Strike of the Stingray (Brice Bannon Seacoast Adventure Book 3)

  STRIKE OF THE

  STINGRAY

  A BRICE BANNON

  SEACOAST ADVENTURE

  DAVID DELEE

  COPYRIGHT

  STRIKE OF THE STINGRAY

  Published by Dark Road Publishing

  Strike of the Stingray, Copyright © 2018 by David DeLee

  Excerpt from The Loan Shark Gambit, Copyright © 2018 by David DeLee

  Cover art copyright © 2018 © revoc9 | Depositphotos.com

  Book and cover design copyright © 2018 by Dark Road Publishing

  Strike of the Stingray and all works contained within are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities or resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is wholly coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner or form whatsoever without written permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violations of the author’s rights.

  For more information, contact us at www.darkroadpub.com.

  All Rights Reserved

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  Thank you for purchasing this book, we hope you enjoy it.

  Dedicated to the brave men and women who serve in the U.S. Coast Guard,

  past and present, thank you for your service

  Semper Paratus

  “Always Ready”

  STRIKE OF THE

  STINGRAY

  Five Years Earlier

  Outside Kandahar, Afghanistan

  THE SUN HUNG HIGH in the bleached-out sky. A white orb searing a stretch of paved road running through the barren landscape south of the NATO controlled Kandahar Airport. The acrid desert rolled out on either side of the road like a lumpy dirt carpet of brown, the dreary monotony of bumps and berms only occasionally broken up by patches of sage-bush and brushwood and ribbons of dark rocky ridges.

  Nothing moved until a desert-tan, high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle, commonly referred to as a Humvee, sped along the highway at a steady thirty-five miles per hour clip. Mounted with an M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun, it crewed with four personnel. The gunner was in position wearing a dark ballistic vest, a tan camouflage helmet, and large orange-shaded goggles. The vehicle provided security for the close-column convoy that followed.

  Traveling forty meters behind their security escort, a light-armored vehicle served as convoy lead to three medium tactical vehicles, and one M925 5-ton cargo truck. The trail vehicle was a second Humvee.

  Sergeant Josh Starling drove the trail vehicle with Specialist Jon La Rosa riding shotgun—literally. Born in Sedona, Arizona, Starling was no stranger to temperatures that could reach a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit and an unrelenting barren desert that offered no relief from the broiling sun and searing heat. Beside him, La Rosa, an olive-skinned Puerto Rican kid who’d lived his whole life in Miami complained nonstop about the heat. Like it would change the more he whined about it.

  “How ain’t you hot, Sarge?” he asked again, wiping a rolling drop of sweat from his temple.

  “Used to it.” Starling sped the Humvee up, closing the gap between them and the last tactical vehicle, the M925. A blunt-nosed truck, it was capable of transporting ten-thousand pounds of cargo in its seven-by-fourteen foot bed, had hinged side racks and tailgate, troop seats, and a tan canvas cover that sagged between its supporting ribs that wobbled as the truck barreled down the road.

  “They say it’s different,” La Rosa said, making conversation.

  “What’s that?” Starling asked, not caring what La Rosa had to say or what he thought.

  “Dry heat verses tropical heat,” La Rosa said. “It’s all friggin’ hot, you ask me.”

  Starling didn’t respond. That didn’t stop La Rosa.

  “Least where I’m from,” he said, “you’ve got lots of water to jump into. Cool yourself off, you know what I mean?”

  Before Starling could reply, he heard the split-second whine of an RPG and saw the streak of a white contrail flare across the barren landscape ahead of them. A thunderous explosion of sound followed. The blast obliterated the lead vehicle, a light-armored vehicle. In it had been their company commander and Starling and La Rosa’s platoon leader. Oily black smoke billowed into the sky. Proof to Starling there’d be no survivors.

  Small arms fire opened up on the convoy from the low desert berms.

  The radio crackled with frantic voices, calls for assistance and airstrikes. Curses were shouted over the static as the convoy vehicles moved forward and in reverse, each driver indecisive as to whether to drive ahead out of the kill zone or to back away.

  A second shoulder-fired anti-tank missile struck one of the tactical vehicles up ahead.

  The impact lifted the truck up onto two wheels before it slammed down again, righting itself. Two soldiers leapt from the cab. They ran for cover away from the burning truck and dove into a low gully beside the road.

  An exchange of small and medium arms gunfire raged up ahead.

  Over it, Starling could hear the rapid spitfire of the lead Humvee’s .50 caliber machine gun.

  If there was Hell on Earth, this was it. Starling threw his Humvee in reverse as the 5-ton ahead of them barreled backwards, desperate to get out of the kill zone. Starling slammed on the brakes and spun the Humvee around. The roadway behind them exploded in a geyser of macadam, dirt, and smoke.

  “Get out!” he shouted to La Rosa. “Get out!”

  The overly talkative specialist did as he was ordered, taking his M16 with him. They ran for the gully beside the road and dove for cover.

  The 5-ton struck Starling’s Humvee, upending it a split-second before another RPG-launched missile destroyed the cab of the truck, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke. From inside it, Starling and La Rosa could hear the dying men scream.

  The engine compartment burned. The flames inside the cab roared out though the shattered windows, reached the canvas cover stretched over the ribs of the truck’s cargo compartment, and soon it was burning hot, too.

  From the bed of the truck, voices cried out.

  Starling scampered out from the gully. “Cover me!”

  He raced for the vehicle, providing his own one-handed cover fire as he ran.

  “Sarge! Josh! What the hell are you doing?”

  Starling ignored La Rosa. He reached the back of the truck. It was upended at an angle, having crushed the Humvee under its two tires on the one side of rear tandem dual axle. He climbed up on the hood of his crumpled vehicle and unhinged the tailgate of the 5-ton. He let it slam open and jumped back as the Middle-Eastern men trapped inside the cargo space leaped and scrambled off the Humvee to escape the burning truck.

  They tumbled to the ground and ducked as bullets pinged off metal and chewed chunks out of the macadam, spitting dark pebbles around them like shrapnel. The men were dressed in drab green and brown baggy clothes. Most wore a taqiyah. All were handcuffed behind their backs with black zip-ties. In all, two dozen men fled from the back of the truck.

  Ahead of them another vehicle in the convoy exploded. More rocks and shrapnel rain down, pelting them. Starling ducked and covered his head.

  One of the men from the back of the truck, a tall, dark-skinned man, stumbled over to Starling. He was very thin with a scraggily black beard and wore a soiled turban. He turned his back to Starling
. The sergeant cut off the zip tie restraints with his Ka-Bar knife.

  The others approached him and Starling did the same for them.

  When all the prisoners were freed, the tall man in the turban reached out and covered Starling’s hands with both of his, cupping them, shaking them. He patted them.

  “You saved our lives. You saved my life. You have been a good friend to me through troubling times, Josh Starling. Your compassion shall not go unrewarded.”

  The sound of approaching attack helicopters filled the air. The fighting around them was fierce. The cries of the dying echoed over the barren emptiness of the desert. More RPGs landed and exploded around them.

  “You must go, Ghaazi!” Starling shouted over the latest explosion. “Run! Now!”

  Ghaazi Alvi nodded and took off running, joining the other escapees as they ran low and quickly, soon disappearing behind the rolling berms of desert and rocky ridges. Starling watched them go with a grim but satisfied smile. He heard the roar of waiting vehicles and saw a cloud of dust billow up from behind their well-placed concealment. He nodded once and ran back to where La Rosa anxiously waited.

  Starling slid back into the safety of their dusty, ad hoc foxhole.

  “Christ, Sarge. What’d you do? You aided those prisoners in escaping.”

  Starling stared at him for a moment and then said, “I did.”

  He aimed his Beretta M9 at La Rosa’s forehead and pulled the trigger, killing him.

  To the corpse, he said, “Let me know if Hell’s got a dry or tropical heat.”

  FRIDAY

  CHAPTER ONE

  DRESSED CASUALLY IN TAN slacks, a short sleeve polo shirt, and boat shoes, Brice Bannon walked through the kitchen of his seaside bar, the Keel Haul. A hole-in-the-wall dive located on the strip in the small town of Hampton Beach, a small jewel on the eighteen-mile New Hampshire seacoast. The Keel Haul was Bannon’s pride and joy.

  At least it had been until three weeks earlier when a group of terrorists attacked the bar in the middle of the night, shooting up the place with automatic small arms fire and grenades. Fire, smoke, and a lot of bodies later, the resulting damage had made a soup to nuts renovation all but unavoidable. A process the Keel Haul was currently undergoing.

  Paint-splattered metal scaffolding was pressed up against one wall near the front of the bar. A worker in painter overalls was taping and plastering the ceiling. There were sawhorses and gang boxes, ladders, and big rubber garbage cans with brooms and shovels stuck in them all around the place. The floor was covered in sawdust. Painters, carpenters, electricians, and laborers filled the bar with more people than Bannon typically served on a Saturday night.

  He stepped through the propped open kitchen door just as a table saw buzzed into operation behind him. The noise vibrated his back teeth. He flipped back and forth through papers on a clipboard as hammer guns and power drills added to the cornucopia of construction sounds.

  In the bar area, the tables and chairs were stacked in one corner, a canvas tarp draped over them. The booths were all covered in plastic sheets taped down with duct tape. He walked toward the bar, greeted by more banging and the colorful shouting of construction workers and Garth Brooks singing about his friends in low places.

  Bannon glanced up from his clipboard in time to see his best friend, John “Skyjack” McMurphy step through the open front door. It was open because there was no longer a door there.

  Before the attack, the door had been a conversation piece. Salvaged by Bannon from an 18th Century British frigate he’d discovered during a dive off the coast of Rye Beach, just a few miles north of Hampton Beach. He’d restored the door to near pristine condition and even installed an authentic brass porthole in it, complete with dog ears and nuts.

  To gain entry into the bar, the terrorists had blown the door to smithereens. What little that was left of it was in the thirty-yard dumpster out back.

  McMurphy paused in the doorway and looked around. His expression was one of amused bewilderment as he made his way to the bar. He wore gray running shoes, blue jeans, a plaid work shirt, open and untucked, and underneath it, a black T-shirt that read: 603 LIVE FREE OR DIE. The state’s area code and motto.

  At six feet tall, McMurphy was as wide as a linebacker and could be twice as mean, when he wanted to be. But his unprovoked demeanor was jovial and as self-deprecating as they come. A former career Chief Warrant officer with the Coast Guard, he had dark red hair which he wore longer now that he was out of the service full-time. As was normally the case, he puffed on a thick stogie jammed into the corner of his mouth.

  The stools along the bar were all covered with plastic except for one.

  On it sat Captain Floyd, an ancient regular with rounded shoulders who as near as anyone could tell came with the bar when Bannon bought it. Floyd was never seen without his sea captain’s hat. He looked to everyone like those carved wooden statues of a sea captain sold in every seaside novelty shop throughout the New England seacoast.

  When he wasn’t drinking, Floyd covered his mug of beer with a liver-spotted hand to keep the dust from it.

  McMurphy grinned. “Should’ve known you’d be here, Floyd.”

  “That’s cap’n to you, young man, and you can’t smoke in here. It’s against regulation.”

  McMurphy gave the old man a mock salute, ignoring his request regarding the cigar. “Aye, aye, Cap’n, sir.”

  Floyd grinned approvingly. “More like it.”

  Bannon stepped behind the bar and dropped the clipboard next to a stack of tumblers also under plastic.

  “Some mess you’ve got here, brother,” McMurphy said.

  “Tell me about it. These change orders are going to cost a fortune and they just keep rolling in.”

  Bannon was a ruggedly handsome man in his mid-thirties. As tall as McMurphy, his was a trimmer physique, one tailor made for surfing, which Bannon did a lot of in his younger days, and running, which he still did with religious regularity. Like McMurphy, a former commander in the Coast Guard, he remained in the reserve, but he no longer cut his dark wavy hair to strict military regulation either. A fine coating of sawdust covered it presently.

  McMurphy leaned his elbows on the bar, planted a foot on the brass foot rail, and looked around. He reminded Bannon of a cowboy in the old west.

  “When do you expect to be done with all this?”

  “A couple or three days, according to my contractor, who I just met with.” He looked around the bar, too. “Yeah, color me skeptical. Beer?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Bannon reached down under the counter and dug through ice to come up with two icy bottles of Coors Light. Bannon handed one to McMurphy.

  “Gracias, sir.” He tipped the bottle toward Bannon and then sucked half of it dry.

  “What’re ya thanking ’im for?” Floyd asked. “Service in this joint’s been crap for weeks now.”

  “That’s because we’re closed, Cap’n. For renovations.”

  “Didn’t ya notice all the construction going on around ya?” McMurphy asked.

  Floyd looked around as if seeing it all for the first time, a sour expression on his face. He shook his head. “Naw. Ain’t that.”

  Bannon gave the old man a bittersweet smile. “I miss Tara, too, Floyd.”

  “What?” The old man furrowed his forehead. His thick white eyebrows bunched together over his nose. “Ya mean that girl hangs around here pretending to be a bartender?” He harrumphed. “Don’t make me laugh. She a pain in my—”

  “Speaking of Blades, you hear from her?” McMurphy asked, drinking his beer.

  “No. She’s basically MIA.” Bannon leaned on the counter and used his thumbnail to tear a rip in the silver label. “Learning her brother was alive, after all this time thinking he wasn’t, it hit her pretty hard.”

  “Not to mention finding out he’s the evil terrorist mastermind who tried to kill nearly six thousand people.” McMurphy shook his head. “That’d mess with anybod
y’s head.”

  “Yeah, then there’s that.”

  Bannon had dealt with devastating betrayals before. But he didn’t have a brother, or any siblings, so he’d never experienced the hurt that kind of betrayal would cause, not from a blood relative. His parents had been killed when he was very young. He had no memories of them. He’d grown up in the system. His earliest memories were of being bounced from foster home to foster home until he turned eighteen. That day he joined the Coast Guard, where he’d found a family at last.

  “She went to go find him, didn’t she?” McMurphy asked.

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “I would’ve helped, if she’d asked.”

  “That’s why she didn’t ask. She figures this is her problem to fix.”

  McMurphy nodded. “You worried?”

  Bannon gave the idea some thought. He shrugged. “Tara can take care of herself.”

  McMurphy nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  The three of them were brothers— and sisters-in-arms. That made them closer than family. So, of course he was concerned for her. “Tell you the truth, though. It’s Ghaazi Alvi’s well-being I’d worry about more once Tara catches up to him.”

  “Amen to that, brother.” McMurphy finished his beer. “You ask me, the little weasel deserves everything she gives him.”

  “Want another?” Bannon asked, indicating his empty beer bottle.

  McMurphy slapped the bar. “No. Thanks. I’ve gotta run.” He stepped back. “The reason I stopped by though, the Seacoast Penguins, we’ve got a game tonight. Six o’clock. Wondered if you wanted to tag along? We’re going up against the Saltwater River Cats. The division leaders. We’re gonna crush ’em.”

  McMurphy coached a little league baseball team in the Hampton Beach organized youth league. He’d done it for years, and Bannon often went along and helped out. It was fun. He loved baseball and the kids were great. A lot of them were sons and daughters of deployed servicemen and women. As such, much of the coaching came down to consoling the broken hearts of those missing their loved ones.