Firepower by John Cutter (ebook reader online .txt) 📕

and Somalia. There was a 9mm Glock, fully loaded, with extra clip. He’d already put on the chest armor: JPCs; a Jumpable Plate Carrier vest. There was a set of shortwave-infrared night-vision goggles.

The rifle, however, had no suppressor, nor did the Glock. There was no infrared sighting on the FN-SCAR either.

The loadout was in an unzipped, padded nylon bag on the deck beside him. The bag was not something he would normally carry into combat. It would tear too easily.

He looked down at the bag again and said, “Mac — no sound suppressors? They’re not that hard to get. Easier than the rifle.”

Colls gave him a look of cold hostility and shrugged.

“That your idea, to leave off the suppressors?” Vince asked, in a genial tone — though loud enough to be heard over the rumbling engines.

But there was nothing genial about the question.

Colls scowled. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying it looks like you’d like me to get spotted and KIA on this mission. Or pulled in by the Georgia cops.”

“You don’t question your gear,” Colls growled. “And you don’t question me. We have rank in the Brethren. We have chain of command. You’re a newbie, a private and not even First Class.”

Vince bit his tongue to keep from saying You wouldn’t know what good military order is if it bit you in the ass. Neither would “the General”.

He had the skinny from Deirdre about Mac Colls getting a dishonorable discharge from the Marines for white supremacy activity and other misdeeds. The guy was a blot on the escutcheon of the US Armed Forces.

But he only nodded and said, “Sure thing, Sarge.” Vince looked at his watch. “We should be approaching infil.”

“Twenty minutes,” Colls said.

Vince removed his seat belt and reached down into the bag, drew out a black balaclava face mask. He pulled it over his head. He preferred face and hands blacking but they hadn’t given him any. He pulled on the tight-fitting black gloves — he had no desire to leave fingerprints and his hands needed darkening. He hung the SWIR NVD goggles around his neck on a strap. His combat knife was in its steel sheath on his hip. He buckled on the ammo belt, with its clips and the two flashbangs, and then holstered the Glock. Then he picked up the rifle and slung it over a shoulder and went to stand by the door, one hand gripping a stanchion, boots braced.

He felt a certain comfort in the routine.

Marco reduced altitude till they were just over the treetops and switched off all the heli’s lights. It was now flying illegally, unlit and in an unauthorized airspace. Since it was a civilian helicopter, there were big numbers painted on the fuselage. If they weren’t false markings, then it was taking a chance to fly into a kill-space with those numbers. Someone could spot them and write them down if the moon was bright enough. If he’d been running the mission, he’d have blocked them off somehow — maybe stopped along the way to do it.

“Two minutes out from the LZ,” Marco called.

The mission folder — which would shortly be destroyed — had designated a plowed-under tobacco field for the landing zone. It was a quarter mile from the farmhouse the field was associated with, screened by a windbreak, and it was almost half a mile from the target. He had a compass on his watch, but he didn’t need to look at it. The plan was for the heli to wait on the field, engines and lights shut down. Zipped into a pants pocket, Vince had a burner cell phone he’d been given for the mission, in case the H225 had to take off and a Plan B was needed.

The deck tilted; the big twin engines changed their tone to something lower as the heli dropped. A gut-plunging feeling — and then a double thump, fore and aft.

Colls was up, hitting a switch, and the big steel door hummed aside.

“Hit the ground,” Colls said. “Twenty degrees northwest, gravel road, straight up the hill. You’ve got four hours max. Make it less. Now get moving.”

“Yeah, good luck to you too,” Vince said. He jumped down, boots sinking a little in the turned soil. The engines shut off, whining down to silence, the rotors slowing, chuff-chuffing to a stop, as Vince took the FN-SCAR in his hands and started across the plowed field.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Vince didn’t expect to use the rifle. It was mostly in the way, for a job like this. But it was easier to run with it in his hands.

If he had to fire the FN-SCAR or the Glock, the shot would give away the game. Which might be okay and might not. He still didn’t know how many men were up there — they might hear a shot and rush him from all directions. Too bad Colls hadn’t given him a chance to choose his own armament. He’d have asked for a crossbow.

He slogged out of the field, climbed over a barbed-wire fence — easy if you have climbed over a few hundred of them before — and moved up through an overgrown apple orchard. The trees were silhouettes now, barely lit in the filtered moonlight. The air had the spicy smell of decaying apples.

Vince passed through the orchard and reached a steeper part of the hill. He climbed, soon coming to thick brush, and angled right, stopping now and then to listen for voices or footfalls. He heard nothing but an owl hooting and the breeze rustling the trees.

Fifty yards more, and he came to the gravel road wending up the hill. He’d be too exposed on the road; he’d move alongside it in the brush. Flanking the road were stands of hornbeam and turkey oak, and the occasional pine, all crowded by scrubby beargrass, witch