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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.
He gave Merc a “follow me” sign. “Going in,” he whispered into his headset.
“Right behind you,” Merc said.
Griff pulled his night-vision goggles down over his eyes, pushed open the front door and entered, his machine gun with a silencer in place leading the way.
Merc followed.
Crack and Willy would bring up the rear, with Fridge and Marty covering the building from the outside.
One by one, they cleared each room, the soft sound of silenced gunfire barely making enough noise to rouse the ISIS soldiers from their sleep.
By the time they reached the locked door at the rear of the building, they’d dispatched nine ISIS rebels with no resistance.
The last door had a padlock on the outside of the door.
Griff slid his night-vision goggles up. Merc aimed the beam of his penlight at the lock while Griff pulled the bolt cutter from where it was strapped to his back and made quick work of the master lock on the hasp.
With the lock gone, the door swung open. Mercury shined his flashlight into the dark room.
The stench hit Griff first.
A man lay on the floor beaten, bloody, covered in excrement and so filthy Griff wasn't sure the man was Joe Franklin, the nephew of Senator George Franklin. Was this the American they’d been sent to rescue?
Griff bent over the man and rolled him onto his back. “What’s your name?”
The man groaned something unintelligible.
“Boys,” JJ’s voice sounded in Griff’s ear. “We’ve got company. Looks like a whole company of ISIS headed our way in a convoy of trucks.”
“Name!” Griff said more urgently.
The man forced sound through swollen lips. “Joe.”
“Good enough,” Merc said. “Get him out of here.”
“Wrap it, Griff,” Fridge said. “We have a date with a helo I don’t plan to miss.”
Griff bent, forcing back his gag reflex, grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
