Black Squadron by Michael Stephen Fuchs

Author:Michael Stephen Fuchs [Fuchs, Michael Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Complete & Total Asskicking Books
Published: 2021-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Crusaders

Aleppo – ISIS Execution Chamber

In the dark, windowless, and medieval room, one of the masked and black-clad jihadis fiddles with a camcorder mounted on a tripod. At the same time, most of the others line up behind the seated and restrained Specialist Smith, standing in front of the black flag draped on the wall.

The only one of these men not yet masked is the one holding the machete. He is also the one in charge. He tests the edge of the blade with his thumb, finding it just sharp enough. Dull can be good. You don’t necessarily want a beheading to be too clean or quick.

This done, he squats down in front of the lolling figure in the chair and pulls the hood up over his head. He can now see Smith’s face is swollen and abraded, with dried blood from his nose on his upper lip, and blood from his lower lip staining his chin. The two young men stare at each other, inches apart.

Smith neither flinches nor looks away.

He’s so young, it nearly touches the jihadi’s black heart.

Finally, he makes a tsk tsk sound and shakes his head.

* * *

“What’s your insertion point?”

“Negative!” Kristoff shouts into his chin mic to the pilot, trying to be heard over the outrageous wind, rotor, and engine noise. “We’re flying straight to the X! Put us down on the rooftop!”

Both birds tilt forward and dive out of the sky, flatten out like aerodynamic principles don’t apply to them, and then just kiss the rooftop of a dingy three-story building, within a half-second of each other. The SEALs leap off and the birds rise up, spin around, and blast off again, all in one fluid motion, almost as if they were bouncing off the roof.

In the next ten seconds, two of the SEALs get a frame charge placed at their feet, step back, and blow it – and all six of them drop down through the dark hole, one after the other. Just like that, they’re gone.

Disappearing into the belly of the beast.

* * *

“You crusaders,” the jihadi boss says to Smith, speaking in lightly accented English, his face so close the young Ranger can smell the mint tea on his breath. “You have been killing Muslims for a thousand years.”

Smith holds his gaze, somehow still unafraid.

Much of his face stings, and his ribs ache and throb from where he took some good hard kicks, mostly when he was struggling to get away. Smith understands he’s been abducted. But he was never going to accept it, and he was never going to stop trying to fight back, any way he could.

Mainly, he feels ashamed he let himself get taken alive. It’s not even that it would have been so much better to go down fighting in the street, dying in a pile of his own brass, than to be killed like this, in this sordid dungeon, his death becoming a piece of jihadi propaganda.

Going out like a punk.

No, it’s that by getting taken hostage, he knows he’s become a burden to his team, and his whole chain of command.

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