Oath (The FX Resources Series)

PROLOGUE

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN

NINE YEARS EARLIER

I SPAT INTO the dirt, clearing the grit and sand from my dry mouth. Adjusting the sunglasses that’d nearly melted onto my skin, I checked my watch. The mid-August high had surpassed one hundred six degrees several hours back, but the sun had finally begun to set and nightfall was approaching.

Heating from the inside out, I was used to. Waiting, I was also used to. Today was different.

My father had a superstition. That in a moment where you’d met a crossroad and only had a split second to decide, you always went with your initial gut instinct.

His working theory was that even if you chose wrong, you were less likely to harbor the weight of a failed response.

Today wasn’t the first day I’d shaved against the grain of one of his cardinal rules—I didn’t build a twenty-year career on the back of anyone else’s pedigree but my own—but it was the first time shit felt off.

It was the air—electrically charged and heavy like before a storm, despite the dry heat. And tense.

We weren’t twenty four hours behind a recovery mission that’d reclaimed three Americans and while that might’ve pacified the politicians temporarily, there was a lot more on the line tonight than three arrogant missionaries who’d ignored travel advisories.

Roughly $2.3 billion in US weaponry currently sat in unfriendly territory and someone—I wouldn’t ask even if I did want to know—had apparently convinced the messenger I’d interrogated early this morning to state for the record that he’d seen additional Americans on site.

I’d known he was lying. Playing into it, convinced I could locate and classify his consistencies from his inconsistencies, I’d entertained the conversation.

But the more he’d given up, the less stable the intel began to feel.

Now it was too late to question whether the well had been poisoned and I’d just helped build an op on the words of liar.

All I had to rely on from here was the approval and support from SIGINT, HUMINT, and the other ISA operatives I’d been working with the last four weeks that’d reviewed and green-lit this mission.

“Echo one to Slip. Testing comms,” the voice of second lieutenant Erik Michalk crackled through the receiver in my ear.

“Roger, Echo one,” I responded.

“Hope everybody remembered their sunscreen,” he said.

“Yeah, Slip. You remember your sunscreen?” someone asked from my left. Strapping on my kit, I shook my head.

“Why do they call you Slip?” Bryce Felder called out from under the rear of an MRAP. The FNG of his team and the breacher, he was the youngest on this op today.

“’Cause he’ll slip all your money right out of your wallet before your wife gets her hands on it,” Huascar Nieves said, coming up on my six. The recently promoted twenty-six-year-old spat in the dirt, barely missing his kit. He hefted it onto his back. “Fuckin’ paycheck-fleecing poker savant.”

“That’s why fetuses shouldn’t gamble,” I said. “And it’s retired poker savant.”

“Time to go!” Michalk yelled, jumping into the lead MRAP.

I hauled my shit to the middle convoy and slid into the back with Felder.

Five minutes later, the heavy bodied tactical vehicles ate up the dirt road ahead and I wiped my glasses a second time.

For a place that was so fucking hot and dry you couldn’t even sweat properly, unease bled through my pores like sin bled though a sacrifice.

Another bad sign.

“Head on a swivel. Route’s clear, area’s still hot,” Michalk said.

The kid next to me who was less than four months removed from a high school essay deadline gripped his M16. He was locked the fuck in. I, however, couldn’t stop replaying my last conversation with the messenger.

He entered the room. Twenty minutes after his prayer break and his meal, he already appeared more alert than last night. His skin ashen, a visible exhaustion in his gait as he moved, his eyes were clear. Assessing.

The terp took his seat to my left. The messenger sat down on the other side of the table in front of me.

“Did you have enough to eat?” I asked in his regional dialect.

I’d already ensured he was receiving regular meals and prayer breaks, but I wanted to gauge a baseline for how many times he was willing to lie to me.

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m told you requested to speak with me.

” After ten days under our supervision, the middle-aged man hadn’t said anything but to ask for the time, not even to request food or water, and after hours’ worth of attempts trying to establish common ground, I’d chosen to give up and reroute course, but to my surprise, he’d requested an audience.

His stare tracked me from across the table. “I have something you will want to know.”

I wasn’t necessarily inclined to believe him, but in case he wasn’t just wasting breath, I waited.

“Family.” He said the word in English and the reason wasn’t lost on me. Switching back to Farsi he looked away. “This is all my son knows. I want him to know something else.”

“You’re saying you want to leave?” I asked.

He made a derisive sound. “I will never leave here. I have accepted this. I have something you wish to know. You have something I need. I am ready to speak.”

“From where I’m sitting, we don’t need anything and you asked me for this meeting,” I reminded him.

I was used to detainees running up the clock, making shit up, or using their free will to exert some modicum of control over their situation, but the messenger was neither anxious nor agitated.

Demure in manner and determined, he didn’t hesitate.

“While in the village, I heard voices speaking English with accents like yours. Two men. Not of your military.”

“You sound certain,” I lied. He sounded desperate.

I’d done the recon myself. Consistent twelve-man shifts.

Two changes per day. Heavy artillery. You didn’t flex that kind of firepower for a couple of American civilian captives.

War was expensive, seventy percent of which involved protecting resources or blocking them from enemy access.

I’d bet every winning hand I’d ever played that the warehouse facility fifteen clicks east of here where we’d watched the messenger travel back and forth to over a six-week span before we’d picked him up, was full of weapons.

Whose though, was the question. And the only reason I was still entertaining this conversation.

“How old are you?” the messenger asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Thirties, I assume,” he continued. “You would have been military age just as the US had entered this war. And when you return home, you will do so in the middle of your lifespan, having realized this is what you’ve given your youth for. Will it have been worth it?”

“We’re not talking about me,” I evaded. “We’re talking about what you think I need.”

He nodded. “Nonetheless, I do not want your life for my only child. I do not want my life for him.”

“I can’t guarantee asylum for your son.”

“Not asylum,” he corrected. “Transport. To India. His grandmother and I have not spoken since before he was born, but she will receive him.”

“And if she doesn’t?” I asked.

“He will be a man soon. He must learn what all men have to, eventually—that we have only ourselves.”

Support assets had verified both the identity of a son studying in Kabul and a mother in New Delhi and I’d received permission to make a decision.

I could’ve declined. SEALs had the hostages and I was weeks out from the end of this deployment.

Even still, I never had been able to leave my shit open ended.

A reason to search and seize that warehouse had all but fallen into my lap and it wasn’t that I’d leapt at it that gave me pause, now. It was that I hadn’t even hesitated.

What did that say about me?

“Ten clicks out,” Michalk checked in.

“Good. Let’s light that shit up and get the fuck out,” Nieves said. “An angry pregnant woman wants to yell at me later.”

“Echo two, keep this line clear, please.”

“Three weeks,” Felder mumbled next to me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Three weeks and—”

An eardrum-shattering boom opened up from the front of the convoy, cutting Felder off. The ground rattled. Shit hammered the exterior windows of the MRAP. Adrenaline dumped into my blood stream.

“WHAT THE FUCK?”

“RETREAT! RETREAT! FUCKING RETREAT!”

Ringing in my ears.

The MRAP’s tires gripped the dirt and spun backward.

Too late. Trapped.

Reached for my rifle.

Felder shouted, but I didn’t hear. He gripped the door handle. Another blast. We were wheels up.

Everything went black.