Free Full Assault Mode by Dalton Fury Page B

Delta stuff is just as insane, just as inhumane, just as crazy as this fucking box. Is all this shit still worth it?
    With her left wrist secured to the chain in the center of her isolation box’s roof, weighing four pounds fewer than when she tried squeezing into the size 6 skinny jeans at the mall, and covered in dried shit from her earlier bowel movement, she wondered why she signed up for Delta in the first place. She could have just finished up her enlistment in the army like normal people do . I think I made a big mistake .
    Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan
    A few hours after taking Shaft’s latest situation report over the phone, Kolt leaned over a large black-and-white satellite photo sprawled out on a wooden table. He had left the comfort of Bravo Team’s tent, gained the wooden palette walkway that kept troops out of the mud during the rainy season, and half jogged the forty meters or so across the frozen dirt ground. He slipped around a short maze of concrete T-walls and sand-filled Hesco barriers designed to protect the place from incoming enemy mortar rounds before stepping up two steps and pulling aside the first of two large nylon flaps that served as the entrance to the Joint Operations Center.
    Kolt moved quickly to the nearby long table to grab a cup of coffee. He emptied the GI-issue silver pot, giving him just half a cup, all the while ignoring the handwritten sign prominently posted just behind the half-opened boxes of Christmas care packages from home that read LAST CUP REFILLS THE POT .
    Kolt balanced his Styrofoam cup, careful not to spill what little hot coffee he had, as he walked across the uneven floorboards toward the unwelcoming makeshift planning bay located toward the back of the tent. He passed behind five rows of tables, each crowned by a half dozen of the latest Dell laptop computers, perfectly aligned and alive. On the far wall, six large plasma flat screens played Kill TV on different frequency feeds. Somewhere in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, a dozen armed drones captured every move of unsuspecting ant-size people of interest. Their every move opened to the sky was piped hundreds of miles into this single headquarters.
    The JOC was the working domain of the joint staff officers that did the lion’s share of the work. A 24-7 operation, the staff developed target decks, analyzed mountains of raw intel in search of a golden nugget, and assessed risk and monitored the entire battlefield—all with a single goal in mind: get Delta operators out in the badlands turning targets as fast and as often as possible. Pushing the operations tempo, or optempo, was the sole purpose of the J-staff. A unique mix of the distinct aroma of a Best Buy showroom, fresh plywood flooring, and sweaty, overworked adults on reverse schedule who rarely see the sun could be detected as soon as you opened the second flap.
    Standing around him in the tight quarters and surrounded by plywood walls covered with giant maps of the major fighting spots across Afghanistan and western Pakistan, Admiral Mason and his staff listened intently.
    “Buildings two, three, four, five, and possibly seven,” Kolt stated with authority while pointing in succession with his unfolded Spyderco blade. Admiral Mason and the others hung on Kolt’s every word with a focused gaze.
    “We need to do better than that,” Mason rhetorically stated as he shook his head side to side. “Your man needs to pinpoint the exact location, or I’m not authorizing a launch. I thought that was perfectly clear, even to you, Major.”
    Kolt was dumbfounded. He squinted in disappointment. Fuck . Fine, it wasn’t perfect, but it was actionable. He looked first at Admiral Mason, conspicuously taller than the rest in the room, with a full head of brown but graying hair that never seemed to need a comb, before shifting to the others around the table, the task force planners, the JSOC Command sergeant major, and the helicopter force’s air-mission