Direct Action - 03 (8 page)

As he lay in the prone, he began to get cold. The last few hours before dawn are usually the coldest, and his soaked-through clothes were only adding to the problem. Fifteen minutes went by before he heard anything over the radio.

“Black-side security,” It sounded like Bill. “You got anything?”

“One down crow,” Deckard reported.

“Nice.”

A few minutes later, Rick radioed that he was coming out to meet Deckard. He stood up and whistled to Rick when he heard him getting close.

“Where is he?” Rick asked.

“Over here,” Deckard said leading him over to the body. Rick fired a couple more shots into the body. It never hurt to make sure corpses were still corpses but then Rick loaded a full magazine. Taking a step back, he aimed at the dead body and fired at the Afghan's head on full auto. His gunfire blasted the top of the terrorist's skull clean off and splattered his brains in the dirt. The Liquid Sky member held the trigger down until the rifle cycled through the entire thirty-round magazine.

It was a completely unnecessary and unprofessional gesture. Rick had effectively turned the top of the Afghan's skull into a canoe.

“What was that for?” Deckard asked absently.

“Sending a fucking message,” Rick scolded him. He then patted the body down and pocketed some cash he found in one of the pockets.

“Let's get the fuck out of here.”

Deckard followed Rick back around the compound to the breach point. Zach was outside smoking a cigarette. His man dress was splattered with blood, his AK slung over one shoulder. Paul came walking out of the compound with two floppy pancakes in his hands. It took Deckard a moment to realize that the pancakes had hair. Paul had been inside collecting scalps.

“I got two,” he told Zach with a smile.

“Just the woman,” Zach replied, motioning to the clump of long hair and congealing blood at his feet.

Deckard had no illusions about who he was dealing with. They were out murdering democracy advocates and helping to suppress the Arab Spring, but this was off the charts. Even among those who went off the reservation, this was pretty much unheard of. He was shocked, and would not have believed it if someone had described the scene to him in a bar.

Bill came out with another scalp in his hand and a bloody hatchet in the other.

“Fucking savages never had a chance,” he grinned.

Deckard still couldn't believe what he was seeing.

Ramon came out carrying a plastic bag filled with documents and computer hard drives he had collected on the objective.

“Get rid of that shit,” Bill told him. “Sterile means nothing goes on the objective and nothing comes off. Zero evidence that we were ever here.”

“This was a major command and control node for the network,” Ramon insisted. “We can ball up the entire network based on what these guys have here.”

“Not our problem,” Bill said. “Let the fucking knuckle-draggers in Big Army sort this bullshit third-world country out. We work contract to contract.”

Ramon looked pissed, but walked back into the compound with the bag of sensitive materials he had collected. Rick followed him in and returned back with a couple scalps of his own which he dropped at Zach's feet.

“There is my two.”

Bending over, he wiped the blood off his hatchet on Deckard's man dress.

“Thanks bro. Gotta make sure this bad boy is ready to go for next time,” Rick informed him.

“We got a pickup inside the compound,” Ramon said as he walked back out.

“Good, that will save us some time,” Bill replied. “Deckard, go hotwire that fucker and get us out of here.”

Deckard nodded.

“Wait a second,” Paul said stopping him. “Let me give you a hand.”

Reaching into his pocket, Paul pulled out a dismembered hand and threw it at Deckard. It bounced off his chest and thumped between his feet in a cloud of dust. The Liquid Sky team burst out laughing at the look of disgust on his face.

Deckard walked back inside the compound trying to process what had just happened. These guys were so far gone that there was no turning back for any of them. His plan had always been to infiltrate and then destroy. Now it didn't matter what his plan was. He was all out of choices. These were former Special Operations men like himself and so many others who served.

It was his responsibility to clean up this mess. There was no need for him to justify this to himself, it justified itself. It was time to choose the hard right over the easy wrong. Finding the pickup truck in the corner of the compound, he threw open the door and went to work on the ignition.

As he began to pry the ignition cylinder out with a piece of metal he found laying around, Deckard felt completely disgusted with what he had involved himself in. Even if they were terrorists, this wasn't how soldiers carried themselves. It wasn't just about disrespecting the enemy dead, more importantly, it was about the discipline and self-respect that the soldier had for himself. Once the rot of war crimes infected a military organization, it would spread throughout the unit like a plague and destroy everything that they had once stood for. They would be no different than Al Qaeda and the other human savages that they fought. At that point, the war was already lost.

Just as he hotwired the truck, Deckard knew he would have to be slow and deliberate. He couldn't allow his emotions to control him like the Liquid Sky team. One slip up and he was a dead man. He needed to play along, maybe no matter how dark this road he was heading down got. When the time was right, at a place and time of his choosing, he would drop the hammer and be done with this.

The pickup truck rumbled to life. Deckard got behind the wheel and worked the stick shift, driving out of the compound. Outside, the five other Liquid Sky operators piled into the truck, several sitting in the back. Bill got in the passenger seat and told Deckard he could flip on the headlights and white light it down the road. They just needed to make a quick exit from the target area before daylight and the risk of an ambush was fairly low. He gave him directions on where to go as they drove towards their extraction site. After driving for half an hour, the sun was starting to crest above the horizon.

Bill ordered everyone out of the truck. Deckard put it in neutral and they pushed the vehicle into a creek bed where it rolled over on its side. At least it would be out of sight to any passersby. Then it was back up the mountain. They had done an off-set infil, first traveling by Trojan janga truck and then moving by foot to the objective to maintain the element of surprise and absolute secrecy prior to their assault. It was sound planning, but now they had to walk all the way back to the exfil site where their janga truck driver would pick them up along a different spot on the road.

By the time they were halfway up the ridge, it was full daylight. The good thing was that they were far enough away from the road below and their objective that it was unlikely anyone would spot them. They could see the smattering of compounds below, but without optics, no one was going to see a few ants climbing the side of the mountain.

By eight in the morning they again crested the ridge. Everyone was out of water. It was a short-duration mission with one specific task: hunting and killing with zero American involvement as far as anyone could prove. They took five up on top of the ridge, everyone having a seat on the rocks and admiring the view. Afghanistan was really the prettiest part of hell. It would have been a nice place to visit if not for the jihadist crazies. And the occasional rogue mercenary.

Zach and Rick got into a blow-by-blow about who killed who and how it had all gone down.

“They were Al Qaeda?” Deckard asked Ramon.

“Naw man,” he answered. “Those were Karzai's guys.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, they were tied into the President of Afghanistan. Running a huge drug-trafficking network for him. Completely untouchable by U.S. Special Operations for political reasons. That's why we got called in.”

“Shit.”

“No kidding. They let him get away with it for a long time but I guess he is starting to lean away from America and more towards China these days so someone wanted to give him a gut check. That's my take on it anyway.”

“Its a good thing we took them out.”

Ramon turned to him and whispered, “Look, you did good today. Just keep your head down and they will offer you a full-time job. We do a lot of killing and make good money at it. Its just harder for us Army guys to get an in with them.”

“I got it.”

But Deckard didn't get it. He had completely misread Ramon by thinking he was a SEAL.

They picked it up and started their descent. It was a long haul through the morning as they suffered in the heat and slipped down through the dirt and debris. A few times they had to cling to the sides of cliffs and move hand over hand until they could find a wider path down the mountain. Bill was up front again and he began talking into his radio when the road came into view. There was no sign of their ride home, but he was talking to someone.

They walked down a spur-coming off the mountain overlooking the road and halted. Bill signaled them to stay low as they gathered around a rocky outcropping that looked like something that belonged on the set of Conan the Barbarian.

At this point, they were only a few hundred meters above the road. Down below was a village with a stream running alongside the road. Terraced fields were dug into the opposite side of the valley with houses and huts propped up against the sides of the cliffs at impossible angles. People lived where the water was, no matter how ridiculous the terrain might be. They learned to live there.

In the stream next to the road, a woman in a blue burka stood in the water up to her ankles, washing dishes, pots, and pans that she laid next to her one by one as she scrubbed them out.

“Where is our GI Joe Army guy?” Bill asked. “Deckard, get your ass up here.”

Deckard high-crawled over to Bill and watched the scene below.

“You see that Hodji twat down there?”

“Yeah.”

“This is our extraction point and that fucking cunt is in the way. She'll compromise us. You're disguised as a local, so I want you to get close to her and cut her fucking throat. Think you can do it?”

“Yeah,” Deckard said without hesitation.

“You got a knife?”

“No, just the kit you issued me.”

“Here,” Bill said handing him a rusty butcher knife. Another local purchase. “Make it happen. Once it is done we will come down and I'll call in our driver.”

“Piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” Bill said dryly. “We'll find out in a few minutes, won't we?”

“Do that bitch Deckard,” Rick told him. “God only knows how many puppies she will squeeze out that will become Allah lovin' terrorists.”

Deckard looked down at the road for a moment and plotted his route down to the stream. He figured it out in a few seconds and then dropped down below the crest of the spur, keeping the terrain feature between himself and the woman below. He stepped very carefully now so not to give away his position. Stepping from heel to toe, he slowly maneuvered his way down to the road. The small stones still ground beneath his footsteps but that couldn't be helped.

Moving slowly, he made it down to the road, then crossed it out of sight of the woman. With any luck, she would have finished her task and have walked back home by the time he got there. Another reason why he was in no rush.

There was no way that Deckard was going to murder a civilian in cold blood. The game was over before he had even gotten started. Bill had called his bluff. They wanted to see if he was one of them, ensure that he was a war criminal and just as guilty as the rest of the group. No doubt, the entire Liquid Sky team would have their rifles pointed at him and the woman, ready to open fire on them both if he failed to complete his task.

Crouching in a thicket of bushes, he checked his AK-47 and Glock pistol to make sure he had rounds chambered and ready to go. Once he closed on the woman, he would drag her across the stream and behind a stone wall a few meters further back. From there he would have to escape and evade, run as hard as he could, ambush the Liquid Sky team when and where he could to slow them down, and eventually find a vehicle and make his way back to Kabul. Truth be told, he'd be lucky if he lasted five seconds into that plan and he knew it.

He was a dead man walking, killed by his own self-restraint.

Silently, Deckard moved through the thicket in a crouch. He cursed as he saw the blue burka through the twigs and leaves of the bushes. She could have saved her own life, if she had only known. Now they were both dead.

Deckard was on the opposite bank of the stream from her, but the stream was only a few feet wide. Once he closed the distance he would be right on top of her. He could jump out of the bushes, grab her, and make a run for it. Maybe. A big maybe.

The Afghan woman bent down to wash another one of the pots. He was almost within striking distance now. The American commando readjusted the sling on his shoulder and prepared to move. He had the butcher knife in his hand up until this point, but now he stuck it in his belt.

He took a deep breath. It was now or never. His muscles tensed, prepared for what was about to happen. He was ready to execute.