One Killer Force: A Delta Force Novel (16 page)
“Keep the engine running,” he said, grabbing his .45 from its position between his legs and bringing it up to just below the dash. “We have no idea who’s here.”
Kolt was pissed, but mostly at himself. He’d told Olga not to drive straight up to the house, but to stop a quarter mile out. Obviously, he should have told her again. He studied the aged two-story brick building and burnt-out vehicles in the surrounding area. The war had clearly run over this place. He counted three holes in the wall facing him, most likely from RPGs. The front corner of the structure was completely gone, leaving a ten-foot-wide gap clogged with rubble and wood beams hanging down from the second floor. Every window he could see was shattered. The place looked abandoned, which was good. If his team were inside, they were practicing excellent light discipline.
It was still dark, which normally worked to Kolt’s advantage, but after their run-in with Spetsnaz he found himself wanting more than the artificial kind provided by SureFire.
“I check,” Olga said, apparently reading his mind.
Kolt grabbed her arm before she could step out of the cab of the truck. “Stand by, I’ll join you.” He turned and saw Slapshot staring at him through the rear window. Kolt slid the glass panels back. “I fucked up. We’re too close.”
“You want us to take a look?” Slapshot asked.
“Just cover us from either side of the truck. We’ll go to the door. If it goes south, don’t be strangers,” he said.
“We’ll try to discriminate, but,” Slapshot said, lightening the mood a bit.
A knock on Kolt’s window startled him and he swung his auto pistol up and to the right. Trip Griffin was staring back at him, his smile evaporating as he stared at the business end of the 1911.
Kolt quickly lowered his pistol and reengaged the thumb safety.
“Welcome to Ukraine,” Trip said.
Kolt stood inside the living room of the war-torn safe house and tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Three bodies were laid out on a filthy blue and gray carpet in the center of the room. Placed abreast of each other, the bodies were dress right dress, maybe an inch between them. They were two Delta snipers and a 24th Special Tactics Squadron combat controller. Each one was wrapped tight with the red, white, and blue of a full-size American flag and then inside an olive green plastic Skedco litter, the kind infantry troops use to drag their casualties.
Kolt took a few steps closer to the bodies and took a knee. It was the last thing he expected to see upon arriving at the safe house. He didn’t know the details, at least not enough to determine what, if anything, could have been done differently. On occasion, they’d lose an Eagle on a hit, usually by some freak accident, a lucky rabbit round, or something unseen and uncontrollable. Kolt knew losing a mate left the survivors feeling one of two ways. Either they’d be stuffing more frags in their assault vests and topping off mags, or they’d dump their kit in a pile and mentally shut down for a while. Losing one guy on a hit was tragic enough, but three guys in one hit was entirely uncommon.
“It was a fool’s plan in the first place,” Trip Griffin said, breaking the silence. “We should have waited for better intel.”
“What happened?” Slapshot asked.
“Jackal’s op car hit a land mine during the exfil.”
Kolt gritted his teeth. It was a tough break to lose their sniper team.
“What about Marzban’s courier?” Kolt asked, immediately regretting the comment. Kolt didn’t intend to be insensitive to the casualties, and felt a pang of guilt in his throat. If his men fingered him as a commander more concerned about the mission than the men, his first operation with his new squadron would only get more difficult.
“Slotted him. But that ain’t the half of it. Marzban was there, too,” Trip said.
Kolt looked at Trip. “Intel only had the courier.”
“Yeah, well, they got part of it right. He had extra muscle with him. When we realized it was him, he was already making a run for it. I’m sure I tagged him; Dealer shot, too. He probably has two bullets in him.”
“Dealer?”
“One of the SEALs,” Trip said. “They had the cordon.”
Kolt paused for a second. He knew who Dealer was, but was surprised to hear his name. Kolt knew Colonel Webber had never said anything about the SEALs tagging along on this mission.
“Any word on him?” Kolt asked, hoping something positive had come from three KIAs on a failed mission.
Trip shook his head. “Last we saw of him he was holding his belly. He jumped in a dark-colored sedan and bolted.”
“The Iranian scientists?” Kolt asked. “Any sign of them?”
“None,” Trip said. “They weren’t there.”
“Marzban’s got a girlfriend,” Kolt said. Again, he caught himself, hoping his tone wasn’t too snippy.
“No,” Trip said, “bitch was probably behind the wheel.”
Kolt took his eyes from Trip’s dirty face and disheveled hair and looked down at the three corpses lying on the floor behind him.
“Who are they?” Kolt asked, a knot forming in his stomach.
“Philly and Max,” Trip said, “and our new combat controller, Carson. His first time out with us.”
Mother Fuckers!
Even the impetuous Kolt Raynor knew it wasn’t worth Marzban, not dead or alive. But he knew he wouldn’t turn off the mission because of casualties. The Ukraine in 2014 was not Somalia in 1993, where after too many special operators were lost, weak-kneed politicians pulled the plug, aborting the original mission before it could be realized.
A different time, a different place.
Marzban Tehrani wasn’t simply stealing from a United Nations food distribution center to cement his power base. He was the pivot point for North Korea’s miniature nuclear warhead program, responsible for smuggling nuclear scientists from his home in Iran, across Europe into Russia, and on to Pyongyang.
“Same route you took in?” Kolt asked. He stood back up, wanting to refocus.
“Yeah, the other routes were blocked. Separatists had the place locked down.”
“Dumb luck on the infil?”
“Pressure-plated mine. We missed it going in.”
“Damn. Why did you guys launch if the intel was weak?” Kolt asked, careful not to sound as if he was second-guessing their decision to execute, especially since he hadn’t been there to help.
“Hell, sir,” Trip said, “I don’t really know. I guess because it was written that way on the sync matrix.”
“Sync matrix?” Kolt asked, surprised at Trip’s comment. “Even if the intel wasn’t actionable or vetted?”
“Yeah, seems like we always do it that way,” Trip said, “at least when Lieutenant Colonel Mahoney was our commander.”
“Sync matrices don’t think, don’t process, and don’t audible,” Kolt said, looking Trip dead in the eye.
Trip didn’t respond, just turned slightly and looked down at the three bodies on the floor. Kolt wasn’t sure if the comment even registered with Trip or if he was too shell-shocked to comprehend it.
Kolt bit his tongue, felt the pointed stares from Slapshot and Digger, and took a deep breath. He looked at them both, read their minds, and let it go for now.
“Where’d you guys score those digs?” Trip asked, as if he finally broke out of his trance and noticed the oddball uniforms Kolt, Slapshot, and Digger were wearing. He pointed with both thumbs at his own chest. “We thought this was the Ukrainian uniform?”
“No. Russian,” Slapshot said. “Spetsnaz, in fact.”
“We scored them on a pit stop en route from Kiev,” Kolt said.
“They smell like shit.” Trip waved his hand in front of his nose. “Are those bloodstains?”
“Not ours,” Kolt said.
Kolt studied Trip’s outfit, impressed that his men had dug into the commando toolbox, opting to don deceptive Ukrainian uniforms to protect their cover for action. Kolt noticed the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag sewn to the right shoulder of the puke yellow-green camouflage smock.
“Drop your kit,” Kolt said. “We’ll watch over them. Get something to eat.”
“I lost my appetite.”
Trip walked through the closest doorway and out of sight. Kolt realized then he hadn’t even had a chance to address his entire squadron. Hadn’t huddled them up and given them the obligatory
I’m honored to be your new squadron commander
speech, or told them how valuable they were. He always knew, if he ever got a squadron, he’d make it a point to let his boys know how important each and every one of them was to obtaining the national security objectives of the United States of America. Not that they would need the reminding, or would even expect the kudos; to Kolt it just felt right.
Major promotable Kolt “Racer” Raynor had only been the new Noble Zero-One for less than forty-eight hours. Not long enough to move his kit from his team room in Mike Squadron across the hall to Noble Squadron’s bay. Not long enough for the rigger shop to cut and sew him some new callsign patches. Not long enough for that damn dog Roscoe’s bite to heal. Not even long enough to let them know that Slapshot, Digger, and maybe even Hawk were part of the package. But there had been time for three Eagles to be killed in action on his watch.
From behind, Kolt heard someone address him more formally than he was used to.
“Major Raynor, sir. You need to look at this.”
Kolt turned, seeing it was one of the Unit’s intel analysts, Sergeant John Simminski. Even though Kolt couldn’t remember how to spell his last name, he recognized the man easily enough. Sporting wire-rimmed glasses, the scruff of what could be the attempt at a hipster beard, and a potbelly definitely set him apart from the operators. Still, Sergeant Simminski wasn’t there for his shooting skills.
“Show me,” Kolt said, noticing Olga was on his tail. Both of the Alfa operative’s hands were chest high, holding the leather sling tight, as if the AKMS she had claimed at the truck standoff and now carried on her back was throwing her natural balance off. Her left hand also clutched her conductor’s hat, the dried blood on her hands and around the edges of her fingernails serving as a stern warning that she shouldn’t be tested.
Olga’s shoulder-length hair had fallen naturally to the sides with a center part, as greasy and matted as John’s. Five, maybe six days of facial growth put ten years on him. Kolt figured John hadn’t had a shower in a week, something not uncommon for Unit intel analysts, who put in more time at the office than anyone.
Kolt looked at the palms of his hands and wiped the dried blood on his thighs. He took the paper from the analyst and started reading, but John injected the information anyway.
“Marzban is at the hospital in Donetsk,” John said, also handing Kolt an eight-by-ten color printed map with the thin black horizontal and vertical lines of a standard grid target reference already superimposed over the satellite photo.
“Big-ass hospital,” Kolt said, studying the photo for possible high ground spots for his snipers and infil routes for his assaulters.
“Donetsk Regional Trauma Hospital,” John said. “Believed to be still under control of the locals.”
“What’s the source?” Kolt asked.
“SIGINT,” John said, offering the acronym for signal’s intelligence. “Cell phone chatter has been smoking hot.”
“Who’s doing the monitoring?” Kolt said. “Not an airborne platform.”
“My compatriots,” Olga said. “Our intelligence group is very skilled in this.”
Kolt listened but continued reading. “John, let’s push ISR over the hospital,” he said, “develop the vehicle activity pattern.”
“Can’t, boss,” John said. “All of Incirlik’s Predators are committed to Iraq and Syria. The Kurds have more power than I do, it appears.”
Kolt thought about it and nodded knowingly, seeing in John’s eyes his genuine frustration with the lack of airborne intelligence assets. With the recent territorial gains of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, everyone in JSOC was expecting POTUS to issue a deployment order to send Tier One assets back to Iraq. The ISIL had recently steamrolled through Iraq from the west, cutting off heads from Fallujah to Ramadi, and held mass executions from Mosul to Baiji to Tikrit, which meant the United States was about to butt in again.
Kolt read on.
“Looks like we have Marzban, his girl, and the two eggheads in one spot, boss,” John said, showing he was becoming a little impatient with the time Kolt was taking to finish the note.
“We have current PID photos of all four?” Kolt asked.
“Already printed, sir.”
Kolt turned to Slapshot. “Whatya think, Slap?”
“I think we don’t know shit about this target, don’t know shit about what or who is there, don’t know shit about what room they are in,” Slapshot said. “Should I go on?”
“You’re right,” Kolt said. “We just can’t go in there full-up green machine. Too many breach points, target too big, and even though he probably is wounded, we don’t know how ambulatory he is. And it’s a hospital,” Kolt added, almost as an afterthought.
“Can’t let him squirt again,” John said. “If he does, he probably won’t stop until he is across the border in Russia.”
“What’s the drive time from here to the hospital?” Slapshot asked, his tone revealing his clear lack of enthusiasm for some harebrained, half-baked course of action.
“Hour at least,” John said, “forty-five miles.”
“Forty minutes,” Olga said. “I know a way.”
Kolt looked at Slapshot then slewed quickly to John. “Okay, I need a no-shit assessment here from both of you.”
“Yes, sir,” John said.
No response from Slapshot.
“Our working assumption is Marzban is wounded. This message says the four of them are together, not necessarily in the same room, but likely nearby. A waiting room or something.”
“Just spill it, boss,” Slapshot said.
“Can we afford to wait till the next cycle of darkness?”
“My best assessment, sir, is there are no guarantees,” John said. “We don’t know how bad he is. For all we know he could be stitched up and walking out with a prescription for Motrin.”
“My people will know when he leaves,” Olga said.
Kolt looked at Olga, impressed that she was participating in the hasty mission analysis.
Kolt looked at Slapshot, hoping to get his take next. Silence.