Tier One Wild (12 page)

Unit guys refer to their facility as “the compound” or “the building.” Those on the outside sometimes call the fenced-in complex the “Red Roof Inn” due to the dark-maroon/red-colored roofing on the buildings, or “where the Hardy Boys live,” applying one of the many nicknames the men of Delta Force use for their facility. “He’s behind the fence,” they say when referring to someone who has entered Delta’s ranks and has seemingly fallen off the earth.

The compound is secluded and set back off the passing roads, hidden by tall trees and man-made earthen berms. The buildings and property there contain dental and medical facilities, a chow hall, a gym, firing ranges, obstacle courses, an ASP (ammo supply point), motorcycle trails, close-quarters-battle shoot houses, an Olympic-sized pool, basketball and racquetball courts, and a climbing wall. It’s a civilization all its own, and a motivated operator can remain there for months without ever leaving the grounds.

Armed guards, dressed in professional uniforms, work the gates and patrol the perimeter. Many are retired Vietnam vets and all are honored to be guarding the unit compound. Most of these men stay on the job twenty years or more and know everyone in the compound by name and face.

On his first day back at Bragg after his exploits overseas, Kolt Raynor sat on a gurney in the infirmary, his olive-drab flight suit pulled down around his ankles.

He’d spent the previous ten minutes facedown, pants off, ass on display, while Doc Markham pulled week-old grenade shrapnel from his right thigh.

But that bit of unpleasantness was over now, and he was in no real pain, as the doc had given him a local injection to numb the meat in his leg before he went digging for the ball bearings that had shown up on an X-ray. He’d then stitched him up, and now Racer was seated in his underwear while the doc finished dressing the tiny wounds.

Doc Markham was new. He was a few years younger than the thirty-eight-year-old major, and he’d come along since Kolt’s first stint in Delta. But the young man spoke in a commanding voice. “From the looks of the scars on you, Major Raynor, I’m going to guess this isn’t the first time you’ve had someone in the medical profession tell you how lucky you are to be alive.”

Kolt smiled. “I’ve heard that from people in other professions, as well.”

“Well, you took nine pieces of shrapnel into the thigh. Two blew right on out the side of your leg. I’ve removed the seven that didn’t make exit wounds, but I sure wish you had come right back after this happened instead of lollygagging wherever the hell you went in the five days since catching this grenade blast. You’re lucky we don’t have a nasty infection to deal with.”

The doc knew about New Delhi and Racer’s involvement, from the weekly command staff meeting as well as the compound’s robust rumor mill. But he knew nothing about Tripoli. That op had been too black for dissemination to the support staff. As far as he knew, Kolt had been hanging out at a cathouse in France for the past week.

Kolt just said, “I got a little held up on the way home.”

The doc smiled a smile that gave Kolt the indication that he understood now—Racer hadn’t been lollygagging anywhere just so that his wounds could get infected. He did not say anything more, but instead inspected the old bruises in the middle of Raynor’s back. “You took some more frag to your plate, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Thank God for body armor.”

Raynor chuckled. “I do so on a daily basis.”

Doc Markham looked at Racer’s chart. “Well, let’s see. A concussion and cranial lacerations last fall, a broken back and three gunshot wounds four years ago, and a half dozen more visits to the doctor for broken bones and frags over the past dozen years … I can’t do much else for you but ask you to make sure there isn’t a next time … but since you won’t listen to me on that, please make an effort to get back here and get treatment a bit quicker … if at all possible.”

Kolt knew the guy was just doing his job, and his job entailed reading his operators the riot act about taking care of their bodies. The old Kolt might have said something cute but smart-alecky. But the new Kolt, the kinder, gentler man that he was trying to be, just said, “You got it, Doc. Appreciate you fixing me up.”

“That’s what they pay me for, Major. Change the dressing on your thigh in a couple of days and come back in a week so I can take one more look.”

“You got it. See you then.”

*   *   *

Five minutes later Racer limped out of the infirmary on his way to the SCIF—the Secret Compartmented Intelligence Facility—the intelligence center of the compound. Whenever he found the time, Kolt liked to drop in and see what was going on in the world that might affect him and his troops.

Kolt’s day had begun that morning with a hot wash over the in-extremis retaking of the American Airlines jet in India and the in-extremis Tripoli rescue of the United Nations weapons inspector. A hot wash was an after-action conference with all parties involved in the action, a meeting where all the details are discussed and the outcome of the event is evaluated. These forums can be brutal and intense when determining if mistakes have been made, and often the harshest critic in the room is the operator whose actions or judgment comes under scrutiny.

This morning’s hot wash had been no different, except for the fact that there were two major actions under review, and Major Kolt Raynor was at the center of both of them. It had been a long and intense morning for Kolt, but he’d come out of it relatively unscathed. Colonel Webber had listened to everyone’s accounts of both ops, and he made it clear that he supported his major’s decisions in both incidents. Webber had been impressed with Kolt’s focus after his long hiatus, though he was not at all surprised by his willingness to accept risk—for himself as well as his men. That was the Kolt everyone at Delta remembered from his first stint in the Unit.

The colonel couldn’t argue with the decision to assault the 747 from the roof, reasoning that the hijackers were heading to Pakistan, where they could easily escape after killing everyone on board.

The fact that Raynor did not know they were heading to Pakistan only slightly affected Webber’s assessment. The major had to make a quick decision, and that decision had saved lives.

Webber also recognized the necessity of using lethal means in Libya when the three men following Tripwire turned into six men trying to kill him. And the colonel found the major’s split-second decision to extract Tripwire from Tripoli with the fixed-wing Air Cell asset during daylight hours was most impressive.

Of course, neither op had been perfectly executed, and Kolt and his team were typically self-critical and thorough. A hostage was killed on Kolt’s watch in New Delhi, and a nonsuppressed handgun led to compromising the CIA’s overarching mission in Tripoli. Webber didn’t have to say much. He was mainly in “receive” mode. But given how both ops were seat-of-the pants missions with absolutely zero prior planning time, and probably more fitting for three assault teams instead of just one, Webber figured his men had done a damn fine job, and he would absorb any heat from Washington that came their way.

Raynor knew Webber was his champion here in the Unit, at least until the next op.

Kolt’s return to Delta had been a positive experience overall, but, just as he had during his first time in the troop, he did have his detractors. People seemed to either love Kolt or hate him. During his first stint in Delta, those who weren’t in Kolt’s fan club admitted that he was one of the hardest-working guys in the compound, but they also said he was a hardheaded son of a bitch and, for an officer, took the Tier One Wild tag a little too much to the extreme.

The intervening years and the mileage that went along with them had affected him, there was no doubt about that. Kolt considered himself even harder-working than before, with much more to prove than during his first stint here. But now he was determined to change his image—to take that extra breath before speaking or that extra moment to empathize with the other person’s point of view.

Kolt had always listened to his sergeants. Years ago he had walked into the Unit from the Rangers knowing good and well that he was on the far left of the learning curve, and each and every man he commanded would know more than he about every last aspect of the job. Kolt was not one to argue with the “men in the know”—Delta’s sergeants. He knew he didn’t have to know more than his men to lead them, but he did need to know how to manage his team. But Kolt hated bureaucracy, and those times when he felt his hands were tied by regs or bullshit orders—thus putting his men or his mission in danger—Kolt Raynor historically had been the first one to push back against the system.

More often than not, Kolt simply ignored the red tape and marched to his own drummer, driven by his own instincts. This had gotten him into trouble, and it had labeled him around the compound as the officer with the shortest fuse in the Unit. That this intensity was for his men and his mission was a mitigating factor, but this did not get him off the hook completely.

Something else that had always irked Raynor’s detractors during his first time in Delta was the fact that his best friend, Josh Timble, had been perhaps the most respected active duty officer in the organization. Timble had taken Raynor under his wing from the start. TJ ran interference for Racer with Delta leadership when his mouth went too far or his talents did not go far enough.

And there was one more thing. Even after all the bad shit that had happened to Racer, most guys in the building still thought he was the luckiest son of a bitch alive. The New Delhi hit was one of the biggest Delta successes in a decade, and the fact that Raynor caught the op less than two months after being reinstated gave many in the building the sense that life was not fair.

The news media were all over the New Delhi hijacking, of course, pushing “unnamed sources” inside the military and intelligence communities to come clean about which unit had saved the day. Passengers reported American accents for the black-clad and armed commandos, but the government was uncharacteristically tight-lipped about the operation—a lesson learned after all the hype following the bin Laden kill. So, with little to go on but speculation, virtually all of the media had proclaimed that the vaunted SEAL Team 6 had done the deed in the skies over New Delhi.

Kolt and the rest of Delta just laughed this off. Nobody around the Unit benefited from publicity. ST6 could have the attention, for all they were concerned. The men at the compound knew what they had accomplished. There would be an impressive plaque erected next to plaques commemorating other successful ops carried out by Delta, and maybe even a historical diorama built in the long corridor of the compound known as the Spine.

Visiting VIPs would marvel at it, operators would generally ignore it.

*   *   *

Despite his overall success in the past week, Kolt found himself in a sour mood today. He was glad to get the last bits of New Delhi out of his leg, and he was happy to have returned from two dangerous missions with all of his men. But the death of the elderly woman had him second-guessing his actions.

The loss of the lady, a seventy-four-year-old Dutch woman as it turned out, who had rushed to the bathroom as the grenade went off, was a black eye on the otherwise stellar mission. Most agreed that the poor lady had felt the quite understandable urge to get to the lavatory so as not to vomit in public, and in her panic she acted on this impulse despite all that was going on around her.

The woman’s death had made him morose and angry.

As Raynor headed through the Spine toward the SCIF, he saw Benji, an old-timer master sergeant from another squadron, walking in the other direction. They shook hands.

“Welcome home, Racer.”

“Good to be back.”

“Some guys get all the luck, huh?” Benji said it with a smile.

Benji used to be one of TJ’s men, but now his team was led by thirty-five-year-old Major Rick Mahoney, code named Gangster. Gangster had let it be known around the compound that he thought Kolt Raynor was an asshole and allowing him to return to Delta was a mistake. But unlike Gangster, Benji and Kolt always got along, so the remark about his lucky streak did not bother Raynor at all. He just said, “Good to see you, brother.”

“You, too. Heard about your butt. Doc Markham take a look at it yet?”

“It was my thigh, but yeah. He fished out the foreign bodies. I’m one hundred percent me again.”

“That’s good. You guys have two more weeks on alert. I hope it’s nice and quiet for you.”

Kolt said,“With the OPTEMPO running off the charts looking for those missing SAMs, anything can happen at any time. I was just heading down to the SCIF to see if they’ve got any new blips on the radar.”

Benji chuckled. “You don’t think they’ll let you know if something comes up?”

“Sure, my beeper will go off, but you know me. I’m all about gaming the system. If I get an early heads-up, maybe I can be better prepared.”

Benji nodded.

Just then Tackle came up the hall. Tackle was, like Benji, one of Gangster’s men. At thirty-nine, he was another of the old-guard master sergeants in the Unit and, like Gangster, he had never been one of Raynor’s biggest fans. “Hey, Racer,” Tackle said, “word is you got your ass blown off by a grenade.”

Benji smiled, either not picking up on his teammate’s snide tone or, more likely, just ignoring it.

Kolt sighed. “Thigh.”

Tackle said, “You getting a Purple Heart for those scratches?”

“Not up to me, but I hope not.”

Tackle shrugged. “Whatever. Anyway, we take over alert status from you guys soon. How ’bout keeping your bullets in your mag until you get your downtime?”

Raynor said, “Again, not up to me.”

Tackle kept moving up the Spine.

Benji said, “There is a little jealousy about you scoring those two hits back-to-back like that. You get it, right? Guys go half a year without any fun and then you walk into the compound, and within eight weeks you are crawling on the roof of a plane during takeoff.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Kolt said, knowing that Benji was glossing over the other reasons he wasn’t popular among some men in the compound.