Free Strike Force Delta by Mack Maloney Page B

moment later.
    Captain Johnny Jackson was dreaming that Boy Scouts had rescued him when he heard the mighty crash. He waschained, by hands and feet, in the lowest jail cell at the bottom of the notorious Diablo fortress. The cell was just six feet by six, big enough for him and his torturers—three if they all squeezed in. Just big enough to reel back with a whip or a piece of electrical cord or a rubber hose. That’s what his tormentors had been using on him, 12 times a day, 24 hours a day, for the past six days. The bottom of his cell was covered with his own blood.
    It was the worst kind of torture. His kidnappers did not want to kill him; nor did they want to get information out of him. That would have meant the beatings and whippings had a point to them. No—they were doing it to him, these Al Qaeda people, simply because they liked it, got a rush from it, found it satisfied their ingrained long-repressed sexual urgings, twisted from eons of wandering in the desert and stepping in camel shit. They did it because they were
all
sadists deep inside—all terrorists were; he knew this much from his Delta Thunder training. They did it simply because they could.
    Jackson was the team leader of the captured Thunder squad. He hadn’t seen any of his men since they’d been overwhelmed at the border crossing, after the murderous lopsided gunfight. His last visions of that night were the pile of bodies in front of their makeshift barricade, the storm of tracers going in both directions, and the French Army helicopter waiting nearby, doing nothing to help.
    He and his men had been betrayed. That much was clear. But who exactly had stabbed them in the back? Who’d revealed that they would be accompanying the plutonium shipment? The British mercs? The United Nations? The Angolan fighters? The French?
    It really didn’t make any difference now. They’d beencaught and they were in a place that was impregnable, and because of Thunder team’s supersecret status he knew a rescue attempt was highly unlikely. Thunder was the “Mission Impossible” element of Delta—if they were caught, the President would disavow any knowledge of them. . . blah. . . blah. . . blah.
    Africa was Delta Thunder’s beat. Riding shotgun that night was just their sort of job—though many times they would go right into target cities before doing a mission and become one with the population. They were experts at blending in. That was another reason for their deep-secret status: Everyone in the Thunder unit was black.
    It was almost an inside joke, this rap on the United States’ special ops units that seemed to hold water. There were many special warriors fighting for the Stars and Stripes—but most of them were white. Why? Were America’s Special Forces racist? Discriminatory? At least in the case of Delta Force, the answer was no. In fact, in the past few years Higher Authority had secretly selected the most qualified black candidates for units such as Delta Thunder, one of six operating in Africa, sometimes hiding their advancement by pretending to wash them out. This had been kept so quiet, most people in Delta Force itself did not know. But the black warriors were out there, fighting just as hard for America and her ideals as their white brethren.
    And sometimes they died doing it. And this was certainly going to happen to Thunder squad. Jackson knew it because their kidnappers had already told them they were going to be beheaded, one by one, on videotape, which would then be broadcast to the world on Al-Qazzaza. So they were all going to die, and soon. In away, Jackson at peace with this—some of the time anyway. But the other times, when he thought about how it was actually going to happen, it was just awful.
    That’s why it was so strange that in between the beatings—which would go on for exactly 30 minutes—Jackson would fall asleep. Sleep soundly and deeply and have vivid