One Killer Force: A Delta Force Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

push-to-talk.
    “Rog. Jackal’s up.”
    “All assault elements, you roger my last?” Gangster asked, checking on the three assault teams loitering in their rolling LCCs, or last covered and concealed positions.
    “This is Echo One, up!”
    “Golf One, we’re up.”
    “Fox is good.”
    “This is Noble Zero-One, roger all, out!” Gangster said, sounding pleased his teams were set, alert, and ready to turn the target.
    Bumpered on a pseudo-discreet piece of high ground, overlooking the ancient municipality of Jindires, the lemon-looking Peugeot panel van wasn’t necessarily out of place. Even though it had a finicky ignition, like an old John Deere, nobody could argue that it wasn’t local -looking enough. Syria’s northern neighbor, Turkey, only thirteen miles away, had hundreds of thousands of them. If well-paid CIA assets were good at anything, acquiring suitable assault vehicles for high-risk, high-yield, low-visibility ops topped the list.
    Tilted slightly on the shoulder of a one-lane muddy road and adjacent to one of the village’s four local cemeteries, the van was located more out of necessity than choice. Not a perfect spot for Gangster’s command and control element, but it did provide excellent radio line of sight with his assault teams, just over a mile away. They had driven the hills in a light rain for over an hour, pushing their luck darting in and out of the village, checking possibles identified during the planning phase, before bumpering up. For the second day in a row the spot would have to do. As long as the tires could tame the mud-slicked road, they were good.
    “Guys, hate to break it to you, but I need to lock out a SEAL team,” Kolt Raynor said from the back of the van.
    “You gotta be kidding, Racer,” Gangster said in disgust, ripping the curtain open to look in the back. “A shit? Now?”
    Kolt didn’t appreciate the attitude one bit, but he understood the death stare he was currently getting from Gangster, now turned around in his seat. Gangster had an op to run. The Unit, particularly Gangster’s squadron, had been on the Barrel Bomb Butcher’s trail for some time now, with a couple of near misses and several agency-provided nuggets that took them down dead ends. The dead ends, although not resulting in the loss of any mates, were becoming a running joke within the halls of the Joint Special Operations Command. To the point that the Delta commander, Colonel Jeremy Webber, had to convince COMJSOC to not push the Butcher kill/capture op to SEAL Team Six. All this led to the sketchy decision to stake the Butcher’s mother’s house two mornings in a row.
    Sure, the CIA had reported that the Butcher’s mother was terminally ill. And their assets in the Aleppo Governorate likely had good intel that her days were numbered. Actionable enough for the National Command Authority to cut an oh-dark-thirty deployment order and push a troop from the alert squadron to a CIA safe house in the Turkish border town of Kilis. Whether the intel was legit or not was still to be seen.
    “Man, I’m sorry, but those Turkish meatballs have me jacked up,” Kolt said, ashamed at his predicament and feeling like a jackass, especially knowing the pressure Gangster was obviously feeling to score the Butcher.
    “Can’t you hold it? We’re thirty minutes from showtime,” Gangster said. “I’m not losing the Butcher like the Mossad lost Marzban.”
    “Afraid not, partner,” Kolt said, realizing that Gangster was more amped up than he thought.
    Bringing up Marzban Tehrani—the former leader of the Iranian dissident group the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, and now the current bane of the Israeli prime minister’s existence, was about as random as you can get. Besides, Kolt figured, they couldn’t talk much smack, as they hadn’t positively identified the Butcher yet.
    “I’ll pop out the back doors and find a tree. Be back in a flash,” Kolt said.
    “Unbelievable!” Gangster said. “All right,