“Oh, crap,” Clarence muttered. “You sure done it now, Peggy Sue.” He slammed shut the door as if doing so solved the problem.
“You don’t even know what I done.”
“Get ready!” Moms called out on the team net as she staggered to the edge of the ramp, loaded down with weapons and gear. She was tall, though not as tall as Roland, spotting him a little over four inches. She had wide shoulders above surprisingly narrow hips, giving her a body a beach volleyball player would envy. Her short brown hair had streaks of premature gray, more coming with each op, and it had never occurred to her to get it colored. “Eagle. Stay at altitude, just in case.”
The rest of the team was startled at that last sentence.
“That’s not Protocol,” Eagle said, his voice carefully neutral to mask his concern. “I will descend to be on station overwatch at five hundred AGL to give you cover and provide exfiltration as needed.”
“Don’t hit us on the way down,” Mac added, because Mac always had to add something, but also to cover Moms’s gaffe.
“Follow me,” Moms said, shaking it off and stepping from the ramp. Without hesitation, the others followed.
The four got stable, then pulled, getting full canopies. The quick pull was because they were conducting a high altitude — high opening drop, designed to give Roland some time with feet on the ground before they touched down. It was Protocol, the way the Nightstalkers normally ventured into an unknown and abnormal situation. One team member on the ground first for the quick recon, and the rest following right behind. Protocol was what the team lived and breathed, what kept them alive, but lately, it had started to fray at the edges.
“Time hack on the countdown?” Moms asked Eagle.
“Ten minutes, thirty seconds,” Eagle responded.
Moms was focused on the mission ahead, listening to some last-second updates from Ms. Jones back at the Ranch; Mac was mentally running through nuclear warhead Protocol, cut the blue or red wire sort of thing; Kirk was monitoring Moms’s radio traffic and scanning local freqs to see if word of a problem had gotten out; Doc was focused on trying to fly his parachute and dreading the inevitable impact with the ground.
It occurred to Nada as he twitched his toggles to get his position above the rest of the team that they might see a mushroom cloud race up toward them as they descended. Such thoughts filled Nada’s dark mind when he was on an op.
It was why he was still alive and the longest-serving member on the Nightstalkers.
Roland could see the compound — a gray concrete blockhouse surrounded by a high fence with razor wire on the top. The gate to the compound was wide open.
He could also see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles from various government agencies racing away after having secured a far perimeter on Ms. Jones’s alert. The spear was bent, according to the official government code, but if it went to broken arrow or nucflash, they’d better be damn far away to survive.
For a moment, Roland pondered spears and arrows as weapons, because Roland always pondered weapons when he wasn’t actually using them. He decided he’d prefer the former, because while the arrow had the advantage of range, the spear gave a definite advantage close in.
These thoughts, however, did not stop Roland’s mind from processing the ground racing toward him. He’d done enough jumps to have a fairly good idea of altitude. Five thousand, five hundred feet give a hundred, he experience-estimated. He took a quick glance at the nav board on top of his ruck. Five thousand, six hundred. Off slightly, not important at this height, but fatal closer to Mother Earth.
Roland pulled his rip cord and the parachute blossomed above him. The opening shock pulled him upright and he did a quick check for full canopy and grabbed the toggle on each riser, a slightly more difficult task given the hazmat gloves encasing his fingers.
He hated hazmat suits, not for the same reason as the others — because it meant an NBC op: nuclear, biological, chemical — but because it restricted his movement and meant he had to leave his body armor in the team box lashed down in the Snake’s cargo bay. Roland felt naked without body armor.
He turned his attention back to the compound. He spotted a cluster of concrete-covered silos to the north. Another to the west. A few sprinkled to the east and south. “Moms, do we know which silo holds the nuke?”
“The satellite narrowed it down to area, but it could be any of four silos to the west of the facility.”
“I’m getting a schematic of the compound,” Eagle cut in. “All the silos were sealed and buried. You can’t get in from the surface. You’re going to have to use the access tunnel from the LCC to get to the right one.”
“Find out which is the right one ASAP,” Nada said. “Clock’s ticking.”
Moms and the rest of the team were passing through ten thousand feet, circling beneath their canopies. Doc was just above her, with Mac close by to make sure the team’s scientific expert didn’t do something stupid like “cut away” his main. Doc never liked jumping, but his desire to be on the Nightstalkers outweighed his fear of parachuting out of a perfectly good airplane.
Above Doc and Mac was Kirk, the team’s communication expert. He was also the latest addition to the team, joining them just in time for the “Fun in North Carolina” that had gone down six weeks ago. He was a lean, taut-muscled man whose main claim to fame prior to joining the team was that he’d successfully changed his scorecards in Ranger School in order to pass. His right earpiece crackled with an incoming message. He quickly let go of his toggles for a moment and tapped in the code on his wrist transmitter to open the secure link to Moms.
“The silo you want is number seven,” a voice with a Russian accent informed Moms over the radio. Ms. Jones was the voice from which all information flowed to the team. And all orders.
“The first responders only formed a far outer perimeter, unaware of what the incident is,” Ms. Jones continued. “My data says there are only two people in the vicinity. They are not of consequence. However, we cannot rule out that there is terrorist activity.”
“Roland will be down in a few seconds,” Moms replied. She took a quick glance up, counting chutes.
And above the team, keeping a careful eye on all of them like a good shepherd, was Nada, the team sergeant.
Two hundred feet above the target, Roland grabbed air with his chute, slowing his descent. He touched down on top of the LCC with a slight puff of dirt. He unbuckled from his parachute harness and readied the M249, even though this most likely was not a shooting op. One could always hope though, and Roland fantasized a wave of terrorists rushing out of the LCC.
He was rarely that lucky.
He ran down the side of the bunker and around to the front door. He glanced into the beat-up pickup as he went by, but there was nothing of interest. Roland tried the handle on the heavy steel door, but it wouldn’t budge.
He lifted the M249 and pounded on the door with the stock.
Eight stories down, Clarence and Peggy Sue snapped about and stared upward as the thuds on the door echoed down to them.
“This is my damn home,” Clarence said, heading for the weapons rack.