Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Combat Ops Read Free

mud-brick compound we believed was Zahed’s command post.
    “Ghost Lead, this is Ramirez. Jenkins and I are in position, over.”
    “Roger that, buddy,” I responded. “Just hold till the others check in.”
    I had positioned myself in the foothills, shielded by an outcropping so I could survey the maze of dust-caked structures through my Cross-Com. The combination monocle-earpiece fed me data from my teammates as well as from the drone and the satellite uplinks. The tar geting computer could identify friend or foe on the bat tlefield, and at that moment, red outlines were appearing all over the grid like taillights in a traffic jam.
    Prior to our operation, General Keating, commander of United States Special Operations Command (USSO COM) in Tampa, Florida—the big kahuna for grunts like me—had been talking a lot about COIN, or counterin surgency operations. Keating had expressed his concern that Special Forces in the area might’ve already exhausted their usefulness because the Army’s new phi losophy was to protect the people and provide them with security and government services rather than ven turing out to hunt down and eradicate the enemy. We were to win over the hearts and minds of the locals by  improving their living conditions. Once we made them our allies, we could enlist their help in gathering human intelligence on our targets. In many cases, intel from those locals made all the difference.
    Nevertheless, I remember Lieutenant Colonel Gor don, our Ghost Commander, having several four-letter words to describe how effective that campaign would be. As a Special Forces combatant, he believed, like I once did, that you needed to spend most of your time teaching the people how to fight so that after we left they could defend themselves. However, if their enemies were too great or too overwhelming, then we should go in there like surgeons and cut out the cancer.
    Zahed, our commanders believed, was the cancer. What they hadn’t realized was how far the disease had spread.
    “Ghost Lead, this is Treehorn. In position, over.” Doug Treehorn was the sniper I’d brought along,
    much to the chagrin of Alicia Diaz, my regular operator. Alicia had done tours in Afghanistan before, and I’d had no qualms about taking her along, despite the chal lenges of being female in a nation where women were treated . . . let’s just say differently . That she had taken a fall and broken her ankle two weeks before being shipped out ruined my initial game plan.
    Treehorn was good, but he was no Diaz.
    The others reported in. We had the complex cordoned off, and with Less Than Lethal (LTL) rubber rounds to stun guards before we gassed them into unconscious ness, the plan was to neutralize Zahed’s force, then slip  soundlessly inside the compound and capture the man himself. No blood spilled. Special Forces surgery. I mean, could we make it any more politically correct? We were going in there to take out a man whose soldiers routinely blew themselves up at the local bazaars, but we were try ing our best not to hurt anyone.
    Well, I’d told my guys that if push came to shove, we’d go live. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that, if only to meet the challenge. As I’d told the others before ascend ing the mountains, “This is not rocket science. And it ain’t over till the fat man sings.” Zahed was pushing three hundred pounds, according to intelligence photos and video, and we planned to make him sing all about Taliban operations in the region, including the smuggling of IEDs manufactured in Iraq and rumors about Chinese and North Korean electronic shipments into the country. I know I’m making Zahed sound like a real scumbag, but at that time, things seemed pretty clear. But I hadn’t been there long enough, and I never thought for one second that we Ghosts and the rest of our military might be causing more damage than anyone else. We were
    there to help.
    “All right, Ghosts, let’s move out.”
    I issued a