Primary Target

“Come in, Pirate 2. Pirate 2, Pirate 2.”

Heath paused. Now he listened.

“Pirate 2, status report. Status…”

He shook his head and looked at Luke again.

“They crashed.”

He listened again. “Minor injuries only. Helicopter disabled. Engines dead.”

Suddenly, Heath punched the wall near his head.

“Dammit!”

He glared at Luke. “Son of a bitch. The cowards. They ditched. I know they did. It just so happens their instrumentation failed, they got lost in the storm, and they crashed seven miles from a Tenth Mountain Division bivouac. How convenient. They’re going to walk there.”

He paused. A breath of air escaped him. “Doesn’t that beat all? I never thought I’d see a Delta Force unit DD a mission.”

Luke watched him. DD meant done deal. It meant disappearing, laying low, bowing out. Heath suspected that Pirate 2 had pulled the plug on the operation themselves. Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. But it might be the right thing to do.

“Sir, I think we should turn around,” Luke said. “Or maybe we should set this thing down. We have no support unit, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a storm…”

Heath shook his head. “Negative, Stone. We continue with minor edits. Six-man team raids the house. Six-man team holds the village approaches.”

“Sir, with all due respect, how is this chopper going to land and take off again?”

“No landing,” Heath said. “We’ll fast rope down. Then the chopper can go vertical and find the top of this storm, wherever it is. They can come back when we have the target secured.”

“Morgan…” Luke began, addressing his superior officer by his first name, a convention he could only get away with in a few places, one of them being Delta Force.

Heath shook his head. “No, Stone. I want al-Jihadi, and I’m going to have him. This storm doubles our element of surprise—they’ll never expect us to come out of the sky on a night like this. Mark my words. We’re going to be legends after this.”

He paused, staring directly into Stone’s eyes. “ETA five minutes. Make sure you have your men ready, Sergeant.”

* * *

“Okay, okay,” Luke shouted over the roar of the engines and the chopper blades and the sand spitting against the windows.

“Listen up!” The two lines of men stared at him, in jumpsuit and helmets, weapons at the ready. Heath watched him from the far end. These were Luke’s men and Heath knew it. Without Luke’s leadership and cooperation, Heath could quickly have a mutiny on his hands. For a split second, Luke remembered what Don had said:

We used to call him Captain Ahab.

“Mission plan has changed. Pirate 2 is one hundred percent SNAFU. We are pressing forward with Plan B. Martinez, Hendricks, Colley, Simmons. You’re with me and Lieutenant Colonel Heath. We are A-Team. We will move into the house, eliminate any opposition, acquire the target, and terminate. We are going to be moving very fast. Go mode. Understood?”

Martinez, as always: “Stone, how you plan to make this a twelve-man assault? It’s a twenty-four-man—”

Luke stared at him. “I said understood?”

Various grunts and growls indicated they understood.

“No one resists us,” Luke said. “Someone shoots, someone so much as shows a weapon, they’re out of the game. Copy?”

He glanced through the windows. The chopper fought through a brown shit storm, moving fast, but well below its max airspeed. Visibility out there was zero. Less than zero. The chopper shuddered and lurched as if to confirm that assessment.

“Copy,” the men around him said. “Copy that.”

“Packard, Hastings, Morrison, Dobbs, Murphy, Bailey. You are B-Team. B-team, you support and cover us. When we drop, two of you hold the drop spot, two hold the perimeter near the gates of the compound. When we go inside, two move forward and hold the front of the house. You’re also the last men out. Eyes sharp, heads on a swivel. Nobody moves against us. Eliminate all resistance, and any possible resistance. This place is bound to be hotter than hell. Your job is to make it cold.”

He looked at them all.

“Are we clear?”

A chorus of voices followed, each of differing depth and timbre.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

Luke crouched on a low-slung bench in the personnel hold. He felt that old trickle of fear, of adrenaline, of excitement. He had swallowed a Dexedrine right after takeoff, and it was starting to kick in. Suddenly he felt sharper and more alert than before.

He knew the drug’s effects. His heart rate was up. His pupils were dilating, letting in more light and making his vision better. His hearing was more acute. He had more energy, more stamina, and he could remain awake for a long time.

Luke’s men sat forward on their benches, eyes on him. His thoughts were racing ahead of his ability to speak.

“Children,” he said. “Watch for them. We know there are women and children in the compound, some of them family members of the target. We are not shooting women and children tonight. Copy?”

Resigned voices answered.

“Copy that.”

“Copy.”

It was an inevitability of these assignments. The target always lived among women and children. The missions always happened at night. There was always confusion. Children tended to do unpredictable things. Luke had seen men hesitate to kill children and then pay the price when the children turned out to be soldiers who didn’t hesitate to kill them. To make matters worse, their teammates would then kill the child soldiers, ten seconds too late.

People died in war. They died suddenly and often for the craziest reasons—like not wanting to kill children, who were dead a minute later anyway.

“That said, don’t die out there tonight. And don’t let your brothers die.”

The chopper rolled on, blasting through the spitting, shrieking darkness. Luke’s body swayed and bounced with the helicopter. Outside, there was flying dirt and grit all around them. They were going to be out there a few moments from now.

“If we catch these guys napping, we might have an easy time of this. They’re sure not expecting us tonight. I want to drop in, acquire the target inside ten minutes, and load back up within fifteen minutes.”

The chopper rocked and bucked. It fought to remain in the air.

Luke paused and took a breath.