“They’ve gone Elvis,” Murphy said, spitting a wad of tobacco juice into the wadi. “They’ve flat-out disappeared.”
Campbell sat on the hood of his Viper, fuming. He thought the Reaper had destroyed the mercs, but all his men found were the carcasses of the ISIS technicals, no Humvees. They must have disappeared down this dry riverbed, meaning they were either very lucky or very smart. He didn’t care for either, but he was leaning toward smart.
“Who is this guy anyway? He’s not like any arms dealer I’ve chased before,” Bunker said, flinging a stone into the wadi.
“This mission is officially a soup sandwich,” Black Jack said.
Campbell agreed, but couldn’t admit it in front of his men. Sinjar was a debacle, and now this. Inexcusable, especially since Mr. Winters had handpicked him for this important mission because Jase Campbell was a man who got shit done. That was the reputation he had built over fifteen years in the service, and he wasn’t about to forfeit it now.
“Sure as shit means the Agency will be on us now,” Black Jack said, as the wreckage of the second drone smoked in the distance.
“Those CIA weenies couldn’t find their own asses if both hands were holding their cheeks,” Murphy laughed. “Took ’em a decade to find Osama bin Laden.”
Campbell didn’t answer. The anaconda tattoo on his neck was pulsing. After a while, his silence began to unnerve his men, but Campbell wasn’t budging. Only he knew the true extent of this mission. This wasn’t just another manhunt. It was personal. It was Apollo cleaning up one of its own, before anyone else found out. An operative gone rogue, deceiving two other Tier One operatives into his delusion. They were all traitors now, as far as Campbell was concerned, and deserved their fate.
“Bring them in alive,” Winters had told him. “I need to debrief them. I don’t know what they’ve been doing out there, son, and ignorance is dangerous to us all.”
Campbell had heard the rumors floating around the Ranch, AO’s five-thousand-acre training base in Texas. He didn’t believe them. Hell, no one believed them. That a Tier One team leader went rogue, abandoning his mission in Ukraine, then sacrificed his team to cover his escape. And that he had done unspeakable things to the dead. We’re professional soldiers, Campbell thought, we don’t do that. It’s not the warrior’s way.
Back at the Ranch, they had joked about a rogue merc going “Kurtz,” like Brando in Apocalypse Now. He had laughed then, thinking how fun it would be to be Willard, going off to kill the madman.
But Jase Campbell wasn’t laughing now. That was a former American army officer, not just a mercenary, and that level of disloyalty was inexcusable. There was nothing more disgraceful than a U.S. soldier who turned savage. It was like wiping your ass with the American flag and everything it stood for. And Jase Campbell didn’t have any tolerance for that kind of shit. I guess that’s what you get, he thought, when you take the flag out of military ops.