Novels by cowboydead

The plan, as Soren had worked it out, was straightforward enough in outline.Tomorrow he would be put in a vehicle headed for Port Morrow. Somewhere on that road, far enough from the compound that the response time would be unmanageable, he would activate the Delta Team Support Card and let Delta Team intercept the transport. Clean extraction, minimal variables, maximum firepower on his side.The problem was the variables he couldn't account for. He didn't know how the card worked in practice. He didn't know whether Delta Team would materialize in the vehicle, beside it, or somewhere else entirely. A moving vehicle at highway speed introduced a dozen ways for the plan to come apart, and if the team appeared fifty yards behind a truck doing sixty miles an hour, the two-hour window would be half gone before they closed the distance.He was still turning it over when Evan's voice pulled him back."Don't worry about being overheard," Evan said, glancing toward the door. "I checked when th

The room was exactly as he'd left it.Same cracked ceiling. Same smell of mildew and stale air. Same cold floor pressing through the thin fabric of his shirt. Soren opened his eyes slowly, and for a moment he simply lay there, taking inventory of the silence.The panic that had seized him the first time he'd woken up in this place was gone. What remained in its place was something quieter and considerably more useful. A man who had died once and come back had a different relationship with fear than a man who hadn't. He'd paid for that education in the hardest currency available, and he intended to get full value from it.The HUD appeared before he'd finished the thought.​【Career Instance concluded.】​​【Mission settlement complete.】​​【Congratulations on completing all mission achievements.】​​【You have received four Career Points and one Delta Team Support Card.】​​【Your next Career Instance will begin in seven days. Please prepare accordingly.】​He read through the settlement summar

Delta One's words stayed with Soren longer than the conversation itself.If the ringleader was hiding among the hostages, he wouldn't do it clean. He'd need a reason to bypass the initial screening, a reason nobody would question in the middle of a chaotic extraction. The simplest answer was also the most effective: an injury. A man bleeding through his shirt, barely conscious, loaded onto a stretcher by paramedics who had thirty other people to deal with, was not a man anyone was going to pull aside for identity verification. The ambulance doors would close, and that would be the end of it.Which meant the ringleader's exit wasn't a matter of luck. It was a plan. And it had a window.Soren checked his watch. Four thirty-two in the afternoon. The breach had started roughly two and a half hours ago, which put the ringleader's move somewhere in the final thirty minutes of the operation, when the upper floors were still being cleared and the hostage evacuation was already underway below.

"Thirteenth floor, clear!"Soren lowered his AR-15 carbine and let out a slow breath. His lungs were working harder than he'd like to admit. The body he was wearing had decent baseline fitness, but decent wasn't the same as conditioned, and whatever this version of himself had been doing the night before, it hadn't been sleep. Delta Five's theory about the previous evening was starting to feel less like a joke and more like a diagnosis."Two floors left," Delta One said, clicking off the radio and turning to face the group. "Alpha Team and Charlie Team are already up there. Our job is to hold this landing and make sure nothing slips past us on the way down. If you need a minute, take it. Everyone else, eyes on the stairwell.""A few flights of stairs and you're winded?" Delta Five said, glancing around with an easy grin. "Come on.""Some of us are carrying more than a rifle." Delta Two's voice was flat, the tone of a man who had said nothing for the better part of an hour and had chos

Half an hour later, Soren was standing outside an eleventh-floor room with his AR-15 carbine aimed at a man he couldn't shoot."HPD. Put the weapon down. You are completely surrounded."His voice was level, practiced, the tone of someone who had said this before and expected it to work. It wasn't working.The woman being used as a shield was blonde, somewhere in her thirties, and had long since moved past the stage of fear that produces useful behavior. She was past reasoning, past calculation, operating entirely on the raw animal instinct to beg. Her hands were up, trembling, and she kept her eyes fixed on Soren with the desperate, irrational conviction that if she just looked at him hard enough, he would make this stop."Please," she said. "Please don't shoot. Please."The man behind her had done this before, or something enough like it that the mechanics came naturally. He was crouched low, using her body to cover his own, keeping his center mass tucked behind her shoulders in a wa

Delta Team didn't wait for Bravo Team to finish the second floor."Push forward," Delta One said, and that was the end of it.Soren fell back into the stack and followed the team up the stairwell, the red emergency lighting painting everything the color of a warning. The Police CQB Tactics notification was still sitting at the edge of his awareness, the LV1 designation steady and unhurried, and he let the knowledge settle into him as he moved. Not rushing it. There was no point in rushing something that was already happening on its own terms.The third-floor fire door came up on the left side of the landing. Delta One caught Delta Three's eye and tilted his chin toward it. Delta Three moved without a word, taking position at the handle side of the door, fingers wrapping around the grip, testing it with the faintest pressure. Unlocked. He gave a single nod and held his position, ready to pull.Soren was already moving to the opposite side of the frame, AR-15 carbine up, back flat again