One Killer Force: A Delta Force Novel (20 page)

“He’s gone, boss.”

Kolt barely heard his medic. He had to save this miserable fuck of a terrorist. Killing Marzban was not the mission. The United States wanted Marzban captured. He was tapped as an intelligence bonanza—with a little luck, ripe for enhanced interrogation techniques—and was the only link to the North Korean miniature nuke warheads. Killing Marzban equated to mission failure.

Kolt rose up over Marzban’s chest again, rapidly depressing the man’s sternum deeper and deeper, hoping to jump-start the man’s heart.

“Boss!” the medic said. “No pulse. He’s dead.”

Kolt ignored him, continuing to press.

“C’mon, damn it,” Kolt said, “don’t you fucking die on me.”

“He’s lost too much blood,” the medic said.

“Damn it! Help me!” Kolt said, picking his count back up at twenty-two.

Then, before he could give another chest thrust, Kolt felt a massive bear hug squeezing both of his arms tight to his sides.

“Racer!” Slapshot said. “It’s okay, man. Let him go.”

Kolt’s heart pounded. He couldn’t break his stare from Marzban’s slack, lifeless face.

“Gotta have him alive, Slap.”

“Allah’s hands now.”

“He’s too important,” Kolt said. “We need this guy.”

“More important than Max or Philly?” Slapshot said, letting go of Kolt. “Fuck this asshole.”

That snapped Kolt out of it. He looked at his squadron sergeant major. He knew Slap was right. Marzban had valuable intel. They’d been after him a long time, and not bagging him alive meant they would be at a dead end on the mini nukes and back to the drawing board. But when it came right down to it, Kolt could live with this outcome, especially because it meant his men would, too. Kolt would rather Marzban take his martyrdom trip here while the squadron lived to hunt another day.

Fuck him. Kill ’em all and let Allah sort them out
. Kolt smiled at his very politically incorrect thought.

“We ready to exfil?” Kolt asked.

“All flex-cuffed, and vehicles standing by,” Slapshot said.

“Get a few proof-of-death pics of Marzban and let’s roll.”

FOURTEEN

Startled awake by the sound of bells ringing, Cindy “Hawk” Bird sat up in her sleeper cabin on the train. Bundled in tension and confused, she rotated on her panty-covered rear end, steadied her hands on the side of the bed to save a tumble, and placed her feet on the floor. Puzzled as to why she had only one sock on, she scanned the tiny room but found nothing amiss. She rubbed her wrecked eyes and shook her head.

Where is my sports bra?

Hawk stood, caught a trace of her own body odor, and paused to balance the nausea in her stomach. She felt K27/K28’s cold passenger cabin floor beneath one foot, and wiped her neck-length auburn hair out of her eyes. The ringing seemed to be getting louder. She reached for the water bottle on the small table and slipped the nozzle under her nose to be sure it was plain water, and not full of the dog that bit her, before taking a long pull.

Hawk felt the train slowing, recapped the bottle, and dragged herself to the dingy red curtains hiding the filthy windows. She pulled one curtain aside, rubbed a balled fist on the glass, peered through the clean spot, and tried to focus on the buildings buzzing by. Yes, they were stopping, all right, and dusk was falling, barely offering an opportunity to make out the blurry signage on the drab gray and whitewashed buildings. It was enough, though, to confirm that they were now somewhere in China.

Where the hell are we? How long have I been asleep?

A series of buildings and the glimpse of a river jarred a memory. This had to be Harbin, a city of seven million inhabitants straddling the Songhua River. Her cramming of Asian geography didn’t let her down. Once a small rural settlement, its name literally meaning “a place for drying fishing nets,” Harbin embraced the major technological advances in the twentieth century and had been launched from backwater to one of the largest cities in Northeast China.

Feeling every bit like a rotting crab net, Hawk looked at her watch, fumbled with some basic math, and realized she had slept for the last eight hours. That meant she’d slept through their previous scheduled stop at Shenyang, the railway hub of Northeast China.

Hawk turned too quickly from the window to head back to the bed. The room spun and she held her hands out to her sides like a child pretending to fly. She tried to shake the cobwebs, get the blood flowing, and stimulate her short-term memory about what led her to be unfit for duty.

That bastard Jerud! The bimbos taking pictures! The arm lock!

Hawk sat back down, rat-fucked the covers to find her other sock, and felt something hard on her butt cheek. She reached down, touched her iPad, and rescued it from her unpredictable state.

Hawk opened the tablet and began cycling through her mental Rolodex, sensing her memory wasn’t going to be entirely cooperative. Vaguely remembering bits and pieces, she knew she wasn’t going to get the whole story.

Hawk mashed the power button and stared at the iPad screen as it came to life. She sort of remembered bowing up to eye candy Jerud, was pretty sure she remembered being dragged back to her room by uniformed customs officials, and thought she remembered banging out the sitrep over the secure e-mail link to Fort Bragg before getting horizontal. But, she was pretty darn certain, unless it was part of an alcohol-induced nightmare, that her antics on the hard floor of the restaurant car had been captured. Her photo had probably been snapped more than once, which scared the attitude and hangover right out of her.

She knew that if the college bimbos had already posted images of her slippery arm lock all over Instagram and Twitter, maybe even uploaded a short video to YouTube, Delta Force commander Colonel Webber might have seen it by now. The Unit intel analysts that troll the Web twenty-four/seven while operators, or in Hawk’s case, wannabe operators, were overseas under alias, didn’t miss shit. And if Webber had seen it, he’d do more than just shit, for sure; he’d detonate. Moreover, this would likely doom the pilot program and kill her chances at the Commander’s Board. Webber would have no choice, no matter what he felt personally; the voice of the naysaying graybeards would certainly rule the decision.

Truth be told, Hawk couldn’t deny that she was the one that had brought up the big idea of playing a friendly drinking game. It had been a long, whirlwind Whistle-stop so far, beginning back in Raleigh, North Carolina, with CONUS stops in Atlanta, Houston, Denver, and Los Angeles, where her skill sets were tested with a boatload of dead drops, personal meetings, covert comms, and brush passes. Over the past two weeks, planes, trains, and automobiles had taken her from the States, through South Africa, Istanbul, Croatia, and Moscow, before her last stop in North Korea. So far, she had knocked it out of the park.

But she also knew letting her hair down around the tourist bar after finishing her final mission in North Korea might have killed her chances at gaining operational status.

Fuck!

As Hawk swiped and tapped, drilling down to the secure e-mail link, she tried not to stare at the desktop picture. A picture only a few weeks old, Photoshopped by the cover shop to help cement her status as a young high school teacher interested in European and Far East culture, with a personal penchant for foreign languages. Hawk had been proud of the cover photo and pleased to use it, but now, after her exceptionally poor judgment, she was ashamed at the sight of her standing proud among a group of unknown teenagers at work in her own classroom.

What have I done?

Hawk knew she was Delta Force’s experimental flower child to answer the president’s top-secret tasking of exploring the pros and cons of opening up operational positions to females within the special operations community. Webber and her father, former Delta squadron commander Michael Leland Bird, had been close mates before he was killed in action in Baghdad. She knew very well that Colonel Webber had gone to bat for her numerous times over her two years in the Unit, and she cringed at the idea of letting both of them down. Granted, Hawk hadn’t created one-tenth the problems for Webber as Major Kolt Raynor had over the years, but give her time.

Aw shit!

Hawk felt her stomach tighten as she opened the Send folder, subconsciously holding her breath, hoping like hell to confirm she had indeed pushed the sitrep to Bragg before she’d passed out.

Thank God!

It was there all right, and she slumped forward, quickly opening her sent message. Hawk quickly read the report, noticed a few typos, a grammar issue or two, but was satisfied that she had pecked slowly enough to get the key information out. It was all there, most importantly the unique discovery of details pertaining to Kim Jong Un’s private armored trains and the claims of stealth netting the shoeshine man had bragged about.

Hawk read it a second time, slower, and closed it out. She noticed her Inbox folder highlighted, telling her she had an unread message.

That’s odd.

She wasn’t expecting a message from anyone. Even though the link was secure, part of Whistle-stop was the ability to remember your taskings and itinerary before you left Bragg to begin the solo journey. Whistle-stop was a final culmination of sorts, the last test before attending the Commander’s Board, where her fate as an operational member within the command would be decided, one way or the other.

Hawk tapped the Inbox folder and saw the top unopened message. She didn’t recognize the sender, but figured it was just some innocuous coverspeak. It had to be from Bragg, that much she was certain of. She paused, seeing the subject line blank, but only for a few seconds before she tapped it open. She swiped the touch screen with two fingers, enlarging the message, and was surprised again to see the body of the message empty. She swiped her fingers again, this time closing her fingers to reduce the screen, simply to ensure she hadn’t missed anything. She searched, befuddled as she found nothing, but noticed a file attached.

Hawk opened the attachment, studied it for a few seconds. It was obviously an itinerary of some type for her—she saw “Carrie Tomlinson” in bold letters in the upper left corner. She was expecting another five days or so on the K27/K28 before catching a plane out of Moscow and heading back to Bragg.

Maybe I’m finished. Is Whistle-stop over? Is this my itinerary to fly home?

She read it quickly, running her right forefinger from left to right, ensuring she didn’t skip a line, given her present state of mind.

She read it once, stopped, then said it out loud, unsure of what she was actually reading.

“Depart Harbin International at zero eight thirty, layovers in Beijing and Amsterdam, arrive Stockholm at twenty thirty.”

What the hell is in Sweden?

Pine Gap, Australia

“Mr. Menendez, we have a secure connection confirmed from our end,” Stephan Canary said, leaning toward the video teleconference microphone resting in the center of the conference table. “How do you have us?”

“This is Menendez, I have you secure voice on this end. No video yet.”

“We’ll look into that,” Canary said, waving to the audio technician to troubleshoot appropriately to allow Carlos Menendez II to view the attendees inside the Pine Gap soundproof conference room from his secure location at Tungsten headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. “Give us a few minutes to work on it, please. Our director is still stateside but Vice Director Fontaine is in here with—”

“Nonsense!” Vice Director Fontaine barked. “We can see you fine, Mr. Menendez, we don’t have time to wait around.”

Canary looked at Fontaine, and then up at Menendez on the screen high on the wall. Canary, the forty-two-year-old career analyst, aware he was wearing a perpetually greasy and shiny forehead, and knowing his early gray hair was longer than anyone cared to look at around the office, grew increasingly tense. He knew the time difference between Australia and Atlanta meant that Carlos Menendez had been most certainly woken up in the wee hours of the morning and asked to come in to take this top-secret secure call that Fontaine forced him to arrange. And now, as Canary watched Mr. Menendez’s reaction to Vice Director Fontaine’s annoying and crass comment, he was happy that his embarrassment couldn’t be seen just yet by the man they believed held the answers they were looking for.

“By all means,” Carlos said, obviously signaling he would play well with others and maintain his professionalism. “I’m a morning person anyway.”

“Well I’m not,” Fontaine said. “Where exactly are you in Atlanta?”

“A secure facility,” Menendez said. “It’s fine, I’m alone.”

“You wear a tux when you sleep?” Fontaine asked, as Menendez’s patterned bow tie and coat gave the onscreen impression that Carlos Menendez had just come in from the Governor’s Ball.

“It’s off the rack,” Menendez said. “Was just about to drop it off at the Goodwill trailer.”

“We need you to get back over here immediately,” Fontaine said.

Canary held back a smile, knowing Menendez wasn’t a pushover, and recalling very well that Menendez and Fontaine didn’t hit it off the other day. The texture of Seamstress’s former CIA case officer’s bow tie was certainly in harmony with the texture of the suit fabric. He knew his boss, Fontaine, liked to throw jabs and then duck and cover, getting his rocks off by ignoring his off-balance opponent’s response and getting to it, but Canary thought Fontaine might have met his match.

“I have you secure video now,” Menendez said as he looked away from the screen for a moment.

“When can we expect you?” Fontaine said. “Tonight? Tomorrow at the latest.”

“Impossible,” Menendez said in an even tone.

“Impossible?” Fontaine asked, as if he was insulted by the negative response.

“That’s what I said.”

“This has the highest priority within the administration’s senior cabinet.”

“Wonderful,” Menendez said. “I wish you luck and I guess that ends this VTC.”