by Weston Ochse
The wharf where the target ship was moored rested on the other side of replica of a Tang Dynasty fortress, which was still under construction. The hundred-foot battlements hid the area from any possible tourist observation and kept the place as private and secluded as anything could possibly be on the jam-packed island of Macau. The seclusion was an unasked-for yet appreciated windfall to the SEAL team members, who now didn’t have to contend with the possibility of tourists interrupting their operations. They were lucky. Even at 0100 hours, the area on the other side of the fortress construction site would be filled with people eager to spend their money and see for themselves what made Macau such a lusted-for pearl of the Orient.
After the mission brief, which took up the first thirty minutes of the flight, everyone sacked out for five hours. This time Walker didn’t dream. Exhaustion took hold and smashed him down until he was shaken awake by Ruiz.
“Where are we?” Walker asked groggily.
“We passed over Guam an hour ago.”
Walker pulled himself to his feet. The plan’s transponder identified it as a commercial cargo plane, and this C-141 had been painted the colors of a well-known package-delivery carrier. The ruse would grant them access to the airspace and allow overflight of their target. In addition to their battle rattle, each of them had been assigned High Altitude/High Opening (HAHO) tanks and masks. Normally they’d get a chill suit to defray the extreme cold of the upper atmosphere, but they were going directly into combat and they didn’t want to change clothes in the middle of a firefight. Although Walker had never participated in an actual HAHO, he’d practiced them at KIWG.
“Holmes wants to see you,” Ruiz said. He stood next to his gear and ran through it item by item to ensure it was in perfect working order.
Walker glanced at his own pile of gear. Pack. Gator case for carrying his Stoner during the jump. Ammunition box. Body armor. MBITR. Vest. NVGs. Various other pieces of equipment he hadn’t yet inventoried, all of it looking as if it had just come off the shelf of the Super SEAL Team Wal-Mart. Yeah, he knew what Holmes wanted. He’d stared daggers as he’d given the mission brief. Walker had known full well that when he’d chosen to steal a few moments with Jen, he’d have to pay the price. It looked like it was time to pay. Picturing Jen, though, it was hard to argue that it hadn’t been worth it.
“Yes, boss,” Walker said. He stood at parade rest with his hands folded into each other behind him.
“‘Sir’ will do,” Holmes said, not looking up from the imagery he was studying on his tablet. “Ruiz says boss. He’s from the South so I excuse it.”
“Yes, sir.” Walker fought the urge to roll his eyes. Whatever old-school textbook Holmes had used to learn how to be a leader, he must have excelled on the chapter about how to be aloof but tough. Walker much preferred the in-your-face style of Instructor Reno or any number of Navy chiefs he’d had the displeasure of getting crossways with.
Finally Holmes set his tablet on the bench beside him. Walker watched him, knowing that the man had two choices. He could either stand up and get in Walker’s face, or he could sit back and relax, demonstrating that he didn’t have to work in order to get his point across. Walker had seen both worked to perfection and knew how to deal with each.
“SEALs need to be ready at all times. I spoke with Instructor Reno a little while ago and he said that he was disappointed that your equipment wasn’t prepared.”
Ouch! Holmes knew that there were few men on the planet that Walker respected more than Reno. Walker stood straighter and squared his shoulders. “You spoke to him?”
“I did. He told me that you were one of his better SEAL trainees. Not the best, mind you, but among the better. He asked why you’d been chosen, but I explained that it couldn’t be disclosed at this time. Did you ever let him down?”
“No, sir.”
“And why is that?”
Walker noted the effectiveness of Holmes’s ability to deal with the situation. He looked too calm, too cool, sitting back with his arm resting along the backrest of the bench seat.
“I respect Instructor Reno, sir. I—”
“But you don’t respect me?” Holmes shook his head.
“No, sir. It’s just that I’ve spent the last eleven weeks with Instructor Reno and I know him better.”
“Ahh. So you have to know someone to respect them.”
“No, sir. I respect those appointed as superior over me.”
“And what did I tell you?”
“To get my gear ready, sir.”
“And did you?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re full of ‘no sirs’ tonight, aren’t you, son?”
“No, sir.” But then as Holmes raised an eyebrow, Walker said, “Yes, sir.”
Holmes leaned forward, draping his elbows over his knees. He rubbed the Annapolis ring that was in place of a wedding band. “When you fail to live up to the standards set by Instructor Reno, you have to do more physical training. When you fail to live up to the standards of SEAL Team 666, you let down yourself, the other team members, and me, and you put all of our lives at risk.”
Walker felt the air leave him as disappointment at his own failings filled his chest.
“More important than our lives, you put America at risk, Walker. The president and the Sissy expect us to perform a mission, one in which the sovereignty and safety of the United States of America is paramount. To ignore orders that support this mission is akin to loading rounds into the weapon that kills Uncle Sam. Is that clear?”
Walker gulped. “S-sorry, sir,” he stammered.
“Don’t be sorry, SEAL, just stop acting like an FNG.”
“Yes, sir.” Walker stood for a few seconds before he realized that he was released. He turned to go, but evidently Holmes wasn’t quite done.
“Make sure you zero that Stoner. Get Ruiz to help you. I don’t want you winging me in the head when you’re shooting a hundred and eighty degrees the other way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Walker moved back toward the others near the rear of the plane feeling like he’d just been punched in the gut, chest, and head.
Laws spoke first. “Did he give you the Ring Speech?”
Walker looked at Laws through hollow eyes.
“Was he rubbing his ring while he talked to you?” Laws asked. “Did he use the word ‘paramount’? We call that the Ring Speech.”
Fratty snickered. “That’s a good speech. Left me feeling like a deckhand on the Titanic.”
“I wanted to crawl under a rock,” Ruiz admitted with a sad smile.
Walker suddenly felt a little better. Being singled out was the absolute worst. But the shared-misery philosophy was a foundational belief in the military and was the cement that kept men together even during the toughest times.
Walker set about unpacking his gear and laying it out on the decking of the C-141 Starlifter. Soon Ruiz was next to him, helping him organize and unwrap the new items. Fratty joined a few minutes later, then finally Laws.
“Was she worth it?” Fratty asked.
A smile crept across Walker’s face as Jen’s freckles appeared before him. “Yeah.”
Over the next hour, they readied his gear and repacked it for the mission. Since he’d lugged his entire issue, he had a lot of redundant items that he wouldn’t need. These were in a separate pile.
As they worked, Walker found the other SEALs opening up to him a bit more.
Fratolilio was an anachronism. His was a join-the-Navy-or-go-to-jail scenario, but instead of boosting cars or stealing hubcaps, he had been a hacker who’d been caught changing the grades for all the seniors in his high school. For the first time in the history of Clara Barton High School, everyone graduated—one hundred percent, including the three unwed mothers taking the year off to have babies and the young man doing time for selling X during the homecoming dance.
Johnny Ruiz was another anachronism. To close your eyes and listen to him, you’d imagine a white West Virgin
ia cracker. To look at him, with his swarthy skin and coal-black hair, you’d wonder if he was in America illegally. His southern drawl delivered from a Mexican-American mouth was sometimes too odd to witness. Ruiz was another join-the-Navy-or-go-to-jail recruit. He was caught purchasing marijuana in a drug bust for his mother’s habit. Ruiz’s expertise had always been explosives. His father, uncles, and brothers had stayed behind to work the West Virginia mines, something they’d done for generations. Ruiz learned at an early age the correct amounts of explosive to blow things sky-high, whether it was something as small as a tin can or as large as a bulldozer. Walker would bet that in Wheeling, West Virginia, Ruiz was a big man on campus and wasn’t self-conscious at all. But on SEAL Team 666, he was the quietest among them and always seemed concerned about how people saw him.
Timothy Laws was just plain weird. Unlike the other two, he hadn’t been forced to join the Navy. His father had been a set designer for MGM and Universal Studios in Hollywood and Timmy had grown up meeting the famous and infamous, befriending stuntmen, and helping with set designs since he was ten. School was easy for him—too easy. It wasn’t until he was in junior high that he realized his ability to memorize everything he heard wasn’t something everyone could do. When he joined the Navy, his language testing was off the charts and he was soon learning the first of eventually four dialects of Chinese.
Walker opened up to them as well. He told them about his experience with the Somali pirates and a little about growing up in an orphanage in Manila. For a few moments during the preparations, they felt like a small brotherhood. Walker liked that feeling. This was what it was all about. Being part of something.
The last thing they did was zero the sniper rifle. The best way to accomplish this would be on a rifle range with a spotter, but they’d have to make do with the space they had inside the fuselage of the Starlifter. Walker set up near the front bulkhead and lay prone, the Stoner aimed toward the rear of the plane. In actuality, he wasn’t actually zeroing the rifle, but the Leupold 4.5–14 × 50mm Mark 4 scope. He attached it to the Picatinny-Weaver rail mount system on top of the weapon and set it to factory standard. Then he grabbed a laser sight with a universal mount from the case and attached it to the front of the barrel. It made the weapon heavy, but he attached the bipod, which alleviated the weight and would keep the rifle still. Using a digital leveler, he aligned the laser with the barrel, then turned it on. A beam of light shot from the device down the length of the plane. He aligned it so that it hit the center of the target, then concentrated on the scope. It took a few moments of adjusting the knobs to get the illuminated mil dot within the crosshairs aligned. Then he tightened the knobs in place.
Next he got with the rest of the team and conducted pre-breathing, which consisted of intaking one hundred percent oxygen to flush the nitrogen from their bloodstreams. They’d be jumping from higher than twenty-five thousand feet, and the lack of pressure could lead to hypoxia or decompression sickness if all the nitrogen wasn’t flushed. So for thirty minutes they sat side by side, using the Starlifter’s oxygen supply and going over the mission in their minds, preparing for what would be an intense physical challenge in less than an hour.
Finally it was time to load up.
Over Walker’s body armor went the MC-4 free-fall parachute system, comprising the chute, an altimeter with a compass, an automatic parachute activation device, and a bail-out small oxygen tank, the latter which he’d eject once he was below seven thousand feet. The bulky reserve chute went in front. As always, he found himself resting his arms on it.
His Stoner was in an M1950 weapons case that was attached to the chute on a D ring to a lowering line, used just before impact to lessen possible damage to the weapon. Lastly, he put on his Protec skate helmet modified for MBITR.
After a commo check, they were ready to go. All the remaining gear had been tied down. They now stood at the edge of the closed ramp. The red light above it switched to yellow. The ramp began to open.
Fratolilio was scheduled to be the center man in the formation. Hoover was attached to the front of his parachute by her own harness, replacing the reserve. In addition to the harness, the dog had a muzzle protector, bubble glasses to protect her eyes, and a warming cloak worn beneath the harness. Hoover acted as if this was nothing special.
The team’s only odd uniform concession had been to wear ballistic masks that covered their faces but left holes for the eyes, mouth, and nose. Though they were concerned about video surveillance, there was nothing they could do about their mission possibly being recorded and reviewed by the People’s Liberation Army at a later date. But they could mitigate the PLA’s ability to record their identities for possible future use.
Holmes’s mask was black with a white slash across it.
Ruiz’s mask was a deep blood red.
Fratty wore a solid white mask.
Laws wore a mask with a green camouflage pattern.
And Walker, probably thanks to the tried-and-true tradition of fucking with the new guy, wore a mask so pink that it was fuchsia.
The Starlifter’s crew chief was attached to a monkey harness. When the ramp opened fully, he walked to the edge and glanced out at the darkness. The rush of cold air and the wave of sound hit the team like the slap of a giant hand, but they held their ground.
“Five minutes,” came the chief’s voice through their headsets. “We’re at twenty-seven thousand feet and forty miles southeast of the target.”
All five SEALs checked their altimeters and GPS to confirm.
At the one-minute mark, they conducted a final radio check, then prepared to embrace the dark.
The chief counted down from thirty. When he hit zero, they ran off the edge of the ramp like a gang attacking the night. As they hit the air, they were torn backwards in the jet wash. Last in line, Walker kept his weapon case gripped in his hands just below the reserve chute. It was an awkward position, akin to falling face-first into the water with your hands at your side.
The air temperature was thirty degrees below zero. There was a danger of frostbite if they remained at altitude for any period of time. Thankfully they were falling fast and had already reached terminal velocity of 110 miles per hour, or 56 meters per second. Walker always loved the idea of hurling his body through the air faster than he’d ever driven a car … with the exception of Jen’s Corvette, which he’d gotten to 140 once on an empty stretch of Interstate 8. Of course, there was always the danger of crashing in the ’Vette, but here in the wide black night, there was nothing to crash into except another SEAL.
“Prepare to deploy.” Holmes’s tight voice broke through the rush of air.
Walker angled his left wrist so he could see the altimeter. The digital numbers flew by as they fell lower and lower in the earth’s atmosphere. They were almost to fifteen thousand feet. Below, Walker could see the twinkle of lights and a larger glow from what could only be Macau. The air temperature had warmed to zero degrees. He felt great. No sign of hypoxia or anything else.
They’d flattened out so that they were no longer falling on top of each other, but side by side. Holmes counted down to zero and as a unit they deployed their chutes, each jerking upward as their velocity went to almost nothing. Walker managed to retain his grip on his weapon. He lowered it on the line, then reached up and adjusted his risers until he was following the others, five SEALs moving silently through the Chinese night sky toward their target, nineteen miles away.
15
MACAU. THE WITCHING HOUR.
They’d soared to within a hundred yards of a cruise ship glittering beneath them, laughter and music drifting from it at 0130 hours. The passengers would be witness to the events that were about to unfold if they were sober enough to grab a telescope or high-powered binoculars.
The approach was the trickiest part of the operation. They weren’t prepared for a water landing. A two-hundred-meter length of the second wharf had been designated as their landing zone. A building and rack of storage conta
iners would screen them from the target if they played it right.
Overhead imagery had identified six roving guards and several static cameras, all easily overcome or ignored.
They landed one after the other, coming in low and flaring at the last moment, their black chutes and body armor blending in with the sky, then the close shadows of the night-drenched wharf.
Holmes took out a guard who was lighting a cigarette as they landed. With sound suppressors affixed to all the weapons, his two shots to the man’s chest sounded like loud coughs.
The team wrapped their chutes, harnesses, and oxygen tanks, then dropped them over the edge of the wharf into the South China Sea. After a weapons and commo check, they began to move.
The cargo ship was docked at the end of the wharf. A single guard stood beneath a light at the gangway. Like the other one, he wore the green uniform of the Chinese army. A billed Mao hat rested on his head. He carried an AK-47 at his shoulder. The thing about guards was that they spent their entire lives preparing for a single moment when they had to be ready. It was a minuscule number of guards who didn’t eventually succumb to the boredom inherent in such a task. This man was no exception. He’d found a place to lean, and by the rocking of his head, he was back and forth between the waking world and his place on Mao’s Long March.
Walker had the Stoner out of its case, the optics installed and ready. He helped the guard along his way with a 7.62mm nudge through the head. The guard’s hat popped off as his torso rocked back; then he slumped to the ground.
Another guard ran down the gangway. He’d been obscured by the railing. He was fumbling with a walkie-talkie on his hip when the Stoner coughed again. The QD sound suppressor was about a foot long and extended the barrel length of the Stoner by about six inches. The extra weight was a surprise to negotiate, Walker realized. The first round took the guard in the hip, shattering it and spinning him around. The second round took him in the upper back, exploding a fist-sized hole out of his chest.