David Arris raced the dawn to the earth. The sun was barely slivering above the eastern horizon as he and his teammates ripped through 20,000 feet on their way to zero. They were falling like angels cast down from heaven, clad in HALO suits and armed with modernity’s most lethal weaponry, and their intent was to destroy a group of the faithful. Not because God had ordered it, but because man had.
They passed through 10,000 feet and began to spread out, each man finding his spot in the dark sky. And then, seconds later, Arris felt the pull of air as it filled the parachute and snugged the straps to his body, hugging him tightly for a moment before letting him settle into them. Below him, Arris could make out the variety of shades of gray denoting the various subtleties of the landscape. A moment later he seized the cords of the chute, guiding himself to a smooth, gull-like landing on the dirt, his legs running him to a stop.
Within seconds he was out of the harness and gathering up his chute and stowing it under nearby brush, weighing it down with a rock. He stripped the rest of the jump gear from his body and readied his equipment, a well-rehearsed ritual each man had practiced dozens of times blindfolded or in a darkened training room. Arris readied his HK416 assault rifle and spoke into the small mic attached to his ear.
“Opera, this is Alpha One, music check.”
“Alpha Two, check.”
“Bravo One, check.”
“Bravo Two, check.”
Arris toggled the microphone freq. “Clarksburg, this is Opera. We’re on the stage.”
“Roger Opera, play the tune.”
Arris smiled for an instant, recognizing Dale Singer’s voice as the mission controller. It was rare when the boss of his double-black private military company ran the mission. Dale spent most of his time on the cover side of the story, heading a movie production specialty company that trained actors and movie production units on how to look genuine. All of the operators in the company had two jobs, one real, one not-so-real. Arris often spent time on movie or television sets working with actors to make their depiction of soldiers authentic, but he spent more of his time in global hot spots solving national security problems to which the government couldn’t afford to be connected.
Arris enjoyed the stints on set, but he much preferred to be out in the field, killing bad guys.
Arris switched back to the team-only frequency
“On me,” Arris said into the mic. He pulled out a FaintGlo map that illuminated in 3D when viewed through the special ballistics glasses each team member wore but otherwise looked like silver scribble to the naked eye. He rolled the circuitry-enhanced paper out on the ground, checked the GPS location on his wristband communicator and found the point on the map. Arris smiled at the fact they had hit the LZ in the bullseye.
Just then there was a roar. Less than a roar, really, more like a throaty, piercing call some primate might make, a vaguely undulating pitchy call that rang through the lessening darkness. Arris looked around for the source of the sound as the rest of his team quick-walked to him. The source was close, too close, but shouldn’t be a bother if it were an animal of some sort. Animals steered clear of men most of the time.
“What the hell was that?” Gregoire LeComte asked. He was a lanky Algerian with a dark complexion and tightly-cropped hair who had served in the Second Parachute Regiment of the French Foreign Legion before joining The Military Production Company.
Arris smiled. “As long as it wasn’t any of you, we should be fine.”
The two Bravo team members glanced at each other and then shook their heads at Arris.
“Okay, we’re perfect so far, so let’s not get too far afield as the day goes by. We’re set as we’ve briefed and practiced, so take a look at the map to get your bearings and let’s get moving. Sunrise is almost on us and we need to start moving, so does anybody have any questions?”
Nobody said anything.
“Good,” Arris said, glancing at Calvin Underwood, a former US Navy Seal, and Dexter Filkins, a former member of the British Special Air Service. “We’ll see you two at extraction. Stick to the plan, deviate as necessary. Let’s go.”
The two members of Bravo moved off on their own path, away from Arris and Gregoire. Arris rolled the map, slipped it into a cargo pocket and took a drink of water from the straw on his hydration system. He watched the two men from Bravo melt into the morning darkness and turned toward the east, watching the top of the orange sun forming an arc across the sky.
The howl filled the air again, and this time it was closer. Arris instinctively raised his weapon, stepped several feet away from Gregoire and took a defensive posture. Gregoire had done the same, and the two of them stood sweeping the air with their rifle barrels. Then a commotion of pounding feet and clinking, banging metal and plastic began to rise. The two men looked at each other incredulously.
Arris and Gregoire moved with ghostly quickness to disappear into the landscape as the sounds of running people grew louder. Arris could hear the fear in the collective breathing of the runners, the caught-up panic a noticeable timbre in the syncopated breathing rhythm of the people approaching: they were a mob. A half-dozen shots rang out, a short burst from a machine gun - an AK, Arris noted - and then five men in uniform burst through a low wall of shrubs and scrub grass twenty yards in front of him. They ran right to left, all of them in as much of a sprint as their equipment load and endurance continued to afford them. Arris watched them curiously as they passed by, shrinking into the morning grayness, their sounds fading, drowned out by the tweets of awakening birds.
“Takavar?” came the soft sound of Gregoire’s French-Algerian accented English whisper from Arris’ earbud.
Arris shrugged in the underbrush at the thought of an Iranian Takavar unit, what amounted to Iran’s special forces. “Looks like. I thought these guys had some talent, but that was pathetic on every level.”
“I agree, but what were they doing out here, anyway? We’re supposed to be alone with the Islamic Jihad Brotherhood.”
“Supposed to be, but I always figured they were in cahoots. This might be the middle of nowhere, but there’s no way for the IJB to be out here with a base camp and not be known to the Iranian government,” Arris said. He lifted himself up and looked through a pair of binoculars into the distance, watching the small forms of the retreating Iranian commandos diminish.
He shrugged and slipped the binoculars into a pouch on his battle harness. “At least they’re heading away from us.”
Arris began moving in the direction of the terrorist encampment and Gregoire took up a position nearby, each moving steadily and watching the terrain for more Iranian Takavar soldiers. There should have been none. That there were some meant something neither of them had been briefed on, and whatever the reason for their presence, it was now part of the mission’s equation. He called Bravo element and informed it of the news, but told it to keep on the mission as planned.
Unless the situation changed, of course.
Almost always, something went wrong, some event not anticipated arose that changed the parameters of the mission, and people who had not been scheduled to die were suddenly moved to the top of Arris’ list. Already today, five Iranian men had been penciled in.
About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. His career as a newspaper reporter spanned more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded turcks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife, three children and their cat.
Click here for more stories by William Young
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends