One Rough Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Pike, I don’t have time right now. The boss is on the way down. All I can say is that you won’t be coming to my house for dinner tonight.”

6
    B efore I could ask anything else, the element leader for Omega Operations, Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander, entered the room. His appearance really caused the team to perk up.
    He walked over to Knuckles and me. “Glad you guys could get back in so quick.”
    “Well, we’re here. What’s the story? Something happen to the team in Jordan?”
    “Nothing bad’s happened to the team,” Blaine said, “but something bad is about to happen with the mission. Your target is headed to Tbilisi, Georgia.”
    Knuckles frowned. “Why’s that a big deal? This will be, what, his third trip? Didn’t we already analyze that and decide to focus on Jordan, where he lives?”
    Mustafa Abu Azzam was a confirmed leader of a terrorist cell affiliated with Al Qaeda. Living in Jordan, but born and raised in Oman, he was hell-bent on doing irreparable harm to the United States. Had he been focused on other targets, such as the country of Jordan itself, the Taskforce would have quietly passed its intelligence into the system, letting the Jordanians handle it. As it was, he lived and worked in Jordan as a reputable citizen, leading a double life that allowed him to plan attacks in relative safety. We had worked for close to a year to put a face to the name the Taskforce had been tracking. A year of hard, slow, boring—but necessary—work. Nobody wanted to kill an innocent man. My team had flip-flopped with Johnny’s over and over again, trying to get a handle on this guy, and we were very close. Our next deployment had a good shot at finishing him. Starting with just a name, then with cell phone numbers, building into e-mail addresses and Internet traffic, finally into addresses outside the virtual world, we had pinpointed the man called Azzam. Johnny’s team had taken the first confirmed photographs, and was simultaneously building a pattern of life for an operation while we prepared to deploy for the final takedown.
    Before I could ask anything else, Colonel Kurt Hale entered the room, followed by a scrum of analysts. A large man with jet-black hair, my wife says he would be handsome if his nose weren’t bent at an angle, like it had been flattened and sprung back out of whack. I always laugh at that, because I’m the one who flattened it. Don’t get the wrong idea. It was during routine combatives training. I could show you a scar on my elbow where I had to have surgery because of something he did. I would never say a cross word to the man otherwise, because he’s the finest commander this country currently has. Of course, I’m biased.
    Kurt shook my hand and apologized for interrupting the team’s training. I shrugged it off. “Thanks for throwing in the trailer. It caused a little high adventure.”
    Kurt grinned and said, “You guys need a wrinkle every once in a while. A few more days and you’d have figured out what he was doing.”
    “We didn’t wait. We took him down. Would have had both targets if you hadn’t paged.”
    “You took him down? He just entered the exercise today. Where is he?”
    “In the parking garage.”
    Kurt was flabbergasted. “Jesus, Pike! You brought him here?”
    I held up my hands. “Sir, don’t worry. He’s blindfolded in the back of a van inside a dog kennel. He has no idea where he is.”
    Kurt turned to one of the men with him and barked out instructions. I watched him get the van keys from Bull, then scurry out of the room. The way I was looking at it, Return ASAP meant get my ass here as soon as possible, so I wasn’t too upset at the breach in security. Kurt knew me pretty well, so he shouldn’t have been too surprised. More like business as usual.
    Years ago, Kurt had been my first troop commander at a Special Mission Unit on Fort Bragg, and pretty much kept me from letting my arrogant attitude get me fired. He looked past