“You did one blood test and a bone marrow test, then went back to the base and started putting on a CID unit. You don’t look good, and you’re not acting very right in the head.”
“Get out of my face, Watts.”
Bruno Watts grasped Jason’s CID unit by the base of the helmet. “I’m telling you, Richter, you’re not ready to go back into the field yet. I’m grounding you as of right now.”
“Who’s going to run this drop test, Bruno—you?” Jason responded. “You haven’t even made it through one briefing on CID. So unless you want to climb inside this unit, get the hell out of my face.” He turned and faced the open cargo door again.
Watts scowled at the robot’s back, unaccustomed to subordinates he hardly knew calling him by his first name. But that appeared typical of Richter and others in this task force: they had been doing their own thing for so long that they had absolutely no regard for rank or common organizational structure. “The job of the commander is to command, Richter. You think you’re being a leader by skipping out of the hospital and doing this training mission, but all I see is a guy with a chip on his shoulder, out for some payback.”
“You sound like Kelsey…I mean, Director DeLaine,” Jason remarked. “Why do all of you FBI agents sound alike?”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Major?” Watts said.
“Ten seconds. Stand by.”
Jason turned around and gave a thumbs-up to the two other CID units standing behind him, piloted by Harry Dodd of the U.S. Army and Mike Tesch, formerly of the Drug Enforcement Agency. He then stepped back to the edge of the cargo ramp at the rear of the CV-22 and turned around so he was facing forward, still holding on to the overhead handrail. Tesch and Dodd waited closely in front of him. When he saw the red light in the cargo bay turn to green, he stepped back and off the ramp.
The idea was to land on his feet, absorb the shock of the drop, and simply continue running, but like most plans his didn’t survive impact. He landed squarely on his feet in a running stance, but immediately face-planted forward and ended up cartwheeling across the desert for almost a hundred feet before crashing into a cactus. Mike Tesch’s landing wasn’t much better. His plan was to land on his butt, cushioning his impact with his arms, and let his momentum carry him up to his feet. But as soon as he hit he bounced several feet in the air, and he landed headfirst on the ground.
Harry Dodd’s landing was almost perfect, but only because he didn’t try to run right out of the landing. Instead, he performed a picture-perfect parachute landing fall, hitting the ground with the balls of his feet, twisting to the right, letting his left calf, thigh, lat muscles, and shoulder take the brunt of the impact in a smooth rolling action, then letting his legs flip up and over his body until they were pointing down along the flight path. When his feet reached the ground, he simply let his momentum lift his entire body up and off the ground, and he was instantly on his feet and running. By the time the dust and sand settled, he had run back and was checking on Tesch and Richter. “You okay, sir?” he asked Richter who had just picked himself up off the ground.
“Almost had it there until that stupid cactus got in my way,” Jason complained. “Where’d you learn to do that roll? It looks like you hardly got dusty.”
“Army Airborne school, Fort Benning, Georgia, sir,” Dodd said. “Looks like I’ll be teaching TALON how to do a correct PLF.”
“Buster, this is Stronghold, looks like everyone is still in the green,” Ariadna Vega radioed from TALON headquarters after checking CID unit’s satellite datalink status readouts. She was able to see each unit’s landing via optical target scoring cameras located throughout the Pecos East range and had to force her voice back to normal after laughing so hard at Richter’s and Tesch’s attempts. “Proceed to maneuver positions.”
Following computerized navigation prompts visible on their electronic visors, the three CID units split up and proceeded to preplanned locations, about a mile from a large plywood building erected on the Pecos East range. Once they were all in position, Jason launched a GUOS, or grenade-launched unmanned observation system, drone from his backpack launcher. The bowling-pin-sized device unfolded its wings and started a small turbojet engine seconds after launch, and the little drone whizzed away with a low, rasping noise and just a hint of smoke.
“Good downlink back here,” Ariadna reported as she watched the streamed digital images being broadcast via satellite from the tiny drones. “Report in if you’re bent.” The sensor on the GUOS drone was not a visual camera, but a millimeter-wave radar designed to detect metal, even tiny bits of it buried as far as twelve inches underground. On their electronic visors, metallic objects big enough to pose a threat to the CID units appeared as blinking blue dots against the combined visual and digital imagery.
“I’ve got a good downlink,” Jason said. The terrain up ahead was littered with blue dots—in this case, sensors and booby traps planted by the “defenders.” Judging by the pattern, the objects appeared to be put in place randomly, as if seeded by aircraft. “Numerous surface devices up ahead, guys.”
“I must be bent, One—Three’s got nothing,” Tesch radioed.
“Okay, Three, hang back as briefed and wait for the signal.”
“Roger.”
“One, this is Two, I can circumnavigate the cluster in front of me,” Harry Dodd reported after studying his visor display. “I need to move a little more in your direction. On the way. Cover me.”
Immediately when Dodd said that, the warning bells in Jason’s head went off. “Negative, Two, hold your pos…”
And at that exact moment, Jason’s threat warning system blared. The GUOS drone had picked up the presence of a large vehicle not previously detected from farther away. “Heads-up, guys, we’ve got company up ahead.”
The disguising job was a work of art, Jason had to admit. The Air Force special operations guys had flown in a Humvee loaded with TOW antitank missiles, covered it with a heat-absorbing blanket to shield it from infrared sensors, and then expertly camouflaged the whole area so from the air it appeared to be nothing more than a slight rise in the desert floor. If they had only used infrared sensors on this approach instead of the millimeter-wave radar scanners, they might have never detected the Humvee until it was too late.
Jason and the two other CID units made short work of their target. They fired volleys of smoke canisters at it with their backpack launchers, simulating grenade attacks, then assaulted the plywood “headquarters building” from different directions. Within minutes, the operation was a success.
Not expecting to be called back so soon for an extraction, the CV-22 Osprey was still on the ground at Cannon Air Force Base refueling, so the CID units had a few minutes to wait. While they waited, the three TALON commandos recalled the GUOS drones back to their garrison area before their fuel ran out, and discussed their techniques on this practice operation. Ten minutes later the Osprey was back, and the CID units could practice their exfiltration technique—a recent modification to the old Fulton Recovery System used for decades by Air Force special operations teams to retrieve men and equipment on the ground without landing.
Dangling from the back of the CV-22’s open cargo bay were three “trapezes”—carbon composite rods about five feet long, suspended from composite cables, resembling circus high-wire trapezes. As the Osprey flew overhead, each CID unit raised his arms and, positioning himself perfectly, hooked his arms onto the trapeze bar as it passed overhead. As the first CID unit was pulled up, the second and third CIDs were retrieved in the same manner. Within minutes, all three CID units were reeled inside the Osprey’s cargo bay.