Mike Maden: Drone Threat

Tariq handed him back the tablet. Pearce resized the image.

“Shit!” Pearce tapped his earpiece. “Ian, we’ve got Deltas coming in hot.”

A speeding convoy of trucks was racing toward the women.

“I see them,” Ian said. “But—”

“No time to talk!” Pearce shouted at the others. “Saddle up!”

Luckett and Rowley leaped into their pickup as Tariq barked orders in Kurdish. He hardly needed to. Truck engines fired up and machine guns were racked.

“You’ve got company!” Ian shouted.

Pearce was already in the bed of his truck and pounding the roof to take off when the roaring whomp-whomp-whomp of helicopter blades came thundering over the hill behind them. The sound was deafening as two T-70 Black Hawks swept overhead. One hovered directly above them and poured a blinding searchlight on the convoy. Grit and dust from the rotor wash stung Pearce’s face. The other chopper dropped thirty yards on the Iraqi side of the border, blocking the way forward with its heavily armed fuselage and another blinding searchlight.

“Stay or go?” Luckett shouted in Pearce’s earpiece. Tariq’s anxious eyes asked the same thing.

Pearce checked his tablet. The ISIS convoy was less than a mile from the women, who hadn’t changed course or speed. They clearly didn’t know that they were being hunted. It was now or never but—

The other chopper landed just a few yards behind them, the blades dangerously close. A squad of Turkish special forces leaped to the ground and charged toward them, weapons forward, shouting. Pearce’s instinct was to turn the machine gun around and open up but his mind checked his gut — they’d be cut to pieces in a flash.

The Turks surrounded the trucks just as a middle-aged American woman in civilian clothes and a Kevlar vest jogged up. Her name was Hyssop, the embassy trade attaché. The slowing rotor wash fanned her short, thinning hair.

“What the hell is going on, Pearce?” Hyssop demanded. “I didn’t authorize any of this!”

“I don’t have time to explain. Call your dogs off and let us through—”

“Not going to happen! You’re supposed to be on a trade mission, not an armed incursion!”

“We’ve got lives on the line out there!” Pearce said. “You’ve got to let us go. Now!”

The Turkish army commander, a captain, shouted orders to his men. They raised their weapons to fire.

“Troy! The women!” Ian’s Scottish brogue shouted in Pearce’s ear.

Hyssop grabbed Pearce’s sleeve. “These guys aren’t screwing around. Stand down now and I can still get you out of this—”

A truck engine gunned. Tariq’s pickup leaped forward, scattering the two Turkish soldiers standing in front of it. Before the others could open fire, the captain shouted another order and the squad lowered its weapons.

“Tariq!” Pearce screamed.

Pearce watched as Tariq’s pickup made a suicidal charge straight at the other helicopter. The chopper lifted off before the truck reached it but as soon as it passed underneath, the Black Hawk’s door gunner opened up with a salvo from its Vulcan machine gun, shredding the Toyota’s thin steel and erupting the gas tank in a fiery explosion.

The Turks gathered around Pearce’s vehicle howled with laughter.

Pearce shouted as he swung his size-fourteen combat boot. It cracked into the braying face of the soldier standing closest to him with a sickening thud. Pearce leaped down and crashed into the next Turk, driving the surprised trooper into the ground. Pearce lifted a fist to smash the second soldier’s face when a pistol exploded just behind his head. Pearce’s ears rang with the shot as red-hot ice picks stabbed his eardrums.

Pearce’s fist froze in midair. He turned around. The captain’s pistol was six inches from his face.

“Pearce, you asshole!” Hyssop sped over to him, throwing herself between him and the captain as she hauled Pearce up to his feet.

The Turkish soldiers manhandled the Kurds, seizing their weapons and cuffing them with PlastiCuffs. Two more soldiers dragged Luckett and Rowley out of their truck and hauled them roughly over to Pearce.

“You are in violation of Turkish law and Turkish national sovereignty. I have every legal right to execute the three of you right here as foreign invaders,” the captain said. He glanced with disgust at his two fallen men, one still clutching his broken jaw and moaning through bloody fingers. “And for assaulting my men.”

“Give me ten more minutes and I’ll finish the job,” Pearce said.

The captain held out a gloved hand. “Your comms.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear a word you’re saying—”

The captain’s face hardened as he raised his pistol again.

“Idiot!” Hyssop snatched the earpiece out of Pearce’s ear and tossed it to the captain. He pocketed it, then pulled out a pair of PlastiCuffs.

“Just try,” Pearce said.

“Pearce, it’s not just your ass on the line. You’re about to make this into an international incident. There’s a lot more in the wind than you’re aware of here.”

“Those shit bags just killed my friend—”

She got in his face. “And a lot more people will die if you don’t shut this down right now.”

Pearce glanced at Luckett and Rowley. The Turks were cuffing them behind their backs. But the ex-Rangers were still dangerous men, even tied up.

Luckett read Pearce’s mind. He grinned.

“You call it, boss. We’re with you all the way.”

It would be a stupid move, Pearce decided. Gotta get back to the plane. He held out his wrists. The captain zipped the cuffs tight, then yanked the tablet out of Pearce’s pants pocket and the pistol out of its holster.

“Let’s get out of here. Now,” Hyssop said, pulling him toward the first chopper.

“What about them?” Pearce nodded in the direction of the Kurds already being marched toward the other chopper.

“That’s none of your affair,” the captain said. He barked an order to the sergeant standing nearby, who signaled two others. The three armed Turks prodded the four Americans back toward the first helicopter.

A minute later, Pearce, Hyssop, Luckett, and Rowley were airborne. Pearce watched the Kurds get thrown into the other Black Hawk, their hands bound behind their backs. Pearce knew the bloody history between the genocidal Turks and the hapless Kurds. He assumed the Turks would toss them out of the chopper like sacks of garbage as soon as they reached altitude.

Maybe the four of them, too.

As they pulled away, Pearce’s eyes fixed on Tariq’s truck down below, still burning in the dark. He swore.

Jesus, what a goat fuck.

As soon as they were airborne, the Turk captain opened up Pearce’s tablet. He pressed buttons until an image pulled up. He stared at it. A feral grin spread across his face in the red cabin light. He turned the tablet around and held it close to Pearce’s face.

Pearce’s heart sank. The ISIS trucks and men were on the women like a pack of wolves. But instead of rounding them up, they were killing them. A half dozen bodies already lay scattered on the ground as the rest fell in a dead run, one by one.

The captain’s grin grew wider.

Pearce grunted with rage and launched at the captain, aiming his skull at the Turk’s jaw. But the captain saw it coming and clocked Pearce across his ear with the butt of his pistol and Pearce crumbled to the steel floor, knocked out cold.

Pearce awoke when Luckett dropped him into the plush leather seat. His head throbbed with a splitting headache, and his eyes blinked in the harsh cabin lights of the Bombardier 5000.

“He’s back with us,” Luckett said over his shoulder, a worried look on his unshaven face. The turbines whined as the engine power increased.