Two hundred fifty kilometers away, Jase Campbell stepped onto the tarmac, the props of the Airbus military transport plane lashing his desert fatigues. The land was flat and dusty, but he could see the black outline of distant mountains against the deep purple of the midmorning sky. Iraq. It had been four years. God, he’d missed it.
“Get those Sand Vipers off the bird,” he shouted over the prop wash to the three mercs standing on the rear loading ramp. “Square that shit away,” he yelled to Black Jack Burns, his lead sniper, who was fiddling with a tie-down. “Get a move on!”
The Erbil airport terminal was a few hundred meters away, bright white against the black sky. It was sleek and modern, one of the nicest buildings he’d seen in Iraq, but he wasn’t going there. He was headed in the other direction. Into the Jazira.
“Let’s go, go, go!” he shouted, because if he didn’t shout over the sound of the plane, no one would hear him. “I want to be in those mountains before first light.”
Campbell had a nine-man team, all Tier One, all outfitted to destroy. Their equipment was next-generation, beyond anything U.S. Special Operations Command possessed. The three strike vehicles, currently being unchained by the plane’s loadmaster, were kitted out with a mini Gatling gun turret, reactive armor, Stinger missiles, antitank rockets, and enough demolitions to carve a new face on Mount Rushmore. They even had a recon drone. The vehicles would never pass unnoticed on the open road, but Jase Campbell had no interest in staying low profile. And he had no interest in shooting through his supplies. If this job took a week, he would consider himself a failure. And Jase Campbell never failed.
He had been in this region before, starting in 2004 in Tal Afar, when he had taken part in Operation Black Typhoon as part of a U.S. Army Stryker Brigade. He returned to Tal Afar in 2005 for Operation Restoring Rights, sweeping out al Qaeda as a paratrooper in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. After that, he “hopped the fence” and joined the Combat Applications Group, also known as Delta Force. His next tour in Iraq was at Balad Air Base, seventy-five kilometers northeast of Baghdad, where he was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, or simply “the Task Force.” It was America’s hunter-killer machine, and he was at the pointy edge of its spear. When the war ended, JSOC changed. Campbell went home, got a job, hated it, missed the action. One of his buddies from the Task Force recruited him to “the dark side,” as the old soldiers called it—private contract work. The pay was good. Very good. So were the missions.
God damn, it’s good to be back, Campbell thought.
“Ready,” Luke Murphy yelled over the prop blast, sliding up beside him. Murphy had also served in the Task Force, one of three he’d recruited to work with him when he went private sector. Murphy knew this country like the back of his ass: by feel, if not necessarily by sight.
“Then get a move on,” Campbell yelled. The Vipers’ honeycomb wheels spun and vehicles leapt out of the plane and onto the tarmac, lined up and ready to prowl. If a Humvee, a Porsche, and a tank had an orgy, it would produce a Sand Viper. They were quicker than a Hummer, more maneuverable than a tank, and could take a hit in battle. They were the opposite of the armed dune buggies U.S. SpecOps favored, which had zero armor protection. Campbell always felt like he was riding around in an eggshell in those things; they were only good for running the wrong way rather than closing with the enemy. The Vipers could eat a dune buggy and shit it into the dirt.
God damn, it’s good to be back, Campbell thought again, as the Vipers lined up. The aircraft’s rear ramp retracted, and he returned the crew chief’s thumbs-up. The pilots throttled the engines, and Campbell saluted as the bird rolled down the runway and into the sky.
“Adios, dipshits,” he said, swapping his salute for the middle finger. In Vietnam, the soldiers loved their combat pilots, because combat pilots landed in enemy fire to save their asses. For mercs, the pilots were nothing more than bus drivers. They took the men close to where they needed to go, then got the hell out.
Campbell watched the plane disappear, its silhouette fading into the dawn sky as he removed his ear plugs. The air felt heavy after standing inside a sonic event, but damn if it didn’t feel good. This place, Iraq, had forged a generation of warriors, for good and for bad. It was their place: the professional members of the gladiatorial class, millennial generation. Whether that was a moral thing or not, Jase Campbell didn’t much care. He wasn’t a politician or a philosopher. He just came to kick ass until there was no more ass to kick.
He took out his satellite phone as he hopped into the lead vehicle and dialed the Apollo Outcomes tactical operations center outside Washington, DC. His mission officer, Rodriguez, picked up.
“We’re here,” Campbell confirmed. He waited. He nodded. “Got it.”
“Move out,” he called to his team, drawing circles in the air with his right hand, and then pointing forward like he was chopping air.
Twelve minutes after hitting the ground in Erbil, they were gone.