Read Online Direct Action - 03 by Jack Murphy - Free Book Online Page A

what his plan was. He was all out of choices. These were former Special Operations men like himself and so many others who served.
    It was his responsibility to clean up this mess. There was no need for him to justify this to himself, it justified itself. It was time to choose the hard right over the easy wrong. Finding the pickup truck in the corner of the compound, he threw open the door and went to work on the ignition.
    As he began to pry the ignition cylinder out with a piece of metal he found laying around, Deckard felt completely disgusted with what he had involved himself in. Even if they were terrorists, this wasn't how soldiers carried themselves. It wasn't just about disrespecting the enemy dead, more importantly, it was about the discipline and self-respect that the soldier had for himself. Once the rot of war crimes infected a military organization, it would spread throughout the unit like a plague and destroy everything that they had once stood for. They would be no different than Al Qaeda and the other human savages that they fought. At that point, the war was already lost.
    Just as he hotwired the truck, Deckard knew he would have to be slow and deliberate. He couldn't allow his emotions to control him like the Liquid Sky team. One slip up and he was a dead man. He needed to play along, maybe no matter how dark this road he was heading down got. When the time was right, at a place and time of his choosing, he would drop the hammer and be done with this.
    The pickup truck rumbled to life. Deckard got behind the wheel and worked the stick shift, driving out of the compound. Outside, the five other Liquid Sky operators piled into the truck, several sitting in the back. Bill got in the passenger seat and told Deckard he could flip on the headlights and white light it down the road. They just needed to make a quick exit from the target area before daylight and the risk of an ambush was fairly low. He gave him directions on where to go as they drove towards their extraction site. After driving for half an hour, the sun was starting to crest above the horizon.
    Bill ordered everyone out of the truck. Deckard put it in neutral and they pushed the vehicle into a creek bed where it rolled over on its side. At least it would be out of sight to any passersby. Then it was back up the mountain. They had done an off-set infil, first traveling by Trojan janga truck and then moving by foot to the objective to maintain the element of surprise and absolute secrecy prior to their assault. It was sound planning, but now they had to walk all the way back to the exfil site where their janga truck driver would pick them up along a different spot on the road.
    By the time they were halfway up the ridge, it was full daylight. The good thing was that they were far enough away from the road below and their objective that it was unlikely anyone would spot them. They could see the smattering of compounds below, but without optics, no one was going to see a few ants climbing the side of the mountain.
    By eight in the morning they again crested the ridge. Everyone was out of water. It was a short-duration mission with one specific task: hunting and killing with zero American involvement as far as anyone could prove. They took five up on top of the ridge, everyone having a seat on the rocks and admiring the view. Afghanistan was really the prettiest part of hell. It would have been a nice place to visit if not for the jihadist crazies. And the occasional rogue mercenary.
    Zach and Rick got into a blow-by-blow about who killed who and how it had all gone down.
    “They were Al Qaeda?” Deckard asked Ramon.
    “Naw man,” he answered. “Those were Karzai's guys.”
    “Huh?”
    “Yeah, they were tied into the President of Afghanistan. Running a huge drug-trafficking network for him. Completely untouchable by U.S. Special Operations for political reasons. That's why we got called in.”
    “Shit.”
    “No kidding. They let him get away with