. He shook his head. “Naw. Ain’t that.”
Bannon gave the old man a bittersweet smile. “I miss Tara, too, Floyd.”
“What?” The old man furrowed his forehead. His thick white eyebrows bunched together over his nose. “Ya mean that girl hangs around here pretending to be a bartender?” He harrumphed. “Don’t make me laugh. She a pain in my—”
“Speaking of Blades, you hear from her?” McMurphy asked, drinking his beer.
“No. She’s basically MIA.” Bannon leaned on the counter and used his thumbnail to tear a rip in the silver label. “Learning her brother was alive, after all this time thinking he wasn’t, it hit her pretty hard.”
“Not to mention finding out he’s the evil terrorist mastermind who tried to kill nearly six-thousand people.” McMurphy shook his head. “That’d mess with anybody’s head.”
“Yeah, then there’s that.”
Bannon didn’t have a brother, or any siblings, so he’d never know the hurt that kind of betrayal would cause, not from a blood relative. His parents had been killed when he was very young. He had no memories of them. He’d grown up in the system. His earliest memories were of being bounced from foster home to foster home until he turned eighteen. That day he joined the Coast Guard, where he found a family at last.
“She went to go find him, didn’t she?” McMurphy asked.
“That’d be my guess.”
“I would’ve helped, if she’d asked.”
“That’s why she didn’t ask. She figures this is her problem to fix.”
McMurphy nodded. “You worried?”
Bannon gave the idea some thought. He shrugged. “Tara can take care of herself.”
McMurphy nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”
The three of them were brothers-and-sisters-in-arm. That made them closer than family. So, of course he was concerned for her. “Tell you the truth though. It’s Ghaazi Alvi’s well-being I’d worry about more once Tara catches up to him.”
“Amen to that, brother.” McMurphy finished his beer. “You ask me, the little weasel deserves everything she gives him.”
“Want another?” Bannon asked, indicating his empty beer bottle.
McMurphy slapped the bar. “No. Thanks. I’ve gotta run.” He stepped back. “The reason I stopped by though, the Seacoast Penguins, we’ve got a game tonight. Six o’clock. Wondered if you wanted to tag along? We’re going up against the Saltwater River Cats. The division leaders. We’re gonna crush ’em.”
McMurphy coached a little league baseball team in the Hampton Beach organized youth league. He’d done it for years and Bannon often went along and helped out. It was fun. He loved baseball and the kids were great. A lot of them were sons and daughters of deployed servicemen and women. As such much of the coaching came down to consoling the broken hearts of those missing their loved ones.
“Would love to, but can’t.” Bannon held up his cell phone. “Grayson. I’ve got a meeting with her later today in Boston.”
Elizabeth Grayson, the former US Army four-star General and current Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security for whom they worked for, on occasion. The two men and Tarakesh ‘Blades’ Sardana formed the core members of a small team of specially-trained, highly-skilled operatives she’d brought together for unique, sensitive, and if necessary, secret missions outside the normal channels of either Homeland Security or the Department of Defense.
When she first approached him, Bannon called it black ops and Grayson bristled at the term.
“Secret, yes, but not black ops,” she insisted. “A single unit that’s small, efficient, and nimble enough to respond to and investigate specific, targeted threats to the homeland, threats that can’t be effectively handled by standard operating means or a normal military response.”
In another words, she said, selling him, a chance to make a real difference in this scary world, to get things done when the lumbering behemoth-sized political bureaucracy can’t or won’t.
The three of them had agreed to her terms, and she to theirs. A few hiccups notwithstanding, the arrangement had worked well so far going on nearly five years.
“Lucky you,” McMurphy said. “What’s she want?”
“Didn’t say, specifically,” Bannon said. “I’m hoping there’s been some progress in location the other railguns.”
Three weeks earlier, Bannon and his team had tracked down a group of terrorists led by a zealot named Aziza Faaid. He and his cell had managed to get their hands on a scaled-down, portable version of a devastating weapon called a railgun. Normally the size of a battleship mounted sixteen-inch, 50-calber naval gun, the sort that weigh two-hundred-sixty-seven-thousand pounds, with a sixty-six-foot long barrel length.
Faaid’s scaled-down railgun fit on the bow of a thirty-five-foot long Bowrider.
Based on state-of-the-art technology, the weapon had been capable of delivering a seven pound projectile to seven times the speed of sound and generating muzzle energies of nearly fifty megajoules. Put in prospective, that was the kinetic energy equal to the impact of a five ton bus traveling at over three-hundred miles per hour.
Faaid’s plan was to use the railgun against a passenger cruise ship called the Oceanic Princess, under sail with over six-thousand guests and crew onboard. Bannon and his team defeated Faaid, but not before twenty-eight people were killed and over a hundred more were injured in the attack. In addition, two FBI agents and a Coast Guardsman named Troy O’Neil were also killed trying to put a stop to the horrific plan.
Only after the weapon was destroyed and the terrorists were either killed or captured, did Bannon and his team learn the railgun they’d sent to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean was only a prototype, one of four. Three more operational railguns were out there, somewhere in the United States, waiting to be used, and no one had a clue where.
McMurphy handed him his empty beer bottle. “Better you than me. Maybe ask her again why she benched us rather than have us help in the search. After all, it was us—we—who saved the day as I recall.” He slapped the bar and turned for the door. “Just saying. Have a good one. You, too, Captain Floyd.”
Floyd held up a single finger.
McMurphy laughed. “You’re a hoot, old timer. Always good for a laugh, Cap’n.”
When he reached the door, where there was no door, McMurphy turned and taking a Seacoast Penguin’s baseball cap from his back pocket mashed it down on his head. He mimed opening an imaginary door, stepping through it and then closing it again. Once he was on the imaginary other side he leaned in. He called out over the construction noise. “Might wanna see abou
t getting a door before you try and lock up tonight. Just a suggestion.”
“It’s being delivered in an hour, wise guy,” Bannon shouted back. “Good luck. I’ve see your kids play. I love ’em, but you’re gonna need it.”
McMurphy feigned horror and placed a hand over his heart. “Ouch!”
Bannon waved him away with a smile. “Get out of here.”
Strike of the Stingray – Coming Soon
If you enjoyed meeting Brice Bannon and his friends,
be sure to check out David’s other series
And for more information about all his books check out his author page:
David DeLee's Author Page
ALSO BY DAVID DELEE
Grace deHaviland Bounty Hunter series
Too Far
Stare at the Moon
Takedown
With Intent to Deceive
Pin Money
Fatal Destiny
Runners
Brice Bannon Seacoast Adventures
Facing the Storm
The Oceanic Princess
Strike of the Stingray – Coming Soon
Nick Lafferty Crime Thrillers
Out of the Game
Crystal White
Flynn & Levy Police Thrillers
While the City Burns
Moral Misconduct
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David DeLee is the author of the Grace deHaviland Bounty Hunter series, including the novels Fatal Destiny, Pin Money, With Intent to Deceive, Takedown. And Too Far. David's also written many short stories featuring Grace, most notably Bling, Bling, which appeared in the anthology The Rich and the Dead edited by Nelson DeMille.
David’s other work includes the novel Crystal White which SUSPENSE MAGAZINE called “…a dark portrayal of the evil that men—and women—can do.”, the second novel in the Nick Lafferty thriller series, Out of The Game, and Moral Misconduct, his Flynn & Levy police procedurals, and his Brice Bannon Seacoast Adventures.
