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 Virginia 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 containers 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.
