“He raised a warrior, not a princess.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?” GENGHIS reached for an empty plastic water bottle and spat tobacco juice into it. Brown sludge oozed down the side of the container and she turned away.
A few kilometers ahead on the potholed highway through Ramadi, Hunter’s body moved with the beat of Metallica’s “One” blasting through the Ford Expedition. The country sucked. His employer sucked. The mission sucked. Expecting high-stakes action, Hunter had left his beloved Marine Corps and faked his death to join Force Zulu, the Pentagon’s new elite espionage and counterterrorism unit, but instead of daring raids with the latest high-tech equipment, he was sitting in an up-armored Ford Expedition, a spy undercover as a common mercenary working for Rubicon. He was one of the government’s most highly trained operators, now crammed into a SUV with a bunch of bomb guys on his way to do a job that a bunch of first-year grunts could’ve accomplished. He’d stepped on enough toes over the years that military politics had to catch up with him sooner or later and damn him to this crappy assignment, spying on a military contractor that might have gone bad. At least he was playing ball and he was jazzed, ready for the game. He scanned the road ahead of them and noticed a small shadow moving on the overpass.
“Change lanes!” Hunter said, as the Expedition sped underneath the overpass. Froneberger, the driver, hadn’t been in theater long enough to understand the danger above them. Hunter leaned over him, grabbed the wheel and turned it. Froneberger stomped the brakes and the SUV spun out of control. As they whirled around, the concrete retaining wall blurred in front of them, then a split second later the vehicle behind them streaked by. Hunter fought the driver’s foot for control of the brakes as he struggled to steer. His thoughts raced and the seconds stretched. Everything seemed to move in slow-mo, except him. This was his favorite part of combat-the feeling that he could step out of time and act faster than light.
On the other side of the overpass, the vehicle weaved like a drunk as it came out of the spin. Hunter thought he saw something dark falling from above, the grenade that he had anticipated. An orange flash and a starburst of sparks exploded in midair. His ears rang from the loud bang and the vehicle rocked from the concussion, but the armored door held.
“Get us outta here! Now Froneberger!” Hunter said. He slid back into his seat, grabbed his AK-102 and cracked the door open. He sprayed the overpass with bullets, even though he knew haji was probably plastered to the concrete, spending quality time with Allah. The gunfire would keep him pinned down while the two other trucks in the convoy passed underneath. Then Hunter shouted at the top of his lungs, “Allahu akbar! Allah is great!”
He loved playing with their minds.
Titcomb leaned forward from the backseat and said over the blaring heavy metal, “Don’t you want to go after him-teach him a permanent lesson?”
“Nah, we’ve got to make sure we’re first at the site. I’m determined to be there early. Black Management is muscling in on our turf and we need to kick ass and get out before they show. It wouldn’t be pretty to run into Black Management-trust me.” At least that was the party line at Rubicon, but Hunter didn’t believe it for a second and he knew it was more like the opposite. There were insurgent nests all over the country and he still hadn’t figured out why Rubicon kept assigning him to take down targets just ahead of Black Management teams. Stella’s shop did seem to have better local intelligence networks than Rubicon and had an edge at locating big arms caches, but he couldn’t come up with an explanation that made sense unless someone in charge of contracts at the Pentagon or CIA was watching and Rubicon was simply trying to make itself look good at Black Management’s expense. He would analyze it later. Right now he had a job to do.
Hunter stopped the convoy one click from the target. He shined an invisible infrared commander’s laser pointer onto a satellite image and read it using his night vision goggles. The insurgent compound had one small building inside and it was ringed by a concrete wall with a single iron gate. In the mission briefing, the project manager had claimed that intel indicated that they should expect only light resistance. Without an advance recon team on the deck, Hunter felt blind, but Rubicon had refused to issue him one, claiming their forces were stretched too thin. He knew of a half-dozen qualified operators who were back at the base on “rack ops,” snoozing away, so he suspected there were some things Rubicon’s management preferred that no one observe. Maybe he would finally get the dirt on them so he could finish the suck mission and get back to the real action with his fellow Bushmen at Force Zulu. He had little respect for the overpaid contract soldiers who had left their country’s service to become corporate warriors, contracted to anyone with the money for a private army. He couldn’t wait to get away from them and back with his own kind. Why Stella would become one of them, he had a hard time accepting, even though he understood that, as a woman, she could never see any real action any other way.
He punched a couple of buttons on his handheld GPS to confirm that they had reached the target. The last thing he wanted to do was take down some goat herder’s mud shanty by mistake like another Rubicon team had done a few nights ago. The backlit LCD screen glowed and he squinted as his eyes adjusted to the brightness.
“Get the headlights off and pull over.” Hunter turned off the music, then spoke into his headset, relaying to the other vehicles orders to go black out. He looked in the rearview mirror at his men. Given a choice, he would have hired only one or two of them. The best operators gravitated toward the quality shops like Triple Canopy, Black Management and Blackwater. Rubicon snarfed up the table scraps without even bothering to do background checks. More than once he had heard troops bragging of the criminal records that they had left behind, including a South African who boasted that he was a bona fide war criminal.
“You know the game plan,” Hunter said to the seven men in the SUV. “I want to breech the compound from two points. Froneberger, Titcomb, you’re placing charges on the gate. Cronan and Reeves, think you can arrange for a nice big hole in the back wall? Shooters, take your heavy gun, climb up that dune and keep an eye on them.” The two would stay at the rally point and provide cover with the PKM machine gun in case they were pursued by tangos.
“Got it, boss,” Froneberger said. The others nodded.
“Let’s do it,” Hunter said as he opened the door. His body ached as he got out of the vehicle, pulling down the bottom of his flack jacket that had ridden up on him during the trip. The ceramic plate inserts made it hot and heavy, but comfort was not something he worried about in combat situations. He leaned against the SUV and popped a couple of Motrin-grunt candy. Since he’d been back in Iraq, it seemed he’d relied on that stuff even more than caffeine to keep him going.
He took his night vision goggles from his belt webbing. The Marine Corps always got the rest of the military’s hand-me-downs and when even they were phasing out the PVS-7 NVGs Rubicon was issuing them. Cheap Russian weapons, old military surplus gear and rejects from the other players-Rubicon must have been raking in the dough because they sure weren’t spending much of it on the frontline troops.
He placed the awkward night vision goggles onto his head and suddenly the dark veil of night was lifted to reveal a blurry green world. His peripheral vision blocked out, he felt like he was looking through toilet paper tubes.