The Complete Delta Force Warriors

by M. L. Buchman

  “Can you imagine what…” Baxter joined in for the first time.

  “…two hundred thousand gallons was like…” Burton was on it.

  “…all at once?” Baxter sighed for having missed such a spectacle.

  “Ka-boom!” they said together and both sighed again. They were both explosives techs, so he let them have their moment.

  “I’m lead,” Garret told them. “BB, you’re both hot on my tail. Mutt and Jeff, you alternate sniper overwatch and watching the back doors.”

  “Where do you want us?” Liza had her hand dug into the dog’s fur. He could see that her knuckles were white no matter how calm her voice was.

  “You, Minnow, are glued to my hip.”

  And wasn’t that going to be fun.

  5

  The buildings of Wesh were pitch black—invisible except as dark notches out of the stars. Without her night-vision goggles she couldn’t have made it ten steps. No street lights and what electricity the town did have was apparently on the fritz per usual in small Afghan towns. A few windows were lit by the flickering of oil lamps, a very few. It was a town without air conditioning, and one that needed it desperately. She and Sergey had been tramping through Afghan hell for three months now and neither of them were any more used to the heat than the day they landed.

  “What are we after?” Liza eased down the narrow street far closer to Garret Conway than she’d ever been to him in high school. Much to her surprise, she’d liked watching him with the men. Whatever else she might think of him, his men trusted him completely. This wasn’t some cluster of sycophantic hallway teens; these were top Unit operators.

  “Sergey’s specialty,” Garret kept his voice low. “There is a constant stream of explosives moving in both directions here. Bombs for inbound NATO supply trucks headed into Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. And Taliban and other pissed-off Afghanis going into Pakistan to blow the crap out of shrines and the civilian populace. I don’t care which side is holding it, I just want it gone. No matter which way it’s headed, it comes through Wesh. We want the bombmakers and their middlemen.”

  Wesh was laid out differently than most Afghan towns she’d patrolled. Usually they were a rabbit warren of streets which had evolved for donkeys and pedestrians. But the old Silk Road had passed through here since the Romans began trading with the Chinese and probably before that. The town was sliced by the one wide main street that must date back thousands of years. Rather than being lined with haphazard two-story structures that were connected only by the chance of shared walls, the main road was lined to either side with long rows of stone one-story warehouses. Each warehouse was a great V with dozens of storefronts and storage bays facing inward—the open end of the V facing the trade road. They served the only passage between the countries for a long way around.

  At the head of the first V, Garret stopped at the corner of the building where they were in deepest shadow.

  BB were close behind them.

  Jeff had peeled off to go down the back side of the building in case they flushed anyone out that way.

  Conway tapped her shoulder then pointed across the street and up. With her night-vision goggles, she could just make out Mutt on top of the only two-story building for several hundred meters around. He then indicated for her to lead the way, pointing close along the line of closed shops.

  She turned on the feed from Sergey’s camera in one eye of her NVGs. For brightness, she selected a level that didn’t distract her, but she could see as an overlay if she concentrated on it. Originally, it had been a vertiginous experience—disorienting dog-style motion fed into the human eye—but she’d learned to use and finally appreciate it. Wherever Sergey went, she could feel the connection between them until they functioned as one.

  She knelt next to Sergey, gave him a good scratch, then whispered, “Seek.” A hand gesture—that she knew he could see even if it was too dark for unaided human eyes—was all the direction he needed.

  In that instant, he transformed. He would no longer react well to anyone trying to touch him, but neither would he be bothered by Garret Conway standing a foot away. He now had only one task in mind—sniffing out one of the thousand-plus explosives compounds he’d been trained to recognize.

  Trusting her, he stepped around the corner and began working his way along the line of shops. She swung loose her FN-SCAR assault rifle, double-checked that the flash suppressor was in place and moved in behind him. Sergey trailed his nose along the base of battered wood and steel garage doors that shuttered each bay of the long building.

  Fifty meters down, he skipped a narrow doorway, probably leading up a set a stairs to the roof. She snapped her fingers lightly, calling him back. He double-checked where she indicated, but showed no interest, so she waved him to continue.

  After the third building with no “alert,” she could feel the team’s growing impatience.

  But she knew she couldn’t share that. Couldn’t let Sergey know or he’d pick up on it, get distracted or hurry at the wrong moment.

  She signaled him along the fourth building and followed in his footsteps.

  6

  Garret didn’t know whether to be thrilled or worried. If his team had been searching on their own, they’d still be back at the first building, breaking into bay after bay of worthless garbage. Some of it would be household belongings, stored when refugees had been told they couldn’t take them across the border—all held in the hopes of returning someday. Foodstuffs, manufacturing supplies, bicycle parts, the list was endless. The locks were feeble at best, easily picked. But each lock took time. Each inspection was visual and usually tedious.

  But the dog went by each bay as fast as they could walk.

  This was either fast…or useless. What if they’d walked by some major weapons cache?

  He’d worked with military war dogs before, but always as point on a patrol, sniffing out buried IEDs. He’d never let a MWD guide the destination of an entire mission.

  As they moved to the fifth warehouse, he couldn’t help watching Minnow. She moved like her nickname: quick, smooth, hardly disturbing the air around her. In a land where standing still and just breathing could produce a rising cloud of brownout dust, she and her dog barely stirred the air as they slipped along.

  Get her out of your head, Conway! Being distracted by anything on a mission was bad news. He thought that had been trained out of him, but apparently not.

  Liza could distract a dead man already in his grave. That pleasant, can-do attitude she’d struck with the team this evening had been pitch perfect. She’d won all four guys over with her polite introduction and her ever-so-gentle but obviously dangerous-as-hell companion. He pitied the man who tried to touch her uninvited.

  Minnow had also stood out because of how she looked. They’d all been in-country for a week and looked it. She’d arrived from wherever she’d been, looking fresh-showered and poster perfect. Her straight blonde hair swinging just along her fine jaw line. Her blue eyes wide and observant. Her smile easy—for everyone except him. And the way she acted with the dog was just too much.

  Like the one that he’d murdered and never been able to apologize for, it was clear that she loved her dog and that the feeling was returned. Together they—

  Sergey sat abruptly and Garret almost plowed into Minnow when she stopped as well.

  The dog was looking up at her expectantly, his tongue lolling happily.

  “What?” He was so close to her that he barely had to whisper. As close as lovers.

  Shit! He’d just been in the field too long. Had to be to think such things.

  Minnow made the throat-cutting signal with her hand meaning danger, then pointed emphatically at the closed door.

  Oh! Pay dirt. Sitting was the dog’s signal of a find.

  She quickly guided Sergey forward, pointing at the ground. He sniffed the ground, but kept walking. No IEDs. Then she led him to the opposite edge of the door. Once more he sat abruptly.

  Garret clicked
his mic and whispered, “West side, bay seven.”

  Jeff was now on sniper overwatch and Mutt was on the ground out back. Mutt would position himself to deal with anyone trying to escape that way.

  Burton came forward to pick the lock, but hesitated at the door. He swung his hand forward, the sign for point of entry. Then he made an non-standard gesture like twisting a doorknob. Like—

  There was no lock for him to unlock. Garret checked the door edges again. No light leakage. It was a double, wooden door, with handles and a wear line where a chain and padlock had hung. The doors would swing out to either side.

  In case it was booby-trapped, or a gunman waited in the dark, Garret yanked out a length of tactical line and tied it to one handle. Burton did the same to the other door. He had them switch sides, which confused Burton, but that was just tough. They each backed up holding the end of the line. Burton stood beside Baxter and, as he’d planned, Garret ended up between Minnow and the dog.

  He held up three fingers…two…braced himself, then yanked open the doors.

  A heavy sheet of black plastic hung just inside the doors, blocking all light.

  “Tsook?” a voice asked “Who?” through the black plastic.

  Garret held up a fist to freeze the team in place.

  Someone pulled aside one edge of the plastic less than two feet from where Garret stood with his back against the now open door. The man was backlit by a kerosene or oil lamp and would be night blind. Like most Afghan men, he was thin, weather-beaten, and wore a thin black beard.

  “Tsook?” he asked again.

  Garret reached out, grabbed him by the throat, and dragged him out through the plastic. As the material flapped aside, he didn’t see anyone else inside. He thumped the man in the solar plexus hard enough to make sure he wouldn’t be crying out an alarm in the next few moments, then passed him back to the soldier behind him.

  That would be Minnow! Crap! No choice. He handed the man off and hoped for the best.

  He used his rifle barrel to brush aside the plastic as Baxter did the same on the other side. Two women squatted low over an entire array of armament. There were dozens of AK-47s and several rocket-propelled grenades. An old Toyota Land Cruiser SUV was stripped down, ready to be turned into a rolling bomb. Everything would be hidden inside door panels, fenders, and seats. The only thing they lacked was a pile of something that exploded to shove inside the exposed cavities.

  In moments, Minnow had handed off her prisoner and had the two women bound. Dealing with another woman, the two Afghani women were surprised, but calm. If a man had done it, they’d fight and scream because no married woman was supposed to be touched by another man. Minnow hadn’t missed a single trick. No matter how fresh she looked, she’d clearly spent plenty of time in-country.

  He squatted down and began questioning the man, who just kept shaking his head in refusal.

  That’s when he noticed Minnow. She had Sergey playing his nice-doggie game. Garret never heard the word “friend” but neither was the Malinois poised to rend.

  Unable to get anything from the man, he finally gagged him just as Minnow signaled Garret to the other corner.

  BB made fast work of completely securing the area and clearing the weapons.

  “Couldn’t get shit out of him,” Garret grumbled.

  “The women are waiting,” Minnow replied. “They aren’t happy about it either, but he’s brother to one and husband to the other so they have little choice.”

  “For what?”

  “There’s a shipment coming tonight,” she waved toward the partially disassembled car. “A big load of explosives. Coming here. Not for a while, but it’s coming.”

  Now that was good news.

  He stopped BB before they could burn some thermite and melt the weapons cache. Everything had to look normal. He deployed his team as well as he could, restoring the black-out plastic, closing the doors, as well as arranging a few other surprises. He roamed the room. All the tools of a car mechanic’s shop were piled along one wall, but no spare parts—new or used. The man was a car-bomb producer. Pull in a car, receive a delivery of explosives and, presto chango, mass destruction in a marketplace.

  The front had been cleared for the pending delivery. A stripped Land Cruiser SUV stood in the middle of the bay. The guy was good. He’d welded steel struts in place of the springs. It would make for a hard ride, but the suspension wouldn’t sag—a common indicator of a car loaded down heavy with explosives. Near one back corner, past the stack of dismounted fenders and seats, stood the refuse pile—all the stripped-out metal, springs, fittings, even spare tires from prior car-bomb conversions. There was a small gap along the back wall for access to the rear door. He made sure it was secure. To the other side stood a massive, rusted-out truck’s engine block. He stashed his prisoners behind that.

  At the center of the back wall he was able to sit with a view of the whole bay. He dropped into place with his back against the wall to do what Delta did best—be patient and wait.

  A low growl informed him that he should have landed somewhere other than close beside Minnow and her furry guardian.

  7

  “Shush!”

  Sergey huffed grumpily then lay his head on her thigh, effectively pinning her in place. That blocked any excuse for getting away from Conway.

  “How long until the shipment arrives?” Conway checked his watch for the twentieth time in the last ten minutes.

  “I still don’t know.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  They sat in silence long enough for Sergey to finally relax with a sigh.

  “Doesn’t like me much.”

  “You never gave me a reason to,” which Liza decided was just the truth. She never had, though she was definitely learning to respect the man he’d grown into.

  “Murdering your dog. Guess not.” Liza could hear the hard knot of pain and self-recrimination in Conway’s voice.

  “He was dead already.”

  Conway glared at the ceiling. He’d rested his HK416 rifle butt down between his legs and draped his hands over the protrusion of the foregrip handle. “You saying that you tossed a dead dog in front of my car for the fun of it? I saw him walking.”

  Liza could feel that awful day coming back over her. Rex had slowed down the few days prior. He’d been old, but still enjoying his play and his food, then suddenly he didn’t anymore. It had been everything she could do to not weep after the diagnosis as she walked him home. “One last walk to say goodbye.” They’d spend one last night together in her bed then she’d have to put him down in the morning. And then…

  “He was a dead dog walking,” her voice sounded like a croaking frog, but she held it together. She certainly wasn’t going to lose it in front of Garret Conway of all people. Or on a mission. She distracted herself by telling him about the blindness, deafness, and finally cancer. And not just a little, but riddling his body. “Sometimes I think he stepped in front of your car on purpose, just to spare me having to hold his paw while they injected him.”

  Now Garret was looking down at her, “He was sick? I didn’t know.”

  She could only nod and look down at her hand buried deep in Sergey’s fur.

  After a long silence—that she couldn’t look up from—she could feel him turn to study the ceiling once more. “Well, ain’t that some news. You never said.”

  “The shock, Garret. It was so big. You hit him less than five minutes after I staggered out of the vet’s office. I wasn’t ready to lose him. Not slowly, not fast. Dad gave him to me when I was five. I have almost no memories prior to him. Then he was gone. It was a blessing in disguise. But I sure wasn’t ready to talk about it that day. And afterwards…” all she could do was shrug. “We never spoke much in school.”

  She heard a soft thump, then another, and looked up to see him banging the back of his head against the stone wall.

  “What?”

  “You and that dog changed my life.”

  “No we di
dn’t.” It was a ridiculous idea.

  Then he looked over at her. The deep brown of his eyes so close that she couldn’t look away. They’d been almost shoulder-to-shoulder, and now they were nearly nose-to-nose.

  “Trust me,” his voice went soft and low. “You and he absolutely did.”

  8

  And Garret couldn’t believe he’d just confessed such a thing. Keep it professional. Yeah, too late for that. He was a Unit operator, not a throwback, useless-shit of a self-absorbed testosterone-laden… But he still couldn’t believe he’d told her.

  And the apology that he’d rehearsed a thousand times in his head, but never found a way to say through the rest of senior year, he couldn’t manage now either.

  He wanted to look away, he needed to look away. But there she was, looking at him with those wide blue eyes the color of a summer sky and he couldn’t move. He’d often hung out at the piers along the Patapsco River, waiting for his dad and watching that sky. She was like the only good part of home.

  “How did my dog change your life?”

  “Not just your dog.”

  Sergey looked up suddenly, inspecting her rather than him. Then Garret noticed her white-knuckled hand buried in his ruff.

  “Um, you may want to ease up on your dog there.”

  At that, she finally looked away and he felt as if he’d been released from some sort of hypnosis ray. She eased her death grip and apologized to the dog. Sergey inspected him with curiosity, but no longer animosity.

  Then Minnow looked back up at him and he was trapped again by the eyes that were windows right down into her.

  “How is it you’re still single, Minnow?” Not a question he had ever thought he’d be asking.