Into the Storm, page 6
The round house looked quiet on its perch above the lake. A light rain had begun as they trod the path, and he could see the dark mass of the lake as raindrops littered the surface. The forecast had indicated the wind would pick up after nineteen hundred hours, which was another reason they’d bumped up the time for the jump.
The team would have to deal with cold rain and cold lake, but wouldn’t face a fierce wind from the get-go.
For their part, the SEALs would be pumped, at the peak of their game. Even armed only with Simunition, they’d be hard to take down.
Xavier felt a fierce pride. He was one of them. The old man now with a bum shoulder, but still one of them.
The man he’d fought on the ledge had been trained. Well. He knew how to fight. Xavier’s loss of range of motion in his shoulder had given the tango the advantage. That didn’t bode well for his team. He had to assume they were all equally trained.
Who were they? What was their goal here?
Beyond destroying a platoon of SEALs, that is. He assumed there was a bigger objective, although the humiliation of destroying a team on American soil might be enough.
If a SEAL encountered an ambush similar to what he’d faced on the cliffside trail, he’d assume the attack was part of the training. He wouldn’t fight to the death as Xavier had—or at least hoped he had. The blood on the trail worried him.
He should have called a halt to this exercise the moment he recognized Audrey, should have gone with the instinct that told him something was off. But he’d spent the last three months working toward today.
This was a thousands-of-lives-hang-in-the-balance test run for an op. When it was time for the real mission, they’d only have one shot. This exercise was their best shot at refining the plan before they went wheels up. And after what had happened on Xavier’s last op, he was determined his team would be prepared.
He’d thrown away something special with Audrey to make this day happen. This exercise was crucial, in ways that not even the SEALs about to jump into a frigid lake in winter knew.
He studied the darkened yurt. Everything looked as it should. It was bathed in darkness, no lights to give the SEALs anything to fix on to. They were in full blackout mode for this op.
He circled the structure to the daylight basement door on the side. A few feet from the door, a large power meter was affixed to the exterior. The darkened shape was all wrong, however, and it took a moment for his eyes to register what the dark lump over the meter could be.
Next to him, Audrey let out a sharp gasp, then slapped a hand over her mouth.
He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her deeper into the cover of the woods. He acted on autopilot as his brain reeled. Only one action made sense in the moment: get Audrey to safety.
Once she was safe, he’d check the body that was slumped over the power meter.
Chapter Five
Lieutenant Chris Flyte needed to get his shit together. He took several deep breaths. There was no room for distraction here.
The sadistic trainers who’d come up with this exercise deserved a special place in hell. HALO jumps were risky enough, but executing them right before a storm, with their target being a thirty-five-degree lake, was a special treat.
No way was this a “generic” training as laid out by command. HALO jumps usually weren’t even allowed in this area, but they’d gotten special permission for this one exercise. They were practicing for a specific op that required a frigid lake HALO jump right before a storm.
And damn, but he couldn’t think of any mission that was worth that risk. Bin Laden had been dead for over a decade.
He stood in the open back of the plane and checked his gear with the rest of the team. Oxygen mask secured. Gear he’d need for the next five days packed in a heavy, watertight pack. Every inch of his skin was covered—protection from the balls of ice he’d meet when he dropped through the cloud layer that was between the plane and Lake Olympus.
As he went through the vital, lifesaving checklist, he also tried to box away Pam’s betrayal to a dark corner of his mind. He couldn’t afford to give her any of his headspace until after the training was behind him.
He should have withdrawn from this exercise, but that wasn’t exactly an option. He’d only learned his wife was having an affair two days ago and had zero time to process the utter destruction of his life before flying north to Whidbey.
For the last forty-eight hours, he’d been on autopilot, doing his job and trying not to think about the end of his eight-year marriage. And now here he was, ready to jump from twenty thousand feet into a frigid lake, all to rescue a fake hostage.
The only easy day was yesterday.
Yesterday was the day he’d learned who his wife had been fucking for the last eighteen months.
Yesterday had been total and utter shit.
The signal came. Go time.
Deep breath. Get centered. Time to lead his team.
He pitched and rolled forward off the ramp. Wind buffeted him, roaring in his ears, blocking all other sound. He turned to face upward. The plane grew smaller as the last of the platoon rolled off the ramp, dots above in the night sky.
Satisfied his team was in free fall, he rolled to face the cloud cover below him. The plane would return to Whidbey. They were on their own and would treat this as a real op until the first task was complete and the trainers called a halt to debrief on their successes and failures.
There was an exhilaration to free fall that didn’t go away, even when he had hundreds of jumps under his belt. But today, the feeling was muted.
He dialed in, checking his altitude. There was no room for a wandering mind here. Even with every patch of skin covered, it was damn cold as he plummeted toward earth. The lake would be even worse.
He hit the cloud layer and felt the sting of ice pellets as they pummeled his thick wet suit.
Thankfully, the storm hadn’t quite started yet, and beneath the cloud canopy, his chute opened without a hitch and the wind wasn’t so wild as to throw him off course.
All around him, chutes bloomed as the others pulled their cords.
The quiet that came after the chute opening always brought a sense of peace, but in a low-opening jump, there wasn’t a moment to enjoy it. This was an op, and he was about to go into battle.
He released the chute as his feet touched frigid water. The water was hellishly cold, but the insulating layers of wet suit did their job, keeping the worst of the cold at bay, and his body heated the trapped liquid.
He made his way toward shore, weighed down by the heavy gear bag. He was going to kick Rivera’s ass for coming up with this nightmarish scenario. Didn’t matter that they’d been friends for years. The paces the team was being put through were bullshit.
Without warning, a memory surfaced. A barbecue on the beach two years ago. He’d been there with Pam. Rivera had Lynn at his side. Everyone on the team had been there, including Brock.
Had that been when the affair started? Or had it been later, after the op that had sent Rivera to the hospital and Forsythe and Adams to the morgue?
Do I even want to know?
Not really.
He’d told no one on the team about Pam’s affair, and apart from the SEALs, he had no other friends. No family. No life beyond his marriage and his work. He’d been alone in his miserable thoughts as he prepped for the training.
Betrayed by his wife and a man he’d considered a brother.
Shit.
Focus. Swim. Kick. Breathe.
Before the jump, he’d thought this exercise would be good for him. He’d be forced to get out of his head. Solve problems. Lead his team. How could he think about betrayal when swimming in thirty-five-degree water?
He turned his mind to the cold. Leaned into the pain of it as he swam, fast and hard, carrying a watertight bag filled with the gear he’d need to survive the coming days. He focused on that.
Old friend or not, Rivera wouldn’t let mistakes slide. If he failed this training, Rivera would be right to flag him as unfit for ops. He could be a danger to his team.
Now that his marriage was ending, if he lost his spot on the team, he’d have nothing. No one.
The thought added power to his stroke as he swam toward shore. For this first exercise, they’d divided the sixteen-man platoon into four Fire Teams. Each team knew their extraction point from the lake and mission once they were on land. If they didn’t free the hostages in the first few hours, they’d rendezvous in the forest to the northeast of the lodge at oh four hundred and hatch a new plan.
Chris’s team had selected an extraction point near a campground on the west side of the lake. They’d have to hike a fair distance around the north end to get around Kaxo Falls, but they’d be able to approach the lodge complex from an unexpected angle, taking the tangos from behind. Two Fire Teams would have the direct approach, flanking the lodge compound from the north and south, while the fourth would extract from the water directly opposite the lake from Chris’s team.
If he knew Rivera and Cohen, they’d have set up some nasty surprises in the woods for all four teams—but the trainers didn’t know where each Fire Team had chosen to extract from the water. They were as in the dark as to the planning done by the platoon this afternoon on Whidbey as the team was clueless as to what was in store for them.
Rivera was a big fan of expecting the unexpected and could be diabolical when coming up with ways a mission could go FUBAR. But then, he and Rivera had survived some messed-up operations together, and they both understood the need to put the team through extreme tests.
Rivera had barely survived the last op. Memories of that night, hauling his wounded teammate from the building, would haunt Chris for the rest of his days.
At least in training, if the op went FUBAR, no one would die. That was sort of the whole point.
Chris reached the shoreline. He could see the dark outlines of NPS campground signs on the beach. He chose a spot to the east, where trees abutted the water, and slipped from the lake directly into the cover of the forest.
Raindrops dotted the lake surface, the patter growing more rapid in the moments it took for his teammates to follow him into the woods. They’d barely beaten the predicted storm.
The thick forest camouflage wet suit kept him warm, but they’d be here for days, so they’d take turns changing in one of the campground shelters while the other three acted as guards.
Chris had wanted to parachute onto the meadow above the lodge and skip the hassle of swimming, but the sadists in charge had wanted the frigid swim to be part of their ordeal.
What the hell is Rivera preparing us for?
Grimly, it occurred to him that he’d managed to forget Pam for several minutes. Nothing like freezing his balls to change his perspective.
Jonas, Huang, and Phelps followed him into the woods like silent shadows. They located a pit toilet and took turns changing. Huang and Phelps used the break to touch up the dark greasepaint on their faces, to hide their pale skin. Jonas and Chris were both Black with skin on the darker end of the spectrum and didn’t bother with face paint.
As he waited for his turn, icy raindrops pelted him and wind whipped through the branches of the trees. The storm was coming, but he cursed the wind and rain only in his mind. Why would anyone attempt a hostage rescue in these conditions? This training was full of obstacles for obstacles’ sake. He couldn’t imagine a good enough reason to infiltrate an enemy stronghold in such piss-poor conditions. The odds of failure were too high.
Once he was changed and dry—but still fricking cold—he tucked away his wet suit in his pack, then tapped his earpiece to check in with the other Fire Teams’ progress.
The receiver didn’t make a sound.
He clicked the mic button and hailed the other teams again. Nothing.
“Shit,” he said softly to his team. “Signal jammer.”
Huang pulled out a cell phone and checked the screen. “Cell’s out too.”
Chris pulled their Fire Team’s only satellite phone from his pack. It too couldn’t get a signal. Could be due to forest and cloud cover, but he didn’t think so.
Jonas cursed and tapped his mic button. “Looks like we’ve found the first hurdle.”
Chris didn’t pick up anything from Jonas’s headset, meaning the radios didn’t even work when a mere three feet apart. Yet his NVGs worked. If he still had night vision, then their electronics hadn’t been wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse. An EMP wasn’t selective. It took out all or nothing. So this wasn’t your average signal jammer, and it wasn’t an EMP.
Fucking great.
Phelps, who was usually the glass-half-full type, also swore. “Assholes. It’s not bad enough that we’re dealing with a freezing monsoon? They had to cut out communication too?”
Chris tucked the sat phone away. This little wrinkle meant that after they secured the hostages and identified an extraction point, they’d have to use a landline to call in the helicopter. And they’d have to find their teammates to coordinate without revealing themselves to the trainer/tangos.
The degree of difficulty had gone up exponentially.
Odds were they were going to need that preset oh-four-hundred meet point.
That’s it. Rivera wasn’t invited to the divorce party. Cohen was out too.
Any hope they’d complete the first task and start the second phase of the training in a matter of hours was shot to hell. It was going to be a long cold-ass night.
Usually, he lived for this shit. He’d be pumped, full of adrenaline, ready to take on the world, but today, he just wanted to get it over with so he could go home, confront his wife, and begin divorce proceedings.
At least for a few minutes, Pam had slipped from his mind. He ruthlessly shoved her to the dark space at the back. He needed to take this training seriously, as if it were the real deal. Anything less could put him and others at risk of injury and get him kicked off this team, which, thanks to her, was all he had left.
Audrey was going to be sick. She buried her face against Xavier’s tactical vest, trying to hold herself together. Everything was surreal. Grotesque. This couldn’t be her park. Her lodge. Her life.
She’d felt ownership of these mountains and this forest since she was a kid. The park belonged to everyone, but the eleven-year-old girl who’d just moved to Forks had desperately needed to belong somewhere, to feel something was hers. She’d adopted the park, which had, in the form of ONP Archaeologist Roy Heller, adopted her right back.
The park was a haven, her escape from classmates who’d rejected the awkward new girl, and also from her hostile mother, who’d resented the move to Forks even more than Audrey had.
But this, right now, was straight out of a horror movie, and ONP and Lake Olympus Lodge didn’t belong in this reality.
This was all a bad dream. It was probably three a.m. this morning, and she was deep asleep in her home in Port Angeles. Today hadn’t happened yet. Her subconscious had served up Xavier because they had massive unfinished business, and George was a concern in sleep because she was worried about him weathering the predicted storm. Perhaps she’d eaten something to trigger the stomach upset that led to this nightmare.
Scrooge’s words in A Christmas Carol came to mind: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
Like Scrooge, she needed to look to her other senses for the truth in the moment. Xavier’s arms that held her tight to his chest. The scent of damp woods, the feel of cold rain filtering through the branches. The tapping of raindrops on evergreens increasing in tempo as the storm gathered and settled in.
This was her park. Her forest. Her lodge. She wasn’t dreaming, and no matter how much she wished to, she wouldn’t wake from this living nightmare.
The only way out of this situation was to face it head-on. She lifted her head and tried to see Xavier, but could only make out his outline in the dark woods. Full darkness had settled like a cold, wet blanket. “Was that…one of your men?”
“No.” His voice was gruff. “I was going to ask if it was George.”
She shook her head, then realized he probably couldn’t see the motion. She swallowed and found her voice again. “No. George is smaller, wiry.” From her limited glimpse, the dead man had been large, with thick shoulders. Classic mountain man physique.
“I need to go back,” he said. “Check on the body. Enter the yurt. But first, I need to get you somewhere safe.”
The idea of being in these woods without Xavier scared the hell out of her. “Nowhere is safe.”
“True. But checking the body will be dangerous. I’ll be exposed.”
“Don’t leave me. Please.”
He paused, then said, “Fine. One of us will have the gun, the other will examine the body. See if he’s alive. We should take pictures too. Which job do you want?”
Now was not the time to be squeamish. Her stomach was first-trimester sensitive, but she’d do her best to keep her lunch down. Xavier was more skilled with weapons, and she knew how to look for a pulse. “I’ll check the body.”
She squared her shoulders and stepped back from Xavier’s embrace. The wind picked up and a chill ran through her body, but she figured the blast of cold had more to do with leaving his warmth than from the wind. It was damn cold out here, and it would only get worse as the storm strengthened.
As if to punctuate her thoughts, the rain increased from steady patter to faster staccato. And this was still only the front edge of the squall. She followed Xavier through the trees to the body she’d have to search. Her gag reflex had been triggered, but she held it down.
He covered her as she stood over the body. She snapped a picture with her cell phone before turning him over. If TV and books had taught her anything, it was that she was messing with forensic evidence, but she didn’t have the luxury of worrying about that now. Rain would wash evidence away even if she did nothing, and if there was even a miniscule chance this person was alive, that overrode evidence preservation.
