Tier One Wild
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To the Eagles still fighting demons long after the drumbeat faded and the guns have gone silent
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kolt did most of the heavy lifting in
Black Site,
which for an informed reader—a student of
black
special ops—is easily the biggest hurdle to being absolutely sure that it could ever be anything more than fiction. You see, in special operations, like any other military unit, it’s the sergeants that carry the heaviest load, not the Os.
Besides the Tsunami-size bad call Kolt “Racer” Raynor made in the Pakistani badlands, he spent most of his time working what we call “singleton” missions. He operated alone. Those kinds of ops that for one reason or another, someone reasoned that it made more tactical sense to send a single operator instead of a team to handle the job.
But the quickest route to burnout for any operator is back-to-back-to-back singleton ops. They are just inherently packed with stress, high blood pressure, self-doubt, and living a backstopped but shallow cover. And of course, nobody expected Racer to survive the
Black Site
mission. But he did.
Everyone knows Kolt was the luckiest son-of-a-bitch alive. Including Kolt.
In fact, he vowed to stiff-arm any future singleton ops. Just to stay sane, he needed mates. He needed like mindsets, someone to cover his six and pick up his slack. Can you blame him? It’s been a heckuva long war on terror, and everyone has limits.
If you are still with me, after reading
Tier One Wild,
you know that Racer preferred a team. Without them covering for him, or providing covering fire, this Delta Force thriller series is dead on arrival.
With the first two books behind us, I ain’t flapping when I say Kolt and I have more in common than I originally thought. We both hate operating alone. And we both have a ton of God-given vices. So it’s a no-brainer that we both recognize that we are only at our best when working with teammates. We’re happiest when our Ranger buddies are there to keep us sharp. Safest when our mates are posted at the breach, porting the windows, or pulling high cover in the stairwell. Our critics might even say riding the coattails of more talented operators.
And just as it took a team of teams to track down Abu al-Amriki and the SA-24s, it took a mirror effort—a collective World Series attitude—to birth what you hold in your hands.
Operators don’t leave ranks until they are ready to jack it in and retire to the house. And I am proud to say nobody left our team. The same commando-minded professionals that brought
Black Site
to life remained on the manifest for
Tier One Wild.
And with any book, or any mission, the support effort by anonymous pros behind the scenes can make or break the op. I am deeply grateful and exceptionally proud of the folks at St. Martin’s Press and Trident Media Group whose work in the shadows made the main effort look good. Within specops, we call the
main effort
the assault force. Everyone else is support.
Leading our assault force once again was my editor and diehard New York Mets fan Marc Resnick. I am convinced that a pack of terrorists couldn’t break his positive spirit, or his smile, or even get him to root for the Braves for a single inning. And even if they could, my superagent, Scott Miller of Trident, would be there in no time to make things right. Like many of you, there is a little tier one wild in Scott. With Marc, Scott, and me once again was the übertalented and savvy writer Mark Greaney, to whom I owe an enormous debt for his coaching, mentoring, and friendship. Even though Scott could handle any terrorist, Mark would still pile on like the Cleveland Browns’ secondary. But make no mistake, there is no doubt that the only member of our assault force that we could have put on waivers to bring Kolt Raynor to life would have been me.
Besides the boys at work, nothing gets done without the support of family. And even though my wonderful wife and daughters aren’t all that impressed by all this Dalton Fury stuff, they let it slide as long as it doesn’t interfere with my day job. Keep it out of the house and all is good, but one thing is for sure. Let Kolt slip up and lose the support of the ladies in my house, and he is a dead man.
I’m often questioned if the stuff Kolt pulls off is real. Would Dalton Fury try to take down a hijacked airliner as it was taking off? Of course not, but I’m no Kolt Raynor.
And since ST6 smoked Bin Laden in mid-2011, I’m often asked if Delta Force really tells other people or troops that they are Navy SEALs to preserve their true identity or cover. Well, yes, I am a Navy SEAL. In fact, just because I don’t surf, or sky shark you in free fall, or kick your ass at a bar and steal your girlfriend, as far as my cover for action is concerned, I’m the best darn Navy SEAL on target.
Of course, either you don’t believe me, or I ain’t sticking around long enough to play twenty questions. Just like on target.
CONTENTS
Tier One Wild
(1) Using common sense over process, getting away with more than the other guy, and possessing a bit of an attitude. (2) The mindset that all Tier One (Delta Force and SEAL Team 6) operators roll with, encompassing the idea that someone who is specially assessed and selected to serve in the ranks of a special missions unit (DF and ST6) has the mental and physical capacity to perform to a much higher standard, to accept more risk, to march to a different drummer, and to tell a general officer that he is full of shit (with slightly more tact but with absolutely no fear of retribution).
PROLOGUE
New Delhi, India
The dead lay throughout the first-class cabin. Their bodies stank in the still air.
Four men, two women. A Flight attendant. An air marshal. A man who had looked like he might start trouble. An Indian diplomat from the Punjab. A German woman who had been shot for screaming.
And one martyr.
Unlike the five dead nonbelievers, Marwan’s body had not been dumped across the seats. No, his men had laid him gently on his back, his arms positioned across his chest, a clean starched napkin from a first-class dining cart draped over his face, the two running ends of his red headband just visible. Marwan had been the leader of the six-strong cell of Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters. He and his men had boarded this aircraft two days earlier dressed like businessmen returning from a telemarketing conference in Mumbai. Marwan had gone to the rear galley shortly after takeoff, while the rest of the passengers sat strapped into their seats, compliant like lambs chained to posts in the marketplace. He’d found the case left for him by a Jordanian brother who worked in food service at the Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai, and from it Marwan quietly and efficiently passed the Skorpion machine pistols out to his men. He donned the bulletproof vest left in the bag and slipped the hand grenade into his pocket, and then the seven Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives rushed up the aisles and took over the plane.
Twenty-five seconds after they thought they had control, Marwan fell to the aisle dead, killed by a pistol shot to the back of the head, fired by an air marshal. The marshal was himself killed by Skorpion fire in the next moment, which immediately put Jellock in charge of an operation that still had not recovered from the death of its leader.
Jellock was not Marwan. He was scared and uncertain. He was tired and hot and sick of the strange food on the aircraft and the overflowing toilets and the bodies putrefying up in first class. The ballistic vest he now wore dug into his skin and weighed him down as he ran the length of the plane shouting orders.
In the past fifty-five hours he’d forced the 767’s American flight crew to fly to New Delhi, then back to Mumbai, then to Bangalore, and now back to New Delhi. Jellock had been afraid to keep the aircraft in one place for too long while he waited for his demands to be met. In the meantime, the Indian government had stalled and his men had threatened and then killed passengers and crew.
He wished Marwan were here to tell him what to do, where to go, how to keep order among the other five men in the cell.
But Marwan was dead in first class, and the others looked to Jellock for direction while they bickered among themselves and beat on the passengers in frustration.
What do I do? This is taking too long!
The twenty-three-year-old’s exhausted and stressed mind focused quickly.
Too long.
Yes! Too long they had been on the ground here in New Delhi. He felt the government’s delays had been trickery, that he’d been played for a fool.
Too long.
Jellock stood, stormed into the cockpit, found the flight crew sleeping in their seats, and he screamed at them. “We leave New Delhi! We fly away!”
“Where?” asked the pilot wearily.
Jellock thought a moment. He needed a safe place. Someplace where the aircraft could remain for enough hours for him to get some rest. “Quetta!”
“Pakistan.” The pilot said it as a groan. A statement of frustration.
“Yes!” Jellock screamed every word he said to the pilots, thinking it would make him appear authoritative.
The pilot shrugged. “When?”
“Now! Take off!”
“Son, you don’t understand. We have to go through a preflight checklist and pull our maps for the route we—”
“Take off now or I kill a passenger!” Jellock turned to yell out into the cabin. “Mohammed!”
The pilot rubbed his eyes and reached for his case containing his maps and charts. “Okay! Okay. Just give me five minutes to—”
“One minute!” Jellock yelled, certain of the deceit of this nonbeliever. “In one minute we are moving to the runway or I kill one passenger every minute!”
“Three minutes! You’ve got to give us at least—”
“Two minutes! No more!”
“I need three!”
“You can have three, but I kill one passenger.” He turned back to the cabin. “Mohammed! Bring me the first child you see!”
“All right! Calm down! We’re moving in two!” shouted the pilot, before tuning out the terrorist and focusing on his aircraft.
ONE
The hazy night sky was cool three thousand feet above and aft of the Boeing 767, but Delta Force Major Kolt “Racer” Raynor perspired into his goggles. Rivulets of sweat ran down the back of his black Nomex suit as he hung under the taut canopy of his square parachute and focused on the scene below.
It had been nearly four years since he’d led other men into battle. He had been assessed as ready by both his superiors and his peers, and he felt ready, but still, he was human.
And this shit was scary as hell.
Two more canopies drifted down through the darkness near him. The three chutes were stacked—teammates Digger and Slapshot were strapped together in a tandem rig below and fifty feet ahead of Kolt, and Stitch was positioned slightly above and fifty feet behind.
All four men floated with the wind down toward their drop zone, a few hundred feet aft of the hijacked American Airlines flight.
Digger spoke into his radio from his position up front, hanging in front of Slapshot. “Hey, boss. That plane looks like it’s ready to depart. There’s no auxiliary power attached. Aft stairs are up, too.”
“Guess they aren’t gonna wait around for us to sneak up all ninja-like,” Slapshot mumbled into his mic. The big man always injected humor when no one else was in the mood.