by Dalton Fury
It was a male. A fighting-age male, for sure. This much Kolt could easily tell. But he could also tell he wasn’t your normal fighting-age jihadist. He was carrying something in his left hand, maybe a light of some sort or even a pistol. He also moved slowly, as if he either couldn’t see where he was going in the darkness or was too frail or too injured to be negotiating obstacles.
Kolt studied the man closely, the large turban high on his forehead, the white dishdasha and dark-brown outer garment. The beard. Yes, the long, white, thick beard. He’d seen it before in a picture Shaft had sent the day before. It had to be him.
Fucking Ghafour!
The elderly man took two steps from the ladder and turned back around. He gingerly squatted into a ball, keeping his rear off the roof and wrapping his arms around his knees to keep warm, obviously unaware of his present company.
Kolt slowly stood to a low crouch. He delicately slid his HK around to his left side to free both hands and then raised his NVGs on his helmet. He pretty much knew this was going to be the easiest jackpot he ever participated in, but he needed every bit of stealth to prevent Ghafour from yelling out and alerting the others to his trouble. He couldn’t believe his luck.
Kolt took three long steps to gain forward momentum and leaped toward the old man. He slapped a tight, rear, naked chokehold around the man’s neck, cutting off Ghafour’s carotid artery and instantly putting him to sleep. It was that simple. Not really a challenge. Certainly nothing to brag about given the skill and age difference between the two.
Then Kolt saw something drop from Ghafour’s right hand. The familiar drab olive color was partially veiled by their huddled bodies’ shadow as it rolled to the edge of the roof and stopped just a foot or so from the ladder. As it settled, Kolt could barely make out the square nipples protruding from the oval body. Kolt wasn’t positive exactly what it was, but his spider senses told him it certainly could be a World War II–era Soviet F1 hand grenade.
Instinctively, Kolt yelled out, “Grenade!”
Kolt released his hold on the man’s neck, grabbed Ghafour around the waist, arched his lower back, and pulled Ghafour up and away from the ensuing blast as if he was throwing an opponent in a Greco-Roman wrestling match.
The grenade detonated a moment later, rocketing blast fragments in all directions, tearing into whatever was in its way within fifteen feet.
Kolt’s lower right leg took major frag. It was quick, the largest piece slicing through his calf muscle, and smaller shards tearing through the upper area of his tan combat boot and lodging somewhere under the skin.
Gritting his teeth to manage the pain, Kolt felt Ghafour’s body go completely limp.
Shit! Don’t tell me this guy already bought it.
Kolt felt the moisture on Ghafour’s clothing and laid him on his back to check his wounds. The obvious smell of dehydrated urine mixed with the familiar smell of blood. Ghafour’s pulse was still strong, telling Kolt the PC had obviously pissed his pants when Kolt grabbed him. His right arm was also bleeding heavily above the elbow, but he was just asleep.
Kolt pulled his Spyderco out and cut a long piece of cloth from Ghafour’s shirt sleeve. He wrapped it tight around Ghafour’s upper arm between the wound and the joint to control the bleeding before lowering his NVGs and turning back to the ladder.
So far, he was good. Kolt dragged Ghafour to the edge of the fort’s tall wall and lowered him to roughly four feet off the ground before letting go of Ghafour’s hand and letting the unconscious body drop into the snow, exactly where Kolt and Shaft had knelt earlier to develop their plan.
Kolt spider-dropped from the high wall, landing close to Ghafour. Moving quickly, he rolled Ghafour onto his back and reached down, grabbing his left arm. Kolt then placed his boots over the instep of both of Ghafour’s leather loafers before pulling him up off the ground, naturally locking his knees. Kolt quickly ducked under to shoulder the precious cargo.
Kolt had his jackpot. Now, he just had to find Shaft and book it out of the valley.
* * *
Train knew his place. He wasn’t used to debating these things with the CG. But the boys had always left that stuff to Colonel Webber or, at times, even Major Raynor. Train wasn’t exactly sure what to make of Kolt Raynor just yet. He knew Kolt’s reputation, but this was his first direct-action mission under Kolt’s command. Either way, Kolt’s questionable rep aside, Train wanted to make sure all his mates on the helo had heard his earlier transmission. He turned his radio to the troop internal frequency and keyed his push-to-talk.
“All stations, all stations, I say again. We have two Eagles still at the target,” Train barked into his mouthpiece.
“Can’t do it!” the monitoring 47G copilot responded. “We won’t make it back to the gas station if we wait any longer. We’re minutes from Bingo as it is.”
Smitty broke squelch. “We needed to leave five minutes ago. Over.” Smitty had pushed it as far as he could. Taking on the additional sixteen bodies was already pushing the aircraft’s specs. He knew to trust his instruments, and he couldn’t risk putting her down in Pakistan with two loads of troops.
Under nods Train could see Admiral Mason sitting just a few feet behind Smitty’s center jump seat. He figured Mason was beside himself, seeing him fumbling with getting his headset plugged in properly to the console.
“BREAK, BREAK! This is Mike One-One in the blind. PC secure. EWIA. I have a wounded Eagle as well. Not critical. We can’t make it back to the helicopters. We’ll walk out of the valley as planned, out.”
* * *
Under his tan Kevlar flight helmet and smoke-colored face piece, Smitty smiled. He was happy that the scumbag had been bagged but also that he could finally get his bird in the air. Having to scuttle a second now-overloaded multimillion-dollar Dark Horse inside the Goshai Valley was manageable, but having to abandon two Americans on target scared the shit out of him.
Smitty didn’t need an order from Admiral Mason to get out of there. Kolt’s call was enough. He also knew that as soon as they gassed up back at J-bad and off-loaded the injured men from the downed helo, they would be turning around to recover Kolt at some black unmarked landing zone. With or without the CG’s blessing.
The burly MH-47G helicopter strained to lift her six balloon tires out of the snowdrift. The pilot turned the refuel probe off the nose slightly to the left. The whiteout created by the powerful twin-rotor blades was just as bad as it was during the aborted infil at the target. But this time, they weren’t air-holding to fast-rope operators on target; they were getting the hell out of there with twenty-seven certainly frustrated but alive men on board.
The pilot pitched the helicopter’s broad nose-refuel probe forward and began picking up speed. From his center seat, Smitty strained to look out the starboard side of the bird. He wondered exactly where that crazy-ass Kolt and Shaft were on that snow-covered Swiss cheese terrain. Smitty had known Kolt a long time, and even though he couldn’t help but sit in awe of the Delta operator’s personal courage, he figured Kolt Raynor’s days in the special operations community were over.
And for the second time in just over four years.
Cherokee Power Plant, Gaffney, South Carolina
Nuclear Security Officer Timothy Reston hated his job, his superiors, and life in general. Everything he worked for, everything he dreamed of, and everything he was owed had been taken away from him. And none of it was his fault.
“Fuuuuuuuck!” Timothy shouted, slamming his fist against the arm of the La-Z-Boy chair. He dropped his game console in his lap and began slamming the palms of his fists against both arms. It wasn’t fair!
He’d dedicated sixteen years to the Cherokee Power Plant and had been recognized on numerous occasions by the management team at EnergyFirst Corporation. His “I Love ME Wall” at home was adorned with the typical letters and cheap wooden plaques of adoration. Letters of appreciation, employee-of-the-year citations, and excellence in service—all adorned with the big gaudy r
ed, white, and blue EnergyFirst logo. Below the dozen or so frames, his bookshelf was filled with various leadership and management books, all claiming to reveal the secrets to leading people successfully.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Timothy knew he’d done nothing wrong. He was a gamer, lots of people were. He shouldn’t be punished for that. He lived alone and enjoyed connecting online with fellow gamers from around the world. He looked forward to the weekend and marathon sessions of HALO and Call of Duty. In those worlds, he was a rock star. He’d never said it directly, but he’d let enough slip that the rest of his teammates in the Brotherhood of Raging Dragons believed he was a Navy SEAL. Timothy didn’t bother correcting them. He could have been a Navy SEAL. Hell, he should have been one. He was more gung-ho about protecting America than most soldiers in the army. He desperately wanted to be overseas fighting terrorists in Iraq or Afghanistan, or even Somalia or Syria, but his brilliant military career was cut short. It wasn’t for lack of his desire to kick ass and take names; it was just that his addiction to a large Meat Monster pizza and a two-liter bottle of Coke for dinner most nights left him not quite the lean, mean fighting machine the navy needed him to be.
No matter how shitty life in the real world got, online Timothy was a god. ZooKeeper69 said as much. The kid idolized Timothy. They’d known each other for months and had become fast friends. They were even planning on booking a hotel room to share in San Diego for the next Comic Con. That would be awesome.
“Steel-Ninja, watch your left flank,” Zoo typed. “I’ll cover your right.”
Timothy looked at the TV screen and realized he’d not been paying attention to the game. Leave it to Zoo to cover his ass. Zoo really was cool. He was forever amazed at Timothy’s stories and always asking for more. They chatted for hours, texting and shooting enemy icons and having a great time. Zoo even asked about Timothy’s “cover job” at the nuclear plant. It gave Timothy a chance to vent.
“You missed that guy with the RPG,” Zoo texted, pausing the game.
Timothy banged his fists a couple more times and then picked up the console. He reached over the side of the chair and picked up his wireless keyboard, relieved it wasn’t broken.
“Sorry, Zoo, fucking mad about work,” he typed.
“More bullshit, Steel?”
“They took away my gun! Can you believe that? They’re so jealous of my skills, they moved me out of my security shift and stuck me in badge processing!”
Timothy read his words on the TV screen and believed them, and why shouldn’t he? What he said was true, anyway. They were jealous of him. They knew he was a warrior and so they punished him. All that bullshit about the psych wanting additional screening based on his sketchy “MMPI” test results and poor physical fitness was just garbage.
“That’s crazy. You know more about security than all of them combined! You’re the one that told me about the vulnerable access points and the lag in shift changes when the cameras weren’t monitored.”
“I know!” Timothy said, his hands flying over the keyboard. “I’ve spotted dozens of weak spots in the security at the plant, and this is the thanks I get. Fuck, if the plant were in Iran, I could take it down myself.”
“You and whose army?”
“Fuck you, Zoo. You know I could. I know their moves, their timings, their procedures, everything! Taking it would be easier than this fucking game!”
“OK, let’s do it,” Zoo typed.
Timothy’s stomach lurched. “What?”
“There’s that big hydroelectric factory a kilometer ahead in the game. Let’s pretend it’s the nuclear plant and take it down. You lead, and I’ll give you cover.”
Timothy’s entire body relaxed. Right, the game. “Fuck, yeah. It’s on!”
TEN
Sana’a, Yemen
Sitting in the most secluded corner of the tiny Internet café on the corner of a frigid and dusty street in Sana’a, Yemen, thirty-two-year-old Omer Farooq smiled. It was the third time in as many weeks he’d got Steel-Ninja to walk him through an attack on the nuclear plant. Each time, he expected him to balk, but, if anything, Steel was becoming more emboldened. He’d even started naming enemy players after real men at the nuclear plant.
Farooq leaned back and stretched his neck. He hadn’t anticipated playing online first-person shooter games as part of jihad, but he accepted this path. He longed for acceptance into al Qaeda. His constant ill health, something he shared with Steel-Ninja, a product of childhood asthma and the poor genes of his grandmother, kept him out of the fighting ranks. But Farooq had other skills. Skills any terrorist organization could use in the technologically advanced twenty-first century. He knew computers. So much so that he was suspected by U.S. intelligence as being one of the key authors of the “drone paper,” al Qaeda’s secret effort to find ways to shoot down, jam, or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that had inflicted huge losses upon the terrorist network. And he liked to troll the net.
Finding Timothy Reston hadn’t been difficult. Farooq easily searched the distinctive IP number through the Internet to locate the region Steel-Ninja surfed from. Once he knew what the man did for a living, it was simply a matter of stroking his American ego. He made Timothy feel important. He bought into his stories of imperial aggression as a Navy SEAL. He laughed at his jokes and sympathized with his plight at work.
The challenge had been getting specific information. Steel-Ninja was big on stories, but whenever they started talking about the small details of work, like addresses, number of guards, passwords, and the like, Steel would get vague. Coming up with the idea to attack the plant in the game was ingenious. Nothing was real in the game, after all. Farooq leaned forward and, as he promised, dutifully covered Steel-Ninja as he led their way into the nuclear plant.
* * *
Cindy “Hawk” Bird had known for a few days that Major Kolt Raynor was back in town. Word traveled fast around the Spine when a Unit member was wounded in action. Word was even faster when one was killed. Just the same, Hawk knew her place, and even though she had gotten to know Racer pretty well in her short time in the Unit, she figured she’d tend to her own business.
She planned to do just that. And she did, right up until the last three minutes and twenty-seven seconds of that morning’s daily intelligence brief. It was groundbreaking news.
Haji Mohammad Ghafour, the middle-aged Pakistani that Racer took a frag for in the Goshai Valley and dragged fourteen miles to a black LZ for a helicopter ride back to Afghanistan, was talking. In fact, according to the CIA, the enhanced interrogation techniques were working so well that the analysts were beginning to second-guess the information Ghafour was providing. Which is exactly why the Unit intelligence officer giving the brief offered a caveat for every word.
And not only was Ghafour squealing like a pig, but the thumb drive Shaft secured from his minder, the same minder he smoked through his backpack the night Racer and the boys came to the rescue three and a half weeks earlier, contained some interesting and telling files.
But it wasn’t necessarily the treasure trove of new intelligence that ultimately convinced Cindy Bird to risk being late for a dinner date with her Green Beret boyfriend, Troy. No, that Troy stuff could wait. What was said in that meeting was something much more personal.
As Hawk turned her metallic-gray Beetle right off Morrison Bridge Road and onto the narrow dirt drive, she knew Kolt needed to be informed about it all. But as she slowed, moving past the first of four long, narrow, partially rusted tin chicken coups, the stench of chicken shit and dead fowl made her want to whip a U-turn.
She could make out a single and faint light barely shining through the vertical slats in the two center windows of the single-wide up ahead. She remembered the guys ribbing Racer about his accommodations while they were in Cairo looking for the missing SAM missiles. Truth be told, she had expected more, especially from a major in the Unit. But
the boys were spot-on, down to the cinder-block foundation and heavily rusted, protruding trailer hookup. Then again, in their short acquaintance, she pretty much figured Kolt wasn’t the courting type. She didn’t think Kolt would be wining and dining any ladies at this dive of a place. He definitely wasn’t the married type either, which for a special operator left only one type.
Cindy glanced at her cell, uncertain whether to call first. She didn’t have Kolt’s number, wasn’t even sure if he carried a personal cell, but she could ring the staff duty officer and be patched through to his Unit-issued cell.
Deep down, Cindy Bird felt a crazy attraction to Kolt, and even though she hadn’t seen him for the past three months, he was on her mind. So much so that she started seeing him less and less as a big-brother figure and more as a ruggedly attractive slightly older man, if thirteen or fourteen years’ difference could be considered slight.
But Hawk wasn’t visiting tonight to give Kolt a sympathy screw. Her Special Forces boyfriend wasn’t necessarily the issue; one-night stands just weren’t her style. Freaky attraction or crazy imagination—she wasn’t about to be that third type. And besides, interunit relationships were entirely frowned upon and the quickest route to a swift reassignment.
No, what brought her to Kolt’s trailer wasn’t personal at all. It was professional. She believed in Kolt, had seen him operate up close, and knew he had his head and heart in the right place. So when she heard the unit intelligence officer tell the assembled group earlier that morning that Major Kolt Raynor had been placed on “admin leave” indefinitely, she knew there was more to it than simply convalescing at home from his wounds.
Lost in thought, she rolled to a stop on the dead grass near Kolt’s beat-up black pickup, too late for the courtesy call. Cindy tapped the horn once, then, considering, a second time. She was certain Kolt wouldn’t recognize her vehicle and figured it was worth losing the cool points to keep her metallic-gray Beetle from eating some turkey shot from a drugged-up Kolt wielding an over-and-under shotgun.
