Chapter 1 #2
Zenko led Drax and Reese silently through the night, placing each step carefully to avoid sending loose rocks skittering down the mountainside or snapping one of the dry branches scattered across the trail.
Up here, even that small sound could carry far enough to draw exactly the kind of attention his three-man team was trying to avoid.
Their preplanned route followed the mountain ridge through a long left-hand dogleg, with each checkpoint marked on both their maps and GPS.
They had already passed the second without incident when Zenko signaled a halt and scanned the terrain ahead before committing them to the next stretch.
A faint glimmer of light where there shouldn’t have been one caught his attention.
“Shit.” He peered toward the light. “What do you think?” he whispered to Reese, who approached from his place slightly behind Zenko to the left.
“Looks like a village fire,” Reese whispered back. “But there aren’t supposed to be any villages up here.”
Zenko looked to Drax, who was scanning the area with his night vision goggles. “Agreed,” Drax whispered quietly.
“TOC, this is Ambra One.” Clicking his comms, Zenko double-checked that the volume was turned down to minimum as he waited for the tactical operations center to respond.
“Drone controller is on air. Go ahead, Ambra One,” Max Delgado’s voice from base command answered Zenko’s summons immediately.
Zenko could picture exactly what was probably happening back at TOC, because he had seen Max do it enough times before.
The second someone needed eyes in the sky, the man would scoot his wheeled chair across the operations center to his control desk and pull the relevant system onto the screens while the other drone controllers worked around him.
If there was something down there for Zenko and his team to worry about, Max would find the fucker.
“Is there anything showing on drone footage? We’re seeing lights or possibly a fire.”
“There is a small goatherder village at your three o’clock, a couple of huts,” Max answered. “There is a central fire, and it looks like there is some kind of celebration going on. That area around the fire is full of people.”
Zenko took a quick glance around before climbing a small rocky outcrop. Lying on his stomach, he pulled out his night vision goggles and turned the dials until he had a clear view of the village. “TOC, Ambra One, do you copy?”
“This is TOC, go ahead, Ambra One.”
“That party they’ve got going on—there are no women attending; it’s all men and boys.
Those huts don’t look like the usual permanent structures you’d expect to see up here.
” Zenko looked at the tents made of animal hide and rocks.
Something was fucking off about that village.
“TOC, do we have past footage from when we planned the mission?”
“Yes, we do,” Max responded immediately. “I’m just pulling it up for a side-by-side comparison now.”
Zenko silently thanked Noble for having the foresight to steal Max out from under another covert team that had been pushing to recruit him when JSOC set up their task force.
The man was a fucking genius with computers and comms, and having him sitting back at TOC digging through intelligence while Zenko concentrated on what was directly in front of him had saved their asses more times than he cared to count.
He kept his attention on the village as he waited for Max to scrutinize the documents and photos from the mission planning stages.
“Ambra One, this is TOC, do you copy?”
“Go ahead, TOC.”
“You’re correct,” Max told him. “That village wasn’t on the very first group of images; it was on all three subsequent ones, though… There is a note in the file that intelligence says it’s either a sheep or goatherder village.”
“Damn it,” Zenko answered. With night vision green, he eyed the weaponry on display around the campfire and heard the faint sound of gunfire as one idiot stood at the edge of the ‘village’ and shot off rounds into the air.
Hoping one comes down and hits the dumbass in the head and saves some soldier dealing with him later is too much to ask for, I suppose?
“You don’t need AKs to herd fucking goats or sheep.” He sighed. “Orders?”
“Skirt around it, Ambra One,” Noble’s voice ordered. “Best-case scenario would be if you can avoid engaging with them at all.”
“Copy,” Zenko replied softly into the comms. “Moving to our secondary route.”
“Agreed.”
In the background, Zenko could hear Noble telling Max to switch to extraction point two.
“TOC, Ambra is moving.” Zenko silently scanned the area they had stopped in and made sure that they hadn’t left any evidence to show that they had been in the location before he signaled to Reese and Drax, then all three silently faded back into the darkness.
“Ambra One?” The crackle of the radio was almost unrecognizable against the quiet of the night, the volume already turned down far enough that Zenko could barely hear the call through his earpiece.
Out here, where even the smallest sound could travel farther than he wanted it to, he had no intention of letting their comms announce the team’s position to anyone else on the mountain.
Zenko signaled to the others to stop. “TOC, this is Ambra One, go ahead.” Even though his voice was barely audible, he knew their equipment would pick up every word and transmit it to the location Noble and Max were using as a tactical command center for this mission.
He took a sip of water from his Camelbak while he waited for the intel from TOC.
“We’re seeing two heat signatures just off the trail, about three hundred yards ahead.”
“Copy.” Max’s information made Zenko curse in his head. More fucking delays, great. “How do you want us to proceed?”
Noble’s voice overrode any answer Max may have given. “It looks like they are guarding a cave entrance. Think you can get close enough to hear what they are talking about?”
“Roger that.” Zenko clicked off the comms, and all three carefully checked their weapons before Zenko signaled to Drax and Reese.
They silently made their way forward until they were close enough to smell tobacco and hear the guttural tones of the men standing on watch outside the cave.
Straining his ears, Zenko tried to make out what dialect the men were speaking.
“I think it’s Kurmanji.” Max’s voice was barely a whisper in Zenko’s ear as he listened to the conversation being transmitted through the equipment the team wore on their clothes. “Shit, pull back.”
The order came fast enough that Zenko immediately started moving, but Max’s muttered “Sorry, Boss” a second later almost made him grin.
Zenko had spent enough time working with Noble to picture his swim buddy pacing around the command center while Max and the others tracked their extraction.
The stubborn asshole had never been good at sitting still when his team was in the field without him, and something unexpected turning up along their route would have him wearing a fucking track into the TOC floor.
Zenko didn’t bother to respond; his body camera would show Noble and Max at the base that they were retreating down the track as commanded.
Once they were far enough away from the cave to be able to have a conversation, they took cover against a rock, with Drax and Reese keeping watch as Zen contacted command.
“TOC, Ambra One, do you have that intel?”
“They have a prisoner,” Max told him. “An American. They were discussing how if the boss can’t break him within the next week, they are going to execute him.”
“Fuck-a-duck.” Zenko sighed and scrubbed his hand over his face. “How many heat signatures can you see?”
“Ambra One…”
“TOC, hold on. If there is a US prisoner there, we are not walking past the front door without knocking to see if he wants to come out to play,” Zenko told them before adding, “TOC, find as much on him as you can. We need to know who we have on the line.”
“TOC, Ambra One, what is it you are looking for?”
“Ambra One, TOC, anything you can find on his background, how long he’s been missing, and what kind of shape we should expect him to be in.
” Zenko wasn’t taking Drax and Reese into a possible death trap blind if there was information sitting in some database that could tell him what they were walking into or what condition the prisoner might be in when they reached him.
“The only known missing American is a civilian contractor who was based out of Al Asad Air Base in Iraq’s western Anbar Province.
” Max gave the information over comms. “Shaun Jacobsen, a twenty-nine-year-old Colorado native, six feet tall, dark hair, blue eyes. He was last seen three weeks ago doing a fuel run to Baghdad and never returned to base.”
Fuck, Zenko groaned to himself. A civilian… damn it.
“TOC, get as much information from the drone as you can and send it to me,” Zenko requested from Max and Noble. “We’ll get him back.”
Zenko listened to the chatter in his ear and carefully filed away all the information being passed on. He quickly went over the intel with Drax and Reese before they cautiously carried their packs as close as they dared before stashing them out of sight.