SEAL Team Six Hunt the Falcon(26)

With Cal inside the house, Crocker waited and listened carefully. Things rarely went according to plan.

Through the earbud he heard a man talking aggressively in accented English, asking, “Who are you? Who sent you? What do you want?” At the end, he was almost shouting.

Cal started to answer in Thai, but the man cut him off. Then Crocker heard what sounded like a slap and scuffling, followed by two shots.

“Plan B!” Crocker shouted into the handheld. He burst out the side door of the SUV and ran as fast as he could to the front of the house. Arriving first, suppressed HK MP7A1 ready, he was about to push through the screen door when it opened and a very thin bearded man with a wild mop of hair stuck his head out. Crocker decked him with an elbow to the neck, then stepped over his prone body into the house.

He heard screams in what he thought was Farsi, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness made out the shape of a man reaching for a pistol on the kitchen counter to his right. Crocker cut him down with four quick shots center of mass and one to the face. Mancini and Ritchie rushed in behind him.

The place was a shithole, with a sour, garlicky stench, discarded newspapers on the floor, clothes thrown over all available surfaces. He spotted a half-naked man scurrying out the back door; another was on his knees behind a sofa. A third stood near a mattress on the floor in front of Crocker, holding Cal in a headlock with his left arm. His right hand held a pistol to Cal’s head.

“Surrender!” the man shouted in heavily accented English. “Drop the gun!”

Crocker shouted back with authority, “You’re surrounded, asshole!”

The muscles on the terrorist’s face tightened. Cal’s nose bled down his chin onto the front of his shirt, but he appeared calm. The Middle Eastern man trembled as he pressed the gun harder against Cal’s temple. Out of the corner of his right eye, Crocker saw the short barrel of the MK18 Mod 0 beyond the window. Then he heard a stream of 5.56x45mm bullets rip through the glass and saw them slam into the man’s torso and head. The terrorist slumped and fell to the floor, leaving Cal frozen in place, covered with blood and brain matter.

“Cal, you okay?”

Crocker was aiming his gun at the man behind the sofa when a huge explosion went off behind the house, ripping through the back and sending debris and glass flying everywhere. He used his left arm and shoulder to shield his face. A piece of wood smacked into the Dragon Skin that covered his chest.

Crocker leaned against a cabinet to his right and caught his breath, then crossed to a big hole in the wall where the back window had been. “Wait here, Cal.”

The sofa lay in shreds, and the man who had been hiding behind it was legless now and choking on his blood and dying. A long shard of metal had severed his throat. Through the smoke and falling debris Crocker saw something burning beyond the lemon trees behind the house.

“What blew?” he asked into the handheld.

“The garage,” Akil reported. “The guy who ran out the back activated some kind of trigger before we could stop him.”

“You see anyone else flee the house?”

“Negative.”

“All our guys okay?”

“Anderson got some shit in his eye, a couple scratches. We’re good.”

“Search the back,” Crocker shouted. “See what you can find. Then we’d better clear out.”

Returning to the house, Crocker saw Ritchie and Mancini tie-tieing the man he had downed coming in the door. He was hyperventilating.

Crocker said, “Throw him in the truck, and help Cal. Tell Daw to stay with ’em. Then come back and help me look through this mess.”

“Roger.”

They gathered everything they could find—notebooks, laptops, thumb drives, maps, cell phones—threw them into plastic bags, and got the hell out of there, leaving behind four bodies and a burning garage. They had killed four suspected terrorists. A fifth lay on the floor in the backseat talking to himself in what sounded like Farsi.

Crocker said, “Slap some tape over his mouth. Shut him up.”

The rain had stopped and the sun was trying to burn through the low clouds. Behind them black smoke rose into the gray-blue sky.

This was exactly what Colonel Petsut had told them to avoid—an explosion and fire. But shit happened.

As they tore through the front gate and turned left, Crocker heard sirens approaching. He turned to Daw and shouted, “Get us back on the highway to Bangkok. Fast!” If nothing else, they had taken out the terrorists who had killed John Rinehart, his wife, and the other U.S. officials.





Chapter Seven


Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.