CHAPTER 1
South Carolina
H Canyon, Savannah River Nuclear Reprocessing Facility
There is a moment of silence that exists when you are about to kill a man. Drake Woolf didn't experience that quiet or the whisper of silent judgment before dealing death. In fact, he heard three distinct competing voices, and that sound was deafening in his mind. It was a trifecta of agitating inquiries and orders assaulting his consciousness as the creeping Iraqi target entered his scoped night vision view.
Among the voices, Drake's tongue clicked three times, a tic that had followed him since early childhood. Often the muted sound was a subconscious signal that his body was switching to full operational autopilot like a virtual private network tunnel shielding itself from every unwanted viral thought assaulting his connection. Depending on the situation, it could be in an isolated triad or could continue in a sequential pattern until he could control his wits.
Woolf's Armalite .300 Winchester Magnum rifle rested securely atop a Leatherback bulletproof rucksack. He pulled the buttstock tighter to his shoulder, feeling the stiffness in his body from the latest of battle wounds that had decimated his flesh. Drake willed his body to stay motionless despite the discomfort. The ground was hard; the air was East Coast–heavy but still.
He focused on the distance, target movement, his non-optimal elevation, and the fact that his head was a circus show of sounds that he rucked in his fractured mind. Focus be damned, he had trigger-time work to do and difficult conditions weren't an impediment.
His obsessive-compulsive disorder required him to recheck his range — yet again — and while he was going over the ballistic data in his head, his concentration was shattered by the newest surge of voices.
"Do you have a shot?" squawked Sean Havens, the team leader of Task Force Orange, hoping for a positive sitrep as they prepared to take out the last of the Iraqi Special Operations assaulters that had been wreaking havoc on America for the past weeks.
"Roger. I've got the shot," a chill Drake confirmed, his boss's voice resonating through an encrypted bone-conduction headset.
Kill him, Drake, ordered the neuropsychic voice that medicine still failed to subdue in Drake Woolf's diseased brain. Kill them before they get away. Don't screw it up. You screw everything up.
All of you shut the fuck up, Drake's inner voice of reason cursed as he fought to maintain target viability and presence of mind.
He filled his lungs and pushed the voices, both real and imagined, to the far corners of consciousness. Then, Drake slowly released his breath and eased his heart rate to rebalance mental equilibrium from the cognitive overload that was his minute-by-minute nightmare every damned moment of the day.
The Iraqi, an Iranian-run surrogate exported from Mosul, headed toward the ten-foot razor-wire-topped fence, came back into Drake's scoped view, the reticle moving in time with his heart.
Woolf steadied his eager anticipation of the kill shot.
Not yet. Wait.
Do it. Kill him now. You may need to take a second shot when you miss.
You're going to miss, the head voice taunted in the echo chamber of opinions.
Never. Drake pressed the trigger. The round was sent.
A metal mechanism clink, a subdued subsonic pop, and a dissipated flash of light emitted from the Holy Trinity of discreet ops pipe hitting: the rifle, its sound suppressor, and flash hide.
The Iraqi Special Operations Forces, or ISOF, soldier tumbled forward like a stack of toy blocks, followed by a full face-plant before reaching the fence line.
Drake chambered another round and trained the rifle on the next scampering man, a blur in his view, but Woolf knew the Iraqi was headed in only one direction — in retreat from the dead body that just flopped to the ground.
Drake pressed again.
The second man fell to eat the earth in a heavy thump.
A third ISOF assaulter, also a long way from home, was in full sprint desperate to flee from his falling comrades.
Drake delivered his final judgment in the form of 180 grains of metal a couple hundred yards out.
The Iraqi operator had to have known how this would go down, and such was likely his last thought before all streams of consciousness evaporated like the exploding pink mist from his bullet-ruptured head.
"All secure," Drake announced to his team. Woolf scanned the fallen bodies again for good measure.
Shit. The second Iraqi was fumbling with his chest. Woolf suspected he had popped the man's chest cavity but perhaps spared the heart. The Iraqi was a goner, but why let Murphy's Law have a say in the final verdict. Last thing they needed was a man screaming like a dying rabbit in the quiet of the night.
Drake's weapon coughed out a final message in the international language of assaulters: "You're dead, shithead. Stay down."
The ISOF operator's wounded body hiccupped on impact, and he became motionless upon receiving the deadly news from Drake in a ripping translation that ended his traitorous life.
"Belay last. Enemy suppressed. Targets all down. Had to send a security round. You're clear to approach," Drake confirmed on the closed-circuit channel before Havens could radio in whether a fourth bogie had appeared. "Now maybe we can finally call it quits before the FBI gets a lock on us," he muttered to himself.
Unless there's someone else we trained who's waiting to kill us.
You did what had to be done, the voice of Drake's deceased father chimed in to the chorus of voices refilling the Man from Orange's head. Can't talk now, Pop. And with that, Drake Woolf popped four lithium, the last of the mania-reduction pills, to quell the voices in his head and relax his OCD tendencies. He prepared to move his shit to cover the rest of his domestic killing squad from a tree line as they collected the dead bodies for disposal.
While grabbing his kit, he checked the status of his earlier launch of an autopilot drone feed. Drake examined the real-time video confirming no additional movements from the facility or fence line. Once the team was safe and sound, he could get to his other electronics gear, and Drake would see if the cell phone signals on the Iraqi target list died like their owners. Maybe then the killing spree that had gone on for weeks would stop. But with the Iranian Republican Guards Corps General Shirazian, a Qods Force spy runner on the lam, and new intelligence coming in from the NSA to the team, Woolf knew hunting season remained open and the bag limit endless. Especially since Drake's task force was sanctioned and fully funded, and there was literally no stopping it now from hunt-and-destroy missions across the fifty states. Even if someone wanted to, they would have to find the team first.
That would be no easy feat.
FBI Special Agent Tresa Halliday was learning that challenge the hard way, ever since she was tasked as a counterintelligence ghost to hunt these military lawbreakers down. Fortunately, she was over five hundred miles from their whereabouts and not the wiser of their mission or all of their names, save for the name of Warren Drake Woolf. And that was because she had hunted the hunter and nearly snared him on a couple occasions. It was inconvenient for Woolf because, as dangerous as she...
