CHAPTER 1

Edonian Royal Trade Highway

12 Miles south of the capital, Antrusia

12:35 am September 19th, 2010

A three vehicle convoy travelled south along the main highway that bisected the Republic of Edonia, heading for a small camp of volunteer fighters that stood against the rebel warlord trying to overthrow the government. Edonia had a small standing army, but the nation was relatively young and the forces defending it were still unorganized and under equipped. Villages in various regions banded together, forming small militias pledged to defend their nation, but the overwhelmed government was unable to provide assistance from within its own ranks, so they pleaded with NATO and neighboring countries for help, but no one was willing to risk their political positions by going against a well connected threat like Andru Urchenko, the warlord leading the rebellion.

While the United States government decided it was beneficial to assist the small country, which was rich in mineral resources, it was still reeling from the mess in the Middle East, so they could not support the small country with military forces; however, they did agree to help fund various Private Military Contracting companies to support the militia fighters. The PMCs were hired to send teams that would help train and organize the militias to fight the guerilla forces led by Andru and his brothers, Baz and Damein. The men who were offered the contracts were veterans of special operations forces from various services and nations. They were disciplined, motivated, and had all of their training and years of experience to offer. Specialized teams were formed and sent to Edonia with some of the finest equipment in the world to help them support the Edonian government in its struggle.

The three vehicle convoy on the road was manned by contractors from a multinational company, Denver Security Group, based out of southeastern Colorado. The founder, Terrance Denver, affectionately referred to as John by his friends, founded the company with a small group of fellow military retirees in 2004. They recruited men and women from all around the world to fill the teams and John, along with the other founders, took out huge loans to purchase equipment to outfit them with. Because they asked the teams what kind of gear they would need to be successful, the men were outfitted with newer and better equipment than most military units. He also took ideas from the employees and hired engineers to start building prototypes of some of the best new equipment conceived. The company flourished during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while also taking contracts in Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

The six men in the vehicles were part of an eight man team that had been in Antrusia only a few weeks. They were still waiting for the last two team members to be selected and sent out to fill the team, but the six of them functioned well together, many of them had been on the team for a number of years. The team leader was Thom Sabin, a former Australian S.A.S. team leader and a giant of a man. At six foot five and two hundred and forty-five pounds with blonde hair and green eyes, Thom looked every bit like a rowdy Aussie rugby captain. While he liked to behave accordingly in his free time, when he was on a contract he was as professional a soldier as could be found anywhere in the world. Thom had worked for DSG for just under four years and had been a Detail Leader for three of those. He sat in the passenger seat of the lead Humvee, operating a radio scanner that looked for any frequencies within a few hundred meters of them, trying to listen for any trouble ahead of them.

Driving his truck was Carter Miles, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency operative who was responsible for building their intelligence network and supplying their intelligence analyst with information he could use to begin targeting Andru's forces. Carter was six feet tall with an athletic build, large, expressive brown eyes and kept his hair cut short. Having operated in Eastern Europe most of his career, Carter spoke Russian and Romanian fluently and even though he stood out as a black man in the Slavic nations he was an expert at influencing others to work for him, whether they knew they were or not. When the wars in the Middle East forced the agency to cut back on its operations in other parts of the world, Carter decided to go to work for DSG to continue operating in the region he knew the most about.

The second truck in their convoy was a flatbed truck that had been rented from the locals for their militia's use. Driving it was Ibrahim Kavid, a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer and Moussad agent who served as the team's intelligence analyst and Assistant Detail Leader to Thom. He was slightly older than the rest of the team and had a calculating personality that appeared cold at first. Once the team warmed up to him they found him to have a sharp sense of humor and that he genuinely cared about what he was doing. He was of average height and build with slightly graying-black, curly hair and dark brown eyes, but he was a ferocious fighter when he was pressed into combat. Considering that he had been fighting since he was twelve years old, he had twice as much experience as anyone else on the team and had been Thom's second in command for three years.

Driving the rear Humvee was their Detail Medic, Marcos Del-Rios, a former Navy S.E.A.L. who started as a Corpsman assigned to a Marine Expeditionary Force. At six feet tall and a very fit one hundred and eighty pounds, Marcos looked and acted like the typical Seal, over-confident to the point of being obnoxious, more because he thought it was funny than because he actually believed it. He had a quick wit and natural charm that he attributed to his Latino heritage, along with his good looks. When push came to shove, though, he was an absolute warrior and the team could not have asked for a better medic. He'd been with the team for two years and they would have been lost without him and his high sense of drive and determination.

In the turret of the last truck was the team's new guy, a former Combat Applications Group communications support member named Jeff Stringer. While he wasn't an operator for CAG, he knew more about communications systems in general than anyone they'd met. He had also received a lot of tactical training from the teams he was attached to on operations, making him a real asset. The rest of the team was still getting to know the lanky six foot two blonde haired, blue eyed surfer from San Diego, California, but he was easy going and was very good at his job.

Nick Ryan, the team's current weapons expert and team sniper, was in the turret of the lead vehicle behind his mounted M240B medium machine gun. As a former US Army Special Forces Weapons Sergeant, Nick had spent quite a bit of time in gun turrets on convoys while he was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He missed the heavier weaponry he would be using if he were still in the Army, but he loved working as a contractor. The job was not that much different than what he did when he was a Green Beret, but working as a contractor gave him a sense of freedom to make decisions about where he went and what he did that he would never have had in the military.

At five foot nine, Nick was the shortest guy on the team, but he was a muscular one hundred and ninety pounds and could handle himself in a fight, whether it was with guns or his fists. He came to the team with Marcos and the two had a never ending rivalry of Seals versus Special Forces. For two years they had ripped on each other non-stop, driving the rest of the team insane while they just kept on joking.

Nick watched ahead of them as the road curved around a steep hill to their left. He maneuvered the turret to keep his gun on the road ahead before the Humvee entered the curve. The land leveled out on both sides as the road straightened out on the other side of the hill. The forests that bordered the road gradually crept away from the edges of the pavement as they traveled south, leaving about two hundred meters of grassy plains to either side before the tree lines started. Like the rest of the team, he knew by now that they were only about eight miles from the turn off leading down a rough winding road through the trees to the west into their camp. They had driven to the airfield located in a military camp just south of the capital city Antrusia at least once a week for the last three weeks, picking up supplies and materials to help the militia improve their base.

Through his Peltor Comtac, an amplified hearing protection headset, Nick heard gunfire in the distance, just to the west in the woods. It sounded distant, but it was close enough to get his attention. He turned the turret to his right and keyed the push to talk box for his radio.

"I'm hearing gunfire to the west, maybe six or seven hundred meters inside the wood line," he reported.

"Shooting at us?" Thom asked, turning in his seat to scan out the window.

"Negative," Nick reported.

"Then we'll pick up speed and try to blow past it," Thom said.

They were driving under night vision, keeping their lights off to prevent enemy from seeing them coming from too far away. Without more man power, the little convoy would easily be overrun, so they were trying to use speed and stealth to safely travel through the country at night. While Andru didn't have any massed forces in the area, he sent out random, roving patrols to harass the Edonian forces and try to keep them off the roads. It's why Thom was listening for any radio traffic, trying to get early warning of enemy patrols so they could avoid them.

As Carter accelerated there was a flash of light to the west, which, through Nick's PVS-14 night vision monocular, looked like a white cloud that burst up from the tops of the trees. A split second later the loud explosion was heard by everyone and tracer rounds could be spotted arching through the air over and between the trees. The explosion echoed throughout the valley as the team kept driving. Nick noticed a trail leading from the trees towards the road ahead of them and kept his machine gun trained on the head of it at the tree line.

"Hell of a fight going on over there," Jeff commented over the radio.

"Let's get clear of this shit, mates" Thom told them all, "We don't need a fight tonight."

The Humvee bounced roughly over the worn road and Nick did his best to keep his weapon leveled at the trail. Tracer rounds were spitting out of the trees in line with the trail and he could see bright lights shining out of the woods towards the main road.

"Heads up, there's a vehicle headed our way," Nick reported.

Nick heard Thom shout a string of curses below before his voice came back over the radio, "We're pulling into the clearing on the left. Ibrahim, get that flatbed as close to the trees as you can. We'll pull up and cover south, Marcos, you pull up short and cover the north. I want the guns trained on this clusterfuck, but do not engage unless they directly engage us, clear?"

"Got it," Ibrahim answered as they slowed down to turn off the road.

"Anything you say boss," Marcos replied.

As Ibrahim positioned their vehicle, about a hundred and fifty meters away from the road, Nick watched as the headlights got brighter. Moments later an SUV bounced down the trail out of the woods, moving too fast for the driver to really control. It lurched and flew over the rough ground and fishtailed in the dirt as they fought to keep it out of the grassy plains and on the trail. Tracer rounds spat out of the woods after it and more headlights chased it down the trail. Bullets shattered the windows and chewed up the spare tire on the back hatch of the vehicle. The trailing vehicle came into view, but all the headlights washed out Nick's night vision, preventing him from identifying any of them as Urchenko's rebels or Edonian government forces in the trucks. He could make out the glow of a third vehicle's lights close behind the second truck. The telltale flash of a machine gun mounted on a pedestal over the cab was followed by the echoing report of what sounded like a PKM.

Jeff was able to identify the trailing vehicles from his angle, since he wasn't looking directly at the headlights. His voice came over the radio, calmly declaring, "The trail vehicles are technicals, two pickups with men in the beds. They've got mounted PKMs and I can make out at least one RPG gunner in the bed of the second truck. They look like Andru's assholes."

"Hold your fire until we can positively identify the threat," Thom ordered.

Just then, the SUV was hit with a long burst of machine gun fire and the driver gunned the engine. The small truck lurched forward, bouncing wildly over a few bumps before it hit the ditch at the side of the main road. It struck the embankment and all four tires left the ground. The heavy front end came down crooked and the SUV flipped, rolling across the road. It looked like a civilian truck, one of the local pieces of shit that always clogged the main road during the day.

"They're shooting up the locals!" Nick shouted.

He took aim at the first technical and let loose with a long burst that struck the engine block first and worked its way back along the rest of the truck as it continued forward. He heard Thom yelling curses at him as he and Carter dismounted through the driver's door. Jeff followed Nick's burst with a controlled burst on the last truck. The men in the pickups, without the aid of night vision, fired wildly in their general direction at the flashes from their M240Bs. The rolling SUV came to a stop in the field in front of their lead Humvee, resting on its roof. As he fired another long burst at the first pickup Nick saw Thom and Carter out of the corner of his eye as they sprinted across the grassy field to the rolled civilian vehicle.

Rounds were pinging and ricocheting off of the shield around his turret and he could feel the snap of the rounds as they passed by overhead and around him. He fired his third long burst at the truck, aimed directly at the gunner, and watched him fall back over the tailgate of the truck after taking several rounds to his torso. The pickup had rolled to a stop in the middle of the field and forced the driver of the last truck to slam on his brakes. Smoke was pouring out of the engine of the first truck and the glow of flames licking around the edges of the hood was brightly visible through Nick's night vision. He kept pouring rounds into the truck and the men scattering over the sides of the bed, scrambling for cover in the open field.

Jeff continued to fire bursts at the remaining truck when it was hit with a forty millimeter grenade, fired by Marcos out of the M79 grenade launcher he carried. It was an older weapon, but a classic, firing High Explosive grenades with a kill radius of about five meters. Marcos was more than good enough with it to lob the round into the bed of the truck, where it detonated amongst the guerilla forces' ammo, rockets, and extra fuel. The secondary explosions of everything in the back of the truck ripped the bed right off and flipped it over in the air. The frame of the truck bent down and the cab fell back against the overturned rear of the vehicle. Spilled fuel covered the ground below and around the wreckage and the entire thing went up in flames instantly, blazing in the team's night vision, whiting them out.

Nick flipped the PVS-14 up on his Modular Integrated Communications Helmet to try to encourage his eyes to both adjust to the darkness after the flash. The MICH was a kevlar helmet that was designed for use with headsets like the Peltor and was the same as the standard issue worn by U.S. Armed Forces. Thom came over the radio, "Lift fire! Marcos, Ibrahim, get over here and we'll clear the trucks from the north side."

As they moved up, Nick pulled the remaining ammo from the can in the gun mount and immediately loaded a fresh can of two hundred rounds. He linked the remainder of the belt to the end of the full can and watched as Thom, Carter, Ibrahim, and Marcos quickly approached the destroyed vehicles. They moved quickly and deliberately, putting a controlled pair of rounds into each enemy fighter, just to confirm that they were all dead before they started a hasty search. They kept a safe distance away from the flaming wreckage that Marcos had hit with his High Explosive Dual Purpose grenade as they checked the men for identification or anything else of use to them.

Nick finished with the ammo and climbed down into the driver's seat, radioing, "I'm pulling the truck up to cover the road to the south."

"Stay close," Thom replied, "We need to get the fuck out of here quick."

Nick parked the truck about fifty meters past the rolled SUV and climbed back into the turret, flipping his night vision back down as he watched the road to the south. The rest of the team finished going over the bodies as he scanned for any movement in the fields or among the trees. He was full of adrenaline from the fire fight and his heightened senses made him over-attentive to even the slightest movement of tree branches and grass.

Carter came over the radio, "Definitely Urchenko's men, I found a few of those spider patches on some of these guys."

He was referring to an emblem that the Urchenko brothers had adopted as their symbol, which was just a black spider, outlined in gold on a red shield. It may have had some kind of historic meaning to the region but Nick hadn't really paid much attention to it, he just knew to look for it. To him, it looked like something a thirteen year old would wear to try to look tough.

He heard his teammates opening the doors of the Humvee and he glanced down, surprised to see them guiding a woman to the vehicle. Her long hair was covering her face and it looked like the left side of her jacket was covered in blood. She appeared shaken and unsteady as Thom half-carried her to the door. On her right thigh was an empty drop leg holster and she was carrying a backpack in her free right hand while her left arm was around Thom's huge shoulders.

"Who the hell is she?" Nick asked as he turned back to keep watch on the road.

"There'll be time to find out later," Thom shouted as he sat her inside and slammed the door, "Right now we need to –"

He was cut off by Jeff's voice over the radio, "Vehicles to the rear, coming up fast."

There was a pause before they heard him shouting, "RPG!"