Final Target Read online

  Jonathan, Alpha One, found each of the targets nearest to him via their heat signature and then switched back to light enhancement. Now that he knew where they were, they were easy to see. The concern, always, was the ones you didn’t see.

  As if reading his mind, Venice (Ven-EE-chay) Alexander, aka Mother Hen, spoke through the transceiver in his right ear. “I concur with Overwatch,” she said. The government masters didn’t know that Venice had independently tapped into the same signal that they were using for imagery. She was that good at the business of taming electrons. He liked having her second set of eyes. While he knew no reason why Uncle Sam would try to jam him up, there was some history of that, and he knew that Venice had only his best interests at heart.

  On the local net, Jonathan whispered, “Ready, Big Guy?”

  “On your go,” Boxers replied.

  Jonathan raised his suppressed 4.6-millimeter MP7 rifle up to high ready and pressed the extended buttstock into the soft spot of his shoulder. He verified with his thumb that the selector switch was set to full auto and settled the infrared laser sight on the first target’s head. He pressed his TRANSMIT button with fingers of his left hand and whispered, “Four, three, two . . .”

  There was no need to finish the count—it was the syntax that mattered. At the silent zero, he pressed the trigger and sent a two-round burst into the sentry’s brain. Confident of the kill, he pivoted left and shot his second target before he had a chance to react. Two down.

  From somewhere in the unseen corners of the jungle, two more suppressed bursts rattled the night, and Jonathan knew without asking that the body count had jumped to four.

  Time to move.

  Jonathan glided swiftly through the undergrowth, rifle up and ready, closing on the light source. The fight was ten seconds old now. If the bad guys had their weapons on them and were trained, they could be ready to fight back.

  An AK boomed through the night, followed by others, but Jonathan heard no rounds pass nearby. Strike the training concern. Soldiers fired at targets; thugs fired at fear. Barring the lucky shot, the shooters were just wasting ammunition.

  Jonathan didn’t slow, even as the rate of return fire increased. His NVGs danced with muzzle flashes. The war was now fifteen seconds old, the element of surprise was gone, and that left only skill and marksmanship.

  Three feet behind every muzzle flash there resided a shooter. Jonathan killed two more with as many shots.

  And then there was silence.

  “Status,” Jonathan said over the local net.

  “Nice shooting, Tex,” Boxers said through a faked Southern drawl. “I got three.”

  “That makes seven.” With luck, number eight would be their PC. “Mother Hen?”

  Before Venice could respond, the teenager said, “Alpha Team, Overwatch. I show all targets down. Nice shooting.”

  Jonathan didn’t bother to acknowledge the transmission.

  “I concur,” Venice said. She could hear the teenager, but the teenager could not hear her. Of the two opinions, only one mattered.

  Jonathan closed the distance to the center of the clearing. A naked middle-aged man sat bound to a stout wooden chair, his hands and face smeared with blood, but he was still alive. Dead men surrounded him like spokes of a wheel. This would be their PC, Harry Dawkins, and he looked terrified.

  “Harry Dawkins?” Jonathan asked.

  The man just stared. He was dysfunctional, beyond fear.

  “Hey, Dawkins!” Boxers boomed from the other side of the clearing. At just south of seven feet tall and well north of 250 pounds, Boxers was a huge man with a huge voice that could change the weather when he wanted it to.

  The victim jumped. “Yes!” he shouted. “I’m Harry Dawkins.”

  As Jonathan moved closer, he saw that at least two of the man’s teeth had been removed, and with all the blood, it was hard to verify his identity from the picture they’d been given. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” Jonathan asked.

  The guy wasn’t patching it together.

  “Focus,” Jonathan said. “We’re the good guys. We’re here to take you home. But first we need to know your mother’s maiden name. We need to confirm your identity.”

  “B-Baxter,” he said. The hard consonant brought a spray of blood.

  Jonathan pressed both TRANSMIT buttons simultaneously. “PC is secure,” he said. Then he stooped closer to Dawkins so he could look him straight in the eye. He rocked his NVGs out of the way so the man could see his eyes. Dawkins hadn’t earned the right to see Jonathan’s face, so the balaclava stayed in place. “This is over, Mr. Dawkins,” he said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

  Boxers busied himself with the task of checking the kidnappers’ bodies for identification and to make sure they were dead.

  The kidnappers had tied Dawkins to the chair at his wrists, biceps, thighs, and ankles using coarse rope that reminded Jonathan of the twine he used to tie up newspapers for recycling. The knots were tight, and they’d all been in place long enough to cause significant swelling of his hands and feet. Three of Dawkins’s fingernails were missing.

  Jonathan loathed torture. He looked at the bodies at his feet and wished that he could wake the bastards up to kill them again.

  “Listen to me, Harry,” Jonathan instructed. “We’re going to need your help to do our jobs, understand? I’m going to cut you loose, but then you’re going to have to work hard to walk on your own.” It was good news that the torturers hadn’t made it to his feet yet.

  Jonathan pulled his KA-BAR knife from its scabbard on his left shoulder and slipped its seven-inch razor-sharp blade carefully into the hair-width spaces between rope, skin, and wood. He started with the biceps, then moved to the thighs. The ankles were next, followed last by the wrists. Dawkins seemed cooperative enough, but you never knew how panic or joy was going to affect people. The edge on the KA-BAR was far too sharp to have arms flailing too early.

  “Who are you?” Dawkins asked.

  Jonathan ignored the question. A truthful answer was too complicated, and it didn’t matter.

  “Listen to me, Harry,” Jonathan said before cutting the final ropes. “Are you listening to me?”

  Dawkins nodded.

  “I need verbal answers,” Jonathan said. After this kind of ordeal, torture victims retreated into dark places, and audible answers were an important way to show that they’d returned to some corner of reality.

  “I hear you,” Dawkins said.

  “Good. I’m about to cut your arms free. You need to remain still while I do that. I could shave a bear bald with the edge on this blade, and I don’t need you cutting either one of us up with a lot of flailing. Are we clear?”

  Dawkins nodded, then seemed to understand the error of his silent answer. “Yes, I understand.”

  “Good,” Jonathan said. “This is almost over.” Those were easy words to say, but they were not true. There was a whole lot of real estate to cover before they were airborne again and even more before they were truly out of danger.

  The ropes fell away easily, and in seconds, Harry Dawkins was free of his bonds. Deep red stripes marked the locations of the ropes. The man made no effort to move.

  “Do you think you can stand?” Jonathan asked. He offered a silent prayer with the question. He and Boxers were capable of carrying the PC to the exfil location if they had to, but it was way at the bottom of his list of preferred options. He glanced behind him to see Boxers continuing his search of the torturers’ pockets, pausing at each body long enough to take fingerprints, which would be transmitted back to Venice for identification.

  “I think I can,” Dawkins said. Leaning hard on his arms for support, he rose to his feet like a man twice his reported age of forty-three. He wobbled there for a second or two, then took a tentative step forward. He didn’t fall, but it was unnerving to watch.

  “How long had you been tied to that chair?” Jonathan asked.

  “Too long,” Dawkins said with
a wry chuckle. “Since last night.”

  Jonathan worked the math. Twenty-four hours without moving, and now walking on swollen feet and light-headed from emotional trauma, if not from blood loss.

  “Scorpion, Mother Hen.” Venice’s voice crackled in his right ear. “Emergency traffic.”

  Air One beat her to it: “Break, break, break. Alpha Team, you have three . . . no, four victor-bravo Uniform Sierras approaching from the northwest.” Vehicle-borne unknown subjects.

  “If that means there are four vehicles approaching your location, I concur,” Venice said. She didn’t like being upstaged.

  Jonathan pressed both TRANSMIT buttons simultaneously. “I copy. Keep me informed.” He turned to Boxers, who had heard the same radio traffic and was already on his way over. Jonathan opened a Velcro flap on his thigh and withdrew a map. He pulled his NVGs back into place and clicked his IR flashlight so he could read. “Hey, Big Guy. Pull boots and a pair of pants off one of our sleeping friends and give them to the PC. The jungle is a bitch on the delicate parts.”

  “What’s happening?” Dawkins asked.

  Jonathan ignored him. According to the map—and to the satellite images he’d studied in the spin-up to this operation—the closest point of the nearest road was a dogleg about three-quarters of a mile from where they stood.

  “Alpha Team, Air One,” Goodman transmitted from the Little Bird. “The vehicles have stopped, and the Uniform Sierras are debarking. I count eight men in total, and all are armed. Stand by for map coordinates.”

  Jonathan wrote down the minutes and seconds of longitude and latitude and knew from just eyeballing that the bad guys had stopped at the dogleg.

  “Air One, Alpha,” Jonathan said. “Are the bad guys walking or running?”

  “I’d call it strolling, over.”

  “So, they’re not reinforcements,” Boxers said, reading Jonathan’s mind. He handed a pair of worn and bloody tennis shoes to Dawkins, along with a bloody pair of baggy khaki pants.

  “I’m guessing shift change,” Jonathan said.

  “What, people are coming?” Dawkins had just connected the dots, and panic started to bloom.

  Jonathan placed a hand on Dawkins’s chest to calm him down. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ve got this. Put those on and be ready to walk in thirty seconds.” To Boxers, he said, “Let’s douse the lights. No sense giving them a homing beacon.” It was a matter of turning off switches.

  With the lights out, Dawkins’s world turned black. “I can’t see anything,” he said. His voice was getting squeaky.

  “Get dressed,” Jonathan snapped. “You need to trust us. We’re not going to leave you, but when it’s time to go, you’re going to need to move fast and keep a hand on me. I won’t let you get lost or hurt.”

  “Are we gonna fight them?” Boxers asked. He was ever the fan of a good firefight, and his tone was as hopeful as Dawkins’s was dreadful.

  Jonathan pressed his TRANSMIT button. “Air One, Alpha. Give me the bad guys’ distance and trajectory. Also, are they carrying lights?”

  “I show them approximately three hundred meters to your northeast, still closing at a casual pace. They have white light sources. I’m guessing from their heat signatures that they’re flashlights, but I can’t be certain.”

  Jonathan didn’t want to take a defensive position and have a shoot-out with a bunch of unknowns. It wasn’t the risk so much as it was the loss of time. In a shoot-out, it’s easy to identify the people you’ve killed, and if the wounded are yellers, they’re easy, too. It’s the ones who are smart enough to wait you out that you have to worry about. When he was doing this shit for Uncle Sam, he could remove all doubt by calling in a strike from a Hellfire missile. Sometimes he missed those days.

  Waiting out a sandbagger could take hours, and their ride home—the Little Bird—didn’t have hours’ worth of fuel.

  “We’re going to skirt them,” Jonathan announced.

  Boxers waited for the rest.

  Jonathan shared his map with Big Guy and traced the routes with his finger. “The bad guys are coming in from here, from our two o’clock, a direct line from their vehicles, which are here.” He pointed to the dogleg. “We’ll head due north, then double back when we hit the road. If we time it right, we’ll be on our way in their truck before they even find this slice of hell.”

  “We’re gonna pass awfully close,” Boxers observed.

  “Fifty, sixty yards, probably,” Jonathan said. “We’ll just go quiet as they pass.”

  “And if they engage?”

  “We engage back.”

  “And we’re doing all of this with a naked blind man in tow,” Boxers said.

  “Hey,” Dawkins snapped. “I’m right here, and I’m dressed.” He’d even helped himself to a bloody shirt.

  “No offense,” Boxers grumbled.

  “Let’s go,” Jonathan said. He moved over to Dawkins, taking care to make noise in his approach so he wouldn’t startle the guy. “Hold your hand out, Harry,” he said.

  The PC hesitated but did as he was told.

  “I’m going to take your hand,” Jonathan said as he did just that, “and put it here in one of my PALS loops.”

  “Your what?”

  “They’re attachment straps for pouches and other stuff,” Jonathan explained. “Stuff you don’t need to worry about. You think of them as finger rings.”

  Dawkins yelped as he fitted his wounded fingertips through the tight elastic. “Hurts like shit.”

  “Better than dyin’,” Boxers observed.

  No response. None was needed.

  “Okay, here we go,” Jonathan said, and they started off into the night. He keyed both mikes simultaneously and relayed their plans. “I want to know if anybody wanders off or drifts toward us. My intent is not to engage. But more important than that is not walking into an ambush.”

  “I copy,” the Overwatch teenager said. “I’ll let you know if I see anything.” Jonathan noted that that was the first they’d heard from Snoopy for a while.

  For three, maybe four minutes, they moved as quietly as they could through the thick underbrush. The approaching bad guys were so noisy and clueless that Jonathan’s team could have been whistling and not been noticed. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, all that talking and jabbering stopped. The beams turned in their direction, painting the jungle with a swirling pattern of lights and shadows.

  Jonathan and Boxers took a knee, and Dawkins followed.

  “What’s happening?” Dawkins whispered.

  “Shh,” Jonathan hissed.

  The bud in his right ear popped. “Break, break, break,” Venice said. “The other team seems to be turning in your direction.”

  Jonathan’s stomach knotted. This was wrong. Why would they do that? It was almost as if they’d been informed of Jonathan’s presence.

  He keyed the mike to the Little Bird. “Air One, Alpha,” he whispered. “How are we doing?”

  No reply.

  “Alpha, Overwatch. You’re doing fine,” Snoopy said in his left ear. “You’re close to the approaching hazard, but they are staying to their course.”

  “That’s a lie!” Venice declared in his right ear. “They’re closing on you.”

  “Air One, do you concur?” Jonathan asked. Goodman was silent.

  “Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice said. “I smell a trap.”

  “So it looks like we’re going to have a gunfight, after all,” Boxers said with a chuckle on the local net. “Maybe two if the dickhead in the sky is trying to get us hurt.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Stay low,” Jonathan whispered to Dawkins. “As in pretend you’re part of the dirt.” As he watched his PC press deeper into the undergrowth, he shuddered at the misery of both the nature and the locations of the insect bites the guy was going to sustain.

  “It looks like they’re hunting for us,” Boxers whispered over the local net. When operations went hot, it was a good idea to keep all communicat
ions electronic. Not only was it easier to hear and be understood, but it also kept Venice dialed in from her command post in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia.

  Indeed, not only did the approaching bad guys seem to be looking for them, but their beams were facing in exactly the right direction.

  “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” Jonathan whispered on the local net. “How much distance between us?”

  “Call it seventy-five yards,” she said. “But it’s a ragged line. The farthest is probably one hundred yards.”

  Jonathan had a laser range finder that would tell him exact numbers, but this was point-and-shoot range. “Does every bad guy have a flashlight?”

  “Affirmative,” Venice said. “At least it appears so.”

  “Air One or Overwatch, tell me what you see,” Jonathan said on the government net. It was a test.

  They were both gone.

  “I want that kid’s name and address,” Boxers whispered over the local net. “We’re going to have a serious discussion when this is over.”

  Jonathan folded the stock and foregrip of his MP7 and slid it into its holster on his left thigh, then slid his slug 5.56-millimeter M27—a Marine Corps modification of a Heckler & Koch HK416 carbine—into a shooting position. “I’m switching rifles,” he whispered for Boxers’ benefit.

  “Way ahead of you,” Big Guy replied. Boxers’ rifle of choice was an HK417, a portable cannon chambered in 7.62 millimeter. Each of their weapons was outfitted with the best in night optics. “How close are we going to let them get?”

  “Inside fifty yards,” Jonathan whispered. Even the heavier bullets from these more powerful rifles could be knocked off course if they hit a twig somewhere between the muzzle and the target. The closer the range, the less that would matter. On the flip side, the closer the range, the less of an advantage provided by superior marksmanship.