Direct Action - 03

by Jack Murphy

  Time would tell.

  The driver reached behind Deckard's seat and grabbed a couple bottles of water. He tossed one to his passenger while unscrewing the cap on the other, locking the wheel by holding it between his knees.

  “Drink up.”

  It was early afternoon by the time they rolled up on their destination, a lone compound near a spur coming off the mountains. Clicking a handheld radio, the driver announced their arrival and someone inside opened the gate for them. Pulling inside the thick earthen walls, the driver parked alongside the mud and stone structure in the center of the compound. There was one other pickup truck and a large Afghan janga truck inside the compound.

  Covered from top to bottom with colorful murals, ribbons, blue and yellow sashes, and hanging chimes, the trucks were used by locals for transporting materials, the outside of the vehicles painted up and decorated for good luck.

  “Wait here,” the driver instructed as they stepped out of the pickup and slammed the doors. The Filipino disappeared inside the stone hut while the gate guard who had let them in strode towards him. His eyes were slits as he stared at Deckard with contempt. He wasn't just sizing up the newcomer. There was something more. He looked at him like he was a piece of steak on a table. The gate guard wore dusty civilian clothes with an AK-47 slung over his back. He readjusted it on his shoulder as he blew past Deckard and followed the driver inside.

  Leaning up against the pickup, Deckard felt that everything inside the compound had gotten a little too quiet. In the cab of the truck, he could see the rifle that the driver had left behind. It put him somewhat at ease. A loaded rifle would not have been left there if they were planning to kill him. It wouldn't have been a bad plan from their point of view. If this really was Liquid Sky, they could run a counter-intelligence operation by luring in potential infiltrators and then killing them. It would send a hell of a message to anyone else who might have been thinking along the same lines. Who was really laying a trap for whom?

  A hulking figure emerged from inside the stone building. He was built like a linebacker with arms and legs like tree trunks. Coming in around six foot three, he was almost as wide as he was tall. As he approached Deckard, his eyes drilled holes into the newcomer.

  “You're Deckard?” he asked as if his driver may have picked up the wrong person. “Tell me a story,” he said as he ran a hand over his goatee.

  “What kind of story?” Deckard said with a frown.

  “A Deckard story. One of the good ones. The kind I hear are so outlandish, so fucking bizarre, I don't know what to think. I've seen some shit in my day but the stuff I hear about you makes me wonder.”

  “What have you heard? I will tell you if its real or not.”

  “Heard you are some kind of rogue operator. Deckard: used to be shit hot in Army Special Operations, got picked up by the Agency, and then you fucked up so they PNG'ed you.”

  “True story.”

  “Vigilante Dirty Harry shit, assassinating terrorists. Working as a singleton to rescue a Delta team in Colombia.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rumors going around that you almost started a war with the Chinese in Burma, cleaning out one of these Hodji drug lords from his mountain fortress,” the man motioned to the Hindu Kush mountains that towered above them. “Even heard you were involved with para-military operations in Mexico.”

  “Some of those stories are exaggerated.”

  “What about this tale people whisper in hushed tones about some cruise liner in the Pacific Ocean. The one that sank with all hands on board, the ship packed with high level shot callers in government and business. You involved in that?”

  “They call it one of the world's largest public safety accidents.”

  “Public safety accident?”

  “That's what they say. Like the Hindenburg.”

  “Like the Hindenburg?”

  “Fucking Nazi zeppelin.”

  “And I suppose that story is just a tall tale.”

  “Must be. Can't believe every conspiracy theory you hear.”

  “You can call me Bill,” he told Deckard while reaching into his pocket and pulling out his Oakley sunglasses. “I run this outfit. Here is the deal. You check out as legit, some ugly shit in your past but that is the name of the game. We've only had a day to prepare for a mission that is probably going to go down tonight. You are tagging along. Probationary status only. You kit up, go where you are told, do what you are told. No questions. My team does the op. You just pull security and make sure we don't get our asses shot off. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Come with me.”

  Bill led him inside the stone building which served as their operations center. The conditions were spartan inside. Some gear and weapons were stacked up against one wall. A couple desks had been improvised by laying plywood on top of stacked cinder blocks.

  Deckard's driver sat at one of the desks, looking at an open laptop that displayed satellite photography. He had an Iridium satellite phone pressed to his ear, a wire from it leading out a window to an uplink antennae on the roof. His shirt was pulled up a little, revealing the handle of a Filipino karambit fighting knife.

  “You've met Ramon,” Bill informed him. Now he had a name to go with the face. Deckard was taking it all in. Who was Ramon on the phone with? Someone back in Kabul? Someone in the field? As Bill had pointed out, it wasn't his place to ask questions.

  “This is the team you'll be working with.”

  Bill waved towards the men lounging around the room. “Your gear is in the corner over there. We go in like Indig. This is a low-vis operation, so everyone will be sterile when we leave the wire. If you die, we will try to recover your body, not because we like you, but in order to protect our OPSEC. If you get left out there for the enemy to pick over, you will be presumed to be a white mercenary, as you will have no identification papers on you and no American weapons or gear.”

  Bill sat down in front of another computer and opened his email.

  “Get your kit together. We are standby to launch at 2230.”

  The three other operators on the team stared at Deckard. They were sizing him up like a piece of meat. There were no handshakes or high fives. It wasn't just a professional distrust that stemmed from them not having any past experiences together. Deckard felt like he had just walked into a meeting with the mafia. There was no brotherhood, just a nest of vipers who could turn on him at any moment.

  He had expected nothing less, but the question remained, was this Liquid Sky?

  Recognizing one of the team members as the guy who had opened the gate for them, Deckard tried to piece together who these guys were. This one had long, slicked back hair, looked like he was well manicured even out in the field. He was the pretty boy on the team. He had a mobile game console fired up and was engrossed in shooting up space aliens or something, not even bothering to look up at Deckard again. The other two were built like Bill and looked like they had been drafted from an NFL lineup. One of them snorted at Deckard before going back to flipping through a magazine. The other was busy cleaning his Glock pistol.

  Deckard went to the pile of gear that Bill had pointed him towards as being his for the mission. There was a locally made man dress, the dishdasha that Afghan men wore. There was also some el cheapo concealable body armor made in Latin America, a Glock with locally procured cloth holster, an AK-47, a Chinese chest rig for spare magazines and a few other odds and ends. It wasn't much to work with. If their mission was to be completely denied, then they had to use local weapons and kit. No high tech on this mission.

  It got him thinking again. Why the need for deniability? U.S. Special Operations Forces were still conducting counter-terrorism missions in Afghanistan on a regular basis. With Conventional Forces withdrawing, it was left to Special Operations to perform maintenance on any Islamist fools who went past a certain threshold. Once a terrorist started acting up too much, they would send in shooters to sort him out. Or a drone strike. It ha
d become such a sport that Delta Force was even sending their students from the Operator Training Course to Afghanistan for their final exam, a live combat operation.

  So what was the need for this team and their plausible deniability?

  Deckard spent an hour and a half squaring his kit away. He had a small commercial radio which he made sure was charged up with a full battery. He loaded up five AK-47 magazines from a box of loose ammunition before loading up his Glock magazines as well. Then, he field-stripped both weapons and conducted functions checks. He was careful and deliberate about this final task; it was possible that Bill had his weapons rendered inert by messing with the trigger mechanism or filing down the firing pins, but both weapons were good to go.

  After getting his kit together the way he wanted it, he went off and found a cardboard box full of bottled water. Twisting off the cap, he downed half a bottle in one gulp. He needed to be hydrated if they were going to be out all night cruising through 'vills and scaling ridgelines.

  As he sipped the rest of the water he tried to place Bill and his team. It seemed that his intuition had been correct about the team he was after being former U.S. Special Operations, but which unit did they come from?

  Each unit had their own culture, their own bravado, and their own way of doing things. Rangers were typically younger guys. Hard-charging, door-kicking muldoons who took no shit from no one. Special Forces guys were usually older. Often with age they brought some more maturity to the table and the ability to operate in small teams. Most of them were pretty laid back dudes, a character trait needed when conducting their primary missions, unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense. The Ranger mentality didn't exactly lend itself to training foreign third-world soldiers. While the team sized up Deckard, he had sized them up as well. These guys were not former Rangers or Special Forces.

  The other Army Special Operations unit was Delta Force, and that was a whole other animal. Trained for counter-terrorist operations ranging from direct action raids to aircraft take-downs, Delta drew talent from both Special Forces and Rangers and then polished their combat skills to ridiculously high levels. Delta was known for being the military's most professional unit. The team he was with now seemed a little too nonchalant, like they had an expectation of victory. A sense of entitlement.

  The Marines had Recon, Force Recon, and their new Special Operations component, MARSOC. Marines were brought up the right way, starting at boot camp at Paris Island. The Recon and MARSOC shooters in the Marine Corps were clean-cut, belt-fed, straight shooters who knew how to take the fight to the enemy. Their sense of tradition, esprit de corps, and, along with their infantry background placed them closer to Rangers than Special Forces. Deckard frowned. You could pick a single Marine out of a crowd of a hundred people and none of these people were one of them.

  Then, you had the Navy. He already suspected that Ramon was a U.S. or Filipino Navy SEAL. Deckard had worked with and respected many men on the teams but had to wonder. The linebacker body types that most of them had came from an obsession that many SEALs had with jacking steel in the gym. There was one particular squadron within SEAL Team Six, the Navy's equivalent to Delta Force, that was known to specifically recruit the biggest guys out of Green Platoon. It wasn't much to go on though. Finishing his bottle of water, Deckard knew he'd have to wait and see, develop the situation, and see what shook out of the woodwork.

  Hopefully he wouldn't die in the meantime.

  “So you're here to pick up the slack for Henderson?” A voice said from behind.

  Deckard turned to face him, thinking fast. It was the dude with the slicked back hair who had been playing video games.

  “Henderson?”

  “Made a non-verbal withdraw from the course on our last op. Ate one to the facepiece.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Why?” he asked with a shrug of his shoulder. “Fuck do you care.”

  “Just saying. I didn't know him.”

  “Just try to hang with us tonight and don't step on your crank with golf cleats. If you fuck us, we'll leave your sorry ass out there.”

  “I understand.”

  “What the fuck ever,” he said as if there was a period after each word. “I heard the RUMINT on you and I don't fucking buy it. I think you're just a shithead Army fuck who bolo'ed his ops. You don't even belong here. You're not one of us.”

  “You mean because I wasn't in the teams?” Deckard dropped it, intentionally trying to elicit information.

  “Fuck the teams. That's vanilla shit. We operate on a whole different level, even before we left the Navy.”

  Gotcha, Deckard thought.

  “Hey!” Ramon interrupted from across the room. He was on the satellite phone again.

  “We a go?” Bill asked as he looked up from his computer.

  “Overwatch has eyes on the target. He just arrived at the objective. This should be his bed-down site unless overwatch reports him leaving.”

  “That's a green light,” Bill confirmed. “Everyone kit up; we roll in ten.”

  Deckard's antagonist with the pretty hair swung back around to confront him one more time.

  “You stay on me while we are out there cheese dick. You're going to pull black-side security on the objective and make sure Hodji doesn't skull fuck us while our backs are turned. I'll release you once we get close to the target compound.”

  “Okay.”

  “Grab your shit and let's go.”

  “What's your callsign on the net?”

  “What the fuck is this callsign shit? Just call me Rick.”

  Deckard ditched his civilian clothes and slipped into the dishdasha, then shrugged into his chest rig, holstered the Glock, slung his AK-47, and clipped his radio inside his collar. Ramon was already taking all of the documents and maps from the operations center and dumping them into a burn barrel outside. Lighting a match, it all went up in a golden glow that burned in the early evening light.

  Deckard headed outside.

  Now he was convinced.

  It was going to be another one of those nights.

  Deckard was now rolling with Liquid Sky.

  5

  Yellow flames were still licking out of the top of the burn barrel as they loaded up into the back of the janga truck.

  Bill, Ramon, Rick, and the two other team members had kitted up. Deckard had been listening to them banter back and forth about who would get more kills on this mission and picked up the names of the final two team members, they were Zach and Paul. With Deckard now filling the void left by Henderson, a void created by Nikita's sniper rifle in Pakistan, they had a six man assault element.

  A young kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, had been warming chai tea over a small fire in the courtyard. Bill spoke to him and the kid responded in broken English. He would be their indigenous driver for the mission. It was a simple but ingenious infiltration method. With a local driving the janga truck, the Americans would be hiding in a secret compartment in the back. The Trojan Horse was alive and well.

  After a few words with Bill, the Afghan went and opened the gate, then fired up the truck. The hidden compartment was a large metal box that had bags of rice thrown on top of it to give the truck the appearance of hauling a full load. The door to the compartment was disguised to look like the side of a crate. The Liquid Sky members took turns searching each other over to make sure none of them unwittingly brought any non-local items. The video games and Maxim magazines had to go into the burn barrel before they left. Once out on patrol, they had to be completely sterile.

  Deckard handed Rick his alias passport and other false documents. The former SEAL Team Six operator tossed them in the burn barrel and then patted him down just to make sure he didn't have anything squirreled away. He didn't. If Deckard died on this mission it was unlikely that Pat and the others back at Samruk International would ever discover what had happened to him. They had no idea where he was or what he was doing. His body would be quickly buried by the locals
who would not want to be discovered with a body, especially a white one by other Afghans or Coalition Forces.

  Deckard climbed into the janga truck with the team, and then Bill got inside and shut the door behind him. They would leave the compound unattended. The operations center had been sterilized and they would not be reoccupying their forward staging area after the mission.

  Bill talked into his radio, “Check the bug light.”

  The driver hit a button under the dashboard, and a red light flickered on and off inside the hidden compartment. It was a non-vocal warning in case something was wrong. From inside their hiding place, the team had zero situational awareness of what was going on around them and would be relying on the driver for a heads up.

  “Punch it out of here,” Bill radioed the driver.

  With a squeal of metal on metal, the janga truck lurched out of the compound and rumbled down the dirt road. Where they were heading, Deckard had no idea. Wherever they were going, he was happy that the team at least had the foresight to add some air holes and install a fan inside their compartment. It was brutally hot, and they had loaded an entire case of water bottles inside with them to stay hydrated.

  They rode in silence, the compartment occasionally lit up as someone flipped on a pen light to check a watch or to make last minute adjustments to their gear. For the first hour, Deckard just leaned up against the metal wall while sitting. By the second hour he was starting to feel rattled due to the worn slat shocks on the truck's suspension banging up and down on the rough Afghan roads. By the third hour he was getting motion sickness. He felt like a bug sealed up inside a tin can which was then shaken vigorously by a small child.