Violence of Action Read online

  As the banter continued, Chunk leaned against the rear bulkhead of the open port-side doorway and dangled a leg out into the wind, smiling. His team was gelling like never before. Even with all the twists and surprises, they had executed a flawless rescue op of an American hostage held deep in Taliban country. They had arrived. Gold Squadron was the most badass, covert Special Operations team in the world, and he had the privilege of leading them.

  He didn’t have a crystal ball.

  He had no idea what the world was going to throw at them next.

  But whatever it was, Chunk wasn’t worried . . . because they were ready.

  CHAPTER 3

  top secret joint special operations task force compound

  thirty-five miles north of the afghanistan border

  qurghonteppa, tajikistan

  0545 local time

  Chunk watched with an overwhelming sense of satisfaction as a team of Navy corpsmen and CIA case officers led the young Marine away. He smiled as PFC Gonzalez refused the rolling stretcher and instead limped beside the medical team, looking over his shoulder and shooting Chunk a grin and thumbs-up. Chunk nodded in reply. There might be an operator inside that skinny young Marine just waiting to emerge. Either this experience would drive the kid home to small-town USA to tell tales into old age about the time the SEALs rescued him, or Chunk would run into Gonzalez three years later and thirty pounds heavier after the kid became a Marine Raider.

  “Tough kid,” Saw said from beside him, reading his mind.

  Chunk nodded.

  “It was a good op, boss,” the SEAL sniper added, clapping him on the back.

  “Nice shootin’, bro,” Chunk said and pressed a wad of snuff into his lower lip. He handed the can to Riker, who had come up beside him, and the SEAL snapped the can to pack the tobacco before loading up his own lipper.

  “Good call going in despite our stealth getting blown by that sniper,” Riker said, then dribbled brown spit onto the rocky ground between them. “Sorry I was sounding like a pussy out there.”

  Chunk waved his hand and his two teammates followed him off the flight line toward the white pickup trucks where the rest of the fire team was waiting.

  “The day you don’t give me your honest, no bullshit assessment is the day we’re all screwed,” he said to Riker. “I need my senior NCOs, especially you, to tell me anything on your mind.”

  “Roger that,” Riker said. “Glad we got the kid instead of bugging out.”

  “Hooyah,” he said, his voice neutral. It was big boy rules in the Tier One. Chunk owned his decisions and this one had worked out, but he also recognized that if the timeline had shifted by even a few minutes, it might not have.

  He piled into the rear bed of the second pickup truck and nodded at Watts in the driver’s seat through the back window. He tucked in beside Riker and Saw as Spence hopped up front with a victory smile still lingering on his face. Chunk got it. Rescue missions—especially with zero organic or collateral injuries—were special.

  The pickup truck weaved around the short line of CH-47 helicopters and then hung a right, leaving the flight line and turning onto a narrow road that ended in a small compound surrounded by a low wall, its height extended an additional eight feet with a heavy-duty fence topped by concertina wire. They stopped at the JSOC compound entrance while Watts punched an access code into a box beside the gate. The box beeped and the gate rattled on its track as it slid open.

  Watts glanced over her shoulder and gave Chunk a smile and nod, then pulled into the unassuming little compound that served as the FOB for their activities in the region. It was a far cry from the base within a base at Jalalabad Airport, operational for nearly two decades, but it did the job. If the war on terror was winding down in Afghanistan, there was little evidence of it in their world. The loss of support for the mission after the drawdown of other military units in Afghanistan that served as medical, logistical, and QRF support was painfully obvious and dangerous.

  That’s the job.

  “How much time before we load up for breakfast?” Trip asked, gesturing with a thumb at the ribbon of pink now forming a ragged halo over the mountains to the east.

  “KBR opens in two hours,” Antman said, referring to the contract chow hall supporting the CIA operations at the small base, “and I intend to be first in line at the omelet station.”

  “Plenty of time for a workout,” Trip said, lifting his rifle sling over his head, dropping it into a more relaxed carry on his right shoulder. “Let’s change and meet in the gym and then get in a quick five miles.”

  “On it,” Antman replied, pulling loose the Velcro cummerbund of his tactical kit.

  The “gym” where they trained looked like little more than an oversize garage, but it had a full complement of free and machine weights, pull-up bars, and aerobic machines like rowers, treadmills, and stair climbers. SEALs trained like professional athletes. At the Tier One, maintaining supreme levels of fitness was the rule, not the exception.

  Chunk also felt a run calling but knew it would have to wait until after the post-op debrief. He led the way to the TOC, a stucco building situated across from three rows of white shower trailers. The first trailer had a hand-drawn caricature of an ape on the door. The second featured a caveman. The third trailer, however, had a pinup model airbrushed on the door, of a caliber worthy to serve as nose art on a World War II B-24. This trailer was reserved for the women on the team.

  Watts, who was holding the heavy door of the TOC open, caught him glancing at the voluptuous door art.

  “What?” he said, unabashed. “That was here when we arrived.”

  “Sure,” she retorted.

  “This used to be a Delta compound. You know how those guys are.”

  “You’re all the same, near as I can tell,” she said, sucking in her abdomen to allow the three kitted-up SEALs to pass through. “And why am I holding the door for you anyway?”

  “Because we’re gentlemen,” Riker said with a grin.

  “No, you’re not . . .”

  Chunk and his guys stripped off their rifles and kits, setting them against the wall, and sat down across from where Yi was typing on a computer at a long, rough-cut wooden table. The wide-open room was a workspace with a half dozen similarly crude one-person desks strewn about, each with a closed laptop. The only thing breaking up the unstained wood decor was memorabilia nailed to almost every wall from the JSOC Army unit previously running this TOC, much of it brought along from the abandoned TOCs on the other side of the border, he imagined. Pictures without frames—helicopter pilots, Delta operators in blue jeans and Hawaiian shirts kitted up and grinning—adorned the walls beside captured ISIS and Taliban flags, a pair of crossed Arabian swords, worn-looking AK-47s, and even two RPGs. The wall in the back had a truck steering wheel affixed to it, but no one working here now knew its story—a metaphor for the never-ending war on terror. Chunk reminded himself that the JSOC operators who first occupied the TOC where much of this originated were all retired now. By comparison, Trip, who was in the prime of his career, had been only seven years old when 9/11 happened.

  They debriefed the op as a group, an exercise that often felt superfluous but was a long-standing military practice to make sure all facts were straight and agreed upon before the data package was submitted to the command and archived. Many a lesson learned were born in debriefs, but most of the time for Chunk it was as much fun as banging his head against the wall.

  “. . . looked to me like the QRF trucks came out of this location,” he said, a finger dropping onto a long, low building on a satellite imagery printout.

  “Yep,” Watts confirmed. “Passing that on to OGA as well, as they have assets in the area. As you know, we’re still searching for a bomb maker released from prison after the Taliban takeover, though he might be in the stack of bodies you left behind.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Chunk said.

  “Or maybe he was in Building Three where you dropped the Hellfire,” she said, glancing at him then quickly back at her computer screen.

  “What?” he said, eyebrows up, wondering if she’d meant that to be a jab.

  “What, what?” she said, looking up, her face all innocence.

  “You have something you want to discuss, Watts?”

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t think it was the right call to drop the Hellfire on Building Three, do you?”

  “Well, obviously it was,” she said, the angsty tone of a few months ago absent in her voice today. “Gonzalez is in the clinic and you guys are all here safe and sound. Big boy rules, isn’t that what you like to say?”

  “But you wouldn’t have made that call.”

  She laughed. “Thank God it wasn’t my call to make, because it worked out.”

  “Right,” he agreed, folding his arms over his chest. “It worked out.”

  “This time,” she added under her breath and turned back to Yi’s computer wearing the slightest hint of a grin.

  “Un-uh,” he said, shooting her a sharp look. “You don’t get to do that.”

  She met his gaze, eyebrows up again. “I don’t get to do what?”

  “Make comments under your breath. If you have something to say, Heels, then spit it out,” he said using the nickname he’d christened her with just months ago, when she reported to her first day on the job wearing high heels and a pantsuit.

  Instead of getting defensive, she simply sighed. “I was just messing with you. All kidding aside, Chunk, everyone knows I’m more risk averse than you—maybe than everyone in the command—but that’s part of the system, right? We all get input,
but it’s not a democracy. You’re the boss, and I trust your judgment.”

  “Your job is to give me your unfiltered opinion. Seems like in this case you’re reluctant because my call turned out to be right.”

  She flashed him a genuine smile. “My unfiltered opinion is that I wouldn’t have made the call. Okay . . . are we good?”

  Chunk relaxed his shoulders and nodded. “We’re good.”

  Yi’s computer chimed with a notification, ending the discussion. The petty officer tapped a key and spun it around for Chunk to see. On the screen the serious face of Captain Bowman, current Chief Service Officer of the Tier One SEALs, stared back at him.

  “Well done, Lieutenant Commander Redman,” his boss said. “A perfectly executed JSOC rescue mission.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Chunk said, uncomfortable with the praise in front of everyone. “They threw us a few curveballs, but we got it done.”

  “There’re always curveballs, Chunk. Success is determined by how we handle them. Results matter. You made the right call.” Across from him, Chunk was aware that Watts was looking at her hands.

  “It was a team effort, sir. Our intel team here in the TOC gave us the data and input we needed in real time to allow us to execute the mission despite the dynamic conditions,” he said, throwing in a nod to Watts as a subtle peace offering.

  “All right, enough patting ourselves on the back,” Bowman said. “Let’s move on. What else do you have for me?”

  Chunk grinned. Bowman was the best boss he’d ever had, and he loved the crusty SEAL officer’s no BS leadership approach.

  They ran through a few minor housekeeping updates regarding previous ops, but there wasn’t much to tell.

  “All right, where are we with tracking down Hamza al-Saud’s lieutenants? Watts, give me an update on your progress piecing together the remnants of the al Qadar network?” Bowman said.

  The question was a good one but also happened to poke at Watts’s most tender spot. It had been over three months since Gold Squadron had neutralized al Qadar’s combat drone program and captured the terrorist organization’s leader, Hamza al-Saud. Thanks to Watts’s tenacity and smarts, they’d been able to find and thwart al-Saud’s drone operation, but not before one of the drones launched a pair of missiles at Kandahar Air Base resulting in millions of dollars of damage and loss of American lives. In the time since, however, precious little progress had been made prosecuting the “ones that got away.” The abandonment of Afghanistan made it harder, of course. She’d also had trouble figuring out how the upstart terror group had managed to source Chinese Pterodactyl UAVs, ground control units, and HJ-10 air-to-ground missiles. Besides being a clever tactician, it seemed that al-Saud was also quite skilled at the financial and logistics side of procuring arms. Watts had complained to Chunk on more than one occasion, saying, “How am I supposed to follow the money when there’s no money to follow?” A part of Chunk was empathetic to her situation and wished he could be of some help, but the spooky shit just wasn’t his wheelhouse.

  He turned to look at her as she fielded the question.

  “Not much new to report, sir,” Watts said. “We’re still working with OGA and leveraging the connections you made for us at NSA to monitor SIGINT for communications and any signs of reconstitution. We even have the Group Ten folks in theater squeezing their assets in Pakistan for information, but so far nothing earth-shattering. What we can say with confidence is we see no evidence whatsoever of non-nation-state combat drone activity in theater after the one we destroyed outside of Kandahar.”

  Chunk saw something flicker across her face. She’d been different since the Kandahar attack. They’d lost people. She’d seen things that couldn’t be unseen, and that affected a person’s psyche.

  “So, we think that Pterodactyl drone was the only one in al Qadar’s arsenal?” Bowman pressed.

  “Well.” Watts hesitated and looked at Yi who shrugged. “That’s what everyone seems to think, sir. The mobile GCUs they used have all been destroyed. The Mingora airport, where they were conducting nighttime sorties, has been monitored twenty-four seven since the incident. CENTCOM has dedicated resources to monitoring all Ku-band transmitters in the region and the PakSat-1R—the satellite al Qadar hacked into to conduct the Kandahar attack—is on SPACECOM’s watch list. In addition, Kandahar has implemented new airspace deconfliction and identification protocols to address the vulnerabilities al Qadar exploited the first time around. So unless they’ve somehow gotten their hands on a next-generation stealth UCAV, I’m ninety-nine percent sure they’re not operational. That said, there are still puzzle pieces about al Qadar’s operation that we’ve yet to put together.”

  “I take it from your tone, Ms. Watts, that you’re not quite ready to put this to bed?”

  She seemed to gather her thoughts a moment.

  “Sir, my instinct tells me there’s more to this story. The operation that al-Saud conducted was far more sophisticated and tech-savvy than anything we’ve encountered before. It would be a mistake to assume that a man who was so successful operating undetected under our noses—sourcing and deploying advanced Chinese military hardware—did not have a succession plan in place. Yes, we eliminated a significant number of his rank-and-file members, but where are the engineers? Where are the black hat hackers and drone technicians? It’s impossible to pull off what he did with goatherds and illiterate jihadists who have no cyber and technical skills whatsoever. Honestly, sir, I feel it would be a huge mistake to assume we had dismantled the al Qadar network simply because we captured al-Saud and a handful of his operators. And, with the terrorist organizations emboldened by the Afghanistan withdrawal, recruiting would be easier than ever.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” Bowman said. “Just so you know, CIA considers this a closed operation, though they are ready to assist if something new comes to light. For the record, I agree with you. So, keep beating the bushes and find us who is running al Qadar in al-Saud’s stead. When you do, we run the standard Tier One playbook against them—capture/kill missions, one after the other—until we chase it up the chain to their leadership or wipe them all off the face of the earth. But before that can happen, I gotta have targets, Watts.”

  “Understood, sir,” she said and smiled over at Yi who gave her a subtle fist bump under the table. They were becoming an unstoppable team, those two, and Chunk was glad they were part of Gold.

  “In the meantime, I’m sure we’ll find some Tier One level tasking for you guys in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Bowman added.

  It wasn’t like a few years ago, when the JSOC units conducted raids nearly every single night of deployment, sometimes more than one a night. But there were plenty of threats still to prosecute. After the ambush that had wiped out their Tier One SEAL Team predecessors in Yemen a few years ago, higher authorities seemed far more cautious about not overtasking the JSOC teams. But there was still plenty of work to do, mission packages that would never be reported on CNN. Most of the military didn’t yet know that the Tier One SEAL Team had been reconstituted and that sat just fine with Chunk and his teammates. Quiet professionals needed secrecy to do their best work.

  “Rest the team and be ready for the next op, Chunk,” Bowman said, “but assist Watts and Yi with whatever they need, including running low-level ISR.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chunk said.

  Bowman disappeared from the screen without so much as a goodbye, piss off, or job well done.

  Chunk looked at Watts, who was unconsciously tracing the trefoil knot tattoo on her wrist with her index finger.

  Her comments to Bowman about missing puzzle pieces and the disconnect between the level of sophistication of al Qadar’s operation and the level of sophistication of the dudes they’d captured suddenly resonated with him.

  “Is Hamza al-Saud still being held at the CIA black site across town?” he asked. Like JSOC, the CIA and other elements of the US intelligence community had been forced to move their counterterror operations across the borders of Afghanistan, mostly to the various other “’stans”—Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and even Pakistan.