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PROLOGUE
“What are we waiting on?”John “Griff” Griffin murmured as he held his position and waited for the go-ahead from the team lead.
“What’s your hurry?” Freddy “Mercury” Rodriguez answered. “Got a hot date back in the States?”
“Maybe,” Griff admitted.If she hasn’t already forgotten I exist, he thought.
“That black-haired, green-eyed beauty you met at McP’s?” Merc asked.
“Maybe,” Griff repeated. He didn’t like to own up to having a thing for anyone. Their lives belonged to the Navy. It was foolish to think he could maintain a relationship, much less start one, when they were at the beck and call of the military.
As highly trained Navy SEALs, their lives weren’t their own. Not as long as they stayed in the military.
He'd met her the last time his team had visited their favorite bar, McP’s, in San Diego. They’d been on three dates before his team had gotten called up for a mission. He hadn’t even had time to let her know he’d be gone or for how long. They never knew.
The longer they were away, the less likely she’d be around when he returned.
Trouble was…he liked this one. A lot.
“Let’s get this operation over with already,” Griff muttered.
“Hey, Griff, what’s it look like on point?” JJ Roberts’s voice sounded in Griff’s headset.
Griff studied their target, the building at the center of the little village in Syria. “Quiet. Nothing moving, not even the guard in front of the target building. I think he’s asleep.”
“I count two sentries on the main road leading into the village, leaning with their backs against a couple of homes,” JJ said.
“Got two on the other end of town, same situation. Leaning with their AK-47s slung across their bodies,” Derek Badger’s gravelly voice hummed in Griff’s ear.
Griff’s gut tightened. “Too easy,” Griff said softly.
Peter “Crack” Weissmuller chuckled. “Only easy day was yest—”
“Yeah. Yeah,” Fridge, their team leader, said. “Focus on the objective.”
They were there to extract a US citizen being held for ransom by ISIS – the Islamic State.
The Black Hawk helicopter had dropped them on the other side of a hill to avoid alerting ISIS to their imminent arrival. After a quick hike up and over the hill, they'd made their way to the village.
The team of eight Navy SEALs was tasked with extracting the citizen and getting him out of the country. Alive. If that meant taking out a handful of ISIS bastards, then so be it. Preferably with no civilian casualties, as always.
The ISIS abductors had purposefully chosen a quiet village full of civilians to surround them.
Wading through homes with women and children was like walking through a field of landmines. They had to make certain they didn’t set any off and create collateral damage that would be reported on Al Jazeera the next day with images of the bloody bodies of children to remind the natives why they should hate the US.
“Ready when you are, Griff,” Fridge said. “We’ve got your six.”
Griff glanced across at his sidekick, Merc, and nodded. While Griff provided cover, his teammate gave him a thumbs-up and took off toward the target building, rushing forward and hugging the shadows of the mud and brick homes. When he reached a house one building short of their destination, he stopped and waited for Griff to leapfrog to the corner across from him.
Griff glanced behind him.
Fridge and Marty Sorenson brought up their rear. Crack and William “Willy” Daniels moved in from the opposite direction while JJ and Badger covered the town entrance.
Armed with a submachine gun and a nine-millimeter Glock, Griff took out his KA-Bar knife and slipped silently up to the guard at the front entrance to the building.
The man, dressed in the black clothing of the ISIS rebels, let the strap on his Soviet-made PKM machine gun do the work of holding the weapon in front of him. He was so sleepy that he didn’t see Griff approach, nor did he have time to call out a warning to anyone inside or nearby.
Griff quietly dispatched the guard and dragged him into the shadows. He removed the bolt from the machine gun and slipped it into his pocket, rendering it ineffective. It would not be used against them that night.
