Choke Point

ONE

You cannot apply to become a Ghost.

They find you …

And find him they had, recruited him right out of the Navy SEALs so he could wind up here, in South America, on a search and rescue mission for a CIA operations officer abducted only hours ago by Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, more concisely known as FARC.

During the past year, this revolutionary group had violated their cease-fire agreement with the government. They were back to drug smuggling, acts of terrorism, and kidnapping, which was why former Command Master Chief, now Captain, Andrew Ross was crouched beneath a thick canopy of palm fronds, about to order his Ghost team to attack –

When a gunshot cracked to the east. Remington MSR. Sniper rifle. Fired by one of the AFEUR guys.

The Agrupación de Fuerzas Especiales Antiterroristas Urbanas was the Colombian Army’s special forces group that had first responded to the abduction. They had twelve operators working with Ross’s four-man squad, and one of those boys had just blown their ambush.

‘Pepper, SITREP!’ Ross cried into the boom mike at his lips.

‘Hey, it wasn’t me,’ answered Master Sergeant Robert ‘Pepper’ Bonifacio.

‘He’s in your zone. You got eyes on him?’

‘Negative!’

The sniper rifle boomed once more, echoing across the valley and sending chills ripping up Ross’s spine.

‘Ghost Lead, this is Kozak. I got the drone on our sniper. He fired in reflex ’cause he’s dead. They cut his throat.’

Ross lifted his voice: ‘All right, Pepper? 30K? We’re moving in. Kozak, you hold back with the drone. Let’s go!’

As he sprang to his feet, Ross switched to the command net and spoke in Spanish to his counterpart, an AFEUR captain named Jiménez. ‘One of your snipers is dead. We need a squad in there to take out those troops on the west side.’

‘Roger, Captain. I’ll send them now.’

The FARC outpost where the CIA officer was being held lay on Colombia’s southwest coast, between the ramshackle villages of San Antonio, Las Juntas, and Aguaclara, all captured like insects within the web of Valle del Cauca’s mountainous jungle and the coca fields hidden within.

A storm system had just passed through, and the jungle’s hot breath rose and hissed from the damp earth as Ross sprinted toward the collection of tin-roofed shacks and lean-tos, partially obscured by enormous fronds. The stench of mold, rotting wood and gasoline grew thicker as he rounded the next knot of trees then hunkered down just twenty meters away from the clearing. Ahead lay five mud-covered jeeps, along with three flatbed trucks probably manufactured in the 1960s, an automotive graveyard if you didn’t know better.

Automatic weapons fire flashed and resounded from behind those trucks, drawing a string of short-circuiting wires in the late-afternoon gloom. Ross reached into his web gear, reared back and let fly a sensor grenade.

Once the grenade hit the ground behind the vehicles, the exact positions of the hostiles appeared in his Cross-Com’s heads-up display, targets marked by flashing red outlines of the figures, with data automatically sent to the other Ghosts, their own combination monocle-earpiece and microphones allowing them to mark the targets, hear his reports, and respond in kind. What’s more, the Cross-Coms weren’t the only technological trick up their sleeves. The team’s initial recon of the outpost had been conducted by Staff Sergeant John Dimitri Kozak, the youngest operator and self-professed technophile who loved commanding their Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). More sophisticated than its predecessor, the Cypher drone, this new UAV’s quad rotors rotated downward and turned into wheels so it could land and rumble along for an even quieter and stealthier approach on targets.

At the moment, though, Kozak had the drone in the air for overwatch, and his voice cut through the team net, burred with anxiety: ‘No movement from within the shacks. Something’s wrong. They’re not moving the package.’

Before Ross could comment on that, the AFEUR men, along with Pepper and 30K, returned fire on the rebels behind the vehicles, the barrage of rounds thumping and ricocheting off the jeeps, windows shattering and tires whooshing flat. The AFEUR troops were fielding TAR-21 Israeli bullpup rifles using standard 5.56mm NATO rounds. That distinctive thunder stood in sharp juxtaposition with the FARC rebels’ Chinese-made AK-47s that popped in reply.

Noting the hostiles IDed by the sensor grenade, Ross peered out from behind the trees, and the images of his teammates now shimmered in his HUD, green outlines superimposed over the surrounding jungle, along with blue outlines representing the Colombian SF squads.

Well, Major Scott Mitchell had been right. This sure as hell was an ‘interesting’ first mission for Ross, who’d just gone through the selection and qualification phases of becoming a Ghost, even after surviving the rigors of a career in the SEALs, beginning with preindoctrination and the infamous Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S).

Ross recalled the welcome letter from Mitchell, the explanation of how the D Company, First Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group had been deactivated, with the Ghosts reassigned to the newly formed Group for Specialized Tactics (GST) and Mitchell promoted to serve as its commanding officer. There’d been some mention of a Joint Strike Force that would one day comprise all branches of the service, with test operations beginning at the unit level, mostly notably within the GST. In fact, Ross was one of the first non-Army operators to become a Ghost, and it was with some trepidation that he took on the role of a Ghost Lead to command three members from the US Army’s Special Forces. In the field it was all business, but during downtime, well, he feared their interservice rivalry would reach new heights. So far everyone had been cool, utterly professional, but he was waiting for the bomb to drop and for the team to give him a nickname that he would hate more than terrorists, reality TV, and Cupcake, his ex-wife’s ferocious white Chihuahua.

‘I’m moving up,’ he announced. ‘Cover me now!’ With that, he sprang from the mushy ground, weaving a serpentine path along the perimeter, elbowing past vines and ducking beneath low-hanging branches with raindrops threatening to fall from them like hot wax dripping from a candle. He was drenched in sweat now, his mouth salty, his eyes burning. He ignored his pulse ringing in his ears and was all about the course ahead, cutting, weaving again, sidestepping, and bounding over two fallen logs whose bark was flaking off like sunburn. His boots made sucking noises in the mud, and for a moment his vision blurred and returned as he blinked away more sweat and crossed beneath a stand of wax palms.

He broke from there to a small clearing and the nearest shack, where three of the FARC rebels had assumed defensive positions beside a wall that resembled a quilt of cannibalized sheet metal with fading soda company logos.

One of the rebels glanced back.

Ross lifted his HK416 assault rifle, the same one he carried as a member of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, also known as DEVGRU. Like the AFEUR team’s rifles, his thirty-round magazine was loaded with 5.56mm NATO rounds, and he was about to express deliver some flaming hot lead to these rebels –

When Kozak’s voice buzzed through his earpiece: ‘Ghost Lead! Get down! Got three behind you!’

Ross hit the deck. Craned his neck.

And his HUD lit up like the Vegas strip.