by Dalton Fury
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About the Author
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In loving memory of Dalton Fury
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
I am lucky enough to have known and worked with Dalton Fury for nearly a decade, beginning with the publication of his memoir, Kill Bin Laden, the story of his time as the senior ranking military officer at the Battle of Tora Bora. As a Delta Force commander, he helped create, along with some of Delta’s most talented sergeants, the tactical concept of the operation to hunt and kill bin Laden. Kill Bin Laden was tremendously successful, a national bestseller and the first book to detail just how close Delta Force came to capturing bin Laden, how close U.S. bombers and fighter aircraft came to killing him, and exactly why he slipped through our fingers—though he couldn’t hide forever, of course.
Dalton was an extremely private man (thus the pseudonym) but also a man of principle. He wanted people to know what happened, why the world’s most wanted man got away when we had him in our sights. The book’s success was a mixed blessing for Dalton. His story reached a wide audience and his somewhat reluctant appearance on 60 Minutes, in full disguise, helped bring attention to the book. Unfortunately, it also brought attention to him personally. He was conflicted: He wanted to help promote the book, but he didn’t want the attention to be on him. He decided after the 60 Minutes interview that he wouldn’t appear on television and was unlikely to even do radio interviews again. He was in the office one day and I told him, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” He stopped what he was doing and gave me a look and smiled. With that one look, he reminded me that few people can tell a Delta Force operator, a member of one of the most fearsome military units ever assembled, what to do.
We had a wonderful working relationship. He was professional and funny, warm and personable. He loved book publishing, and when I said to him, “With a pseudonym like Dalton Fury, you should be writing thrillers,” he admitted he always wanted to write fiction. Thus, the Kolt “Racer” Raynor series of Delta Force novels was born. They, too, became bestsellers, and with their mix of action and detailed accuracy, they attracted fans that include authors James Rollins and Brad Thor, members of America’s special operations community, and many thousands of others. Most important, he had a blast with the novels. He didn’t have to give interviews, he could go back to doing what he loved, which, when he wasn’t working or writing, involved spending quiet time with his family.
In September of 2016, while hard at work on the fifth book of the series, Execute Authority, which you now hold in your hands, he e-mailed me with terrible news: Just the day before, he was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. In typical Dalton Fury form, he wrote, “I just wanted you guys to know that I am committed to doing my part to at least meet my writing obligation.” He told me he knew he wouldn’t live to see it published, but he hoped it would hit the bookstore shelves regardless—“if you guys are OK with it.” OK with it? I assured him that nothing would keep me from seeing this book to publication. I told him that he’s the toughest guy I know, and that if anyone can beat this, it’s him. True to his word, he turned in the finished manuscript two weeks later. Unfortunately, two months after his diagnosis, he passed away.
It is my tremendous honor to present to you the final Kolt Racer novel. I hope you enjoy it as much as Dalton enjoyed writing it. I will never forget him, and with these books, a part of him will live on forever.
Marc Resnick
St. Martin’s Press, January 2017
PROLOGUE
Athens, Greece
The view was impressive, spectacular even, but the man lying prone on the hillside was interested only in what was happening in a very small slice of that panorama—the six-degree arc captured and magnified in the objective of the PSO-1M2 optical scope paired to his SVD-63 Dragunov sniper rifle.
His specific focus was an area almost exactly one kilometer to the south, and a hundred meters below his present elevation. At that distance, the scope encompassed an area roughly eighty meters across. The right side of the aiming reticle was an unbroken mass of green: the treetops and vegetation of the sprawling National Garden. To the left, a few trees were visible, but much of the foreground was dominated by tall buildings. The four chevrons lined up vertically at the center of the scope spanned the gray-black ribbon of asphalt between these contrasting environments. That area was the only thing in the world that mattered to him.
The sidewalk on the park side was crowded with people, held back by wooden barricades and caution tape, but there was no vehicle traffic on the street, which had been closed the night before and cleared of parked cars.
The sniper let his gaze drift to the stadiametric rangefinding pattern in the lower left of the objective, an upward-curving broken line marked with distances in hundred-meter increments—from one thousand meters at the far left of the curve, the low point, to two hundred meters at the high right.
Using his right shoulder—neither of his hands were anywhere near the trigger guard—he shifted the rifle on its bipod, making an almost imperceptible adjustment, and placed the rangefinding pattern on a policeman standing to the left of the barricade, so that the man’s feet just touched the bottom line and the top of his peaked cap met the curve, ever so slightly to the right of the unmarked tick that indicated nine hundred meters. That estimate disagreed with the far more precise GPS plot he had run, and he was inclined to believe the latter.
The rangefinder was calibrated to the average height of a man—1.7 meters or five feet, seven inches—which was slightly taller than the sniper’s 166 centimeters, but shorter than average in the Western world. He had been told that his height, or lack thereof, was the result of early childhood malnutrition, but it was a matter of no consequence to him. Many men were vain when it came to their height, wearing shoe lifts and thick heels to compensate for their perceived lack of stature, but the sniper knew all too well that standing out in a crowd got you noticed, and getting noticed could get you killed, especially in his profession. The policeman was probably taller, closer to six feet, which would account for the discrepancy. There were ways of double-checking those measurements, of course. Heights were variable, but weapons less so. If the policeman had been carrying a rifle, the sniper could have compared the length of his forearms to the weapon, and thus determined the man’s height to a reasonable degree of certainty, but at this distance, well beyond what was considered to be the effective range of the Dragunov, it was almost impossible to make that kind of determination. He only knew that the man was a police officer because of the light blue uniform shirt and the dark cap, and of course, the fact that he was standing on the other side of the barricade. In any case, beyond about eight hundred meters the rangefinder was merely a tool for estimation. He was using it now just to stave off boredom.
He had been here for several hours now, motionless on the hillside, just five meters from one of the trails that meandered across the slope. Dozens of hikers and tourists had passed his location dur
ing that time, but none had noticed him beneath the camouflage screen covering him, the scoped rifle, and the sandbags that kept the weapon almost completely immobilized. Patience and discipline were the only things keeping him motionless, but they were enough.
He closed his eye and the world vanished, but the details remained in his mind’s eye like an afterimage. The forested slope around him. The city sprawled out below. The street. The crowd.
Nine hundred and eighty-three meters. That was the actual distance—as measured by the GPS, which was reliable to within a meter—to the spot at the tip of the uppermost chevron, the spot where, if he pulled the trigger, the 7.62×54-millimeter bullet would go, provided his elevation adjustment was correct and the wind did not change. Of course, when the time came to pull the trigger, it would almost certainly not go to that precise spot. The target would be somewhere else, a few meters from that reference point, maybe a few meters farther away or closer, and those minor differences would translate into increasing degrees of uncertainty. He would have to make rapid adjustments to the orientation of the rifle, and to the scope.
Without opening his eye, he slowly moved his right hand to the cheap transistor radio in his breast pocket and thumbed the wheel to turn it on. The radio was tuned to a local news-talk station, broadcasting in Greek, a language that he spoke, though not fluently. He had left the radio off until now, partly because it would have been an unnecessary distraction, but mostly because, despite the low-profile earbuds that piped the broadcast directly into his ear canal, there was always a chance that a keen-eared passerby might hear and then investigate. Now, however, he needed to know what was going on in the world beyond that narrow slice he had been observing through the scope.
He listened for almost a full minute, struggling to piece together the mosaic of familiar words in an unfamiliar context, until something clicked in his head and a clear picture began to emerge.
He opened his eye, returning to that singular point in space, nine hundred-odd meters away, but kept listening until the weather report was given.
Clear skies. The temperature was thirty degrees Celsius, humidity 40 percent, with no chance of rain and an occasional five-mile-per-hour wind from the north.
The sniper peered through the scope again, noting the slight movement of tree branches in the park to the right, and made the determination to leave the scope as it was. If the trees were still moving when the moment of truth arrived, he would make the correction by aiming ever so slightly to the right to compensate, a technique, he had once been told, called “Kentucky windage.”
An American military officer had used that term, and in the same breath, called him “a natural.” The sniper spoke fluent English, even then, but the term had confused him, prompting the American to expand on the definition. “It means you’ve got a gift,” the officer had explained. “A natural talent for distance shooting.”
He would never forget those words, or the man who had uttered them.
It was true, though. He had received only basic instruction in the fundamentals of shooting, but had intuitively grasped the interplay of spatial and ballistic factors that determined whether a round would strike its target. With time and experience, he had refined his abilities to the point where he could, with near-perfect reliability, make a bullet go exactly where he wanted it to, every single time he pulled the trigger.
Today would be no different.
When the weather report concluded, he thumbed the wheel and turned off the radio. He could see in the faces and gestures of the spectators that the moment of arrival was imminent. And then, right on cue, a line of police cars and motorcycles moved through the field of view, escorting four nearly identical black Cadillac Escalades with blacked-out windows.
The imposing luxury sport utility vehicles rolled to a stop. Three of them were visible in the scope, the aiming chevron just touching the one in the middle.
The sniper waited.
At exactly the same moment, the side doors of the black SUVs opened, swinging out over the macadam, and then, in perfect synchronization, men in black suits emerged.
The sniper’s eye drifted to the edge of the scope, checking the treetops for movement. All was still. The wind had died.
The men in suits were now standing a few steps away from the vehicles, their heads moving back and forth as they scanned their surroundings, looking for threats. The sniper knew these men were only the public face of the protection detail; there would surely be many more agents in the area, some blending in with the crowd, others occupying the surrounding buildings, watching the arrival through sniper scopes, just as he was, only their rifles were not trained on the street, but roving the park tree line and the rooftops, looking for potential threats.
Looking in the wrong place.
The sniper did not allow himself even a faint smile of satisfaction. Not yet.
Another figure, wearing a light gray suit, emerged from the vehicle at the top of the sniper’s field of view. He smoothly adjusted his aim, repositioning the reticle onto this new target.
The scope was not powerful enough to reveal recognizable facial features, but the sniper had no doubt about the man’s identity.
The president of the United States.
He checked the trees again. A light breeze had come up in the twenty seconds since his last check. He watched the foliage moving, instantly judging the strength of the wind, and shifted the weapon just enough to move the target to the left of the aimpoint.
He reviewed the distance to the target, calculating and verifying his bullet-drop adjustment. At this distance, the bullet would fall almost ten meters from a perfectly straight line, five times the height of the distant target.
He tilted the barrel up by an infinitesimal degree.
Once he pulled the trigger, it would take about two seconds for the 7.62 round to reach the target, two seconds in which the man could move out of the path of the bullet.
He shifted the aiming reticle a few more ticks to the left and brought his finger to the trigger, confident that when he broke the trigger, the round would go exactly where he wanted it to. He visualized the eruption of pink mist that would signal the success of his shot and the end of a man’s life.
This, he knew, was what it meant to be “a natural.”
“Soon,” he whispered, and then shifted the scope again.
PART ONE
NATURAL
ONE
A faint breeze rustled the branches at the edge of the National Garden, and as the air moved across the back of his naked neck, U.S. Army Delta Force Lieutenant Colonel Kolt Raynor—code name “Racer”—unconsciously shrugged his shoulders and adjusted the blank navy blue ball cap perched atop his head.
After more than fifteen years of “modified grooming standards”—an exception made for elite military commando units, who were often required to blend in to the local populations of hot spots around the globe—he was having trouble getting used to the idea of more frequent haircuts, but that was one of the consequences of pinning on the silver oak leaves and taking charge of a Delta sabre squadron. As a squadron commander, he now spent a lot less time in the shoot house and the sniper condo, and a lot more time in meetings with people who wore either tailored suits or stars on the shoulders of their Class A uniforms, men who were not at all comfortable meeting with a shaggy-haired, bearded operator in combat-tested Multicam. Raynor’s current hairstyle, while still nowhere within the regs, and considerably longer than the high and tight he had sported in his younger days as an Airborne Ranger captain, still managed to accentuate the fact that his hairline was in full retreat, which, perhaps more than anything else, made him self-conscious about his appearance.
It was by no means the biggest sacrifice he had made to stay in the Unit, and, trade-offs notwithstanding, he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Aside from what was mostly a reflex response, Raynor barely noticed the breeze. The reason for his latest haircut, and in fact the reason he was standing on a
Greek sidewalk, had just arrived, and Kolt’s senses were now fully occupied with what was happening around him. He turned his head slowly, eyes sweeping back and forth, not focusing on any one detail but rather taking in the entire tableau as it unfolded around him.
From the corner of one eye, he saw the Secret Service agents emerging from the identical vehicles comprising the motorcade. They alone knew which vehicle actually carried POTUS—the forty-fifth president of the United States of America—and which were decoys. Raynor did not look directly at the vehicles or the men fanning out in front of him. That was the one place he knew he would not find an emerging threat. He was watching the crowd, and the trees behind them, and the buildings to the north and south of the Maximos Megaron, the official seat of the prime minister of Greece. Mostly, though, he was watching the faces of the Delta operators—his men … and women—who were dispersed throughout the crowd, and in the trees and nearby buildings. He could only see so much, but collectively, the Delta squadron saw nearly everything.
It was the “nearly” that kept Raynor on his toes.
His eyes briefly lit upon a face in the crowd, a big man with shaggy brown hair and a thick reddish brown beard. The man’s arms were crossed over his broad chest as he gazed serenely out over the assemblage, but then his gaze swung toward Raynor, and his lips puckered into a kiss.
“Right back at you, Slap,” Raynor murmured, and resumed his scan.
Slap was “Slapshot,” the code name of Jason Holcomb, Kolt’s friend and the sergeant major of Noble Squadron, two roles that were not always readily compatible. Despite his senior leadership position, Slapshot could be counted on to inject his own unique irreverent—and to Kolt’s way of thinking, not particularly funny—brand of humor into any stressful situations, which pretty much described all the situations Delta operators found themselves in.
