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Maidan Wardak Province, Afghanistan

August 15, 2021

The CIA-contracted Mi-17V raced over the ridgeline, the pilot chomping hard on the stick of gum as he cleared the ridge and dove for the spiderweb of wadis-water channels, bone dry in the summer heat-that crisscrossed the valley floor. Like everyone else aboard the helicopter, he was all too aware of the valley's reputation as a Taliban stronghold, and with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan already underway, the last thing he wanted was to get shot down in Indian country.

The pilot had been desperate for a way out of this mission ever since they'd taken off from the CIA compound in Kabul, but with the target area rapidly approaching, he knew he was running out of time.

He was beginning to give up any hope of aborting when a quick look at the instrument panel showed both the oil pressure and the RPM gauges dangerously close to the red, a clear sign that he was pushing the aged Russian helo too hard. The prudent move would be to ease up, decrease the power, but instead, the pilot sensed the chance for a last-minute reprieve. He reached for the collective, wondering how much more throttle it would take before something on the aircraft finally failed.

He wouldn't get the chance to find out. As he began to increase power, a silver-haired man stepped into the cockpit from the helo's cargo bay, the lights of the instrument panel glinting off of the pistol in his hand.

***

Dominic Porter wasn’t a maintenance officer, but after ten years in the Navy SEALs and another decade as a CIA paramilitary officer, he’d logged more hours in the air than most pilots. From fresh off the assembly line UH-64 Black Hawks to the Eastern Bloc relics favored by third-world dictators, he’d spent enough time in darkened cargo holds to know the good sounds from the bad.

It had taken Porter about five seconds of listening to the high-pitched roar of the Mi-17's turbine to know that something was seriously fucked.

He was on his feet in an instant, his hand on the butt of his Glock 19 as he squeezed past the squad of heavily armed mercenaries packed in around him.

"What is it?" the team leader asked.

But Porter ignored him, not sure if he was being paranoid or if Ground Branch had stuck him with another spineless pilot. The moment he stepped into the cockpit, he could smell the pilot's fear over the caustic burn of aviation fuel and transmission fluid that permeated the cabin. Sweat streamed down the pilot's face as he white-knuckled the controls.

His eyes darted to the instrument panel, and the red-lined gauges he found there confirmed what he'd suspected since taking off from Kabul thirty minutes prior: the pilot was trying to sabotage the mission.

Fucking coward.

Before the pilot could register his presence, Porter drew his pistol and jammed the barrel hard into the man's neck, the cold press of steel against warm flesh sending the man stammering over the internal comms.

"Wh-what the hell-"

"Back it down," Porter told him. "Now."

The pilot stared at him, his pupils wide as eight balls.

"Back it down. Or you're a dead man."

But the man was vapor-locked, his mind flatlined by the 9-millimeter pressed to his throat.

Porter turned to the copilot, who'd to this point only watched, wordless, as the drama played out. "You've got the controls," Porter told him, and without waiting for the man's reply, turned back to the pilot, backhanding him across the face with the barrel of his Glock.

The pilot slumped forward, blood gushing from his flattened nose, and the helicopter dipped crazily toward the craggy outcroppings below, the terrain avoidance radar toning loud in the cockpit.

"Get him off the stick!" the copilot shouted.

Porter holstered the pistol and grabbed the unconscious pilot by the back of his flight suit and hauled him off of the controls. He pushed the man's limp body against the firewall, and expertly unhooked his harness. Once the copilot had regained control of the aircraft, Porter jerked the pilot from his seat.

Porter threw the man back into the cargo hold and motioned a thick-necked mercenary forward. "O'Malley, drop your gear and get in the pilot's seat," he ordered.

O'Malley frowned, confused by the order, but like every man in the mix of contract mercenaries and Afghan commandos in the cargo hold, he'd been handpicked by Porter for the mission at hand. Aware he was being paid handsomely to obey without a moment's hesitation, he dutifully dropped his kit and climbed into the right-hand seat.

"What the hell is this?" the copilot asked.

"An insurance policy," Porter replied.

"I don't understand."

"Just fly the fucking bird." Porter turned to O'Malley. "Make sure this man doesn't forget why we're here."

Then he was back in the cargo hold, pausing to snatch his HK416 and helmet from the nylon bench. He slung the rifle across the front of his blood-spattered plate carrier and strapped the helmet tight over his head, then moved to open the troop door. He held up his hand to the men around him, all five fingers extended. "Five minutes."

***

At forty-three, Porter had almost two decades on the men around him, but their cocky smiles and easy confidence as they stretched and double-checked their weapons and gear reminded him of when he’d first come to Kabul as a twenty-four-year-old Navy SEAL with bright eyes and an eagerness to make a difference.

"Loyalty to Country and Team" was the code he'd lived by, and that loyalty was the reason Porter and so many of his brothers had returned to Afghanistan, again and again. But somewhere during the twenty-year war, Porter had lost faith in the mission. He'd grown tired of risking his ass for a country and a people that at best didn't seem to want his help, and at worst tried every way it possibly could to kill him.

Osama bin Laden was dead. The lives of innocent Americans back home were no longer at stake here, not the way they'd been when Porter had first arrived in-country. Still, the war dragged on, and Porter could see no real benefit to it except to line the pockets of the weapons manufacturers back home who kept feeding the machine, sending young American lives to be slaughtered thousands of miles from their homes.

Somewhere along the way, Porter had grown sick of risking his life and getting nothing in return. He'd given twenty years to this godless place. He was damn sure going to walk away with something for his trouble.

"One minute," the copilot announced.

Porter raised his index finger and the men pushed themselves to their feet and shuffled toward the rear of the helo, past the door gunners hunched expectantly behind the pair of M134 miniguns mounted behind the cockpit.

Ordinarily, Porter would have preferred to land short of the target and close the distance on foot, using the cover of darkness and perhaps an orbiting AC-130 gunship or a CIA drone to mask their approach. But this little excursion was in no way a sanctioned hit, and Porter didn't have any air assets to protect his men. If something went wrong, this was going to have to be a down and dirty fight.

"Target building coming up," the copilot advised over the radio. "Looks like we've got a welcoming party out front."

"I see 'em," the door gunner said, spooling up the minigun.

"Light them up," Porter told him. Knowing that the Taliban fighters gathered below wouldn't be expecting the ambush-and that even if they were, there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do about it now.

The pilot brought the helo in low and fast, and Porter braced himself against the strut watching the first tracers come coiling up from the ground like a multicolored snake. In retaliation, the door gunner mashed down on his trigger and the minigun roared to life, flame spitting from its six rotating barrels. The gunner hosed the rooftop, the two-hundred-round burst of 7.62x51mm bullets from the minigun cutting through the fighters like a flail, sending a cloud of torn flesh and bone drifting down to the street below.

The gunner relaxed the trigger. "All clear."

A second later, the pilot pulled back on the stick and the helo flared like a stallion, the downdraft from the rotors sending a wall of dust and debris tumbling over the collection of mud-brick buildings and terraced gardens built into the side of the mountain.

Porter leapt from the helicopter the moment the rear wheel touched the earth, the impact of his boots against the hard dirt sending a lightning bolt of pain through his knees. The sudden surge of pain might have sent another man to the ground, but Porter's adrenaline was pumping, and he made himself ignore it.

He hooked right and brought his rifle up to his shoulder, the exhaust from the turbine hot as a blowtorch on the back of his neck. He held his breath and started toward the target building just as a man stepped out of the alley with an AK-47.

The fighter lifted the rifle at Porter, but before he could fire, Porter was already on the trigger of his HK. He fired twice, the pair of Black Hills 77-gram hollow points punching through the other man's sternum at 2,700 feet per second.

The impact rocked the fighter back on his heels, the clatter of the rifle to the ground muted by the roar of the Mi-17 lifting skyward.

Porter held security on the alley and waited for his team to catch up, studying the target building out of the corner of his eyes. Compared to the rest of the village, the aluminum façade of the target looked like something from another planet.

But Porter had seen enough of the modular buildings being unloaded from the backs of C-17s to know...