He spent nearly two years with the Screaming Eagles before being accepted into Ranger school. Once he finished Ranger school, Josh immediately set to getting out of his current unit and into a Ranger battalion. Once he was a Ranger, he deployed constantly and realized there was even more the Army had to offer a young man. Josh applied for the Special Missions Unit and went through their selection process, which he found much harder than most of the things he’d been required to endure in the Ranger community.
Josh spent the next five years of his life running around the world, doing things most people couldn’t begin to imagine. His body had taken a beating, but he enjoyed every second of his time in the unit. When the lights went out, Josh and a handful of his mates were the only members of the unit not deployed. They became the tip of the spear in the government’s effort to secure assets and begin to rebuild. Josh found most of what he was being asked to do seemed self-serving by whoever was in charge, but he was still doing what he loved and hadn’t missed a meal to date, when millions of others were dying of starvation all over the planet.
The missions were pretty straightforward and nothing Josh hadn’t been trained to do in his past life. So far, he had mostly been asked to fly into the built-up areas and bring people out the government deemed vital to rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. Most of the operations had been fairly mindless work for Josh compared to some of the complex missions he’d participated in overseas. So far, Josh’s newest command had lost only one helicopter and one operator from Josh’s unit, along with several men and women who were wannabe warriors, in Josh’s opinion.
Most of their casualties came in the one incident. No one ever figured out what had happened to them, and no one really seemed to care much after about a week. Josh and John had not been close friends by any stretch of the imagination, with Josh viewing John as a bit of a do-gooder type. Josh never had a problem with John, but didn’t see him as the kind of guy Josh would hang out with away from the chaos of their work. When John failed to return, Josh gave it about three seconds of thought before moving on.
Josh sat inside the blacked-out helicopter as it raced over the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. He’d spent time in San Francisco, working with the Alameda County Sheriff’s SWAT team, performing threat assessments on key infrastructure sites all over the Bay Area. Other than his brief time in the area, he was mostly unfamiliar with its geography other than what he could draw from looking at photographs taken from satellites or studying topographical maps.
Josh felt fortunate that he had been on home soil when the solar flare occurred. Many of his friends were deployed, and as far as Josh knew, not a single one of them had been heard from. He and the few other men from his unit were quickly tasked with various missions like the one he had been assigned to for the last two months. He had been bequeathed five active duty and reserve troops as part of his small section. These five men accompanied Josh when he was tasked with a mission.
Josh did his best to train the men, but most of them were not mentally tough enough for his liking, so he trained them all the while resenting each and every man under his command. Josh was accustomed to serving with partners who were cut from the toughest cloth in the world. Men from the Special Missions Unit were conditioned to suffer in silence while giving their absolute all. The men under Josh’s command would complain about blisters when he worked them on weapons manipulation drills, causing him to wish violence on them all.
As he sat lamenting the hand he’d been dealt in regard to the weaklings in his new unit, Josh thought about the last mission to this part of the state. To date, no one knew what had happened to John’s team along with the air crew. In times before the event, Josh knew the US government would have moved heaven and earth to locate a lost aircraft and its crew. Nowadays, they didn’t have the resources to search for crash sites.
Josh’s mission tonight was to fly to the coast and link up with twelve SEALs who were currently aboard a submarine. The submarine was the USS Connecticut, a Seawolf-class nuclear submarine. The boat had been cruising the Pacific Ocean when the solar flare occurred, and remained hidden until recently when what was left of the Pacific Fleet Command was able to establish communications with the boat. The powers to be arranged for the SEALs to swim ashore south of a town called Halfmoon Bay, where they would move to a preplanned extraction site and be picked up by Josh and his team. After the pickup, the two teams were to be flown back to base, where the SEALs would be rotated into operations being run to shore up a crumbled government.
The pilot interrupted Josh’s thoughts by announcing they were ten minutes to the extraction site. Josh clicked his mic twice in acknowledgment. When they were one minute out, all the men readied themselves in case there was any trouble, which no one expected. If there had been trouble, the SEALs would have alerted them long before they were anywhere near the landing zone (LZ). The SEALs had simply given the go-ahead for pickup, otherwise maintaining radio silence.
Josh felt the pilot ease the nose of the aircraft up as he lowered power, bringing the big craft into a nose-up descent angle, down and toward
