by Dalton Fury
Over the loud buzz of the propeller, Raynor heard a transmission from Blocker One. “Unfriendlies inbound from the north! Two vans, hauling ass. ETA one mike.”
Kolt shouted to the car, “Shit. Bad guys will be here in one minute. Everyone double-time it on board the plane!”
Curtis and Slapshot did not need any prodding; they leapt from the car and climbed in back of the impossibly tight cabin of the plane.
Kolt pulled Marris from the car, but he would not walk forward. “I’ll guide you,” Raynor said as he pushed on the bigger man, but Marris did not budge. He was still hooded, and still in a noncompliant mood.
“Get in, Dr. Marris,” said Raynor, his hand tight on Marris’s jacket. Tight enough to insinuate that he would be dragged aboard the aircraft if he did not get in on his own power. The big man did not fight the American this time; he stumbled forward and then climbed into the aircraft, and Digger followed and strapped in next to him.
Kolt himself sat in the tiny copilot seat of the plane. He put on the headset stowed in front of him and spoke into the mic quickly. “Eleven hundred pounds, plus or minus fifty. We gonna be too heavy?”
“I’ll get us out of here,” the silver-haired pilot responded in his mic, and then he pushed the throttle all the way to 100 percent power.
Kolt pulled the little cabin door shut.
This Argentine-made Aero Boero AB-180 was ideal for STOL (short take-off and landing) work. It was a lightweight tail-dragger specially customized for clandestine duties, with a larger engine and a smaller gas tank.
With a total of six tiny seats, including the pilot’s, this mission was barely within the envelope for the aircraft’s capabilities.
The AB-180 picked up speed quickly, but as far as Raynor was concerned, they were getting dangerously close to the VW bus blocking their path ahead.
And just when Kolt felt confident that they would make it into the air and over the bus, the two rust-colored vans raced into the road in front of the VW. The enemy vehicles had made their way around the parked bus by driving right through the fruit orchard. They barreled down on the approaching single-engine aircraft, dust kicking up around their tires.
Behind the vans, the Air Cell support men darted into the orchard, leaving the VW right were it was parked. There was nothing more these two men could do but extricate themselves from the scene.
As the vans approached, the pilot spoke into his mic. “Somebody wants to play chicken.”
Kolt, asked, “What’s the plan, old-timer?”
The pilot did not move his hand from the throttle or turn his head toward the question. “I’ve got to fly this baby, so I’m going to keep my eyes open, but you might want to shut yours. This is going to be a might close.”
Raynor sank back in the chair and fastened his seat belt. He realized he was growing tired of dramatic air travel.
But he did not close his eyes. When the first of the vans and the nose of the AB-180 were less than one hundred feet from one another, the pilot pulled back on his stick, then drew it to the right. The plane’s nose lifted skyward and then the aircraft’s wings banked hard to the right. The plane climbed slowly into the air, and seemed to hang over the edge of the roadway and the orchard to the north of the road.
The two vans shot by to the left of the aircraft, the first one missing the low tail of the plane by fewer than eight feet.
Digger called from the back with nervous laughter, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
In the copilot’s seat, Kolt, a decade older than Digger, blew out a long sigh of relief.
* * *
The Air Cell pilot turned the plane to the southeast, and within minutes they were flying at five thousand feet over a landscape of desolate desert.
Unsure of who was sitting next to him, the hooded Canadian asked Slapshot, “What are you going to do with me now?”
“No idea, partner. Ask the tour director.” Slapshot placed a headset over Marris’s head and positioned the mic in front of his mouth. He put the push-to-talk button in Marris’s hand. “Press down and speak. All set!”
Marris keyed the mic and transmitted. “Where are we going?”
Curtis replied into his headset’s mic, reasserting his authority over the operation. He did his best to control his heavy breathing before speaking. “We are going to an airport nearby where we will climb aboard a larger aircraft. It will take you wherever you want to go.”
“I want to go back to Tripoli.”
Curtis sighed. “Except there. How about you take a vacation? We’ll fly you to Toronto. Once you get home you can come right back here if that’s what you want. But, just so you know, we are talking to our friends in your government there, as well as in the UN, and we will stress to them how dangerous it has become for you in Libya. You might have a little trouble getting back in.”
“You Americans are all bastards.”
“We are the bastards who just saved your life. Do your work from home. Please don’t stop. But try and keep from getting slashed to pieces for a while. The U.S.government is very fond of you, and we’d hate to lose you.”
“Fuck you, Curtis.”
Curtis pulled off his headset and concentrated on looking out the window at the horizon. He got nauseous on small planes, and needed to focus his attention on not spewing his lunch across the cabin.
* * *
They landed at Nanur Airport forty-five minutes later. The airfield was in the desert some two hundred kilometers southeast of Tripoli, and was in use by U.S. military and intelligence assets under agreement with the new government. As they touched down on the runway they saw a pair of aircraft on the tarmac waiting for them. A chic CIA Gulfstream business jet for Curtis and Marris and a dramatically less chic Air Force C-130 for the three Delta operators.
Kolt knew leaving a half dozen dead and wounded behind would make life extremely difficult for American intelligence here in Tripoli. Curtis’s job just became exponentially harder, but Kolt and his team had had no choice but to wipe out the would-be assassins, and Kolt and his team had no choice but to exfil the country immediately after so doing.
The six-seat tail-dragger shut down its engine, Kolt slapped the Air Cell stunt pilot on the back for a job well done, and then he climbed out of the AB-180 and legged it a few hundred yards across the tarmac with his teammates to his awaiting C-130.
As he started up the ramp into the Hercules he saw Curtis jogging over to talk to him. Kolt sent Digger and Slapshot into the cargo hold to get strapped in for the long flight back to Bragg, and he waited for the CIA man to make it over.
Curtis stuck a hand out and Kolt shook it. “Sorry I snapped at you back there. I was wound up pretty tight.”
“It’s forgotten.” It wasn’t, not really, but Kolt had been working on his attitude lately, and it seemed like the professional thing to say.
Curtis then asked, “Was the deadly force unavoidable?”
Raynor did not hesitate. “Yes.”
Curtis stared back at Raynor through mirrored aviator sunglasses. “It’s going to make things tough for us. Half dozen goons down. It’s not going to look to anyone like a UN official made a run for it on his own. Parties are going to know CIA was involved.”
Kolt shrugged. “It couldn’t be avoided. You handed me shit and bread and I made the best-tasting shit sandwich I could with the time you gave me in the kitchen.”
Curtis did not smile at the metaphor. Kolt just looked at his own reflection in the man’s aviators.
Curtis said, “It’s going to make an incident.”
“If you’re looking for help to soften your cable traffic to Langley, I’m the wrong guy, Curtis. Bottom line: Tripwire is alive.”
Curtis was becoming more combative. “Yeah, but you were supposed to keep it low-key.”
“Maybe it would have been more low-key if Marris was dead in the street because we didn’t engage those assassins.”
Curtis said, “I just need to know you had no other options.
”
Kolt wanted to snap back at the guy. He wanted to say that he had told him twice that it was his only option, and if Curtis wanted to second-guess men risking themselves for his operation, maybe next time Curtis should either come up with a better plan or else do the dangerous shit himself.
But that was the old Kolt. The new Kolt held his tongue. But he also held the CIA man’s stare. After the staring contest continued for a few more seconds, he asked, “Was there anything else?”
“No.”
Kolt turned away and headed up the ramp of the C-130 without another word.
Digger, Slapshot, and Kolt sat next to one another on the webbed seats attached to the fuselage of the Hercules. A group of conventional soldiers, engineers who had been working on infrastructure projects in Libya, sat toward the front of the cargo hold dressed in desert camo, chatting among themselves about their impending leave. The young men all stared at the hairy men in local clothing sitting in back near the ramp, wondering who the hell they were.
The three Delta men did not engage the others in conversation.
“Hey, boss?” Slapshot called out over the whine of the four big Pratt & Whitneys as the plane began taxiing toward the runway.
“Yeah?”
“Just once, I’d freakin’ love to rescue some hot blonde with a big rack who is so full of appreciation that she can’t keep her hands off of me.”
Kolt smiled, leaned back against the cold and hard fuselage. Draped his turban over his eyes and shut them tight for the flight home. “You should have joined the SEALs. They get all the flashy gigs.”
NINE
Fort Bragg, just west of Fayetteville, North Carolina, is named for Braxton Bragg, a nineteenth-century North Carolina native who graduated from West Point, fought in the Second Seminole War and the Mexican — American War, and served as a general in the Confederate Army in the Civil War.
The base reaches into four counties of central North Carolina and it is the longtime home of the 82nd Airborne Division as well as the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and many other units. But Bragg is most known for the numerous super-secret organizations that operate in the shadows. They pockmark the rolling hills throughout the 251 square miles of government-owned property.
And somewhere out there, tucked into a relatively tiny portion of those 251 square miles, lies the home of Delta Force.
As Delta Force began its initial activation process in the late 1970s, it acquired the “Stockade,” a former military detention facility located on the north post. They remained there till the mid-eighties, when they moved to their current location northwest of the main post and most definitely off the beaten path. A Unit member can drive to work and barely see another soldier. A Delta operator can go throughout his workweek on base without seeing any 82nd Airborne or Special Forces personnel, even if he’s running in the backwoods and in the numerous training and maneuver areas.
Unit guys refer to their facility as “the compound” or “the building.” Those on the outside sometimes call the fenced-in complex the “Red Roof Inn” due to the dark-maroon/red-colored roofing on the buildings, or “where the Hardy Boys live,” applying one of the many nicknames the men of Delta Force use for their facility. “He’s behind the fence,” they say when referring to someone who has entered Delta’s ranks and has seemingly fallen off the earth.
The compound is secluded and set back off the passing roads, hidden by tall trees and man-made earthen berms. The buildings and property there contain dental and medical facilities, a chow hall, a gym, firing ranges, obstacle courses, an ASP (ammo supply point), motorcycle trails, close-quarters-battle shoot houses, an Olympic-sized pool, basketball and racquetball courts, and a climbing wall. It’s a civilization all its own, and a motivated operator can remain there for months without ever leaving the grounds.
Armed guards, dressed in professional uniforms, work the gates and patrol the perimeter. Many are retired Vietnam vets and all are honored to be guarding the unit compound. Most of these men stay on the job twenty years or more and know everyone in the compound by name and face.
On his first day back at Bragg after his exploits overseas, Kolt Raynor sat on a gurney in the infirmary, his olive-drab flight suit pulled down around his ankles.
He’d spent the previous ten minutes facedown, pants off, ass on display, while Doc Markham pulled week-old grenade shrapnel from his right thigh.
But that bit of unpleasantness was over now, and he was in no real pain, as the doc had given him a local injection to numb the meat in his leg before he went digging for the ball bearings that had shown up on an X-ray. He’d then stitched him up, and now Racer was seated in his underwear while the doc finished dressing the tiny wounds.
Doc Markham was new. He was a few years younger than the thirty-eight-year-old major, and he’d come along since Kolt’s first stint in Delta. But the young man spoke in a commanding voice. “From the looks of the scars on you, Major Raynor, I’m going to guess this isn’t the first time you’ve had someone in the medical profession tell you how lucky you are to be alive.”
Kolt smiled. “I’ve heard that from people in other professions, as well.”
“Well, you took nine pieces of shrapnel into the thigh. Two blew right on out the side of your leg. I’ve removed the seven that didn’t make exit wounds, but I sure wish you had come right back after this happened instead of lollygagging wherever the hell you went in the five days since catching this grenade blast. You’re lucky we don’t have a nasty infection to deal with.”
The doc knew about New Delhi and Racer’s involvement, from the weekly command staff meeting as well as the compound’s robust rumor mill. But he knew nothing about Tripoli. That op had been too black for dissemination to the support staff. As far as he knew, Kolt had been hanging out at a cathouse in France for the past week.
Kolt just said, “I got a little held up on the way home.”
The doc smiled a smile that gave Kolt the indication that he understood now — Racer hadn’t been lollygagging anywhere just so that his wounds could get infected. He did not say anything more, but instead inspected the old bruises in the middle of Raynor’s back. “You took some more frag to your plate, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Thank God for body armor.”
Raynor chuckled. “I do so on a daily basis.”
Doc Markham looked at Racer’s chart. “Well, let’s see. A concussion and cranial lacerations last fall, a broken back and three gunshot wounds four years ago, and a half dozen more visits to the doctor for broken bones and frags over the past dozen years … I can’t do much else for you but ask you to make sure there isn’t a next time … but since you won’t listen to me on that, please make an effort to get back here and get treatment a bit quicker … if at all possible.”
Kolt knew the guy was just doing his job, and his job entailed reading his operators the riot act about taking care of their bodies. The old Kolt might have said something cute but smart-alecky. But the new Kolt, the kinder, gentler man that he was trying to be, just said, “You got it, Doc. Appreciate you fixing me up.”
“That’s what they pay me for, Major. Change the dressing on your thigh in a couple of days and come back in a week so I can take one more look.”
“You got it. See you then.”
* * *
Five minutes later Racer limped out of the infirmary on his way to the SCIF — the Secret Compartmented Intelligence Facility — the intelligence center of the compound. Whenever he found the time, Kolt liked to drop in and see what was going on in the world that might affect him and his troops.
Kolt’s day had begun that morning with a hot wash over the in-extremis retaking of the American Airlines jet in India and the in-extremis Tripoli rescue of the United Nations weapons inspector. A hot wash was an after-action conference with all parties involved in the action, a meeting where all the details are discussed and the outcome of the event is evaluated. These forums can be brutal and i
ntense when determining if mistakes have been made, and often the harshest critic in the room is the operator whose actions or judgment comes under scrutiny.
This morning’s hot wash had been no different, except for the fact that there were two major actions under review, and Major Kolt Raynor was at the center of both of them. It had been a long and intense morning for Kolt, but he’d come out of it relatively unscathed. Colonel Webber had listened to everyone’s accounts of both ops, and he made it clear that he supported his major’s decisions in both incidents. Webber had been impressed with Kolt’s focus after his long hiatus, though he was not at all surprised by his willingness to accept risk — for himself as well as his men. That was the Kolt everyone at Delta remembered from his first stint in the Unit.
The colonel couldn’t argue with the decision to assault the 747 from the roof, reasoning that the hijackers were heading to Pakistan, where they could easily escape after killing everyone on board.
The fact that Raynor did not know they were heading to Pakistan only slightly affected Webber’s assessment. The major had to make a quick decision, and that decision had saved lives.
Webber also recognized the necessity of using lethal means in Libya when the three men following Tripwire turned into six men trying to kill him. And the colonel found the major’s split-second decision to extract Tripwire from Tripoli with the fixed-wing Air Cell asset during daylight hours was most impressive.
Of course, neither op had been perfectly executed, and Kolt and his team were typically self-critical and thorough. A hostage was killed on Kolt’s watch in New Delhi, and a nonsuppressed handgun led to compromising the CIA’s overarching mission in Tripoli. Webber didn’t have to say much. He was mainly in “receive” mode. But given how both ops were seat-of-the pants missions with absolutely zero prior planning time, and probably more fitting for three assault teams instead of just one, Webber figured his men had done a damn fine job, and he would absorb any heat from Washington that came their way.
