Free Dead Six by Larry Correia, Mike Kupari Page B

getting our asses kicked the whole way. There were only a few of us left. The Montalbans were supposed to have a plane there to extract us.”
    “There wasn’t a plane, was there?” Tailor asked.
    Hawk laughed bitterly. “Hell, no.”
    “How did you get out?” I asked. “Did the Montalban Exchange help you?”
    “No, they didn’t. They just left us to die. We hooked up with some Portuguese mercs and made a run for it. Decker sacrificed one of our guys, young fella named Ozzie, to distract the Cubans. He pulled it off, though. The rest of us managed to get on a plane to South Africa. Lost a lot of good men in that mess . . .” Hawk trailed off, looking toward the darkened mountains.
    “Holy shit,” Tailor said. “Ramirez never talked about that.”
    “And yet the story sounds strangely familiar,” I said, giving Tailor a hard look.
    Hawk opened another beer. “None of us talked about it. We made a mistake, and it got a lot of people killed. Well . . . even if we hadn’t been there, the same thing probably would’ve happened. And Africa’s Africa. Every time some politician sneezes over there a hundred thousand people get slaughtered.”
    “Africa sucks,” I said, looking up at the stars. The time I’d spent there hadn’t been so pleasant, either.
    “It is what it is,” Hawk said quietly. “You boys be careful over there, now. Always have a way out. Don’t trust the people you work for. Remember, if you die, they don’t have to pay you.”
    “Okay, Hawk,” I said.
    “I mean it , boy,” he said harshly. “I’ve been to too many goddamned funerals already.”

    VALENTINE
    Kelly Field Annex
    Lackland Air Force Base, Texas
    February 4
    0545

    Southern Texas was warm, even in February. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was a far cry from the harsh winters and lake-effect snow of Northern Michigan, where I’d grown up.
    The last few days had been a whirlwind. Tailor and I had been flown from Las Vegas to San Antonio. From there we were hurried to a military installation that they tried to keep secret, but I knew it was Lackland Air Force Base. I’d gone to Air Force basic military training and Security Forces School here. They kept us cooped up in an old barracks for several days. Each day, more and more people would arrive. All told, there were forty-two of us living in the barracks, that we knew of.
    Food, in the form of military MREs, was brought to us, and we weren’t allowed to go outside. All cell phones had been confiscated, and those that had kept theirs hidden had found that they had no signal anyway, meaning our hosts were probably jamming them somehow. They also took all of our personal identification documents, like passports and driver’s licenses. This caused all manner of outrage, but our employers insisted that these effects would be returned when the mission was complete.
    People came and went from the barracks, but they weren’t part of our group. No one knew who they were, so we all guessed that they were associates of Gordon Willis. I had to hand it to Gordon: he’d certainly managed to recruit an interesting bunch. As Tailor and I talked to, and got to know, the people that were presumably our new teammates, we learned quite a bit about them and how much we all had in common.
    For starters, almost all of us had combat experience. Most were ex-military, like me, and of those, a few had been kicked out or had spent time in the Fort Leavenworth military prison. Others had an intelligence background, and most of us spoke foreign languages. Tailor and I spoke Spanish fluently. Very few of us had any close family. None of us were married.
    There were a few women in the building, too, but they were confined to a different part of the barracks and weren’t allowed near us. We didn’t know how many there were. I guessed that they were afraid someone would end up pregnant or something. It seemed silly to me.
    So there I was, standing on the ramp, looking at a plain white Boeing 767