When falling to earth from 35,000 feet, even the air tries to kill you. The oxygen is too thin to breath. Temperatures reach negative-fifty degrees. Gravity wants to punish you for leaving the ground.
Matador streaked through the night sky at terminal velocity. Turbulence pounded his body. Wind screamed in his helmet. The Yemeni desert looked like an ocean of ink under wisps of cotton. He checked the GPS on his wrist-mounted phone, then used his limbs like wings to stay on target. He waited until the last possible moment to deploy his chute.
The rocky terrain came up fast.
With expert precision, he touched down running, detached his chute, and had himself combat ready before the rest of the team reached the ground. He counted five other chutes: Fullback, Tao, Trigger, Schlitz, and Locke.
Matador flipped up his night vision goggles to view hell with his own eyes. He stood atop a high plateau. Desolate mountains stretched out in every direction. A narrow canyon opened to his right. It snaked ahead, fracturing the landscape into countless peaks. The canyon widened into a small valley crowded by rocky bluffs. A ribbon of silver water ran through it, hundreds of feet below.
His target was eight clicks ahead, on the other side of the gorge.
These ancient hills were a labyrinth of eroded rock and precipitous drops, like walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon in the dark. This was mountain goat country, filled with terrorist training camps. Matador flipped down his night vision and crept ahead watchfully.
He came upon a ghostly green figure. Locke was crouched near the precipice, studying the valley through the slender scope of his sniper rifle. “On your left,” Matador said through his bone phone tactical radio.
Locke acknowledged with two clicks of his mic.
Matador knelt nearby. He looked down scope. Distant hills jumped into focus. He led the crosshairs over cliff faces, one after another, until they landed on their first objective: an arched limestone bridge that looked as old as the mountains themselves. That bridge was the only way to cross the canyon for miles in either direction. It had been built treacherously narrow. Only one man could cross at a time. The path rose sharply on either side, up sheer cliffs. It was said that such bridges could be disassembled in minutes, rendering them useless. All were designed to protect the villages from foreign invaders—like himself.
Locke spoke. “The path on the other side of the bridge veers away at the top. Can’t tell if it’s being watched.”
“Let’s assume it is,” Matador said.
“True that.”
“You’re on point.”
“Roger, that. Let’s go get some.” Locke stood and picked his way through the rubble and underbrush down to a dusty path that disappeared around a ridge.
The other operators had assembled behind Matador. Four shadows in the night. They fell into silent step behind Matador.
Matador knew they needed to cover the distance at speed. He chose a shepherd’s trail that had been cut into the rock centuries ago and was wide enough for animals and carts to use. Centuries of traffic had worn deep ruts into the solid stone. Despite the sparse population of these bleak hills, this path was still in daily use. God help anyone they encountered on the path tonight.
Matador had been down many such paths before. He spent years hunting men on the wild edges of the world. The frequency of these trips intensified in recent years, despite the winding down of the War on Terror. The troops had gone home, but the war was far from over. It simply had gone dark. That’s why he existed—to fight a war that no one saw.
This mission, like so many recent others, was based on a singular goal: hunt down the world’s most dangerous man. His agency consumed mind-boggling amounts of data, which it parsed, analyzed, and filtered down to thin bits of actionable intelligence. Then they turned him loose. With any luck, this mission would accomplish it’s goal … and he would kill a friend.