Choke Point Read online

  Written by Peter Telep

  TOM CLANCY’S GHOST RECON®

  Choke Point

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Acknowledgments

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  TOM CLANCY’S GHOST RECON

  Peter Telep is the New York Times bestselling author of over forty novels spanning many genres including film adaptations, medical drama and military thrillers. In addition to his writing career he teaches creative writing courses at the University of Central Florida.

  Novels by Tom Clancy

  THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

  RED STORM RISING

  PATRIOT GAMES

  THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN

  CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

  THE SUM OF ALL FEARS

  WITHOUT REMORSE

  DEBT OF HONOR

  EXECUTIVE ORDERS

  RAINBOW SIX

  THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON

  RED RABBIT

  THE TEETH OF THE TIGER

  DEAD OR ALIVE

  (written with Grant Blackwood)

  AGAINST ALL ENEMIES

  (written with Peter Telep)

  LOCKED ON

  (written with Mark Greaney)

  THREAT VECTOR

  (written with Mark Greaney)

  SSN: STRATEGIES OF SUBMARINE WARFARE

  Nonfiction

  SUBMARINE: A GUIDED TOUR INSIDE A NUCLEAR WARSHIP

  ARMORED CAV: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN ARMORED CAVALRY REGIMENT

  FIGHTER WING: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIR FORCE COMBAT WING

  MARINE: A GUIDED TOUR OF A MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT

  AIRBORNE: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIRBORNE TASK FORCE

  CARRIER: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER

  SPECIAL FORCES: A GUIDED TOUR OF U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES

  INTO THE STORM: A STUDY IN COMMAND

  (written with General Fred Franks, Jr, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  EVERY MAN A TIGER

  (written with General Chuck Horner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  SHADOW WARRIORS: INSIDE THE SPECIAL FORCES

  (written with General Carl Stiner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  BATTLE READY

  (written with General Tony Zinni, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  TOM CLANCY’S HAWX

  TOM CLANCY’S GHOST RECON

  GHOST RECON

  COMBAT OPS

  CHOKE POINT

  TOM CLANCY’S ENDWAR

  ENDWAR

  THE HUNTED

  TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL

  SPLINTER CELL

  OPERATION BARRACUDA

  CHECKMATE

  FALLOUT

  CONVICTION

  ENDGAME

  Created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

  TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER

  OP-CENTER

  MIRROR IMAGE

  GAMES OF STATE

  ACTS OF WAR

  BALANCE OF POWER

  STATE OF SIEGE

  DIVIDE AND CONQUER

  LINE OF CONTROL

  MISSION OF HONOR

  SEA OF FIRE

  CALL TO TREASON

  WAR OF EAGLES

  TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE

  NET FORCE

  HIDDEN AGENDAS

  NIGHT MOVES

  BREAKING POINT

  POINT OF IMPACT

  CYBERNATION

  STATE OF WAR

  CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  SPRINGBOARD

  THE ARCHIMEDES EFFECT

  Created by Tom Clancy and Martin Greenberg

  TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS

  POLITIKA

  RUTHLESS.COM

  SHADOW WATCH

  BIO-STRIKE

  COLD WAR

  CUTTING EDGE

  ZERO HOUR

  WILD CARD

  He who conquers others is strong; he who conquers himself is mighty.

  – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

  The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.

  – Thucydides (460–395 B.C.)

  ONE

  You cannot apply to become a Ghost.

  They find you …

  And find him they had, recruited him right out of the Navy SEALs so he could wind up here, in South America, on a search and rescue mission for a CIA operations officer abducted only hours ago by Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, more concisely known as FARC.

  During the past year, this revolutionary group had violated their cease-fire agreement with the government. They were back to drug smuggling, acts of terrorism, and kidnapping, which was why former Command Master Chief, now Captain, Andrew Ross was crouched beneath a thick canopy of palm fronds, about to order his Ghost team to attack –

  When a gunshot cracked to the east. Remington MSR. Sniper rifle. Fired by one of the AFEUR guys.

  The Agrupación de Fuerzas Especiales Antiterroristas Urbanas was the Colombian Army’s special forces group that had first responded to the abduction. They had twelve operators working with Ross’s four-man squad, and one of those boys had just blown their ambush.

  ‘Pepper, SITREP!’ Ross cried into the boom mike at his lips.

  ‘Hey, it wasn’t me,’ answered Master Sergeant Robert ‘Pepper’ Bonifacio.

  ‘He’s in your zone. You got eyes on him?’

  ‘Negative!’

  The sniper rifle boomed once more, echoing across the valley and sending chills ripping up Ros
s’s spine.

  ‘Ghost Lead, this is Kozak. I got the drone on our sniper. He fired in reflex ’cause he’s dead. They cut his throat.’

  Ross lifted his voice: ‘All right, Pepper? 30K? We’re moving in. Kozak, you hold back with the drone. Let’s go!’

  As he sprang to his feet, Ross switched to the command net and spoke in Spanish to his counterpart, an AFEUR captain named Jiménez. ‘One of your snipers is dead. We need a squad in there to take out those troops on the west side.’

  ‘Roger, Captain. I’ll send them now.’

  The FARC outpost where the CIA officer was being held lay on Colombia’s southwest coast, between the ramshackle villages of San Antonio, Las Juntas, and Aguaclara, all captured like insects within the web of Valle del Cauca’s mountainous jungle and the coca fields hidden within.

  A storm system had just passed through, and the jungle’s hot breath rose and hissed from the damp earth as Ross sprinted toward the collection of tin-roofed shacks and lean-tos, partially obscured by enormous fronds. The stench of mold, rotting wood and gasoline grew thicker as he rounded the next knot of trees then hunkered down just twenty meters away from the clearing. Ahead lay five mud-covered jeeps, along with three flatbed trucks probably manufactured in the 1960s, an automotive graveyard if you didn’t know better.

  Automatic weapons fire flashed and resounded from behind those trucks, drawing a string of short-circuiting wires in the late-afternoon gloom. Ross reached into his web gear, reared back and let fly a sensor grenade.

  Once the grenade hit the ground behind the vehicles, the exact positions of the hostiles appeared in his Cross-Com’s heads-up display, targets marked by flashing red outlines of the figures, with data automatically sent to the other Ghosts, their own combination monocle-earpiece and microphones allowing them to mark the targets, hear his reports, and respond in kind. What’s more, the Cross-Coms weren’t the only technological trick up their sleeves. The team’s initial recon of the outpost had been conducted by Staff Sergeant John Dimitri Kozak, the youngest operator and self-professed technophile who loved commanding their Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). More sophisticated than its predecessor, the Cypher drone, this new UAV’s quad rotors rotated downward and turned into wheels so it could land and rumble along for an even quieter and stealthier approach on targets.

  At the moment, though, Kozak had the drone in the air for overwatch, and his voice cut through the team net, burred with anxiety: ‘No movement from within the shacks. Something’s wrong. They’re not moving the package.’

  Before Ross could comment on that, the AFEUR men, along with Pepper and 30K, returned fire on the rebels behind the vehicles, the barrage of rounds thumping and ricocheting off the jeeps, windows shattering and tires whooshing flat. The AFEUR troops were fielding TAR-21 Israeli bullpup rifles using standard 5.56mm NATO rounds. That distinctive thunder stood in sharp juxtaposition with the FARC rebels’ Chinese-made AK-47s that popped in reply.

  Noting the hostiles IDed by the sensor grenade, Ross peered out from behind the trees, and the images of his teammates now shimmered in his HUD, green outlines superimposed over the surrounding jungle, along with blue outlines representing the Colombian SF squads.

  Well, Major Scott Mitchell had been right. This sure as hell was an ‘interesting’ first mission for Ross, who’d just gone through the selection and qualification phases of becoming a Ghost, even after surviving the rigors of a career in the SEALs, beginning with preindoctrination and the infamous Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S).

  Ross recalled the welcome letter from Mitchell, the explanation of how the D Company, First Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group had been deactivated, with the Ghosts reassigned to the newly formed Group for Specialized Tactics (GST) and Mitchell promoted to serve as its commanding officer. There’d been some mention of a Joint Strike Force that would one day comprise all branches of the service, with test operations beginning at the unit level, mostly notably within the GST. In fact, Ross was one of the first non-Army operators to become a Ghost, and it was with some trepidation that he took on the role of a Ghost Lead to command three members from the US Army’s Special Forces. In the field it was all business, but during downtime, well, he feared their interservice rivalry would reach new heights. So far everyone had been cool, utterly professional, but he was waiting for the bomb to drop and for the team to give him a nickname that he would hate more than terrorists, reality TV, and Cupcake, his ex-wife’s ferocious white Chihuahua.

  ‘I’m moving up,’ he announced. ‘Cover me now!’ With that, he sprang from the mushy ground, weaving a serpentine path along the perimeter, elbowing past vines and ducking beneath low-hanging branches with raindrops threatening to fall from them like hot wax dripping from a candle. He was drenched in sweat now, his mouth salty, his eyes burning. He ignored his pulse ringing in his ears and was all about the course ahead, cutting, weaving again, sidestepping, and bounding over two fallen logs whose bark was flaking off like sunburn. His boots made sucking noises in the mud, and for a moment his vision blurred and returned as he blinked away more sweat and crossed beneath a stand of wax palms.

  He broke from there to a small clearing and the nearest shack, where three of the FARC rebels had assumed defensive positions beside a wall that resembled a quilt of cannibalized sheet metal with fading soda company logos.

  One of the rebels glanced back.

  Ross lifted his HK416 assault rifle, the same one he carried as a member of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, also known as DEVGRU. Like the AFEUR team’s rifles, his thirty-round magazine was loaded with 5.56mm NATO rounds, and he was about to express deliver some flaming hot lead to these rebels –

  When Kozak’s voice buzzed through his earpiece: ‘Ghost Lead! Get down! Got three behind you!’

  Ross hit the deck. Craned his neck.

  And his HUD lit up like the Vegas strip.

  TWO

  Kozak was perched about halfway up the mountain overlooking the FARC outpost, and he had a clean line of sight on the shacks and trucks.

  With the drone crawler’s remote clutched in his hands, he gaped at the LED screen showing the drone’s point of view: Ross had just hit the deck and activated his optical camouflage. The team’s fatigues, boots, gloves, scarves – everything – were made of a meta-material specially engineered to reflect the current environment. The drawback was that you had to remain perfectly still; movement produced a visible distortion as the system’s microprocessor attempted to catch up. Moreover, the report of your weapon would send reverberations through your body that often deactivated the system.

  ‘Ghost Lead, I have you covered,’ Kozak said, taking the drone into a nosedive, then flying in and out of trees until he reached an opening in the brush. He brought the drone down, the quad rotors rolling into tire position, and thump, she was on the ground, speeding up behind the three FARC rebels who were jogging toward Ross.

  Kozak switched on the drone’s speaker and spoke into the remote’s built-in microphone: ‘Oo ti blya, golova, kak obezyaniya jopah.’

  If the FARC rebel who spun around had grown up in Little Odessa, Brooklyn, and been the son of Russian immigrants, then he would’ve understood Kozak’s words: Your face looks like a monkey’s ass.

  But the rebel did not share Kozak’s background. And getting his attention was all Kozak needed. The bearded rebel took aim at the little ‘toy’ rolling toward him –

  And that’s when Kozak thumbed the touchscreen and launched the drone right into the man’s face, knocking him to the ground, a triplet of gunfire erupting from his AK, his two comrades crying out and turning back to see what had happened.

  ‘Get ’em now, boss!’ Kozak cried.

  It was, in Kozak’s young mind, a perfect marriage of technology and tenacity, with the drone diverting the rebels and clearing the way for Ross to attack. Indeed, Ross fired three rounds – perfect head shots that dropped the targets nearly in unison, as though they were
androids controlled by a single power supply that had suddenly been cut.

  ‘Get that drone back in the air,’ Ross ordered, bolting off toward the shacks.

  ‘Roger that.’ Kozak flew the drone straight up above the canopy and once more began sweeping the entire perimeter. ‘The Colombians have their squad attacking in the west,’ he reported. ‘I got eyes on about ten guys around the shacks, marking them now. Still no sign of the package.’

  The drone’s computer picked out and highlighted each of the targets and updated their positions every one-hundredth of a second. Kozak wasn’t sure what he liked more: providing overwatch and intel with the drone (which in his youthful twenty-six-year-old mind gave him major baller status) or actually being in the shit and firing the guns (which was equally awesome). He figured he’d catch hell from Ross later for that stunt with the drone, but he’d argue that he had just been improvising, not trying to show off, not trying to perform some feat of heroism. They had the technology – why not put it to good use with a little old school demolition derby?

  A rustle of leaves from behind, followed by the sudden rhythm of footfalls, had him turning, tucking the remote into his web gear, activating his camouflage, and holding still –

  Just as two dark-faced rebels wearing boonie hats approached from the east, one grunting in Spanish, ‘I heard him up here, somewhere.’ The other used his free arm to hold back some fronds while he and his comrade drew closer.

  Kozak adjusted his grip on the rifle, a Remington ACR with suppressor, well suited for jungle ops like this one.

  He held his breath. Time slowed. Sounds congealed into one another like pieces of clay to form one constant: the beating of his heart. The men drew closer. He could ambush them now, but in the second he killed one, the other could get off a shot.

  Don’t move, he ordered himself.

  ‘Being a great warrior isn’t just being a good killer. It’s knowing when to pull the trigger, and when to shake a hand. It’s doing what it takes to win.’

  Kozak’s father, Leonid, who’d remained behind in Russia, had said that after learning his son wanted to join the Army. And while Kozak hadn’t realized it then, he understood now that being a successful Special Forces operator required just that: knowing when. And the only people who’d ever witness his decisions, good and bad, would be his teammates. They were, in truth, the audience he needed to please. You didn’t become a Ghost to get famous – that was for sure. ‘Credit is failure,’ Major Mitchell had told them time and again. You became a Ghost because you wanted to serve, you wanted to make sure that all those kids who’d suffered through 9/11, those kids who’d lost their families, would never, ever have to go through something like that again. Someone had to do the job, someone who would not lead an ordinary life. Kozak had always known he would be a soldier. He had the Russian fighting spirit in his blood and the love for America in his heart and soul. He was a Russian-American. He was proud.