One Killer Force: A Delta Force Novel (6 page)

Nothing Kolt could do about it now. Either way, the Butcher or not, they would know soon enough. Kolt kept his attention on the closing crowd.

“Trip, Gangster, at least close it down and get back here behind the curtain.” Kolt slid back to his seat to make room. “Make sure the doors are locked, and pull the keys.”

Somewhat surprised they actually listened to him, Kolt watched Trip peel into the back, quickly followed by Gangster. JoJo put his fist up to get everyone’s attention and give the hand and arm signal for
freeze
.

The procession moved closer, faint sounds of singing and chanting in Arabic seeping through the van’s thin aluminum skin, tinted windows, and blast blankets. Kolt and the team were trapped.

THREE

Kolt held his breath. Of all the times he could have died and all the ways he imagined he might someday buy it, stuck in the back of a damn minivan had never entered his mind. The sound of the crowd grew louder as they reached the van and began to move around it.

A few moments later it felt to Kolt as if the crowd was bumping into both sides of the van as they made their way for the cemetery entrance. Funeral or not, Kolt knew the more switched-on men would be window-shopping the interior of the cab, probably looking for anything valuable like food or items to barter with at the Aleppo souk.

Kolt looked at Gangster, now squatting next to the radio. He could tell his nerves were pinging.

A few seconds later the crowd of men screamed in unison before breaking into what sounded most certainly like chants of Allah u Akbar,
God is Great
! Kolt looked around and thanked their training that no one had their finger on the trigger. He couldn’t speak for the others, but that collective scream had startled him.

Kolt looked at Trip, then to JoJo. Both men looked ready to explode. “
American Idol
material?” Kolt said, offering them a slight grin.

Neither man responded.

“That was close,” Gangster whispered as he looked at Trip.

“Too close,” Trip said.

Kolt reached for the blast blanket and slowly peeled it back an inch or two to peek out of the rear-door window.

“Shit!”

Kolt quickly let go of the blanket after seeing the blade edges of a hand just leaving the window glass and a male face turning from the van.

“Someone just tried to look in the window.”

Kolt waited a few moments and tried again.

“Crowd passing the coffin over the rock wall,” Kolt said as he watched the men gently but efficiently pass the wooden coffin from one group to another to clear the short wall without losing a single flower.

And then he saw someone that looked familiar.

Kolt let go of the blast blanket and quickly yanked his left sleeve up his arm. He moved his forearm closer to his eyes, fixated on the two pictures of the Butcher.

“I’ll be damned!” Kolt whispered. “That’s him!”

Before anyone could respond, the assault net came alive. “Noble Zero-One, target secure, over.”

“Roger. Do you have jackpot, over?” Gangster asked.

“Possible, controlled pair to the face though, unrecognizable now. Three more fighting-age males, questioning them now, stand by.”

“Roger. Finish it and exfil, over,” Gangster said.

Finish it? What the hell does that mean?
Kolt thought.

Kolt went back to the rear window. He looked again but his angle was off; he was barely able to see the backs of a few of the men halfway into the cemetery.

“Grave-side service under way,” Kolt whispered.

Gangster took the ball. “Let’s initiate exfil, best time is right now.”

“Gangster, you don’t have PID on the Butcher yet from your assault teams,” Kolt said, turning away from the window to make eye contact. “I’m pretty sure I spotted him outside, let’s hold for a few more.”

Gangster didn’t respond. He looked at JoJo and then Trip, likely trying to gauge their opinion. Kolt knew Gangster couldn’t argue with his logic. He didn’t have PID from the target and he damn well knew it. They all knew it. This hit was too important to the Unit to bug out before they knew for sure.

“Damn it!” Gangster said, trying to keep his voice down. “It’s illogical that the Butcher is in that cemetery. What are the odds? Ridiculous!”

Kolt looked at Trip and JoJo, surprised they hadn’t chimed in yet, one way or the other. Kolt didn’t expect them to specifically stiff-arm their commander, but he did expect all Unit members to speak their mind to help solve the problem.

Nothing.

Gangster had had enough. He made his decision.

“All elements, this is Noble Zero-One, we’re moving, acknowledge, over.”

“This is Assault One, we are target clean at this time, all Eagles up, en route to linkup point.”

Kolt watched Gangster slowly climb back into the front seat, allowing Trip to control the black curtain behind him.

Son of a bitch!

Kolt knew his influence on this op, if there ever was any, was shot. This wasn’t his squadron. No need to push it now. He knew Webber would already be pissed once he got an earful from Gangster at the post-mission hotwash.

As Trip settled into the driver’s seat, Kolt decided to take another look out the rear window. If for nothing else, to simply cover their six as they pulled off the shoulder and gained the muddy road.

He pulled the blast curtain out of the way one last time.

Holy hell! The Butcher! No doubt.

There, with the edges of his hands against the window, his nose pressing flat on the glass, his unmistakable large gemstone eyes peering into the van, goatee and shaved head obvious, was the Barrel Bomb Butcher. The shitbag responsible for the death of thousands of innocent men, women, and children throughout Syria stood only a few feet from him. This was the man controlling the helicopter force dropping barrels filled with high explosives, oil, and shrapnel on civilians, and he was literally two feet away from the only man in Delta told by the commander not to get involved.

Fuck that!

Kolt snapped his telescopic buttstock up to his firing shoulder and with the precision of a NASCAR tire changer cleared the blast blanket with the four-inch SureFire can, thumbed the selector switch from no bang to bang, and pulled trigger slack. Without an ounce of hesitation or second thought, he indexed the EOTech’s bright red dot on the Butcher’s cranial vault, center mass above the bridge of the nose and between those signature eyeballs, and broke the trigger.

Dead trigger!

Dang! Did I forget to lock and load?

Kolt took immediate action, reaching up with his nonfiring hand and two-finger ripping the charging handle to the rear, and slightly turning the rifle to ten o’clock to observe a round eject. Nothing.

Holy shit! I did forget.
Kolt knew immediately he’d screwed up, a total rookie mistake. He had taken his strap-hanger status for granted, failed to turn the mental switch, execute his own precombat checks like a simple brass check.

Kolt slapped the bottom of the magazine to ensure a full seat before releasing the charging handle, slamming the bolt forward and into battery, shoving the mag’s top cartridge into the chamber. He looked up, back to the window, at who he was absolutely sure was the Butcher.

Outside the back of the van, the Syrian’s right hand was balled into a fist. He circled the fist, wiping the raindrops off the window, and touched his nose back on the glass to peer back in.

Again, Kolt seated the buttstock, fingered the trigger and pulled slack, simultaneously looking to red-dot the bridge of the Butcher’s nose.

The Butcher turned his head at the exact moment Kolt expected the trigger to break. Too late to stop the rearward pressure, in an instant, a single 5.56 mm full-metal-jacket bullet screamed down the nine-inch cold-forged-hammer barrel and through the baffled suppressor at close to 2,400 feet per second.

Kolt thought he saw blood splatter simultaneously with the rear window tempered glass shattering. Hundreds of pea-size pieces of glass fell into the back of the van and out onto the muddy ground.

“Holy shit, Racer!” JoJo said as he fumbled for his rifle.

Kolt heard Trip try to crank the van but it wouldn’t turn over.

As Trip held the ignition, certainly hoping for a spark and most likely pumping the gas pedal, Kolt ripped the bomb blanket open to look out the broken window.

Son of a bitch! He’s not down.

The Butcher was hit all right, definitely a head shot, as Kolt saw him holding both hands to his face. He was stumbling away from the van, bent over at the waist, the back of his weathered black jacket facing the van.

“He’s not dead,” Kolt said, turning around to look at Gangster as he grabbed the SureFire suppressor’s cam ring to untighten it. “Toss me your bangers, I don’t have enough.”

“Absolutely not!”

Kolt slid the end mount suppressor off the muzzle as he turned back to the rear door.

“We can’t leave a target wounded,” Kolt said, digging his two nine-bangers out of his nylon pouch, “I need to put him down.”

“No way, Raynor, leave him,” Gangster said. “He’ll likely bleed out anyway.”

Kolt knew Gangster was right; the Butcher could bleed out for all he knew. He could pull out of it too, maybe with Allah’s will, and especially if the bullet just grazed him or his people carried him to a clinic soon enough. But, Kolt knew the mission statement was crystal clear, they always were. You don’t go halfway with a kill mission.

No, as much pain as the Butcher was currently in, he was the specific target that they were there to see about. He was a problem that the United States wanted solved, not just warned, not just wounded.

“I really don’t want to do this,” Kolt said. “Options?”

“I said leave him, damn it!” Gangster yelled.

Kolt dropped his rifle to his chest, letting it hang by its sling as he pushed aside the bomb blanket to open the rear door, hoping to get a clear finishing shot. Instantly, the van awoke, the engine turning over a second before Trip slammed the gas pedal to the floor. Kolt lost his balance, falling toward the shattered rear window. He was unable to stop himself—the van’s forward momentum sent Kolt tumbling out of the back. The rear tires kicked mud all over him, forcing him to roll to the side, farther out into the road.

Now caked in muck, as if he had hit the Kiss of Mud obstacle in a Tough Mudder run, Kolt struggled to both knees. He fumbled to pull the slippery pin from his first nine-banger. As he did, he looked toward the Butcher, now leaning over the rock wall with at least a dozen very concerned men at his side. Initially stunned by what they had just witnessed, a stranger tumbling from the odd-parked panel van, Kolt could see in their eyes that a chocolate-covered commando solved the riddle.

Don’t have a lot of time here. Make it quick!

Kolt lobbed the first nine-banger at the crowd, just clearing the rock wall. The nine rapid detonations were deafening, forcing the funeral party to scatter like scalded apes. They quickly moved away from the Butcher, giving Kolt clear visibility of his prey. Kolt immediately yanked the safety pin from his second and last banger and sailed it farther into the cemetery, where it landed in a cluster of old tombstones. The crowd continued to flee, some faster than others, most moving away from Kolt and the Butcher.

Kolt first pushed up to one knee, took tactical control of his slippery rifle, and tried to stand. Taking the first step toward the Butcher, he pulled his left leg out of a large sludge puddle that threatened to suck his boot off his foot. Kolt brought the rifle up to a low carry and slogged forward to reach the grass.

Kolt saw the Butcher turn to face him, rolling over to his back but remaining against the wall. The bullet with his name on it had clearly struck his face—blood ran down both sides of it. It must have gone through both cheeks, probably busting several teeth.

Lucky bastard!

Kolt looked back at the crowd. Several Syrian men, yelling something in Arabic, right fists raised high in the air, were moving back into the cemetery and toward Kolt. Rifle up, both eyes open, he scanned for threats, looking at their hands. Nothing.

The nine-bangers had served their purpose. But, with his personal load spent, and with the crowd’s rage now obvious, Kolt had to give himself more margin.

Sure, more than one guy in the funeral party probably needed smoking—this, Kolt was certain of. But the pissed-off guys yelling at Kolt from inside the cemetery weren’t on the Unit’s kill list, not yet anyway. If they were, Kolt wouldn’t have dicked around with the nonlethal flash-bangs, but would have been popping frags. No, only one target today. One terrorist. One man that needed to be dumped.

Kolt lifted his muzzle toward the overcast sky, thumbed the selector to Fire, and ripped half a mag. The supersonic sound of bullets racing skyward reverberated across the fog-covered small hills and valleys, and bounced off the outer walls of half the village homes. The riot-control rounds helped, giving the crowd pause, as they knew bullets were much deadlier than the flash-bangs.

It wouldn’t last, and Kolt knew it.

Kolt took a few more steps toward the Butcher, lowering his rifle in preparation for the kill. And that’s when he made his second rookie mistake.

First, inside the van, he’d forgotten to rack a round when they departed the safe house, resulting in a dry gun and failure to fire. Now, instead of just stitching the guy, control-pairing him center mass of the chest, he let himself look directly into the Butcher’s bloodred and green eyes. Everyone knew you didn’t look a dead man walking in the eyes before you pumped him full of holes.

Invariably it causes a man to hesitate, putting himself and his mates at risk. Not only does it put you at a distinct disadvantage on target, the souls of your confirmed kills haunt you for life.

“Your mother is a whore,” the Butcher said, spitting up blood.

Kolt ripped three rounds into the Butcher’s chest. From point-blank range, Kolt watched him first slide down the short wall to a sitting position, then fall half over to his right, his eyes locked open, thick auburn-colored blood slowly spilling from the crook in his mouth.