One Killer Force: A Delta Force Novel Read online

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  To the unsung rock stars of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, whose customer service is legendary inside the purple community. On short notice in pitch dark, at bat-out-of-hell speed and cornfield level, you can bank that the Night Stalkers are on time, on target, plus or minus thirty seconds.

  PREFACE

  Behind the wheel of Bessie, Scotty saw the billowing smoke and gassed it, curb-bouncing our Toyota in reverse over your garden-variety street trash prevalent in war-torn Baghdad. Next to him, wide-eyed with mouth probably open, I stared in silence at the target building as it exploded, jetting hot shards of steel, concrete chunks, and blast waves toward four unarmored Hummers only yards away.

  We were hunting Zarqawi chemical weapons or their precursor material—jackpot on the materials; the blast we could have done without.

  Scotty and I unassed Bessie, dashed into the smoke, and found what we hoped we wouldn’t. A female soldier staggered into Scotty’s arms, cammies blown out at the seams and burned over most of her body. Scotty did what he could.

  I continued through the smoke, coming face-to-face with a tall soldier staggering zombielike and unrecognizable toward me. His Kevlar tilted back like a Little Leaguer’s ball cap, face crushed, torched, mumbling incoherently. The soldier collapsed into my arms. I dragged his heavy body from the smoke, away from the burning vehicles, and laid him on the asphalt street. I patted out the burning clothes with my flight glove–covered hands, and unclipped and cleared his M16A4 rifle.

  My Tier One mates, Tora Bora warriors like Stormin’, Shrek, Blinkie, and a dozen-plus others, had moved on to service a follow-on target, leaving Scotty and me as the Task Force 626 liaison. The best medics in the world, only minutes earlier, had been on target. Now, pulling in the distinct smell of burning flesh, I tore into my personal first-aid pouch attached to my vest. The wounded soldier was breathing but expiring rapidly. He needed a lot of attention, but an open airway was priority one.

  “Hang in there, man,” I said, while slipping the Kevlar off his head, covering my gloves in crimson blood. “You’re gonna be all right, buddy.” I’m not sure I believed it myself, but I hoped he did.

  I pulled the flexible nasal tube from my pouch, lubed it with a dribble from my CamelBak, wiped the blood and dirt from his nose, and tried to insert it into his left nostril. It passed fine for an inch or so before it dead-ended. No luck. I touched gently on his maxilla bone just under his nose. It was compromised.

  The soldier’s eyes were shut. I shook him gently to gauge a reflex or determine if he was conscious. I was losing him.

  “Stay with me, Sergeant!”

  I yanked the nasal tube out and went to the hollow, hard-plastic J-tube. Tilting his jaw back, I spotted his tongue and seated the tube, slowly pushing until it passed the soft palate, where I tried to turn it 180 degrees to direct the tube down into his throat. Again, something was blocking it from moving further.

  Shit!

  “MEDIC!”

  I looked up, shocked to see a big red-and-white ambulance only a few feet behind me. Two Iraqi national EMTs, in white-over-white uniforms, stood with timid and nervous looks, holding an extended stretcher between them. I looked around, consciously hoping to see a Tier One medic appear out of nowhere.

  The soldier was expiring, I couldn’t help. Behind me, back toward the target building, the large crowd of irate Iraqis was growing and closing around us on three sides. Collapsed but still-hot power lines were sparking off the street like giant horse whips. A dozen Iraqis had jumped on top of the four burning and derelict Hummer hulks, chanting an unintelligible rant, taunting those of us who were left.

  “Scotty, let’s get him in the ambulance. He needs a doctor.”

  As the door closed to the ambulance, two shots rang out from close by. I looked toward the Hummers to see an Iraqi dressed in a brown T-shirt and U.S. desert khaki fatigue pants. He was being passed down from the top of one of the turrets, person to person in a human chain.

  I looked at the platoon sergeant nearby.

  “Are you up on head count?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

  The wounded Iraqi dressed like a U.S. soldier, screaming from a wound or maybe from fear of losing his head, was being carried through the crowd to another ambulance near the intersection.

  Scotty and I looked at each other, silently knowing we were both thinking the same thing. Had the locals pulled the unit’s terp from the burning Hummers? Was the platoon sergeant still looking for him?

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. “We’re back.”

  It was the bearded Blinkie, an assault team leader. The cavalry had returned and I could tell he knew what Scotty and I were thinking. I looked quickly for the platoon sergeant but he had vanished.

  “Let’s go!”

  We took off at a dead sprint into the swarming crowd of Iraqis. I yanked my M4 suppressor from my muzzle and rocked the safety off, firing five rapid rounds into the clear blue sky to clear the way. We reached the ambulance before it departed, and stopped the driver. In the back, we opened the rear doors to find the wounded man on a stretcher with an ambulance tech leaning over him.

  I jumped into the back of the ambulance, climbing over the bloody man, as Scotty and Blinkie secured the area and kept the ambulance stopped. I grabbed the man’s arm and asked if he spoke English. He frantically shook his head, letting me know he was both scared shitless and not who we thought he might be. I searched both cargo pockets, pulling out some papers with Arabic writing and a pair of black leather work gloves before offering my hand to give him one more chance to let us save him. He wasn’t taking.

  As we did in the streets of Baghdad or the mountains of Afghanistan, fictional operator Kolt “Racer” Raynor must make split-second decisions based on his tactical acuity, tacit knowledge, and operational experiences. Shit can turn in the blink of an eye and guys can go one of two ways: either vapor lock and wait for a mate to bring you back, or turn the switch and auto-revert to your training. Just like Scotty did.

  In One Killer Force, Racer is served up combat and chaos wholesale, forced to audible from plan A, which rarely survives the first gunshot.

  Luckily for Kolt Raynor, even though many think his decision-making cycle is sketchy at times, he gets shit done. To what standard is typically debated in the hotwash and the hallways. For me, on that hot summer day in Baghdad, I should have been better. And if not for Scotty and the timely return of the Tora Bora warriors, there’s no telling what would have materialized.

  In the real world of spec ops, there are no individuals. It’s a cross-functional team of teams with complimentary skill sets that lead to mission accomplished. From snipers to imagery analysts to helicopter door gunners to personnel clerks, if it’s not a well-oiled and synchronized cast of thousands, it is darn close. In the fictional spec ops world, fortunate
ly for me, things are no different.

  To write One Killer Force, I needed more help than normal. Obviously, without the extraordinary support and blind confidence from my longtime editor at St. Martin’s Press, Marc Resnick, and super-agent Scott Miller of Trident Media Group, Delta operator Kolt “Racer” Raynor would have remained in deep-cover status forever.

  With the Delta Force thriller series at book four, I’m humbled and entirely grateful to still have Marc and Scott providing world-class top cover. I’m equally blessed to have Chris Evans back, an extremely talented writer in his own right, to tighten my shot group as my pen ran into the margins and to correct those peculiar things about writing comprehension that I admittedly gave less priority to than Coach’s trick third-and-long plays or animated hand and arm signals from the third-base coach’s box a few decades ago.

  Besides Marc, Scott, and Chris, I’m deeply thankful to former mates and other unnamed experts that willingly provided unique and insider-knowledge-only details about special equipment, and historical perspective on real-world ops we experienced together years ago. Battling the enemy or crafting a book, no doubt about it, it’s a team sport. For Kolt Raynor it’s a sport that, if not for the continued support of my wife and daughters, would have him on waivers in a second. I owe all these Racer fans a deep debt of gratitude.

  ONE

  425 nautical miles northeast of Goose Bay, Newfoundland, Atlantic Ocean—March 2014

  A small, dark shadow flitted across the waves under a waning quarter moon. Casting the shadow was a MH-6M Mission Enhanced “Little Bird” helicopter of the 1/160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, its outer skin a dull matte black that absorbed both light and radar. Riding on the starboard pod of the bird, Delta Force Major Kolt “Racer” Raynor leaned into the headwind and wished like hell he’d never seen an episode of Shark Week.

  Kolt accepted that putting his life in danger was just part of the job. Hell, it was one of the main reasons he loved being a special operator. Still, there were times when it felt like he was pushing his luck, and skimming across the cold, dark ocean was definitely one of those times.

  Tonight particularly sucked for a number of reasons, which Kolt had way too much time to ponder as the Little Bird tempted fate over the ugly-looking waves way too close to the bottom of its skids. Scuzzball Iranian terrorist Marzban Tehrani and a group of jihad wannabes had hijacked the Queen Mary II in the middle of its cross-Atlantic cruise. As bad as that was, the intel update made it a whole lot worse. It was believed, though unconfirmed, that Tehrani had managed to get ahold of one, and possibly two, North Korean–made miniature nuclear warheads, the legendary suitcase nuke that had been a constant fear of Western governments for decades. There was credence to this, as Marzban was known to have ties to the North Korean regime through the illicit trade of nuclear technology between North Korea and Iran.

  Whatever Marzban and his compatriots had in mind, assuming it wasn’t simply a massive suicide bombing, they weren’t talking to the FBI’s hostage negotiators. No, they were either oddly shy or operationally savvy. So far, they were only communicating through the cell phone belonging to an elderly woman from Buffalo who was on the cruise as a gift from her children. The NSA had quickly provided all the information they could find on Mildred Angelica Swanson, age seventy-three, born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, graduate of Vassar College, widow of one Jonathan Merle Swanson, mother of two adult children, and frequent visitor to Trump Casino in Atlantic City as well as several of the Native American–run casinos in upstate New York. Their information on Tehrani wasn’t nearly as detailed.

  Kolt rolled his shoulders an inch or so higher inside his rubber dry suit to close up the opening near his neck. The suit was far from a custom fit. Unlike the suits worn by the SEAL team he was flying along with, his suit was a SEAL Team Six supply-room handout, and whoever had cut out the neck area must have been endowed like Hulk Hogan. Now, the piercing winds coming off the choppy ocean water seemed to be collecting right under his Adam’s apple.

  Motherfucking SEALs!

  Through his headset, Raynor heard the OPSKED, the code word for the helicopter assault force, or HAF for short, as they reached the point of no return. “All stations, all stations, I send Gettysburg. I say again, Gettysburg.”

  Kolt tilted his head forward, moving his eyes higher in their sockets to get a glimpse of the target vessel. With Gettysburg called, he figured he might be able to pick up a faint silhouette as soon as they cleared the horizon. No dice. Three MH-47 Dark Horse heavy-lift helos, the meat of the HAF, were flying staggered trail right and roughly a hundred meters in the lead, preventing Kolt from gaining eyes on the target.

  Kolt knew the SEALs would be roughly thirty seconds in front of the 47s, cutting a deliberate path through the ship’s rough wake. The boat assault force, or BAF, cross-loaded on four low-profile gunmetal gray Mark V Special Operations Crafts, was perfectly positioned, steering for the target ship’s fantail with nobody on board the wiser.

  He turned to look at the SEAL seated behind him, leaning backward, hiding from the headwind as much as possible. The SEAL was tucked in nice and tight, taking advantage of the few inches he was able to gain inside the open cabin, allowing Kolt to block every bit of headwind. The SEAL’s kit was definitely custom, perfectly waterproof and buoyant.

  Son of a bitch!

  Kolt turned back around, moving his eyes past the fast rope hooked to the overhead, the rest coiled and lying in the cabin just a foot away, then back forward past the pilots in the bubble-glass cockpit, before leaning slightly aft to look through the opened cabin and focusing on his troop sergeant major, Slapshot. Ice-cold sea water whipped up by the pounding 47 blades, mixed with a sea squall rain, seeped into his lower neck area, running down between his pecs and settling in his belly button. Kolt wondered if Slapshot was having the same problem.

  Slapshot, like Kolt, had been given the shit spot, too, just on the other side of the Little Bird. A second recruiting-poster-perfect-dressed SEAL, along with a very unfriendly-looking Belgian Malinois, were hooked in behind Slapshot.

  Kolt made eye contact with the alert K9, Roscoe, a fully kitted out bomb dog. Roscoe’s black, marblelike eyes reflected the waning quarter moon like a pocket mirror. Kolt shivered and looked away.

  Kolt reached up with his gloved nonfiring hand to adjust his inflatable horse collar. The tactical life preserver was must-have kit when flying a bird’s-eye view of the ocean, but it had already rubbed his neck raw. Embedded with hydrostatic inflator technology, the vest would automatically inflate within seconds when submerged in four or more inches of water. In an overwater emergency, with HIT, keeping your head above water was a certainty, but breathing was something altogether different.

  Giving up on finding much comfort with the life vest, Kolt checked the positioning of his helicopter emergency egress device. A compact and lightweight mini-scuba bottle, the HEED III was snap-linked into his assault vest’s nonfiring shoulder strap. Kolt gripped it lightly, slightly repositioning the mouthpiece toward his own mouth. Taking a quick glance down at the waves, he mentally rehearsed saving his own life. Unlike the horse collar, the HEED bottle had no auto-activate technology inside. The only way it would work was if you were conscious and had your shit together.

  The bird rose and dipped before settling back into level flight. Kolt’s stomach caught up a few seconds later. He knew the pilot gripping the collective inside the bubble cockpit of Twister Two-One, Chief Warrant Officer Three Stew Weeks, was one of America’s best, the gold standard of helicopter pilots for sure. All the same, flying nap-of-the-earth at 152 knots, only a hundred feet above the frigid sea swell of the North Atlantic, at night, bordered between careless and reckless.

  As the Killer Egg, as the Little Birds were also nicknamed, dipped dangerously close to the waves before climbing, Kolt wished he’d been more aggressive in scoring a spot on one of the 47s. Being in one of those big-ass birds was like riding in an M1 Abrams compared to this
little toy.

  Kolt began to regret pushing to get clearance for operations from the doctors. Only a few months before, he’d been a human guinea pig as they dosed him with experimental antibiotics along with a hematopoietic stemcell transplantation at Raleigh Duke Medical Center. Kolt had tried to follow all the medical jargon and finally gave up, hoping that whatever they were doing would save him from the radiation he’d received at the Yellow Creek Nuclear Power Plant.

  Hawk. She was there for him through every procedure, every fever-racked reaction to the drugs, every—

  “All stations, I send Sumter, Sumter.”

  Shit. Turn the switch, Kolt.

  Kolt shook his head, releasing the spell. He looked ahead, over the choppy Atlantic Ocean.

  There, just visible above the ocean’s flat horizon, were the soft yellow lights of the seventy-six-thousand-pound Queen Mary II. Kolt looked down and saw they were already flying over her wake. The helo banked and lined up directly aft of the ship and their target, the Grill Terrace, a five-star restaurant.

  Navy intelligence analysts had focused on the Princess Grill during the mission planning. It was here, with a large heated whirlpool behind them, that the terrorists would likely set up to snipe approaching rescue boats or helicopters attempting to sneak up behind the luxury cruise liner.

  Kolt mentally ran through his checklist, already preparing for the post-mission joint hotwash.

  BAF planning and approach, check. HAF planning and approach, check.

  The restaurant’s lights were still on, slightly illuminating the massive ship’s wake. To Kolt, it made the dark water look that much colder. It was surprising that the lights were on, as they would serve to backlight any terrorists on the stern, but all the better for the assault team. It was a mistake to assume your enemy would always do the smart thing. You had to be ready to adapt, especially when your foe was acting stupid. Kolt knew all too well that rational action could be predicted, but stupid had a mind of its own.