Read an Excerpt
Force 5 Recon: Deployment: Philippines
Chapter One
TEAM DOGMA
TOWN OF TIPO-TIPO
BASILAN ISLAND
SULU ARCHIPELAGO, SOUTHERN PHILIPPINES
1930 HOURS LOCAL TIME
Sergeant Mac Rainey was on the hunt, and that meant bad news for the guerrilla fleeing down the jungle trail.
A group of fourteen men from the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) had just raided the rural town of Tipo-Tipo. The terrorists had stolen money, food, and medical supplies, and had shot and killed three farmers who had made the unfortunate mistake of standing up to the bandits. Rainey, his Force Recon Team, and a five-man team of Filipino Marines had fast-roped into the town from their Huey slick choppers. As they had questioned the locals, two meatheads armed with AK-47s and clad in nondescript green fatigues had darted from a perimeter hut and sprinted for the jungle. Evidently those geniuses had not been able to escape in time with their ASG buddies, so they had made their move, splitting up once they had reached the tree line. Rainey had charged after the guy on the left, sending Corporal Jimmy Vance after the other one.
The familiar crack of gunfire resounded about thirty yards east of Rainey's position. Before the echo died, Vance's report sounded in Rainey's earpiece:
"Dogma One, this is Dogma Four. First bad guy is down but alive, over."
"Roger that, out," Rainey replied breathlessly into the boom mike at his lips. He ducked under a limb, smashed through the leathery leaves of a mass of rubber plants, and found himself in ankle-high mud as yet another limb blocked his path. He shoved the branch aside, but it slipped from his fingers and snapped back, scratching his painted face and pulling at his bush cover.
Just as he flinched, a round exploded from the terrorist's rifle and sliced through the branch, coming within a few inches of his cheek.
Reflexively, Rainey bounded to his right while leveling his M4A1 carbine and squeezing off a three-round burst toward a coconut tree, the bad guy's most likely point of cover.
As the shots echoed, Rainey hunkered down and squinted through his rifle's night-vision scope --
To watch his prey book off toward the next cluster of trees. Rainey panned for a shot, his reticle sweeping over the man's glowing silhouette before he lost him. "Damn it." He lowered the rifle and bolted to his feet.
Heart thundering, hamstrings ablaze, he fell into the bad guy's trail, foliage now blurring by, the shadows heaving up with a life of their own. For a moment, he heard only his breath, his heavy footfalls, and smelled only the stench of gunpowder hanging in the humid air. He caught a glimpse of the terrorist, saw him vanish down into a gully ahead.
Rainey rounded the next cluster of rubber plants and began to descend. The gully swept out across a long bank of mud and rose up, about fifteen yards ahead -- where his bad guy was just ascending the opposite wall of weeds and dirt. The man suddenly turned, jamming down the trigger of his AK.
The popping stung Rainey's ears as he hit the deck and the rounds scissored through the fronds behind him. At once, the nearness of death rocketed him back to the recent past, to that morning in the delivery room with Kady. Just a month ago their first child, James, had come into the world.
"It's a boy! A beautiful baby boy," the doctor had said.
Rainey had worn the widest grin of his life. "My son ... I'm going to teach him how to be a man."
But he needed to be a man now. A Marine. He had a job to do. But Kady and James also needed him ...
Honor. Courage. Commitment. Core values. Corps values. Had Rainey forgotten them after nearly seventeen years of service?
No! Where is that scumbag? There!
But don't get too close.
A baby boy needed him now.
But so did the United States of America.
He forced all the fear and bullshit from his mind and willed himself across the gully. He reached the wall and barreled right up to where the ground grew level. He shot his gaze left, right, peered hard into the dark pockets of jungle ahead and detected a glimmer, just a glimmer -- but it was enough.
Running again. Hard. Hard as he could. Shoulders tucked in, his rifle warm and ready.
He was back on the hunt.
"Dogma One, this is DogmaTwo, request sitrep, over."
Not now, Doc. Rainey couldn't blame the Navy corpsman for being concerned, and, of course, Glenroy "Doc" Leblanc, AKA Dogma Two, had no way of knowing that his team leaderwas narrowing the gap on bad guy #2 and had no time for a little encrypted coffee klatch.
The canopy of brown and wilting palm fronds abruptly opened, permitting the full moon's shimmering light to fall upon the terrorist.
Remarkably, as luck or fate or God would have it, the bad guy tripped over a bulging root and fell onto his gut. He clambered to his hands and knees, but Rainey was already in range.
A series of warning shots leaped from Rainey's carbine and blistered a path beside the terrorist. He would've shouted Halt!, but Rainey knew that not all members of Abu Sayyaf understood English. Some members spoke Arabic, while others had learned English or Filipino (based on Tagalog) or even one of the eight major dialects.
Besides, bullets were a universal language.
Unfortunately, the meathead was as dense as the lead rounds that had torn into his path. He got onto his haunches, turned, prepared to fire --
Rainey blinked, glanced around the delivery room. "How does it feel to be a father?" Kady had asked.
Blinking again, Rainey took aim, shot one of the thug's kneecaps, then he shot the other. The young fool collapsed to a carpet of withered palm fronds, clutching his legs and screaming his ass off.
Force 5 Recon: Deployment: Philippines. Copyright © by P. Storm. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
