Black Site (4 page)

“Getting drunk?” shouted Thomasson. Icy derision in his voice.

“Damn right, Skipper,” mumbled Kolt as he headed alone back toward the superstructure.

FOUR

Raynor unlocked the door to his mobile home, stepped inside, and tossed his keys and wallet on the peeling Formica kitchen counter. He crossed the tiny living room and plopped down roughly on the mattress on the floor, grabbed the half-empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad he’d left there, and took a violent swig.

It had been a long afternoon with his shrink, and Raynor needed this drink. He was careful to avoid smelling like a honky-tonk bar when he went in to meet with Dr. Rudolph in his office just off base of Fort Bragg. He knew the interminable session would only become more insufferable if Doc got a whiff of the whiskey, and Kolt would do anything to just get in and get out, and get back home, where Old Grand-Dad, his true therapist, would be waiting for him.

As he swigged another mouthful, making up for lost time, he surveyed his worldly possessions. Kolt’s mobile home looked like it had been ransacked around him, but in actuality it had been trashed by the occupant himself. Every dish in the trailer was filthy, stuck to tables or stacked high in the sink. Empty, nearly empty, and soon-to-be-empty whiskey bottles lay strewn around the kitchen and den. Adventure gear lay on the couch and floor, and backpacks with dirty clothes were scattered about, as if Kolt had just returned from one of his overseas security postings.

In fact, Pete Grauer had fired Raynor a month earlier, almost immediately after the pirating in the Gulf of Aden. Kolt didn’t blame him. He knew Grauer had no choice in the matter. Most of the witnesses said that Raynor had doubtless saved lives with his actions, but every last one of them admitted he’d likely done it while intoxicated. Wounding the captain and then firing a full magazine into a boatload of pirates, all but one of whom were little or no threat to the freighter, didn’t set well in maritime security circles, though Jorgensen Cargo Lines had done its best to cover up the matter. They removed Grauer’s firm from future crossings and voided their contract with him.

Consequently, Grauer saw no alternative but to let Kolt go.

Kolt returned to the States and went back to his dingy trailer, his home since he had rented it with his best friend and Delta teammate T.J. seven years prior. It sat on a poultry farm a few miles from the north gate of Fort Bragg, away from the busy Fayetteville side of the post. The farmer who’d rented out the mobile home asked only two hundred a month, but that would have seemed a criminal rip-off to anyone not accustomed to the austerity of a special operations unit. The nearby chicken coops filled the air with the dander of old feathers and the musky stench of bird droppings, and training at the artillery range just across the road used to shake T.J. and Raynor off their mattresses at night. Still, the two friends had outfitted their pad with a big-screen TV, cardboard boxes full of clothes and canned food, and a computer. They trained together in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the dirt yard behind the trailer, they competed for hours on end overhanding throwing knives from distance into a head-sized target fashioned into a gnarled oak tree just outside the door, and they watched movies on the big screen.

And though it looked more like a dorm room at a Third World junior college than a home base for two of America’s most elite commandos, once a month or so when T.J. and Kolt ordered a mixed-martial-arts fight on Pay-Per-View and filled the fridge with cheap beer, their dump of a home became party central for themselves and their Delta mates.

Raynor considered moving away when he left Delta—there was no reason for him to stay so close to Bragg. But he never really felt like he had anywhere to go, so he remained, waiting on some new direction or new plan to carry him away.

For the past month the former Delta major had done little but lie around and brood, avoid phone calls from his parents and from the media who had gotten wind of his shootout with the African pirates, and drink himself to near oblivion.

And he was drinking now. He lay back on the mattress, looked at the clock, and wished like hell that the night would not come so soon.

Most nights he had the dream. If he was drunk enough before the dream, the images would be muddled, less crisp, less real, less nonfiction and more fiction. But it was evening already, he’d fall asleep before successfully pickling his brain, and he knew that this inability to be sufficiently shitfaced before bed, plus Doc Rudolph’s persistence in discussing the events of three years prior during today’s session, all but ensured that tonight’s dream would be stone-cold authenticity. History, not fantasy. Kolt would hear the sounds, feel the fear, smell the death.

Relive the guilt.

He chugged the Old Grand-Dad and began to cry. And he wished like hell he could stay awake all night so that he could avoid the motherfucking dream.

FIVE

Three Years Earlier

Four pairs of hiking boots dug for purchase on the narrow mountain spur. Four pairs of wary eyes searched the dark distance for threats. Four men climbed onward and upward, sucked lungs full of thinning air, and ignored the churning snow that wetted beards and clothing, adding to the bone-soaked chill of their own sweat. Heavy packs and load-bearing vests, buckles and straps straining with gear, compressed spines and hampered balance.

Though it was perilously steep and poorly marked, discovering this goat track had been a windfall for the team, even if using it was a gamble. Certainly crossing the mountains via an established trail was preferable to just humping overland, but the men had no illusions they were the only two-legged creatures on this path between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban, al Qaeda, donkey caravans of opium poppy or assault rifles, anyone with an illicit requirement to travel from one side to the other undetected, might well be just beyond the next rise.

With a craggy limestone wall on his left and a sheer drop-off to oblivion on his right, the lone officer in the silent procession stopped. Thirty-four-year-old Major Kolt Raynor looked ahead into the darkness and surveyed his team. Master Sergeant Michael “Musket” Overstreet clambered up the trail twenty meters on, decked head to toe in high-tech mountain clothing in blacks and browns. He sported an impressive salt-and-pepper beard and wore a pakol, the local wool cap favored by Pashtun men in the region. Though heavily burdened with equipment, Musket showed no obvious strain. He pulled himself up the incline, his gloved hands grabbing and then pushing off the mossy rocks on the wall to his left, and then he looked back over his shoulder. Noticing his major’s halt, the master sergeant dropped to a kneepad and turned his attention to the wide valley arrayed off his right shoulder.

Looking back now through the darkness and precipitation, Major Raynor could just make out Sergeant First Class Spencer “Jet” Lee moving up the mountain trail fifteen meters behind. He climbed carefully, reaching out to steady himself as he stepped onto an icy stone in his path. Jet wore a Heckler & Koch 416 rifle over his chest and a fat Combat Casualty Response Kit on his back. A pouch on his chest rig sported a .40 caliber Glock 23 pistol. Jet served as the team medic, but he could shoot his long gun or his pistol as well as any of his colleagues. His beard, in contrast to Musket’s, was short and scruffy and obviously hard-earned, and he kept his North Face cap pulled down below his eyebrows. He looked up and saw the halt in front of him, so he lowered himself and his sixty pounds of gear to the cold earth, took a knee on a broken piece of shale.

Raynor knew Rocky was up ahead on point, just out of sight but leading the way with his rifle cradled in his arms. Even though he was fifty meters ahead of his team leader, with his new third-generation NVGs, Sergeant First Class Carl “Rocky” Price would be able to cover the trail all the way back to Jet, at least when the trail was straight enough to get line of sight.

Kolt Raynor pressed the Talk button on his inter-team radio. “Rock, you good up there?”

The reply took a moment. The labored breathing was audible in the transmission. “Just chillin’. Why we stoppin’, Racer?” As expected, Rocky
did
have eyes on the team. Raynor was not surprised to hear the man struggling in the thin air. Although Rocky was the best pure mountaineer in the squadron, a serious sinus infection had sent him back to the States for recovery, and since his return he’d not yet fully reacclimated to the altitude.

“Let’s break out the O2,” Raynor suggested to all the men. “Huff ’em if you got ’em, boys. It’s thinning out fast up here. We’ll be heading down below eight thousand in less than a klick.”

“Roger that, boss.” Though he could not see him, Raynor knew Rocky would now be on a knee, pulling a tiny aluminum tank from his pack and inhaling heavily from its attached mouthpiece.

Raynor, Musket, and Jet had been in the mountains for nearly three months, and altitude sickness for them at this elevation was highly unlikely. Still, a few inhalations of pure oxygen sounded good to the major. He’d played it like he was making the offer for Rock’s benefit, but he took this opportunity to reach for his own tank as well.

Raynor leaned his rucksack against the wall behind him to take some weight off his legs and hips. Though his fitness level was that of a professional athlete, this was no ball field. This was war. His conditioning of late had been of slight concern to him, but he hid it well back at base. He had no doubt whatsoever that he could fulfill this mission, and he would have done anything to avoid being left behind. Yes, he had let his training lapse—he was an officer, and his focus had been on the maps and the intelligence reports and the gear and the personnel and the logistics, and not sufficiently on his fitness. But Kolt Raynor had always considered himself a game-day player. He knew he’d rise to the occasion and suck it up, even if that meant sucking wind along the way.

This hit was too important.

Though they all held military rank, these were not soldiers. These were operators. Members of First Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta. The public and the press called them Delta Force; the Department of Defense called them Combat Applications Group; inside Delta they often just referred to their organization as “the Unit.” And when America needed hard men for hard duty in a hard land, America called Delta.

With all the shit holes and shit heads in this world, these days Delta did not go wanting for work.

When his men again stood at the ready, Raynor prepared to move out. He adjusted the sling on his short-barreled HK416 rifle so that it would scrape against a different patch of skin on his neck, and he took a swig from the nipple on the end of the tube running to the water bladder in his backpack. He checked his GPS, found his location, and noticed he was literally straddling the border. Though that was probably significant to some politician or diplomat far away, it did not really matter to him, because the border here was just a fantasy. The mountains held no signposts, no fence line, no markings at all. The British had drawn a stroke across a map over a hundred years earlier and named it the Durand Line after some meddlesome English foreign secretary, and since then it had been all but ignored by the millions of Pathans and Baluchis who lived on either side of it, and by smugglers of weapons and drugs, jihadists, and, on extraordinarily rare occasions, American commandos.

For Raynor and his three men sharing this stretch of trail there was no cause to be more vigilant now, entering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, than there had been at any point during the previous three hours of their insertion. No, there was just as much danger five klicks behind them, in the hills of Afghanistan, as there would be five klicks ahead, in the hills of Pakistan. The Taliban did not consult a GPS, did not check their maps or check their fire. This entire region, deep verdant valleys and jutting snowcapped peaks alike, was the homeland of the enemy, and they outnumbered Raynor and his men one thousand to one.

Major Kolt Raynor, code name “Racer,” turned his eyes back to the east, away from his procession of operators and toward his objective, though it was still hours off. He moved out and his men followed suit.

*   *   *

Nine seconds later in a darkened trailer at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the thirty-year-old pilot of an unmanned aerial vehicle spoke into her headset without looking away from the flat-panel screens in front of her.

Her voice was smooth and soft; a hint of Ohio infused her vowels. “Hunter 29 is over the border at Waypoint Charlie. Incursion time Zulu nineteen-nineteen.”

In her headphones came an abrupt reply from her commanding officer. “Hunter 29 at Charlie nineteen-nineteen Zulu. Okay.”

Air Force Captain Pamela Archer watched the feed from her variable-aperture infrared camera, tracked the four operators moving along the trail fifteen thousand feet below her MQ-9 Reaper drone as news of the cross-border incursion came from the GPS coordinates on the moving map panel mounted above the real-time image monitor. The Delta element showed as white hotspots on the monochrome display, hotspots with arms and legs, climbing and pulling themselves arduously up a mountain trail snaking along a wide canyon.

Although this morning’s focus was on the Afghan-Pak border, Archer considered herself on the front line of this war as well. True, she did concede, there were conveniences on her front that were not enjoyed by the Delta boys. She had the fortune of stopping off at the base’s Starbucks on her way to battle. Indeed, a four-fifths-empty quadruple mocha sat alongside the black joystick that controlled the flight of the UAV. The men on her infrared monitor, by contrast, had been humping through the mountains for hours, with only an occasional swig from their CamelBak water bladders to sustain them. And they had the frigid November air to contend with, thinned by the nine-thousand-foot mountain and whipped into brutal intensity by the high-walled gorges, whereas Pam lived in a middle-class apartment complex in a suburb north of Las Vegas, enjoyed daytime highs in the eighties and nights just cool enough for a zip-up fleece.