“Two down,” Digger announced.
Stitch regained his footing and continued down the aisle with his handgun. He moved so fast he almost missed one of the terrorists sitting on his right, but the man made it easy as he identified himself.
“
Allahu Akbar!
” he screamed as he rose with a machine pistol in his right hand and a young female passenger held close to him with his left. Stitch spun toward the noise and squeezed off a .40-caliber round almost instantly. The Pakistani’s head snapped back, the Skorpion fell from his hands, and the woman wrestled out of the dead terrorist’s death grip and into the arms of her husband in the next seat.
“Three crows down.” Stitch kept moving.
Just then, on the left side of the plane, a dark-skinned man stood quickly in a window seat, shouting something incomprehensible. Both of his hands were thrust into the air as he stood and tried to get out into the aisle, shoving past those in the seats next to him. Raynor’s Glock lined up on the man’s forehead, and Raynor’s finger took up the slack of the pistol’s trigger safety as he prepared to shoot the man dead.
But the man’s hands were empty.
He was a “squirter,” a civilian panicked by the assault and trying to make a hopeless run for it.
A fraction of a second before he fired, Kolt recognized the man was not a terrorist, but as long as the man was up and moving and not in control of his actions, he was, most definitely, still a threat.
Kolt reached across two passengers and shoved the man back into his seat.
“Get down!”
Slapshot, moving down the left aisle facing aft, was a few yards ahead of Raynor. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man lean out from the center exit aisle of the plane with a weapon in his hand. Kolt was dealing with the panicked passenger, and Stitch and Digger could not see the man from their position on the right side.
The terrorist ducked quickly back into the galley before Slapshot could fire.
The master sergeant shouted into his MBITR’s mic as he kept his eyes focused on the corner. “Crow in the center galley!”
He continued moving aft, hunting for terrorist indicators.
Without his Peltors, Kolt didn’t hear the call on the net, but it did not matter. He’d caught a fleeting glimpse of the man as he ducked around the corner. When Slapshot was held up for a moment with another squirter in the center cabin, Raynor leapfrogged his mate and made it to the galley, his eyes locked on the folding metal door of the lav. The terrorist would be inside; there was no indication that he’d retreated into the rear coach cabin.
Raynor did not hesitate. He sidestepped left into the galley area to clear the rest of the space, and here he inadvertently stomped down on a male steward’s left penny loafer. Kolt looked at the young man cowering in a ball on the floor of the galley and the two made brief eye contact.
The kid smelled like he had shit his pants and his body shook uncontrollably.
Kolt reached down with his nonfiring hand and grabbed the collar of the kid’s blazer. On the other side of the steward was the door to the lavatory concealing the Lashkar terrorist.
“Need your space,” Kolt said. “Move toward the cockpit.” But the young man remained still. Kolt had used the balance of his good manners on the squirter, so he yanked the kid by his collar and lifted him up, trying to force the steward out of his way.
“Don’t move me!” the kid finally shouted in a panicked falsetto.
Raynor shouted, “Get your ass out of the—”
Dragging the kid all the way to his feet, Kolt finally saw it. A shine and movement of a wire attached to a drawer in the side cupboard. It was a shine and a movement that did not belong. The wire ended in a noose around the steward’s neck and was clearly visible now, though Raynor had not checked for it an instant earlier.
As Kolt pushed the steward out of the galley, the kid’s movement pulled the wire, which opened the drawer, which then fell to the floor. From the plastic drawer a small cylinder bounced out, a spring-loaded handle popped off, and then the cylinder rolled across the galley.
This, Kolt Raynor recognized instantly.
“Grenade!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
The steward was clear; he had stumbled into the forward coach cabin and slammed straight into Slapshot, knocking the big operator back onto a passenger in his seat.
Raynor heard the lavatory door open. His senses in overdrive, he whipped his head a few degrees to the right before picking up the blur of a weapon’s muzzle.
Kolt was going to take a hit from the grenade on the floor behind him, there was no way to avoid that. In that flash of an instant he told himself he would “eat” the grenade if he had to, but he was damn well not going to let some asshole Pakistani terrorist shithead shoot him.
Raynor opened his mouth to absorb the overpressure of the impending explosion, and he dropped to a prone position to get below the bulk of the grenade’s shrapnel. While doing this, he opened fire on the lavatory door, blasting four .40-caliber rounds chest-high as he hit the deck, hoping like hell that most of the blast would go over him.
Between gunshots he heard shouts from both Digger and Stitch, plaintive cries for a passenger to “get the fuck down!”
An old woman appeared suddenly in the galley from the rear cabin; her hand was over her mouth and she was vomiting, desperately trying to make it to the bathroom to avoid embarrassment. Instead, she stumbled around the corner, saw Raynor on the floor facing her and firing into the lavatory.
She did not see the grenade on the floor behind him, but it would not have mattered if she had.
Kolt started to shout at her, but he was enveloped by white light and violent noise and indescribable pain.
THREE
Kolt Raynor fought through the pain and stared at the light ahead of him. It blinded him but he could not turn from it. He’d lost clarity, he’d lost the ability to discern what was real and what was a dream.
The flashlight flipped off and a group of men stood behind it. They wore black rain parkas and their faces were obscure in the darkness.
“Get up.”
Kolt looked around, and he found himself sitting in the mud. He was not on an aircraft over New Delhi now; he was in the Smoky Mountains, straddling the Tennessee–North Carolina border.
He’d been walking for hours through rain and cold, the nylon straps of his pack dug into his body, and the bottoms of his feet burned like someone ten miles back had set fire to his boots and he’d just let them burn.
But he’d slipped and fallen into the muck a few minutes earlier, and he’d been sitting here in the rain ever since, fading into and then out of consciousness.
This walk in the woods was Relook, Kolt Raynor’s return tryout with Delta. Kolt had been a respected Delta officer some time back, but almost four years earlier he’d been cashiered from the Unit in disgrace and declared persona non grata by his former mates.
That should have been the end of Kolt’s career, but the previous autumn he’d been given a chance to redeem himself for his failures. A one-man, off-the-books op into Pakistan had shown the Delta brass that the former major still had the goods, so now he was getting his shot at returning to the fold.
Kolt thought Relook would be easy. A couple weeks of isolated land navigation with a heavy-ass rucksack strapped to his back, an intense but doable recheck with a couple of classroom shrinks, and a quick check-the-blocks commander’s board where the current Delta leadership would throw him some softball questions before welcoming him back into the Unit with open arms. That was the way he remembered it going down all the times he had been cadre for other Relook candidates wishing to rejoin the ranks after leaving for one reason or another. Sure, one or two of those guys were denied a second shot, but those men were the exception, not the rule. The Unit wouldn’t bother offering Relook if they didn’t really want the operator back.
Still, Kolt knew he’d have to “go through the gates.” Standards were standards.
But he quickly found out that the standards had changed. He was well aware that he was the first Delta operator ever offered a Relook, a second chance, after being dubbed persona non grata. In the ranks, even though guys came and went over the years, PNG was a lifetime sentence. Once that was decided, there weren’t too many miracles that could remove the tag.
Except, possibly, if you did what Raynor had done in Pakistan the previous year. If you did
all
that, and somehow lived to tell about it, you might get a cautious invitation to come back home to Delta.
But things were different at this Relook. First, Kolt’s two weeks in the woods humping the mountains were done with a rucksack thirty pounds heavier than any other second-chancer had ever been forced to carry. Second, he wasn’t picked up each night and brought back to the barracks for hot chow and a hot shower. Instead he was forced to remain alone in the mountains. Third, as Kolt humped the mountains with a map and compass and checked in at each rendezvous point, the cadre member present acted odd. Kolt knew the majority of them, and he knew they were required to retain a professional image, to show no emotion other than a square-jawed poker face, but this wasn’t formal selection and assessment for guys trying to earn an entry spot in Delta. This was Relook: a simple check of an experienced operator who had already proven his mettle in Delta’s ranks. He figured the guys would give him a wink and a nod, maybe even give him some good-natured shit, stick a heavy rock in his ruck and tell him to drop it off at the next rendezvous point. Anything to show him they were happy he was coming back.
But no. It wasn’t the same, and if Kolt sensed it on day one when his basic orders were to not be late, light, or out of uniform, by day three he
knew
this experience was going to suck.
By day eight he was positive. By day fourteen Kolt was wishing he had never taken Webber up on the opportunity.
Few men can cover forty miles a day for two weeks straight in the cold mountains and remain mentally and physically together, and Kolt was no different in this regard. The bottoms of both feet were missing two layers of skin. His three pairs of socks were covered in blood, as were the insides of his jungle boots. His back had been rubbed raw in three spots where the friction of his pack tortured him with every step. His shoulders screamed and his knees and shins were beaten to hell from the deadfall and rocky terrain. Raynor’s four-year-old back and leg injuries throbbed and ached with each step.
“Raynor!” Kolt heard the yell just before a boot kicked him in the leg.
Kolt shook his head to clear his eyes. The men were closer now, they stood over him.
He rubbed his eyes as he tried to make out who the guy kneeling in front of him was. In a second he recognized him.
Wait. Yeah … I know this asshole.
He was a Unit psych, a shrink there to test him psychologically while the rest of the cadre tested him physically.
“Bring him to the trailer,” he said, and the other men standing over Kolt lifted him up on his bloody feet and rushed him off the trail and down a little hill.
Here a small gravel parking lot sat in a clearing. A road ran from it off into the night.
Kolt was taken to a Winnebago trailer parked on the lot, and he was helped through the open door and pushed into a chair in front of a laptop on a table. The computer showed Kolt live on the left side of the screen. On the right side was a second window, and in it a teenage girl with short brown hair hiding her ears, and one of her eyes looked straight at him.
Her exposed eye was red from crying.
What the fuck is this?
Kolt thought.
Behind Raynor, the shrink just nodded at the girl.
“My mother says you knew my father,” she said.
Kolt looked at the psych behind him. No response. Kolt was near delirious with exhaustion, but he had not forgotten he was in Relook. He figured this was just part of the new standards. Play along, he figured. This was all some test that he’d need to pass.
“What’s your name, young lady?” Kolt asked, trying to soften the situation, use his people skills, and stall for time.
“Kelly Lee. My father was Sergeant Spencer Lee. He was a medic.”
Kolt’s mouth opened in shock.
Jet?
Jet had been killed in Pakistan four years ago. Raynor had met Jet’s daughter once, and he did not believe this was her. He could not believe the damn shrinks would drag out the kid of a dead operator as part of some mind-game test.
Surely this was a trick.
“How is your mom? Laura, isn’t it?” Kolt could feel the tension in the air. He needed to vet the girl to see if she really was Jet’s daughter. If this was some sick test Delta had engineered to dick with Kolt, this girl not correcting Jet’s wife’s name would end the nonsense.
“No, my mother’s name is Stephanie.”
Shit.
“She said you made a mistake, Mr. Raynor. She said you got my daddy killed. She said it was all your fault.”
Raynor looked back to the psych, whose eyes were locked on his. He turned back to the camera, and his voice wavered as he said, “Kelly … your dad was very brave. We were good friends.” Kolt was still not sure if this was a test or if the girl on the screen was actually Jet’s daughter. It had been close to five years since he had seen her at a squadron picnic.
“But you killed him. It is your fault. Why, Mr. Raynor?”
Kolt stiffened.
What the hell do I say to that?
He didn’t have kids, hadn’t even married, as he was always too busy with the Army to ever give a woman the attention she certainly would demand. Many of his buddies handled married life okay, but Kolt had no illusions that he was ready for that level of commitment to something more than the military.
He looked up to the shrink, but the shrink just stared back blankly, his face impassive and ghostlike, illuminated as it was by the laptop’s glow.
“I’m … I’m so sorry about your father. We were caught in a trap. It was a trap that I led us into. I failed your dad, I failed some other men who died that day, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to make amends for that. I know that doesn’t take the pain away and it won’t bring him back. I did mess up, Kelly. But your daddy died fighting for his country, for his family, and for his teammates. He didn’t die in vain. He made a big difference.” Kolt wasn’t sure where to stop. He wanted to say so much more, but knew after a while Kelly wouldn’t be hearing anything else he said.