Sons of Valor Read online

  “Yes, it was,” he said, the levity draining from his voice.

  “You’re right, it was, but I didn’t know what else to do . . . I couldn’t stomach watching you hold your breath anymore.”

  Qasim cocked an eyebrow at Eshan. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Eshan let out a long, slow exhale. “I woke up one morning and I realized we were still playing that damn game. Ever since Saida died, we’ve been holding our breath—both of us. Chests on fire, brains silently screaming for oxygen . . . torturing ourselves for years. Then I met Aleena, and it was like I could finally breathe again. It felt so good, Qasim, so good to purge all the toxic ether I’d been holding inside and to inhale life again. That’s why I came to see you in England. You’re my best friend. You’re my brother. I love you, Qasim, and I couldn’t let you suffocate in silence any longer. So yes, I might have manipulated you by taking you to your family home. And by arranging for Diba to be there. And by introducing you to Hamza. But before you condemn me, answer me this—do you not feel alive? For the first time in years, do you not feel energized with purpose? Do you not feel wanted and valued and respected?”

  Gooseflesh stood up on his arms as Eshan spoke. The profundity of his friend’s words touched the very core of his being. And yet . . .

  “I thought Hamza was like us. I thought he and I were building a friendship,” Qasim said. “But then I watched him have a man brutally murdered in front of me. And for what, not doing his job well enough? In England if I cock something up at work, I get sacked. If I screw up here, I get my throat slit! I don’t want to work for terrorists, Eshan. More importantly, I don’t want to be one.”

  “You need to stop,” Eshan said, his words as hard and jolting as a gunshot.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop using the rhetoric of the enemy. They call us terrorists, but I ask you, which organization is the one firing missiles at wedding receptions? Which one uses their drones to target civilians, and which one is targeting soldiers? They invaded our ancestral home. They built bases, imported their machines of war, and maintain an occupation force of thousands. We are not the terrorists, Qasim, they are!” Eshan took a deep breath and collected himself before continuing. “But it’s not your fault. Your mind has been conditioned with their lies. Since our childhood, we have been bombarded with propaganda. I thought Hamza had explained all of this to you. We are not ISIS. We are not the Taliban. No. We are al Qadar. We are honorable Muslim soldiers, and we are at war.”

  “If the cause is so righteous, then why did Hamza have that man executed?”

  “Because he was a traitor. For so long as there have been armies on this Earth, military commanders have executed traitors and spies in their ranks. They do this not for the joy of killing, but because they must. Spies and traitors must be dealt with swiftly and decisively, or their future actions will lead to loss of life on a grand and catastrophic scale. The Pakistani man you saw executed, Mohamed, had the potential to bring down the entire organization. If he had been followed, or if he had been wearing a wire or a tracker, the Americans would have been tipped off and you’d be dead right now.”

  “It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?” Qasim murmured, his gaze going back out the window. “My fate was decided the minute I stepped into that warehouse and saw the drone. This is one decision I can never walk away from.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Eshan said. “Your fate was decided the minute an American drone pilot decided to squeeze the trigger on your sister’s wedding night. Hamza is not your enemy. I am not your enemy. We are your brothers, Qasim . . . Someday, I hope you’ll understand that.”

  CHAPTER 26

  north of the swat river

  kanju, pakistan

  0140 local time

  Chunk adjusted his helmet, headphones, and boom mike. Something seemed crooked and he couldn’t get it to sit right. As he fidgeted with it, he felt Riker’s eyes on him.

  “How do I look?” he said, winking at the SEAL.

  “A little chunky, but pretty,” Riker said. Then with a reference to Morales, he added, “You’re no Hollywood, but I’m sure there’s plenty of dudes who would do you.”

  Morales shook his head and grinned, and Chunk laughed and shifted in his seat to look out the van’s windshield at the darkened cityscape. Less than a day in-country, and Watts had already come through. Her lunch meeting with Theobald and his asset had yielded actionable intelligence. By that evening, Theobald had supplied them with the address of a possible al Qadar safe house near the river. Both he and Watts theorized this was the possible center of operations in Mingora because satellite imagery showed the house had a parabolic dish on the roof, but it could also simply be for television service. Was it a slam dunk? No. Did they have a location where the drone was being stored? No. But it was enough for Chunk, so he’d made the call and notified Bowman, who’d remained in Jalalabad, that they were going to hit the house. He was playing by big boy rules now. If the op was successful he’d get an, “Attaboy.” But if things went bad, well . . . then he held the bag of shit. The downside risk was almost always bigger than the upside payoff in Special Operations. And that was doubly true in the Tier One.

  As a white side SEAL, he’d had seven major deployments under his belt, and that didn’t include multiple short-fuse, small-scale operations. He’d participated in hundreds and hundreds of Special Warfare operations—hell, maybe over a thousand by now—but he’d never once been so isolated from any support. Always, there was a QRF of Rangers or other operators, or conventional forces somewhere nearby. There was at least an MH-6 helicopter—if not a squadron of F/A-18s—a radio call away, ready to mete vengeance from above. They had eyes in the sky, AC-130 spooky gunships, as well as Predator and Reaper drones to watch their backs. Level two medical and surgical support and level one trauma assets were just a short hop away. And they had a high-speed TOC coordinating all of those assets. In the past, he’d always had someone, somewhere with the means and authority to bail him and his team out.

  Not tonight.

  Tonight, if the shit hit the fan, it was just them—and the DIA guy, Jackson, in the driver’s seat of their shitty white-panel van. Their CASEVAC was a Beechcraft 1900 to Jalalabad. The Beech was sitting chocked on the tarmac at the airport. That bitch was no Blackhawk, and there was no one swooping in to extract their asses if things went bad. They had to get themselves and their gear to the airport. And if somebody got shot, their surgical support was Donnie Morales and his med kit.

  He leaned forward, angling to talk to the DIA man in the driver’s seat of the twelve-seat van—six of which held his teammates and their gear. Not a great vehicle for a high-speed getaway, but plenty of extra room for any crows they pulled off the X.

  “How long you been in Mingora?” Chunk asked.

  “Three months,” Jackson answered.

  “You know the roads? Can you get us to the airport without NAV support?”

  “Yeah, man. I gotcha.”

  “Cool,” Chunk said and settled back into his seat.

  “Show you approaching Cadillac,” Watts said softly in his ear.

  “Check. Jackal is Cadillac,” he said, resisting the urge to point out that usually the operator called the checkpoint, in this case the right-hand turn north onto Deolai Road. Maybe Watts was worried they would miss the turn. More likely she was just nervous. She was whip-smart and confident, but slow and rigid at adapting to the unfamiliar.

  Once the residential development thinned out, the driver had killed the van’s headlights. They crept north until they reached the target house. The front drive was flanked by two metal posts with a chain hanging between them, a minor impediment to accessing the dirt road beyond.

  The driver slowed the van.

  “Drive past and circle back,” Chunk said.

  “Jackal, we show no one on the access road. It’s two hundred yards to the target, though, and plenty of hides, but we show no thermals on the approach. Two roving sentries are circling the building and two more are in a truck beside the front door on the east side.”

  He wanted to tell Watts to limit her comms to new and changing information, instead of reiterating status quo tactical data they knew from the last update. Instead of lecturing her, he double-clicked his mike. Their TOC for tonight’s op was the hotel conference room. And since Yi was more proficient working the computers, that left radio communication and coordinating duties to Watts.

  You go to war with the army you have . . .

  He looked over his shoulder at his men, whose lives were in his hands. He reconsidered their opponent—a terrorist cell that had the smarts and wherewithal to procure, operate, and hide a Predator-class drone. This was not his father’s terrorists they were up against, which meant he should expect modern, if not advanced, security countermeasures at this site. Night vision-

  capable security cameras, proximity motion sensors on the driveway and potentially scattered around the compound, maybe even a QRF standing by at a nearby location? Any of that was possible.

  Decision made, he turned to the driver.

  “We’ll execute plan B. Take us to the dead end of the next road, slow and quiet. We’ll drop and begin our infil. I want you to loiter until we call Jaguar. At that point, start a six-minute count, then crash the gate and drive to the front of the house. We’ll load our crows and whatever gear we can pull of the X. From breach to exfil, I want ten minutes or less on-site.”

  Jackson nodded without a hint of nerves. Chunk felt pretty sure this guy was a former operator, and this was not his first rodeo.

  Good.

  “Mother, Jackal will
execute Bravo on the infil. We’ll call Jaguar. Call any changes or relevant information, but otherwise let’s keep comms nice and quiet,” he said, dropping the hint without ripping Whitney a new one for her propensity to chatter.

  “Roger,” came her reply.

  Message received.

  Minutes later Chunk led Riker and Edwards up a short rise in a V formation, while Spence, Morales, and Trip maneuvered north to approach the rear of the house. The terrorist safe house was a western, ranch-style design—made of cement blocks and painted bright yellow—in an otherwise drab landscape of smaller stucco homes clustered to the north. Saw peeled off from both groups to set up as overwatch, positioning himself between the two groups on a rocky elevation that looked directly on the house, enabling him to cover all but the south side of the property, where he would be obstructed by the house itself.

  Chunk kept low in a combat crouch, scanning left and right over the rolling green-gray night-vision landscape. His boots crunched loudly through his Peltor headset, though he knew he was all but silent in the real world. He kept them weaving around rocks ranging from softball sized to boulders as big as a Volkswagen. Plenty of low cover up here in the hills.

  They crested the rise and he dropped prone, hearing the amplified thunk of Riker and Edwards dropping in on either side of him.

  “Jackal One is set,” he whispered into his boom mike.

  He scanned the flat, open area where the dirt road widened into a courtyard in front of the house. It looked just like Watts described—a blue pickup truck beside the main door, the occasional white glow of cigarettes belonging to the two fighters in the cab. He could see one of the two roving sentries at the rear corner of the house, forty-five degrees to his right, the other perhaps obstructed at the south rear corner. He watched as the man outside the truck paced toward them, scanned right up at them, then spun on a heel and shuffled toward the rear of the house.

  “Five is now God,” Saw said, reporting he was in position and set.

  Chunk double-clicked his mike.

  The activity at the target house was low, which was a good indicator the leadership inside was blissfully unaware of what was coming. At some point, there would be a changing of the watch and the men inside would be up to relieve the sentries outside. They had no historical data to predict when that would be, so their best bet was to hit soon, while half the security detail was asleep.

  “Five, One—do you have a line on the truck out front?”

  “Affirmative, One. I can get both tangos from here.”

  Chunk scanned again and nodded to himself. He’d noticed during load out that Saw had selected the semiautomatic M110 sniper rifle tonight over the bolt action M40. Good foresight, Chunk thought, because I need him to drop both the assholes in the truck before either can sound an alarm. Saw’s range was good too, less than half of the eight-hundred-yard limit where accuracy dropped off.

  “And the sentries?”

  “I’ve got the north guy pacing back and forth, but I’m only getting short glimpses of the guy on the south side.”

  Chunk double-clicked.

  “Jackal Two—in position,” came the report from Spence to the north.

  Chunk scratched his beard with his gloved hand, the moving lines in his head taking shape as the plan turned into an action.

  “Two, One—close range as possible. God will take the guys in the truck, but I want you to take both walkers, and do it quiet. We’ll breach through the front and you hold the rear and be ready for squirters.”

  Double click.

  Chunk estimated he, Riker, and Edwards could make it to the front door in under fifteen seconds, maybe a few more seconds more to account for the rough terrain. He didn’t want to lose the element of surprise before they breached the door. With the advanced suppressor on the M110, Saw’s shot would be quiet, but the glass breaking in the truck’s window would make some noise. Spence taking out the roving sentries would not be silent either.

  “Two is set,” Spence reported, indicating they’d repositioned.

  “God, stand by. One is calling the shot.” Chunk scanned the house one last time before giving the order. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . go.”

  He heard the dull thump of Saw’s first shot and he was up, clearing as he rose, scanning left and right as his legs churned beneath him. He swept the green dot of his PEQ-4 IR target designator over the terrain, searching for enemies on the approach. A second thump reverberated less than two seconds after the first, and this time he heard the soft sound of Saw’s round penetrating the tempered glass windshield.

  “Jackal, God—two tangos in the truck are down.”

  Chunk descended the hill in the lead, with Edwards fanning right and Riker tight on his left. He heard two more rounds, this time fired from suppressed MK18s—Spence’s squad killing the sentries—but the house stayed dark.

  “One, Two—both tangos down,” came the kill report from Spence as Chunk and his guys reached the front door. Chunk slid close behind Riker on the left side while Edwards pressed against the wall on the right. Riker pressed a small charge beside the door handle—only a few ounces of explosive. Chunk took a deep breath, pictured Saw on the long gun and Spence, Trip, and Morales fanned out and taking knees, focused on the rear exit for squirters. They were set.

  He tapped Riker’s left shoulder.

  Riker fired the small charge, then kicked the door open, tossing a flash-bang grenade into the room and turning toward Chunk, eyes shut tight. A dull whump pulsed the night air, and the windows flashed with white light. Riker breached the door and moved left, with Chunk following tight behind and turning right. He cleared the empty corner behind him, then spun back to face front, aware of Edwards surging into the gap between him and Riker.

  His brain instantly assessed the room and catalogued the contents:

  Two long sofas facing each other with a coffee table between. A desk along the back wall, covered with multiple laptops charging. Simple round dining table in the corner. And three tangos . . .

  As he silently advanced, the room’s occupants—who had presumably been sleeping just before having their world rocked by a flash-bang—looked left and right in confusion, one man sitting up on each sofa, and one on hands and knees on the floor. Then, they all moved in unison. The man on the floor reached for an AK-47 leaning against the coffee table. The man closest to Chunk on the sofa dove for a rifle propped against the end table beside him, and the third man popped to his feet with a pistol in his hand.

  Chunk fired twice in rapid succession, aware of matching, almost simultaneous fire from his teammates. Both would-be shooters crumpled. The man standing beside the sofa—who was dressed in business attire as opposed to a fighter—froze. He’d raised his pistol, but instead of sighting over it, he was looking at the red flower of blood growing on his chest, as if searching for something he’d lost. He looked up just as Edwards fired again, the second round tearing through the center of his closely trimmed bearded face. The man pitched forward, landing face down on the floor at Chunk’s feet.

  Chunk scanned the bodies for signs of life and finding none announced, “Clear.”

  “Clear,” Edwards echoed.

  Riker, who’d arced around the sofas, scanned over his rifle and advanced on a door that led into what appeared to be a bathroom.

  “Clear,” he confirmed a heartbeat later.

  Chunk felt his shoulders drop, and only then did the burn in his neck and shoulder muscles register.

  “Mother, Jackal is Jaguar,” he reported. “Off the target in five.”

  “One, Uber,” Jackson radioed in from the van. “Through the gate and to you in one mike or less.”

  “Check.”

  Chunk slung his rifle, pulled a tablet computer from his cargo pocket, and rolled the dead terrorist in dress slacks onto his back. He sighed with aggravation as he snapped a picture of the man’s ruined face.

  “Why do they always have to go for their guns? Stupid, stupid bastards,” he murmured, positive that had they been able to take this dude alive, they would have been able to extract information of value.