by Dalton Fury
What the hell? In an instant, Kolt realized he hadn’t notified Gangster that they had already serviced Hawk, had already deployed from Camp Greaves, had already created one international incident, and were not prepared to enter into a second one. Kolt had forgotten he was a squadron commander now, not a troop commander, and his focus should have been on notifying his higher command first, and acting second.
Aw shit!
“We are inbound your location, one wounded Eagle, litter but stable,” Kolt transmitted, bracing for the response.
Again, a long silence from Gangster’s end.
“Say again, Racer!” Gangster demanded. “You launched? For what?”
“We are about three mikes out, sitrep on the ground.”
“Negative, negative, negative,” Gangster said with deep disdain in his tone. “Turn around and head to Beaver immediately.”
“Can’t do it,” Kolt said, careful with his inflection. A lot of people were listening on that net, especially his men—Gangster’s old men—and even though they still had their fighting load of bullets and charges, their SIMON devices, and most of their MAUL rubber rounds, he knew he needed some more situational awareness about Kleinsmith’s shitstorm that he couldn’t obtain from the pod of a Little Bird.
“Need fuel and a medic, then we’ll turn.”
Kolt looked at JoJo, who was nodding his head in approval.
“Noble Zero-One, this is Heater One-Zero, go ahead and put her down here. Tractor One and Two arrived, z-bags and medics waiting.”
Startled by the response, Kolt didn’t recognize the call sign, but he knew the voice. It was Captain Yost, the SEAL Team Six commander. He wasn’t sure if he was in for an ass chewing or an attaboy for safely recovering Hawk, but he knew Yost to be a calm-headed commander and a seasoned SEAL leader.
“Roger,” Kolt said.
“Quick FRAGO on the ground, hot refuel,” Yost said. “Need to get you guys airborne ASAP!”
TWENTY-SIX
Inchon, South Korea
Kolt instinctively lifted his black Salomons a few inches as Breaker Four-One’s tubular skids gently found the weed-covered and forgotten parking lot outside the hangar. Something about the idea of having his lower legs crushed always made him nervous.
Kolt unhooked, slipped off the pod, and turned toward the hangar area. He spotted the litter bearers and waved to get their attention. With the blades still spinning, Kolt reached high in the air, careful not to lop his gloved fingers off, and pumped his fist to get them to hurry the hell up. Seeing Kolt’s signal, they started jogging toward the bird.
Greenpeace know about this place?
The place stunk like the black-market dock of a Panamanian trout farm. The aroma was worse than last night. He rubbed his nose with his sleeve and chalked it up to baking sun rays pulling every biohazard from the side-floating bloated bodies.
Kolt turned back toward Hawk, still sitting upright in the belly of the helo, holding her left deltoid with her right hand. Through the open cabin he noticed Digger had retrieved his leg. Now bent over the opposite pod, framed by the pearl white and aqua blue waters of the Yellow Sea, he was reattaching it to the male end of his right knee.
The idle engine still turning the blades drowned out the sound of the waves slapping against the riprap as if hiding the danger ahead. The rolling whitecaps, something Kolt knew the SEALs, and maybe Gangster, would frolic in, hadn’t always given him pause, but that was another time.
Hawk looked comfortable, almost as if she thought they might be giving her a lift back to the Seoul Grand Hilton. She made eye contact with Kolt, smiled, and lifted her left hand in a thumbs-up.
“This is your final destination. Don’t forget your belongings,” Kolt yelled, trying to be heard over the engine noise as he passed Hawk her cell phone back. “We have one more leg though.”
“Where are you guys going?” Hawk yelled.
“Troops in contact,” Kolt said.
“I’m going!” Hawk said, letting go of her shoulder to try and close up her soiled blouse, and pulling her bandaged leg off of Digger’s helmet to show she was ambulatory and not a liability.
“You’re fucked up, you need attention,” Kolt said. “We got this.”
“You guys don’t know the train like I do.”
“I said we got this.”
“You don’t got shit, Kolt!” Hawk said, knocking her blond bangs out of her eyes and running her hair behind her right rear.
Kolt narrowed his eyes at Hawk, a little taken back by the smart-ass remark. Uncharacteristically informal for sure. In the past, ever since they’d first met inside Huske Hardware House years earlier, Hawk always made it a point to be respectful, if not of the rank, of the seasoned operator.
Kolt took a long pull on his CamelBak. He swirled the fresh water around his mouth for a few seconds before spitting out a long stream that splattered several unnamed weeds, essentially clearing the clam nets from his mouth.
“You’re delirious,” Kolt said, chalking it up to the shock she must be feeling, coupled with the blood loss. He motioned to the litter bearers to help her out and onto the litter.
“All yours, fellas.”
“You guys don’t know what Seamstress looks like,” Hawk yelled, “only I do.” She scooted a little farther away from the litter bearers like a kid avoiding Mommy, not ready to go to bed just yet.
“Look, Hawk, you aren’t frickin’ going, now get the hell out so we can refuel this thing.”
She didn’t budge. The litter bearers, in a high crouch under the spinning blades, stood dumbfounded. Kolt looked to his left, where two men in civilian clothes were approaching the nose of the helo, laboring to keep from dragging the heavy black z-bag they were holding between them.
Why didn’t Digger just stick her?
Hawk leaned toward Kolt and handed him the folded-up note. Kolt opened it and cocked his head, a little confused.
“Field trip permission slip from your mother?” Kolt said before shoving it in his left shoulder pocket next to his chew.
“From Seamstress,” Hawk said, “probably need to get it translated.”
“You’re still not going.”
“Seamstress doesn’t have an RRD on Kolt,” Hawk said.
“We know,” Kolt fired back, “you hit him with a Q dot.”
“I missed!”
“You sent Toyota.”
“I did,” Hawk said, “but I hit his jacket, right between the shoulder blades.”
“Good enough,” Kolt said.
“Think about it, Kolt,” Hawk fired back. “If I hit his head, they’d have to waterboard the shit out of him, cut his head off, or make him bob for apples for an hour to get rid of the Q dot crystals.”
“Your point?”
“The point is that they probably stripped Seamstress naked by now, or best case, have taken off his jacket.”
“No jacket, no crystals, no tag,” Kolt said. “Is that it?”
Movement out of Kolt’s peripheral grabbed him. The two refuelers had held up short of the bubble and lowered the z-bag to the deck by the side handles. As per standard procedure, they looked to the pilot for instructions. CW3 Stew Weeks extended his forefinger and turned it downward, issuing the signal to fill the main tank only.
Kolt then noticed Weeks manipulating some small knobs, frictioning down the cyclic and the collective. The pilot then took out a black nylon strap and placed it over the collective. Weeks unhooked his safety harness, bent forward in the seat, and wrapped a red-and-yellow bungee cord around the spring-loaded right pedal. These steps would maintain the Little Bird at flight idle, main rotors spinning, and allow him to unass without risking the aircraft yawing right.
Weeks leaned back, confirmed the rpms were holding steady, and began crawling out of the right side of the bubble cockpit.
Kolt turned back to the medics. “See about her left shoulder. Body wrap her if you have to, but get the bleeding stopped. Her head, too.”
Ko
lt turned away from the cockpit, took a few steps in a crouch to clear the blades, then went upright, following Weeks up the slight incline toward Slapshot and the rest of the boys. Some lounged in the rucksack flop and some were standing. Kolt slid his rifle around to his back, letting the sling hold it in place, muzzle down, as he approached the hangar. He was looking at the front door when it flew open; the first person out ruined his day.
Shit! Gangster.
On Gangster’s heels, immediately following him out the door, was Captain Yost, the SEAL commander’s barrel-chested body and hint of a beer gut filling up the fatal funnel completely. Next out was the SEAL LNO and a few others Kolt didn’t recognize.
Guess we’ll get plenty of opinions.
Yost was a legend, Kolt knew, on the battlefield and in every boardwalk bar and saloon in Virginia Beach. Even though he’d slowed down a little, the hard-man, dirty-fighter reputation he’d built as a young SEAL officer had stayed with him. Kolt knew Yost wasn’t Dick Marcinko hard, but he was damn close. That was all good, for sure, but it needed to wait until they could hit oyster and beer night at CP Shuckers again. At the moment, Kolt only needed gas and a mad-minute intel dump.
Gangster went right for the jugular, not wasting any time. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Tied up, man,” Kolt said as he unhooked his helmet from his assault vest. “Hawk’s wounded but fine.”
“What?” Gangster said, looking past Kolt and toward the helo. “How bad? Where is she?”
Kolt ignored Gangster’s episode, pulled off his glove like a gentleman, and stepped toward Yost as he approached. Kolt extended his hand, taking the full seat of Yost’s, and consciously doing grip battle, as he didn’t want his old friend to best him.
“I still gotcha, Raynor,” Yost said, smiling as he handed Kolt a bottle of water. Kolt could feel the ice-cold water through his tactical glove.
“Great to see you, sir,” Kolt said. “Last time I believe I was dragging your ass across the Drina River east of Zvornick.”
Yost smiled, laughed, and slapped Kolt on the back. Total bullshit of course, as the War on Terror had seen to it that they ran into each other every few months or so. Kolt also knew he owed Yost for saving his ass, keeping him from drowning in the river that night, some sixteen years ago. In fact, it hadn’t been too long that Raynor and Yost were at the memorial chapel in Dam Neck, the services for the SEALs that had hit Nadal the Romanian’s safe house in Sa’naa, Yemen, and run into a trap. Before that tragedy, Yost had requested Racer by name to deploy with his SEALs.
“Damn good to see you, too, Kolt,” Yost said. “Look, Kleinsmith and the boys are in their E and E corridor but having a slow go of it with their casualties.”
“Just waiting on gas, sir,” Kolt said as he poured half the bottle of ice water on his head and took a deep swallow of the rest.
“Not sure they’ll get through the DMZ and back inside South Korea in one piece,” Yost said.
Gangster jumped in. “Kleinsmith blew Beaver and Bear.”
“Old news now, right?” Kolt asked, knowing he and his men were only gassing up to QRF the SEALs and not try to recover Seamstress.
“No, it still matters. One of your missions is QRF, quick reaction force, but your little flight to Panmunjom took the quick right out of that,” Gangster said.
“So the bridges are blown then, big deal,” Kolt said, still not understanding exactly what they were looking at before they buzzed back across the MDL and into North Korea airspace.
“Not exactly sure, Raynor,” Yost interrupted. “They think one or both might have gone low order, they couldn’t confirm it.”
“We are QRF, not a reserve assault force.”
“You’re both!” Gangster said.
“You’re smoking crack—I’ve got twelve shooters and my headquarters element.”
“Damn it, Rac—” Gangster said.
“Colonel Mahoney is right, though, we’ll send Tractor One and Two to pick up Red Squadron at the DMZ; we need you to go after the train and Seamstress,” Yost said.
“C’mon, sir, let’s think this through a bit before we just go guns a-blazing into North Korea,” Kolt said. “Have you guys put considerable thought into this?”
“Of course we have!” Gangster yelled.
Kolt saw Yost’s eyes lock on Gangster, the unspoken message loud and clear, forcing the former Delta officer to check his mouth a little. It worked for the moment, but Kolt was sure it wasn’t enough to plug his pie hole.
“What the hell do you think we have been doing here? What do you think the J-staff does?” Gangster said through clenched teeth. “We’re way past mission analysis, and this exact situation is covered completely in our synchronization matrix.”
“No problem with the J-staff, man, just saying you know how quick shit changes,” Kolt said, trying to let Gangster off gently, knowing Yost was already an ally. “Color-coded Excel spreadsheets aren’t always the answer.”
“It’s on the spreadsheet. Did you bother to read it?” Gangster said.
“What? It says somewhere to assault an armored train under way and protected by crack North Korean troops already spooked with four Little Birds and sixteen men?” Kolt said with no effort to hide the sarcasm. “What part of the surprise, speed, violence of action class in your operator training course did you miss?”
“Okay, chill out. Both of you,” Yost said, trying to muffle his voice enough so the men of Noble Squadron huddled nearby didn’t overhear. “Racer, tell us what you know. Why spooked?”
“Seamstress is tagged, with the Q dots, not the RRD,” Kolt said, running the key points through his mental database. “Shit went sideways at the meeting, but Hawk got it done.”
“How bad is she?” Yost asked with obvious concern.
Kolt looked away from Yost, making eye contact with Slapshot standing a few feet behind him. The Night Stalker pilot, dressed in a tan jumpsuit under his earth-tone survival vest, had edged closer to the discussion by now.
Kolt hesitated, searching for the right words, accurate words for sure, but not so dramatic as if to imply they might be combat ineffective.
“Hit twice. She’s alert and getting patched up. We had to slot a guy though,” Kolt said.
“You guys used lethal force?” Gangster asked Slapshot. “Killed a man? What the hell is wrong with you guys?”
“It was clutch. Linebacker depth, sir,” Slapshot said as he wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Kolt lifted his hand as if to tell Slapshot he had this.
“My shots,” Kolt said, still looking at Yost. “Wasn’t looking to drop him, necessary though.”
“That wasn’t the plan, Raynor,” Gangster scolded.
“The North Korean had other plans,” Kolt said.
Kolt lifted the bottom of his assault vest with his left hand, reached near his belly button with the other, and yanked the Velcro flap open. He grabbed ahold of his hard armor ceramic plate, pulled toward his crotch, and slipped it from its hidden pouch.
Kolt held it up, showing Gangster and Yost the two spots where the North Korean’s bullets spalled the outer covering. “These kind of plans.”
“He saved a little girl’s life,” Weeks added, “had to be done.”
“We have radios for this kind of thing, Racer,” Yost said, signaling that he may not be entirely on the Kolt Raynor bandwagon.
Kolt dug the note out from his shoulder pocket, bringing the half-filled pouch of Red Man with it, and handed it to Yost. “Seamstress is compromised, taken away by thugs at gunpoint. Two shiny black four-door sedans, doubt we’d ever find them.”
“Shit!” Myron Curtis said, jumping in from behind Yost and practically pickpocketing the note from the SEAL’s hand. He had slipped up unseen by Kolt. “They won’t stop until they get him to the train at Kaesong Station. They won’t harm him, not yet anyway. That’s the Workers’ Party prerogative.”
“We need to move then,” Yost said.
Kol
t had just finished two-fingering a golf-ball-size wad of leaf chew into the pocket between his cheek and gum, making his next response sound like he had a bag of marbles in his mouth.
“What the fuck, sir?” Kolt said. He wiped the tobacco residue from his fingers onto his Crye combat pants.
Curtis chimed in. “I agree. Seamstress is the mission. We have to get our hands on him or we condemn a lot of sailors and civilians to certain death.”
“Now wait just one damn second here,” Kolt said, trying to be the calming voice in the crowd. “Are we all comfortable with the intel that confirms that?”
“Roger,” Yost said.
“I am totally,” Curtis added, “as is Langley.”
Kolt looked at Weeks. He was motionless, poised with a professional demeanor, ice in his veins, almost recruiting poster–like, giving no response one way or another.
“Damn it!” Kolt said, “I’m not taking the handful of men I have on a suicide mission into North Korea. No gunship support, no armed predator, no eyes in the sky, that’s fucking suicide.” Kolt knew enough not to push it, adding a quick, “Sir.”
“I need you to reconsider, Kolt,” Yost said.
Reconsider? What the hell does that mean?
“I’ll do it, sir,” Gangster said, turning toward Yost. “I’ll take them back in.”
Kolt looked at Yost, shocked by Gangster’s balls. Surprisingly, Yost almost looked like he was actually considering it.
“Kolt?” Yost said, obviously giving him a chance to change his mind.
I’m being muscled here?
“Seamstress or not, even if we get lucky and grab the guy, we’ve probably started World War III anyway,” Kolt said before quickly tilting his head to push a dark stream of tobacco juice away from the crowd.
“You don’t have to go back out there, Kolt, but—”
Kolt turned quickly to CW3 Weeks. “You good with this, Stew?”
“No operational reason to say no,” Weeks said.
“Fuck, all right, it’s against my better judgment,” Kolt said, now clearly on the spot. “Let’s dirt-dive it real quick.”
