The Gray Man

PROLOGUE

A flash of light in the distant morning sky captured the attention of the Land Rover’s blood-soaked driver. Polarized Oakleys shielded his eyes from the brunt of the sun’s rays; still, he squinted through his windshield’s glare, desperate to identify the burning aircraft that now spun and hurtled towards earth, a smoldering comet’s tail of black smoke left hanging above it.

It was a helicopter, a large Army Chinook, and horrific though the situation must have been for those on board, the driver of the Land Rover breathed a subdued sigh of relief. His extraction transport was to be a Russian-built KA-32T, crewed by Polish mercenaries and flown in from over the border in Turkey. The driver found the dying Chinook regrettable but preferable to a dying KA-32T.

He watched the chopper spin in its uncontrolled descent, staining the blue sky directly in front of him with burning fuel.

He turned the Land Rover hard to the right and accelerated eastward. The blood-soaked driver wanted to get as far away from here as fast as possible. As much as he wished there was something he could do for the Americans on board the Chinook, he knew their fate was out of his hands.

And he had his own problems. For five hours he’d raced across the flatlands of western Iraq, fleeing the dirty work he’d left behind, and now he was less than twenty minutes from his exfiltration. A shot-down chopper meant that in minutes this place would be crawling with armed fighters, defiling bodies, shooting assault rifles into the air, and jumping around like fucking morons.

It was a party the bloodstained driver would not mind missing, lest he himself become a party favor.

The Chinook sank off to his left and disappeared behind a brown ridge in the distance.

The driver fixed his eyes on the road ahead. Not my problem, he told himself. He was not trained to search and to rescue, he was not trained to give aid, and he certainly was not trained to negotiate for hostages.

He was trained to kill. He’d done so back over the border in Syria, and now it was time to get out of the kill zone.

As his Rover accelerated through the haze and dust at over one hundred kilometers an hour, he began a dialogue with himself. His inner voice wanted to turn back, to race to the Chinook’s crash site to check for survivors. His outer voice, on the other hand, was more pragmatic.

“Keep moving, Gentry, just keep moving. Those dudes are fucked. Nothing you can do about it.”

Gentry’s spoken words were sensible, but his inner monologue just would not shut up.