Prime (9 page)

Despite his size, or maybe because of it, he
moved down the exterior of the hotel like King Kong on the Empire State Building.
He’d grown up with the woods of New Hampshire as his playground; climbing was
second nature to him. He swung between balconies, made dynamic leaps between
the patios when necessary and finally dropped the last ten feet to the concrete
deck that surrounded the entire building, whereupon he immediately melted into
the shadows.

He considered trying to steal a car from the
parking lot, but rejected the idea. Someone was bound to contact the
authorities in response to the shooting; the last thing he needed was to roll
up to a police checkpoint with a hot ride, a small arsenal and a bogus Canadian
passport. Instead, he employed the method of travel that had served soldiers
like
himself
well for untold millennia. He started
walking.

The airport was only about six miles away, a
distance he could have traversed in about an hour without even breaking a
sweat, but when he emerged from the hills that separated the Gold Mohur coastal
area from the residential areas of Aden, he was able to hail a taxi cab and
shorten the journey. Forty minutes after leaving the hotel, he was on the
tarmac at Aden International Airport where a USAF C-17 waited. As he hiked up
to the open rear ramp of the enormous cargo jet, Vaughn stepped out to meet
him.

Vaughn was a little shorter than Tremblay,
but solidly built. He had wavy brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard that
was—like Tremblay’s goatee—against Army regs, but Delta wasn’t like the regular
army. Unit operators needed to be able to blend in with the general population
as much as possible, and that meant some rules had to be bent a little. The
Texan’s expression was uncharacteristically grim.

Tremblay nodded to him. “Houston, we have a
problem?”

“Shake a leg, Juggernaut. There’s a fire.”

Tremblay’s brows creased but he withheld his
questions until he was on the ramp.
“What the fuck, over?
Didn’t you get the kid?”

“We got the kid; zero complications.
Handed him off to State fifteen minutes ago.
This is
something else.” Vaughn waved to one of the flight crew, then ushered Tremblay
forward to where the rest of the team was waiting. When Tremblay was seated,
Vaughn spoke again. “You know about Cipher element, right?”

“The CT
unit working with the Agency.”
Cipher element wasn’t a unit, per se, but rather an assignment, and
the plan was for every Delta squad to get their turn. Most of the current
Cipher
roster were
from Bravo team, but Tremblay knew
a few of them.

“That’s right. Well, we just got word that
they are in the shit. Right now, as we speak.”

Tremblay
frowned,
trying to recall the names of the men he knew who were currently deployed with
Cipher. “What went wrong?”

“What didn’t? All I know for sure is that
they are stranded in the desert and they could use a few more shooters.”

He let it hang right there, and Tremblay
couldn’t tell if Vaughn was ordering them into the fight or asking for
volunteers.

It didn’t matter really. Either way, he was
going.

TEN

Iraq

After their initial success, the tide of the battle had shifted against
the insurgents. They still had superior numbers on their side; the original
force of one hundred and eighty-five
mujahideen
had been whittled down to about a hundred and thirty, while by their best
estimates, the surviving Americans numbered less than a dozen. Their greatest
asset however, the element of surprise, had been thoroughly expended. The
Americans had suffered heavy losses in those first few minutes of combat, but
once the initial sting had worn off, the Americans’ superior training and
technology had swung the pendulum in the other direction.

Two groups of American soldiers, working in
concert with some hidden observer, had flanked their position and destroyed the
mortar emplacements before they could be used to deadly effect. One of the fire
teams had been cut off and annihilated, but the damage was done. With the
mortars gone, the insurgents had lost their ability to light the battlefield,
to say nothing of having the capacity to rain down destruction from a safe
standoff distance.

The battle had begun with a cacophony of
shots and explosions, but now, as the various pieces on the chessboard moved to
gain strategic advantage, silence dominated the night, with only occasional
scattered gunfire—spooked insurgents, shooting at phantoms. The American rifles
and machine guns had not been heard for nearly half an hour.

The insurgents, motivated more by impatience
than courage, advanced to the site where the helicopters had gone down. Smoke
still seeped from the burned-out remains of the Black Hawk helicopters, which
had both been completely destroyed with incendiary charges. Using hooded
flashlights, they scanned the area and quickly discovered the trail left by the
retreating soldiers—a trail of blood from bodies dragged across the dry
floodplain. The Americans were fleeing to the old lake monitoring station—the
bait that had been used to lure them out into the desert in the first place.
The
mujahideen
set out at dead run, confident
that victory was nigh.

There was no sign of activity at the concrete
building, but a faint glow was visible inside. The bulk of the fighters spread
out, taking up over-watch positions, while a small knot crept forward, their
weapons trained on the door. The leader of the group noted the deactivated
tripwire, lying on the sand of the entryway. He dug a Russian-made F1 fragmentation
grenade from his satchel, pulled the safety pin and lobbed it through the open
doorway.

The grenade detonated with a dull thump. The
concrete walls withstood the blast, but the explosion blew the metal shutters
off the windows, sending them spinning like shrapnel into the night. A column
of dust and smoke vomited from the door.

No one inside could have survived, but the
insurgents needed to be certain. After waiting a few seconds for the smoke to
clear, they rushed inside. A few moments later, one of them emerged and called
out with his report.

No bodies. The building was empty.

More of the fighters came forward, as if to
confirm for themselves.

That was the
moment for which Jack Sigler had been
waiting.

He pumped the M57 firing device three times,
but once was enough to send a small electrical charge through a fifty-meter
long strand of insulated wire and detonate the blasting cap in the M18 Claymore
anti-personnel mine.

A storm of steel pellets obliterated the
advancing group. At the same instant, the surviving Eagle-Eye snipers reached
out with their rifles and started picking off targets of opportunity. The men
searching the building rushed out, only to be met by a hail of bullets from the
Delta operators concealed in low fighting positions less than a hundred meters
away.

Primal fear momentarily overcame
fundamentalist zeal; the insurgents abandoned their defensive positions and
fled.

Sigler keyed his mic. “Cease
fire, I say again, cease
fire and move to zero.”

He didn’t wait for confirmation. Everyone
knew the plan.

After Beehive Six-Four had gone down, the
priorities had changed. Up to that moment, the plan had been to simply stay
alive long enough to get everyone out. Survival and victory
were
the same thing now; staying alive meant defeating this enemy, destroying them
completely.

Sigler possessed the ability to think
analytically—strategically—even under the worst conditions. His instructors at
OCS had quickly recognized his innate talent, and they had sharpened it by
running him through increasingly difficult scenarios and simulations. He’d
learned how to outwit his opponents, overcome seemingly impossible odds and
perhaps the hardest lesson of all, when to gamble with the lives of his men.

Half a world away, observers at Joint Special
Operations Command painted a picture of the battlefield from real-time imagery,
supplied by the UAV circling overhead. Sigler had divided the survivors into
four groups. One group, comprising most of the remaining snipers and the lone
surviving crew chief from the downed Black Hawk would fall back to the original
objective to disarm the booby-trap and set up an ambush of their own. The rest
of them—six men, including Sigler and Aleman acting as spotters—would flank the
insurgents and take out the mortar emplacements.

They’d succeeded in accomplishing that task,
but one of the forward teams—Jon Foley and Mike Adams—had been cut off during
their retreat. The disembodied voice from JSOC had confirmed their deaths.

There were just eight of them left now—four
snipers, including Lewis Aleman, whose right hand was broken and useless; one
warrant officer from the Night Stalkers; and the three surviving members of
Cipher element—Daniel Parker, Casey Bellows and Sigler. They were desperately
low on ammunition, and every shot had to count. That was the bad news. The good
news was that help was on the way…or so HQ kept telling him.

Sigler sprang to his feet and hurried to the
corner of the building to provide covering fire for the rest. Parker appeared
beside him, still hauling the M240. A loop of ammunition, about twenty inches
long, hung from the feed tray; fifty rounds, maybe less…after that, they might
be able to beat someone to death with it.

The snipers had the farthest to run, and
before they could reach the relative shelter of the structure, the insurgents
seemed to collectively recover their nerve. Sigler heard the low crack of
Kalashnikov rifles firing, and then realized that rounds were ricocheting off
the cinder block walls behind him. The snipers were zigzagging, trying to stay
one step ahead of the incoming fire.

“Move your ass!” Sigler shouted, more out of
frustration than anything else, and then he fired in the direction of the
muzzle flashes closest to the running men. Beside him, Parker ran out the last
of the ammo belt, and then immediately switched to his carbine.

With a howl of divinely inspired ardor, a
dozen insurgents broke from cover and started running toward the building,
sweeping their AK-47s ahead of them as they ran, firing at random intervals. A
round caught one of the snipers in the leg, and he went down in the open. The
other man skidded to a halt, trying to reach his fallen comrade, but was driven
back by a storm of lead.

Sigler held his ground. Two shots, new
target…two shots, new target. Enemy fighters went down, one after another, but
not all of them stayed down. Two shots, new target…two shots, new target…

Click
.

It wasn’t a surprise. He habitually counted
his shots so that he could be ready for a fast reload. The problem was he
didn’t have any more magazines.

“I’m out!”

“Well you ain’t getting any of mine,” Parker
shouted back, firing with the same rhythm.

Then his weapon fell silent, too.

Six of the original twelve
mujahideen
were still on their feet,
still advancing.

Sigler drew his KA-BAR knife from its sheath.
“Danno, let’s teach these assholes that you don’t bring a gun to a knife
fight.”

“Foxtrot Alpha,” Parker replied, drawing his
own blade—
a standard issue M7 bayonet—
and standing
beside Sigler to meet the charge.

Something popped in the air high above them.
For a moment, Sigler thought it must be another flare, but the sound repeated
twice more in the space of a second, without any other accompanying fireworks.
Just as Sigler started to look up, something big slammed into the ground fifty meters
north of their position.

Suddenly, the head of the nearest insurgent
exploded like a watermelon at a Gallagher show. A loud report echoed from above
like thunder, and then there was another, and another, and one by one the
charging fighters went down, their bodies erupting in geysers of blood.

A dark figure dropped out of the sky, landing
less than twenty meters from the corner where Sigler and Parker were preparing
to make their stand. He wore a black jumpsuit and helmet, but Sigler could
distinctly make out a wisp of blond hair sprouting from the man’s chin. The
paratrooper wielded a pair of enormous pistols, one in each hand, and as he
fired them out, the last of the charging insurgents went down.

The newcomer shrugged out of his parachute
harness before the canopy could settle around him, then hastened to join
Sigler. He kept his pistols aimed in the direction from which the attack had
come, but the balance of the enemy forces were well beyond pistol range, even a
pistol as massive as the Desert Eagle. When he reached Sigler’s side, they all
hastened into the relative safety of the concrete building.

“Heard you guys were throwing a party,” the
blond man said, grinning. “Hope you don’t mind us crashing.”

Sigler was almost too stunned to reply. “The
more the merrier, but I hope you brought some beer. We’re out.”

One of the other paratroopers stepped
forward. “No beer, but we have these.” He passed over a clutch of magazines.
“Sonny Vaughn, call me ‘Houston.’ Smiling boy over there is Stan Tremblay—Juggernaut.”
He jerked a thumb toward the third paratrooper. “That’s Silent Bob. We’re Alpha
team.”

In a rush of understanding, Sigler realized
that these men had performed a HALO—a high altitude, low opening—parachute
jump. The dangerous technique, which involved jumping out of a jet aircraft
from an altitude of 35,000 feet, freefalling for two minutes, and then popping
a chute just three hundred feet above the ground, was usually reserved for
stealthy insertions into enemy territory, but it was an effective way to get a
shooter onto the battlefield in a big hurry.

Alpha
team…HALO jump… These guys are Delta
.

For the first time since the battle had
begun, Sigler felt a ray of hope. He took one of the magazines and reloaded his
carbine. “Any more of you guys on the way?”

“Cherry should be around here…” Tremblay
started to say, but Vaughn cut him off.

“Cherry burned in. What you see is what
you’ve got.”

Sigler remembered the loud impact that had
preceded the paratroopers’ arrival. There were no second chances with a HALO
jump. You could get hypoxic during the long
free-fall,
or giddy with nitrogen narcosis… Your hands could freeze… Your chute could
malfunction…and that was it. Game over, permanently.

“Aww shit, really?” Tremblay shook his head.

Three men.
Sigler’s candle of hope flickered a little.
Still, they were Delta operators, and that was nothing to sneeze at.

Parker clapped Tremblay on the shoulder. “You
saved our asses with those hand cannons of yours. Is that Alpha standard issue?
Jack, you gonna get us some of those?”

Tremblay sucked in a breath and then stoked
his grin back to life. “I found these babies just lying around. They were too
shiny to pass up.”

“Hang on to them. You’ll probably get another
chance to use them.”

Sigler cleared his throat. “If you girls are
done fixing your makeup, there’s work to do.”

“Roger that, boss. What’s the plan?”

Sigler had been pondering that very question.
The enemy knew where they were, and the odds were good that they were already
planning another mass attack. He hastily outlined his defensive plan: two
sniper teams on the roof, shooters at every window.

Each of the Alpha team shooters had brought
along eight thirty-round magazines, and they divided these so that everyone had
at least two full mags. The newcomers had also brought along another five
hundred rounds of loose ammunition. Everyone immediately set about reloading
empty magazines, but it was a tedious chore, and Sigler doubted very much that
enemy would give them time to complete it.

They got about four minutes.

The insurgents had used the brief lull to
send a flanking element around to approach from the south. When one of the
snipers on the roof spied their approach and started picking off targets, it
was like opening the floodgates. The enemy fighters charged like a swarm of
warrior ants.