Brian’s lungs were on fire as the platoon came to a stop in the small clearing. He immediately reached for a protein bar as he took a long swig from his hydration bladder. Adrenaline had kept him going for the first ten miles, but combined with the long swim in choppy water, the next five had been a struggle. Mile sixteen and he was still waiting for his second wind.
At least the spring storm that had made their swim something akin to moving through swirling concrete hadn’t followed them onto shore. The boggy marshes and melting ice of the Arctic tundra that awaited them at the coast had been bad enough without the addition of precipitation.
He supposed he should be glad it had been a balmy spring day of fifteen rather than the minus-forty it could be in winter. It had warmed up quite a bit from that even as they’d left the reindeer, shrubs, and sickly-looking birch trees of the tundra for the Siberian cedar that surrounded the mountains on the west side of the Polar Urals.
Glancing at his watch, he could see that it was still twenty-five at 2350 hours. By day it might even climb to forty-five. A veritable heat wave in the Komi Republic.
Brian assumed it was just a regular rest stop until he noticed Lieutenant Commander Taylor and the platoon operations officer talking with Ruiz, the lead communicator, aka the radioman or RTO. The terminology might be antiquated—radio telephone operator—but the acronym lived on. The RTO was easily identifiable by the antenna array on his back. Thesatcom kept him in contact with HQ, and like every other team member he also carried the handheld radio and headset for squad communications. Although each operator on the team had his specialty, unlike many other Special Operations units, SEALs were generalists, not specialists. Each man on the team could step in and do any job if called upon.
The LC didn’t look happy. Which wasn’t saying much. Lieutenant Commander Taylor hadn’t looked happy since he was handed this mission. He’d looked... focused. Intense. Determined. As if he’d just been given an impossible task that put his ass on the line. Which pretty much summed it up.
As the platoon commander and officer in charge, he was responsible for the success of the op. And even for the men of Retiarius Platoon, who were called on for the most covert, failure-isn’t-an-option missions, a recon op in Siberian Russia wasn’t going to be easy.
All they had to do was slip past Russia’s sophisticated Arctic Sea defenses of underwater satellites, drones, and robots (check), swim over two miles in the frigid waters of the Barents Sea, and land on a remote coast of Arctic Siberia (the Nenetsia region, for which there was a damned good reason no one had ever heard of it) without being detected (another check), hump twenty miles into the Polar Ural Mountains of the Komi Republic (three-quarters check), and locate an old gulag in the inaccessible wilderness that sat images showed might be being used as a secret weapons facility. Then they got to do it all over again on the way back.
And oh yeah, the whole time operate under the watchful eye of their team skipper back at the base in Hawaii, the top brass at Special Warfare Command Center in Coronado, US Special Operations Command in Tampa, Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, and POTUS—the president of the United States herself.
Thanks to a very powerful and secret new stealth drone that could evade Russia’s sophisticated antidrone technology, they were beaming live right now to the Situation Room in the White House just like the op undertaken by their now famouscounterpart DEVGRU (aka SEAL Team Six) in their takedown of bin Laden.
If anything went wrong, they were screwed. Not only would they likely be killed, but only a month after an American fighter plane had gone off course during a training mission and been shot down in Russian-controlled airspace, killing two airmen and nearly starting a war, the Russian president had vowed to declare war on the US if there were any more “accidental” incursions. Unlike with the fighter pilots, however, their presence couldn’t be explained. No one strayed into this part of Siberia by accident.
Although there were plenty of higher-ups in the government who would only be too happy to go to war with Russia and put Ivanov in his place—including the father of one of the pilots killed who happened to be a four-star general in the Joint Chiefs of Staff—President Cartwright wasn’t one of them. After the debacle in Iraq with WMDs—or rather lack thereof—she wasn’t going to act without proof. Lots of proof. Which was why they were here.
But even if they did find evidence that Russia was up to something, Brian wasn’t convinced that Madam President would have the balls—figuratively speaking—to do anything about it.
For years Dmitri Ivanov had been thumbing his nose at the rest of the world, violating airspace, seas, treaties, and just about everything else with impunity. He was like the coworker at the office party who drank too much and everyone stood around watching nervously, hoping he didn’t do something that crossed the line so they’d have to deal with him.
Whether Ivanov would actually go through with his threat of war, Brian didn’t know. But he wouldn’t put it past the crazy bastard. Russia’s economy had been in the shitter for too long, and the people were beginning to rumble.
What strength Russia had was in its military, and Brian suspected there was little Ivanov wouldn’t be willing to do to hold on to power and save face. Even if he eventually lost the war, he could cause the US a lot of damage in the meantime.
And if Ivanov really did have some kind of doomsday weapon as intelligence seemed to suggest? He could blow them all back to the Dark Ages and even the game. It was one way to shift the balance of power.
Yes, Lieutenant Commander Taylor had reason to be worried with so much at stake, but so far everything had proceeded as planned. However, if his expression was any indication as he conferred with Ruiz and Lieutenant White, that was about to change.
Word of what was going on spread Brian’s way in the form of SO3 Travis Hart. In other words, the only special warfare operator third class other than Brian, and the man who’d been the lowest on the totem pole before he joined. Hart had been the happiest man in the world to see his face.
“We lost Sauron,” Hart said in his thick Mississippi accent, referring to the Sentinel stealth drone nicknamed for the powerful eye in the sky fromThe Lord of the Ringstrilogy.
Travis was a country boy through and through. He drove a truck, listened to Kenny Chesney, wore nothing but roper boots and Wrangler jeans held up by belts with big, shiny buckles when they weren’t on duty, and had probably held a gun before he could walk. He was also the platoon’s best sniper.
Hart was about as far from Brian’s liberal California upbringing as you could get. Yet there was something instantly likable about his simple “God, Country, Family” beliefs, and he and “Jim Bob” (Travis’s code name) had become surprisingly close in the three weeks since Brian joined the team. Nothing brought men closer than shared pain, and being the FNG on the Teams was all about pain in its many unpleasant forms.
Before they left, Brian had been stuck with a bar bill for three hundred and fifty dollars at Hulas, their favorite local hangout in Honolulu. How nine guys—he was the designated driver until the next poor bastard FNG came along—could drink that much in Coors Light, he didn’t know.
Coors Light was the beverage of choice for most SEALs. So much so that Brian had heard of a team who’d claimed tobe the Coors Light Parachuting Team when questioned in bars about the presence of so many big, fit guys hanging out together. Hell, it was better than Chippendales dancers, which Donovan had claimed once—offering Hart up to the ladies to prove it.
But dancing like a stripper and being stuck with the bar bill was all part of the drill. Hazing—like surviving the infamous BUD/S training course—was how you proved you belonged.
“What happened?” Brian asked.
Problems with technology weren’t uncommon with new, top-of-the-line, not-far-from-experimental technology—Team Six wasn’t the only team who got to test out the new toys—and drones were prone to losing communications and occasionally crashing. Brian hoped that wasn’t the case here or someone was going to lose his ass.
Hart shrugged. “Don’t know. Ruiz said it suddenly cut off. They’re on the satcom trying to find out what happened, but the connection is crap.”
The poor radio connection didn’t surprise him. Distance and topography could wreak havoc on even the best communication systems. Even if they weren’t in Siberia, the trees and mountains like this could put them in a black hole.
Five minutes turned into ten as Lieutenant Commander Taylor went over to confer with the senior chief. You would think it would be the other way around, but the dynamic between officers and senior enlisted petty officers, who were often grizzled veterans with the most experience, could be tricky. Especially when both men were stubborn, proud, and natural leaders.
