Two dark forms swam their way to shore. Taking a knee in the gentle waves they carefully inspected the shoreline with their Night Optical Devices.  A row of bungalows was laid out in front of them, some with lights on inside, others blacked out.  Everything appeared normal, so they turned around and used a red-lens […]

            The airfield in Turkey was buzzing. White Land Cruisers sped around the runway, ferrying Westerners around the immediate area.  Were they working for relief organizations, intelligence services, or corporations?  Deckard watched another group of middle aged men depart a third airplane that had landed that morning and decided that […]

The interior of the Casa 235 was cramped, claustrophobic, and hot. The passengers rocked around the inside of the plane as it skirted low over the surface of the earth to avoid surface-to-air missiles.  They flew blacked-out, in the dark, the free fall jumpers sitting on the cold metal floor while their bodies quickly heated […]

            Pat cursed as machine gun fire rattled his vehicle. It was the third time that night and they had only been in Syria a matter of hours.  Tartus had been an obvious no-go to make port in so they had to come in at a much smaller port to […]

            The staging area was a bombed-out crater, the ruins of what had once been a series of family housing units on the outskirts of Homs.  Now, it was Al-Nusra’s command center for their Homs offensive.  The city looked even more bombed out then Beirut had been back in the […]

            Deckard ran. The kid disappeared through the door to his house. Deckard jetted down the road that was getting shelled by the Syrian Army.  Gunfire chased after him.  Voices yelled behind him.  His boots beat the street.  His heart was beating right out of his chest as he did […]

            Ramon herded the Nusra fighters around the collapsed building.  The Quds Force fighters had been beaten back for the time being and had retreated back to Syrian Army positions elsewhere in the city.  A couple of civilians who were busy looting abandoned homes had told them where they had […]

            Deckard was up on his feet and moving the second the grenade exploded.  It was early morning and the cold night air cleared his head as he threw the blanket off.  Running out the door, he turned through the smoke hanging in the air from the explosion and sprinted […]

            Deckard heard the screams when his hand grenade detonated. The Operator had been driving his cell of Nusra fighters hard.  They kept pushing Deckard deeper and deeper into no man’s land.  He had nowhere else to go.  It had become a running gunfight, Deckard finding a position that offered […]

            Bill tugged on the black canister stuck to the back of his car.  Whatever adhesive it used was powerful stuff, as even a physical specimen like him had a hard time yanking the tracker off the car.  Locking the canister in a vice grip, it wasn’t the glue that […]

Pat watched as a car approached in the distance. It was late afternoon.  The city of Homs was burning.  Again. The mercenaries had managed to fight their way out of the city and find a defendable position to bunker down in until they were extracted.  Pat had also sent out a few scouting parties to […]

            Nadeesha smiled and the young NGO worker responded in kind.             He was a young kid with one of the save-the-children type non-governmental organizations that scooted back and forth across the border everyday.  She had told him that she was a freelance journalist who had gotten trapped behind enemy […]