SEAL Team Six Hunt the Falcon(96)

The angry voices of men shouting in Farsi echoed from below. Out of breath and eyes watering, he hurried down. When he reached the landing and turned left, he saw another flight of steps, and past them Alizadeh and a soldier resting in the corner next to the door to floor two. Alizadeh’s foot was bleeding. The soldier was bent over him. Looking up and seeing Crocker, he reached for the weapon slung across his chest.

Crocker launched himself, firing the MPT-9 at the same time. Bullets tore into the soldier’s torso, but still he managed to squeeze off a few shots. One struck Crocker in the right forearm, causing him to land awkwardly on the second step from the second-floor landing, twist his right ankle, and crash into the soldier, whose body helped break his fall.

As he struggled to get his bearings, he felt something slice into the skin on his right shoulder. His eyes coming into focus, he saw the triumphant look on Alizadeh’s face, eyes glowing with hatred and the shining silver Swiss military watch on his wrist—the same one he’d seen in the underground prison in Barinas.

“Crocker?” the Iranian spat out as he pulled the knife out of Crocker’s shoulder and got ready to thrust the blood-covered blade into his heart.

“Yeah. Fuck you,” Crocker hissed, twisting his body to the right and pounding Alizadeh in the neck with his left elbow. He spun back and smacked the stunned Iranian in the arm hard enough to dislodge the knife, which hit the metal door with a clang.

Crocker heard men shouting from below. Their footsteps grew closer.

Alizadeh groaned and reached for the knife with short hairy fingers. Crocker grabbed the thick black-and-silver hair at the back of his head and, despite the intense pain in his forearm, smashed the Iranian’s face into the wall, shattering his nose and sending blood spraying against the wall and door.

The footsteps came closer. Crocker wanted to see his rival’s bloody face one last time. He spun him around, trapped Alizadeh’s head between his knees, and growled, “This is for all the other people you’ve hurt, you son of a bitch!” Then he pulled Alizadeh’s head forward and twisted it sharply until his spine cracked and the hatred drained out of his eyes.

On impulse, he took Alizadeh’s watch and stuffed it in his pocket as the soldiers drew closer. He saw the tips of their boots on the landing below, and for a second he thought his time was up.

But then a stubborn burst of energy lifted him to his feet and helped him limp out the door to the second floor. His body moved on automatic to the back corner office, where he kicked out the window glass, jumped down onto the hood of a parked car, and rolled off.

Crocker pulled himself to his knees and took a deep breath as the gentle raindrops cooled his face. Remembering Rahman’s promise, he limped around the back of the movie theater, where the green garbage truck was just pulling out. Rahman at the wheel saw him and stopped long enough for Crocker to grab hold of the ladder on the side of the hopper with his left hand. That’s when the exhaustion and the loss of blood overcame him. The last thing he remembered was hitting the mess of papers and trash inside and seeing Ritchie’s surprised face.





Chapter Twenty-Three


Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.

—Will Rogers



He was sitting with his back against a metal shipping container, listening to Mancini explain how he had paid Rahman a thousand dollars for the old van they had driven from the garbage dump to the scrap metal yard where they were now, and how it was the sweetest thousand he had ever spent.

Someone had applied a blowout patch to Crocker’s forearm, bandaged the wound near his shoulder, wrapped his ankle, and given him some painkillers. His body felt numb. The sky above his head was deep black. A steady, cool rain fell.

He watched Akil fifty feet away using gasoline and a lighter to set a pile of wooden loading pallets on fire. He was about to scream at him to stop when he heard a roar in the sky.

Thunder? No. A Blackhawk helicopter with its lights out.

Ritchie and another man helped him in the door. And as the bird lifted off, he felt his heart ease in his chest.

“We’re going home,” Akil said.

Ritchie: “We did it, man. We did it.”

Mancini: “Fuck, yeah. Now what’s for dinner?”



By the time the SEALs landed at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach twenty-three hours later, Crocker was running a 102-degree fever. He was transported to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where doctors cleaned the infected wound near his shoulder and shot him up with painkillers and antibiotics.

When he woke the next morning, the first things he saw, like a beautiful dream, were the faces of Holly and Jenny. He blinked and looked again to make sure he wasn’t imagining them, then realized the constriction he felt from the tubes in his arms and the machines he was hooked up to was real. So were the shouts of surprise from Jenny, the kisses, the joy on their faces, and the relief in Holly’s eyes.