Masters watched as most of the others exchanged confused looks, but now wasn’t the time to delve into the meaning of that question.
“Calm down, Alex. Your little problem with heights aside, I’m afraid we are going to have to jump in.”
Alex paled, but collapsed back into his seat rather than making any further complaints.
“This is going to be a HAHO, high-altitude, high-opening jump. That means we’ll use breathing gear, and we need to exercise careful control coming in,” he told them. “Captain Andrews, are you jump qualified?”
“Yes, but not for HAHO,” she answered, grimacing.
“Fine, you’ll fly with me,” he told her. “Rankin, you take Alex. The rest of you know the drill. Nathan, I want you to pick your spot and stake it out. Make sure you have a good vantage point — you’ll be our overwatch on this.”
“Works better with a spotter,” the sniper replied, raising an eyebrow. “Not to mention at least one other team to cover blind spots.”
“I know, but we’ll work with what we have,” Masters told him. “Everyone else, stay together. We need to pick a landing zone we can clear and control in a hurry.”
“Water.”
Everyone looked over at Alex, who was still grumbling.
“Pardon?”
“If it’s from the other side,” he said, nodding his head to the side, “water is important. Running water is best, but any moving water is a defense.”
Captain Andrews blinked, shaking her head. “What in the name of God is he talking about?”
“Water, right.” Masters nodded, thinking about it. “Assuming it’s not, you know, waterborne.”
“Obviously,” Norton drawled.
“I don’t know, I don’t like it.…” Masters ignored the sarcasm and the distraction of Andrews demanding that he pay attention to her. “There aren’t any rivers down there. We could come down between the lagoons, but it’ll be a death trap if you’re wrong. With the narrow access, we’d be bottlenecked.”
“So would they.”
“Yeah, and I’d consider that if we had the slightest idea who they are,” Masters conceded, “but we don’t. So we’re going to come down west of town, right here.”
He pointed to a location on the map he was looking at, near the beach that faced out over the Beaufort Sea. “This is far enough out of town that we shouldn’t be spotted, unless they’ve got enough men to post guards literally all over the place.”
“And if they do?” Rankin asked from over his shoulder.
“We’re fucked anyway.”
“Just checking.” The master chief sighed.
“All right,” Masters said, “suit up. I’ll tell the pilot to climb and bring us to the south. We’ll ride the prevailing wind right into town.”
“I just want to go on record as not liking this plan,” Norton said, sounding resigned.
“Tough.”
“Would you mind telling me what the hell you’re all talking about now, please?” Andrews demanded, finally finding a lull in the planning.
“Yes, actually, I would. Get your kit on. Oxygen and cold-weather gear, now,” he told her, his voice grave. “Or stay behind. Personally, I’d prefer it if you stayed behind.”
She scowled at him, but finally broke the staring match and turned to grab her kit bag.
I always wondered what it would be like to tell my superior officers to go to hell, he thought, smiling to himself as he made his way up to the pilot, and it’s even better than I imagined.
A HAHO (high altitude, high opening) jump was the counterpart of the more commonly known HALO (high altitude, low opening) jump. Requiring more skill with the parafoil and certain favorable conditions, the HAHO offered operatives several key advantages over the HALO.
Primarily, and crucially, a high opening of the parachute would completely mask the pop of the airfoil deploying, therefore allowing for an almost completely silent approach. The main drawback was that the control needed to maintain an accurate flight path over the kinds of distances involved in a HAHO required a degree of skill that surpassed the requirements for normal precision jumps.
Additionally, if you were jumping into an enemy-controlled region, HAHO offered a way to evade surface-to-air missiles since jump rigs had extremely low radar profiles compared to aircrafts, and you could glide in from a significant distance. In this case, however, Masters was simply more concerned about his team being spotted.
When the team poured out of the Gulfstream, almost instantly losing sight of the blacked-out aircraft as they plummeted through the cold northern air toward an equally black void below them, Masters found himself thinking about how much he’d actually missed doing things like this in the years since he’d been pushed out of the SEALs.
Of course, I would have preferred not to have an extra couple hundred pounds strapped to my chest, even if a good portion of that does happen to belong to a rather good-looking female captain.
Captain Andrews was surprisingly controlled as they fell, obviously experienced enough not to throw off his balance. He knew then that she was certainly jump qualified, even if she wasn’t proficient enough to trust her skills for this sort of exercise.
After they jumped, fifteen seconds passed before he pulled the chord on his chute, the force snapping them upright. Masters checked his compass, and then guided the parafoil around to the right. Behind him he could hear the pop of someone’s chute opening, but he couldn’t be certain if it belonged to Rankin, who was right behind him, or one of the others, since he could have missed the noise if Eddie had been close enough behind his own deployment.
The lights of the town became visible again as they leveled out — a blob of familiarity against the abyss of blackness all around them — but he wasn’t aiming for the lights. He steered west of it, gliding silently through the night over the last thirty miles to the prearranged touchdown point. As they drifted lower, the ground became visible, appearing out of the abyss in a dark blur that rushed past at decidedly unhealthy speeds.
“Hang on,” he said over the rushing wind, “here comes the landing.”
Andrews tensed against his body, but otherwise didn’t say a word as he hit the risers at the last second to bleed off horizontal motion into a brief vertical climb. His stomach plummeted as they swooped low over the half-frozen mud and dirt, barely missing a chemical pool, which he could only assume was related to the nearby oil wells.
Andrews’s feet hit the dirt first, preceded by the heavy duffel bag hanging below them, and he was pleased when she took more than her fair share of the impact with flexed legs. He planted himself an instant later and hit the release on the chute so that he could twist around and start reeling the silks in. He felt Andrews unlatch herself from the harness as he did, and in moments he’d rolled up the chute and was digging a rough hole in the ground to bury it in.
He could see the shadows of the others around him as they did the same. When he was done, he rose from his knees and briefly clapped the dirt from his hands and clothes while looking around.
“What is this place?” Captain Andrews asked, breaking the silence.
“Chemical pools and a dirt quarry for the oil wells, I expect,” he said, reaching down to pick up the duffel. “Keep an eye and an ear out. Normally this place probably runs twenty-four hours a day, though I don’t know how busy it would be.”
“Doesn’t sound like there’s anyone here right now.”
“Yeah, and that worries me a little,” he admitted. “If there’s anything that would keep running, no matter what hits it, it’s a drilling operation. Time is money, and they don’t tend to care about much else. Come on, let’s round up the others.”