Free Black Site by Dalton Fury Page A

check on him shared very little about their current activities, and this Raynor found strange. Strange that after three and a half months, he knew little more about what had happened to Eagle 01 than he’d learned from Monk on the recovery helo.
    Soon enough it became clear to him. He was no longer “one of the boys.” As a Delta troop commander, he had always been audacious and aggressive. His superiors and subordinates had admired the ease with which Raynor seemed to fall into the shit and crawl back out smelling like a rose. But this time it was too much. Lieutenant Colonel Josh Timble and the five men who went down with him were missing and presumed dead, and when he finally returned to Fort Bragg, Major Kolt Raynor found his wall locker in his team room cleaned out and a maelstrom of incrimination and charges awaiting him. That he would be cashiered from Delta was never in doubt. No matter the extenuating circumstances, he had disobeyed a direct order and nine men had died as a result of his insubordination. A court-martial was considered, but all agreed that Raynor should be dismissed from the Army, quietly and quickly.
    The Army he could live without, but the Unit declared him persona non grata, and this devastated him. Four months to the day after his ill-fated operation in South Waziristan, Major Kolt Raynor became, for the first time in eighteen years, simply Kolt Raynor, a man who had lost much more than a title before his name.

 
    TEN
    Three years later Raynor lay on the mattress on the floor of his trailer. Dressed only in his underwear, his body was covered in sweat that stank, though he didn’t notice, so accustomed had he become to his own stench. Morning light poured through the blinds in bright linear shafts and he recoiled from its sting. His long hair hung askew and his T-shirt retained the colors and smells of the microwavable Chinese dinner he’d polished off just before nodding off the night before.
    He looked across the room at his clock, squinted to bring the green numbers into focus, and determined it was either ten after six or ten after eight. If it was the former he could go back to sleep; if it was the latter, he was in trouble.
    He had to get up and go to work this morning.
    Shit. Kolt closed his eyes.
    His money had run out and with it all but the last of the booze, so now it was back to his old job, selling sleeping bags and climbing equipment at an upscale sporting-goods store in Southern Pines.
    He had to be at work at nine, and he had either slept through his 6 a.m. alarm or forgotten again to set it, and now he was too hungover to even tell the time.
    A knock on the door caused him to lift his eyes, but not to get up. He hadn’t heard a car pull up the gravel drive to his trailer, but in his current state his senses were hardly at their sharpest.
    It came again. A pounding this time. Kolt rolled onto his side, his head hanging off the edge of the dirty mattress. He wasn’t expecting company, didn’t have any friends or owe anyone money.
    “Hang on!” he shouted, fought with his covers to try and sit up.
    With a crash the aluminum door flew in, a big black leather boot behind it, the cheap plastic blinds fell off the window, and the entire trailer rocked as if it had been hit by a bus. The upper hinge of the door broke free. The lower hinge held, but the door sagged deeper as the soft aluminum bent.
    Raynor bolted upright.
    David “Monk” Kraus stood in the doorway. Kolt hadn’t seen the Delta master sergeant since the night over western Pakistan, three years earlier, but he looked exactly the same, save for his clothes. Gone was his military uniform. Instead he wore a rust-colored flannel lumberjack shirt and faded blue jeans. He stepped inside and cleared the doorway, and Benji entered behind him. They both looked down at Kolt, at the bottles on the floor, at the shitty living arrangements.
    “What the hell?” was all Raynor could think to say. He remained on the mattress