The Gray Man

by Mark Greaney

The fight was on. The fact that Court didn’t have a clue what they were fighting over was a nonissue. He did not waste a single brain cell pondering this turn of events.

Court Gentry was a killer of men.

These were men.

And that’s all there was to it.

Markham got a shot off with his SIG Sauer handgun but missed high; his forty-caliber round pierced the aircraft’s skin near the cargo hatch, sending pressurized air from the cabin. Gentry dove behind the cargo on the floor. As he did so he saw Markham and Barnes frantically unhooking their bench harnesses.

McVee was the only man on Gentry’s left as the Gray Man crouched behind the pallet and faced the cockpit doors, thirty feet away. Dulin was up by the bulkhead wall near the doors, and the other three operators were ahead and to his right. Court rolled left, emerged from behind the pallet with his M4 raised, and fired a long burst at McVee. The man’s goggled face slammed back against the wall, and his H&K dropped away from his fingertips.

The black-clad operator fell back on the bench, dead.

Gentry had killed him, and he had no idea why.

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

THE GRAY MAN

A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Jove premium edition / October 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Strode Greaney.

All rights reserved.

For Edward F. Greaney Jr.

and Kathleen Cleghorn Greaney

Mom and Dad, I miss you both

I would like to thank James Yeager and his brilliant cadre of trainers at Tactical Response Inc. in Camden, Tennessee, for getting me up to speed on rifles, pistols, immediate-action medical, and team tactics, and most especially for having the decency to put me out after setting me on fire. God bless you; America is a safer place because of all you and your students do. Now go lay down some hate.

Many thanks also go to James Rollins, Devin Greaney, Karen Ott Mayer, John and Carrie Echols, Mike Cowan, Greg Jones, April Adams, Nichole Geer-Roberts, Stephanie and Abbie Stovall, and Jenny Kraft. Writers appreciate readers, and I appreciate you all.

My agent, Scott Miller at Trident Media Group, and my editor, Tom Colgan at Berkley, also receive my deep and eternal gratitude. This was fun, guys. How ’bout we do it again sometime?

MarkGreaneyBooks.com

PROLOGUE

A flash of light in the distant morning sky captured the attention of the Land Rover’s blood-soaked driver. Polarized Oakleys shielded his eyes from the brunt of the sun’s rays; still, he squinted through his windshield’s glare, desperate to identify the burning aircraft that now spun and hurtled towards earth, a smoldering comet’s tail of black smoke left hanging above it.

It was a helicopter, a large Army Chinook, and horrific though the situation must have been for those on board, the driver of the Land Rover breathed a subdued sigh of relief. His extraction transport was to be a Russian- built KA-32T, crewed by Polish mercenaries and flown in from over the border in Turkey. The driver found the dying Chinook regrettable but preferable to a dying KA-32T.

He watched the chopper spin in its uncontrolled descent, staining the blue sky directly in front of him with burning fuel.

He turned the Land Rover hard to the right and accelerated eastward. The blood-soaked driver wanted to get as far away from here as fast as possible. As much as he wished there was something he could do for the Americans on board the Chinook, he knew their fate was out of his hands.

And he had his own problems. For five hours he’d raced across the flatlands of western Iraq, fleeing the dirty work he’d left behind, and now he was less than twenty minutes from his exfiltration. A shot-down chopper meant that in minutes this place would be crawling with armed fighters, defiling bodies, shooting assault rifles into the air, and jumping around like fucking morons.

It was a party the bloodstained driver would not mind missing, lest he himself become a party favor.

The Chinook sank off to his left and disappeared behind a brown ridge in the distance.

The driver fixed his eyes on the road ahead. Not my problem, he told himself. He was not trained to search and to rescue, he was not trained to give aid, and he certainly was not trained to negotiate for hostages.

He was trained to kill. He’d done so back over the border in Syria, and now it was time to get out of the kill zone.

As his Rover accelerated through the haze and dust at over one hundred kilometers an hour, he began a dialogue with himself. His inner voice wanted to turn back, to race to the Chinook’s crash site to check for survivors. His outer voice, on the other hand, was more pragmatic.

“Keep moving, Gentry, just keep moving. Those dudes are fucked. Nothing you can do about it.”

Gentry’s spoken words were sensible, but his inner monologue just would not shut up.