Maslick shook his shaggy head.
“Not personally. Before the Unit, I served in Second Bat. All the casualties came from 1st Ranger Battalion, but the community’s pretty small. I’m sure my running buddies do.”
The all-clear signal indicating that the FOB was no longer under attack echoed down the flight line, saving Coleman from replying. As he led the way out of the bunker’s dank confines, a pair of Apache helicopters thundered by overhead. If the gunships were returning to base, Coleman felt fairly confident there was nothing left outside the FOB to shoot. Next to a platoon of frogmen, nobody loved putting steel on target more than Apache pilots.
“What’s the plan?” Will said.
That was a great question.
“It’s fluid,” Coleman said. “Rapp still hasn’t surfaced, but I received a text from an Agency analyst while we were on the C-130. They got a hit on Rapp’s Farid Saeed persona. He popped up on the manifest for a Kam Air flight from Islamabad into Kabul.” Coleman glanced at his Luminox dive watch. The timepiece was Swiss-made and much too expensive for fieldwork, but Coleman was a SEAL. He had an image to maintain. “It should be landing in about an hour.”
“We gonna pick him up?” Will said, his confusion evident.
Coleman shook his head. “He’s still dark for a reason. My guess is that he’ll clear customs in Kabul and run a surveillance detection route. Once he’s sure he’s clean, Rapp will head for Bagram. From there, he’ll either give us a call or catch a flight here.”
“The old hurry-up-and-wait drill,” Will said.
“Welcome to Team Rapp, kid,” Charlie said with a smile.
“I’m gonna wander over to the TOC and see what ops are scheduled for the next twenty-four hours and who we might be able to rope into serving as a quick reactionary force. You guys find somewhere for us to bunk, then zero your weapons and start prepping gear. Questions?”
There were none.
This was not because Coleman’s pipe hitters understood the plan. At this point, there wasn’t anything that could even loosely be termed a plan, but that was okay. With the exception of Will, this wasn’t anyone’s first Rapp rodeo. Mitch had a deserved reputation for getting shit done, but no one would term his operations low-profile. Even the world’s best quarterback couldn’t function without the protection of a good offensive line. Before he took his team into the field, Coleman would have a plan, but if experience was any guide, Rapp would end up calling an audible.
Welcome to Team Rapp.
Then again, if Coleman had wanted predictable, he’d still be attaching demolition charges to the rusted supports of some derelict oil rig. Life as the CEO of SEAL Demolition and Salvage Corporation had been lucrative, predictable, and utterly boring. Life with Rapp could be challenging, but there was something that service with the CIA provided that Coleman hadn’t found in the civilian world.
Job satisfaction.
Eyeing the collection of B-huts, Coleman selected the one with the most antennas and headed toward it. Someday, Coleman might decide that it was time to take his company totally legitimate again.
Until then, supporting Rapp was his business.
And business was good.
CHAPTER 20
“ANYTHING?”
Captain Mark Garner tried to keep his voice unemotional as he asked the question. Judging by the CIA officer’s reaction, he hadn’t succeeded.
“No,” the portly man said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “I know you’re concerned, but we’re doing all we can. As soon as we have something, you’ll be the first to know.”
Mark stared back at the man, Dan, trying to contain his emotions.
Dan was the CIA’s chief of base for Jalalabad, and he was responsible for collating all the various intelligence products generated in Regional Command East, an area of Afghanistan that encompassed many of the nation’s worst hot spots. He wasn’t a shooter by any stretch of the imagination, and his slovenly appearance didn’t do much to inspire confidence.
Dan’s stringy hair flopped over a mostly bald pate in what might have been the world’s worst comb-over. His patchy faux operator beard looked like a Brillo pad, and his ample belly hung over cargo pants that were at least an inch too short. His desk was a mess of papers and crumpled candy wrappers, and an elaborate pour-over coffee rig shared space with a half-eaten bag of gourmet jelly beans.
If this knucklehead was responsible for providing a coherent, actionable picture of what was happening on the ground to Mark’s chain of command, it was no wonder they’d been unable to locate Mark’s missing Ranger.
Mark had purposefully placed his hands on his hips so that he wouldn’t inadvertently clench his fists, but his body still vibrated with equal parts rage and frustration. Though the five or so CIA analysts who shared the B-hut with Dan were pecking away at their laptops, there had been zero intelligence products worth a damn distributed by this fusion cell since the ill-begotten raid on the HIG compound had turned Mark’s world upside down.
After hours with no word from the CIA, Mark had decided to pay Dan a visit.
What he’d found hadn’t been reassuring.
Rather than address Mark’s concerns with anything approaching urgency, Dan seemed to imply that Mark should go back to his side of the compound and leave the intelligence professionals to do their work.
Mark had no intention of doing so.
Almost an entire platoon of his Rangers had been killed or wounded. The dead were beyond Mark’s help.
The living were not.
“Look,” Mark said, crowding Dan’s personal space, “I don’t mean to be a dick, but I’ve got a missing Ranger who’s most likely in the hands of Taliban, HIG, or Haqqani thugs. If they get Saxton across the border into Pakistan, the next time we see him it’ll be on a jihadi torture video as some black-masked fucker saws his head off. I’ve got sixty jacked-up pipe hitters waiting to rain down hellfire and brimstone, but we can’t do shit until you find us a goddamn target.”
Despite his best efforts, Mark’s voice had grown steadily louder until his last two words had come out at a shout. The previous twelve hours had been the worst of Mark’s life. Doug Peluso and his team of Green Berets and Afghan National Army commandos had been a godsend after the shootdown. Mark’s remaining Rangers had hit the compound as planned while Doug and his men had secured the Chinook crash site, provided first aid to the wounded, and begun medevac operations.
This change in plan hadn’t come without cost.
Because the Green Berets had deviated from their original tasking to provide the operation’s outer cordon, no one had been on squirter control. Mark’s assaulters had captured the HIG commander who’d been the raid’s objective, but several of the HVT’s lieutenants and fighters had escaped into the surrounding mountains.
That wasn’t the worst of it.
After the dust cleared on the assault, Mark had learned some terrible news.
