Crusader One (Tier One Thrillers Book 3) Page 27

  “The troop carrier is pulling up,” Chunk said.

  Dempsey looked to his right, where the lights of the approaching truck lit up the curving road. He got back on the binoculars just as a soldier jogged over from the car back to the officer. He said something, and then the officer nodded and gave an order, and the three soldiers hustled back to the APC.

  “We may be okay,” Elinor said. “It looks like they’re leaving.”

  The couple were still on their knees, but Dempsey thought he made out what looked like a smile on the male asset’s face. The Iranian officer continued talking but paced around them in a circle. When he was directly behind the man, his hands came from behind his back, and Dempsey saw the pistol. His gut tightened as the realization hit him. The officer fired point-blank into the back of the man’s head, the asset’s face exploding outward in a gory spray and the body pitching forward. The woman screamed and raised her hands just as the man fired a shot into her temple. Her dead body crumpled to the ground.

  “Oh shit,” Chunk hissed.

  A soldier climbed out from the passenger seat of the newly arrived multiaxle transport, which the driver had pulled in behind the “stalled” sedan. The new arrival and the murdering officer spoke for a moment and then shook hands. The officer walked back to the troop carrier, stepping over the woman’s corpse while waving his hand in a circle over his head. The soldiers in his unit remained back by the APC, but they didn’t climb inside the rear cabin.

  Meanwhile, two soldiers ran from the newly arrived truck carrying gas cans, which they poured all over and inside the sedan as well as onto the dead bodies sprawled beside it. Dempsey watched the driver of the troop transport back up a few yards and then stop again, just as the car and bodies burst into flames.

  “I think we have our answer,” Chunk said, his voice grim from the executions. “We scrub the mission and I get you back across the border.”

  “No,” Elinor said. “We have a backup plan.”

  Dempsey looked at the gray bags on the back of two of the DPVs. “Wait for these guys to clear out; then we haul ass over to the river.”

  “Are you two out of your minds?” Chunk said, looking back and forth between them. “Did you not just see what I saw? You are in hostile enemy territory. They are running patrols. They are executing civilians without provocation. Your assets’ NOCs were irrelevant because that asshole didn’t even look at their papers. Route 15 is closed for business. Period, end of story.”

  “Then we try Route 46,” Dempsey said and looked at Elinor.

  “Agreed,” she said, turning to Chunk. “You get us to 46, and we’ll get ourselves to Sanandaj.”

  “We don’t even know if your people got your request and prestaged a backup vehicle.”

  “Yes, but we can check that with the drone,” Dempsey said.

  Chunk screwed up his face and scratched his beard. “You’re serious?”

  They both nodded, but Dempsey could see that it was going to take something else to convince Chunk of the merits of risking his life and the lives of his men. Something to convince him that John Dempsey had not lost his friggin’ mind.

  “You wanna know what the call sign is for this operation?” he asked.

  Chunk shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Crusader,” Dempsey said, putting a hand on his brother SEAL’s shoulder. “Do you understand what that means? Do you understand who my target is?”

  Epiphany washed over Chunk’s face. “You’re going after the bastard responsible for wiping out the Tier One in Yemen?”

  Dempsey nodded. “And this is the best shot I’m ever gonna get.”

  Chunk met his gaze. “All right, we’ll take a look with the drone. If a vehicle is parked where Elinor instructed it to be, we go. If not, we bug out. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Dempsey said before Elinor had a chance to answer.

  “All right,” Chunk said, raising his binoculars to look back at the scene alongside the road. “We just hang tight and wait for these assholes to . . . uh-oh.”

  Dempsey quickly raised his own binoculars and saw two men carrying a heavy black box between them. He zoomed in and watched as the soldiers set the box down and opened the lid. Next they unlatched the hinged lid and opened it, but he couldn’t quite see what was inside.

  “Something’s not right,” Chunk said. “I got a bad feeling about this, JD.”

  Dempsey watched as the two bent over the open box on the ground. “I agree. We need to go.”

  “We’re too close,” Chunk said, still watching. “They’ll hear the DPVs.”

  A beat later, Dempsey’s heart sank as one of the soldiers lifted a compact drone over his head while the other tapped on a handheld tablet.

  “Shit. Shit,” Chunk said. “Time to go.”

  Chunk, Dempsey, and Elinor hustled back to the DPVs, Chunk spinning his hand in a circle over his head. As they strapped in to the DPVs, Dempsey took one last look through the binoculars toward the road, and what he saw made his chest tighten. The drone was banking right toward them at about five hundred feet, freshly alerted, no doubt, by the sound of four engines coming to life. Behind the drone pilot, a mortar team was rushing to set up as two other soldiers passed shells out the side hatch of the APC.

  “Go, go, go,” Dempsey barked as he heard the whump of the mortar leaving its tube.

  “Mortars incoming,” Munn called as the four DPVs fishtailed in the dirt and broke out of formation.

  The first mortar shell struck the ground by the front right corner of the DPV with the team LCPO. The explosion lifted the front of the dune buggy off the ground and rolled it onto its left side, where it spun in a half circle before coming to a stop.

  Dempsey heard another whump.

  “Fuckin’ light them up,” Chunk hollered.

  The SEAL gunners of the three upright DPVs responded, and the roar of the fifty-caliber machine guns filled the air, the smell of sulfur comforting and familiar. Dempsey watched the stream of tracers rip through the night toward the road. The mortar team retreated behind the protection of their armored vehicle as the first volley pounded the earth and the side of the APC.

  “Keep ’em pinned down,” Chunk yelled. “Strafe the APC. Don’t let them fire up the heavy gun.”

  Dempsey jumped out of his vehicle and was sprinting toward the overturned DPV when the second mortar exploded behind him. He felt the heat and the shock wave but no shrapnel; the trajectory was too short.

  “You all right?” Dempsey asked the Senior Chief, who was just getting to his feet beside the overturned vehicle. The LCPO nodded and turned back to his crew. The SEAL gunner was unhurt. He jumped off the overturned chassis, dropped to the ground, and immediately fell into a prone firing position. The SEAL sighted in with his SOPMOD M4 and joined the firefight just as enemy bullets began pinging off the metal frame of the overturned dune buggy.

  Dempsey skirted to the other side to check on the driver. “Are you hit?”

  “No,” the frustrated SEAL grunted, “but my left arm is pinned.”

  “I need help,” Dempsey hollered. In a flash Munn, Chunk, and two other SEALs were beside him.

  The five men squatted and grabbed the aluminum rails of the DPV.

  “One . . . two . . . three,” Dempsey barked, and they all lifted with everything they had, raising the DPV a full foot off the ground. For a moment, Dempsey thought they might be able to actually flip it upright, but once the driver slithered out from under the roof rail, the vehicle became instantly and immensely heavy again—the adrenaline of the rescue ebbing. In unison, they all let go and it crashed back to the ground. A bullet ricocheted off the frame near Dempsey’s face, and he reflexively crouched and found cover behind the vehicle. A heartbeat later, he had NVGs on, rifle up, and was searching for targets. Unfortunately, there were many and they were closing fast.

  He squeezed the button on the forward grip, activating the IR targeting system, and placed a green dot on the forehead of a sprinting soldier. He pulled the
trigger and the Persian assaulter pitched forward and fell face-first in the dirt.

  “How many fucking Iranians can you fit in one truck?” someone shouted as enemy soldiers poured out of the troop transport like angry bees from a hive.

  “It’s like a damn clown car up there,” Munn shouted back.

  Enemy fighters were converging everywhere, but the SEALs were dropping targets left and right with headshots. In the corner of his eye, Dempsey saw Elinor drop prone beside him and start shooting with the battle-hardened calm of a blooded SEAL. She dropped an IRGC soldier and he took down two more. But then, to his dismay, the armored personnel carrier’s headlights began to shift. It was turning straight toward them. He saw a torso pop up in the turret to man the KPV heavy machine gun. The Sarir APC was armor-plated to withstand .50-caliber rounds, but the dune buggies wouldn’t last a second against the 14.5 mm rounds from the double-barreled beast on the top turret.

  “We gotta go, Chunk, right now,” Dempsey shouted as he sighted in on the gunner’s head while the Iranian assault vehicle bounced across the rough terrain toward them. He squeezed the trigger and watched his round miss and ricochet off the turret. As if reading his mind, two SEAL gunners with .50 cals lit up the APC, shredding the gunner to ribbons as he tried to drop back down inside.

  “Everyone to the vehicles,” Chunk shouted as Buddha activated three satchel charges on the doomed DPV.

  “Go, go, go . . . now!”

  Dempsey strapped in to the DPV and then turned his rifle behind him, firing at the small army of advancing Persian troops. Because they were down one DPV, each vehicle had an extra man, with two SEALs crammed in and clinging to the one-man gunner turret in back.

  “They can’t catch us in that piece of shit,” the SEAL driver said, spraying a rooster tail of dust behind them as the trio of DPVs sped off toward the valley below. A beat later, the sound of gunfire was drowned out by a thunderous explosion and blinding fireball as the scuttled DPV was practically reduced to molecular constituents by the satchel charges—thereby eliminating any hard proof the SEALs had ever been there.

  “We’re not out of the shit yet,” Chunk said in his earpiece. “Even if they can’t catch us, they still got that drone. If they have an air asset in orbit, we’re fucked.”

  “It’s less than three clicks to the border,” the LCPO said. “We can make it.”

  “What about the river?” Elinor asked as the APC disappeared behind them and the Iranian troopers stopped firing as they moved out of range.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Chunk said. “The entire Republican Guard will be hunting for us. This is an abort.”

  Dempsey looked behind him and saw he was riding in one of the two vehicles with the large gray bags. This could still be salvaged. The thought of missing Amir Modiri, of failing his dead brothers, was too much to bear. “Chunk,” he said calmly into the microphone boom by his mouth, “we need you to drop us near Dezavar village with one of the boats before you cross back over. Elinor and I are gonna continue on alone.”

  Dempsey could actually hear Chunk laughing over the comms circuit. Then the SEAL officer said, “That bag of boat has to weigh close to two hundred pounds. How are you going to carry it? It’s seven miles to the Daryan Dam. There’s no fucking way, dude. Besides, they’re hunting us.”

  “They’re hunting a squad of SEALs on dune buggies. We just need to make it to the other side of Route 15. I’ll steal a donkey in Dezavar if I have to.”

  A long, silent pause followed.

  Finally, Chunk said, “All right, I just got confirmation from our eyes in the sky that there appears to be an abandoned vehicle parked a half mile off Route 46 and a hundred yards from the river. Looks like Elinor’s asset came through . . . so, I need one suicidal volunteer to accompany me and our two insane spooks deeper into hell so they can float their boat on the River Styx.”

  “Count me in,” Munn said without hesitation. “But we can’t hump it on foot. We have to use a DPV.”

  “Then we have no choice but to take out that APC and their drone,” Dempsey said. “Do you have ordnance on the Reaper?”

  “Yeah, four Hellfire IIs,” Chunk said, but his tone clearly indicated his displeasure with what Dempsey was suggesting. “But JD, if we do this, then yours truly just unilaterally declared war on Iran on behalf of the United States.”

  “Wrong,” Dempsey said. “Amir Modiri declared war on the United States on behalf of Iran when he used VEVAK operatives to blow up the DNI at his home on American soil. We didn’t start this fight, but we sure as hell are going to finish it.”

  Dempsey understood what he was demanding of Chunk. It was a potentially career-ending ask, but the courage to make decisions like this was what separated true leaders from lesser men. After an excruciatingly long silence, Chunk came back on the line.

  “Okay, I called it in,” the SEAL officer said, and as hellfire turned night into day behind them, he mumbled, “May God help us.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Sirwan River, One Mile North of Razaw Village at Route 46

  Kurdistan Province, Iran

  June 1

  0445 Local Time

  Dempsey felt naked.

  He’d shed his combat gear, slick BDUs, and the Under Armour top for blue jeans, a University of Limerick T-shirt, and a garish long-sleeve Patagonia travel shirt. He’d even traded his Oakley boots for a pair of Toms shoes that Elinor insisted he wear. But most gut-wrenching of all, he’d forfeited his weapons. All of them. Elinor forbade him from even carrying a compact 9 mm in the small of his back. He could not remember the last time he’d gone anywhere unarmed. High school, he reckoned. It felt like he’d stepped into the phone booth as Superman and stepped out as Clark Kent.

  Good-bye, John Dempsey, lethal operator.

  Say hello to Corbin Odell, craven civilian.

  Sure, he had his NOC credentials in the weathered, gray Trakke backpack, including an ambulance driver’s license from Cork and his identification as a medical aid worker with the Universal Care for All NGO. He also had an Irish passport. His visa was dated two months earlier, and his passport showed he had traveled as an aid worker extensively in the Middle East and Africa. The documents were all perfect, but what had happened to Elinor’s assets hours earlier proved that paperwork was worthless against an armed patrol. He slung the pack over his shoulder and, for the first time since crossing the border, wondered if maybe this operation was a mistake.

  “Well, bro, I can’t believe we actually made it,” Chunk said as he finished packing Dempsey and Elinor’s gear tightly into the high-tech inflatable boat. “These things sure are slick.”

  The two inflatables, with their integrated, quiet drive motors, had made the trek upriver without incident. They were so silent, the only sound they’d made was the swoosh of the dirty water along the nylon hull.

  “You got enough power to make it back?” Dempsey asked.

  “Yeah, should be more than enough,” Munn said, checking the reserve-power indicator. “Plus, we’ve got the current helping this time.”

  “Well,” Chunk said, turning to Dempsey with a wan smile, “as much as I’d love to camp out and roast marshmallows with you kids, we better get moving before my guys eat my food, steal my Skoal, and ship all my shit back home.”

  The SEAL officer’s voice sounded confident, but the trip had burned enough night that making it back across the border before sunrise was going to be impossible. Chunk and Munn would have to find a place to hole up in the mountains during the day and hope the DPV they’d camouflaged and left behind wasn’t discovered. As a SEAL, Dempsey had always hated the missions where he had to lie low in enemy territory and pray some goat herder wasn’t the end of him.

  Dempsey stuck out his hand and the SEAL officer gripped it. “I owe you one, brother.”

  “Yeah, you do . . . Now go get that bastard Modiri, but when you’re ready for someone to rescue your dumb ass from this hellhole, don’t call me.”

  Demps
ey laughed and turned to face Munn, who’d stepped up beside Chunk.

  “I don’t have the words, man,” the doc said and pulled Dempsey in for a bear hug.

  “Take care of Lizzie,” Dempsey said, the words catching in his throat. “And, uh, Jarvis and Smith are going to need you in the coming days.”

  Munn released Dempsey and took a step back. “Dude, don’t talk like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re not coming back.”

  Dempsey gave his friend a tight smile but offered no rebuttal. There were a million things he wanted to say to Munn—to express his admiration and gratitude for everything this incredible human being had done for him over the years—but all he could manage was, “Hooyah, frogman.”

  “Hooyah,” Munn and Chunk barked in unison.

  With that, Dempsey turned his back on his friends and teammates for what, in all probability, would be the very last time. Elinor, her hair now covered by a silk headscarf in accordance with Persian norms, extended him her hand.

  He took it and, in his best Irish accent, said, “Helluva way to spend the rest of our honeymoon, love. If only you liked drinking piña coladas on the beach like all the other lasses.”

  Elinor laughed and led him toward the beat-up Toyota sedan parked next to a tree. “Beaches are boring,” she said in a Persian-flavored English accent, thick and sexy. “Besides, how was I to know there was a war brewing?”

  “There’s always a war brewing, love,” he said. “Always.”

  When they reached the car, she let go of his hand and walked to the driver-side door. Finding it unlocked, she exhaled with relief. Dempsey meandered to the passenger side, fighting the urge to look back until he couldn’t bear it any longer; he glanced over his shoulder and caught a fleeting glance of two of the finest SEALs he’d ever known silently disappearing around the bend in the river. He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and climbed into the car. Elinor checked for car keys: behind the sun visors, inside the center console, then the glove box, and at last found them tucked under the driver’s seat. She inserted the key into the ignition but, before starting the engine, turned to him.