Riley stood up and began unbuckling himself from the harness. As he did so, he scanned the area to see if he could spot other team members. Another jump done. Now the ground mission began. Once out of the harness, the first thing he did was unsling his M16A2 from his shoulder and prepare it for action. Although he was carrying only blanks and knew that there would be no "enemy" on the drop zone, old habits were good to keep.
Riley grabbed the apex of his canopy, s-rolled the parachute, and shoved it into its kit bag. Then he shouldered his rucksack and threw the kit bag on top. His slim frame was bent almost double with the combined weight of forty-eight pounds of parachute and a hundred pounds of rucksack. Staggering toward the tree line on the northern end of the drop zone, he made his way to the assembly point. Riley figured that a troop of cub scouts armed with butter knives could wipe out his team right now, separated as they were and laden down with rucks and chutes. Infiltration was the most vulnerable part of any Special Forces operation.
It took Riley twenty minutes to make the eleven hundred meters to the assembly point. He was sweating in the early summer night air. Along the way, he linked up with two other team members. Pete Devito was the team's senior medic; he easily carried his gear atop his bodybuilder's six-foot-two, 220-pound frame. Riley considered Devito a good man. They'd been together in the 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, on Okinawa during a previous assignment, and Devito had shown himself to be a conscientious soldier and medic.
The other man, Smith, was the team's junior engineer and one of the first-termers on the team. For a while, desperate for bodies, Special Forces had allowed soldiers to enlist in the army, go through basic and advanced training, and airborne school, and then straight to Special Forces school. The traditional way was to accept only seasoned noncommissioned officers (NCOs) into Special Forces training. Older NCOs complained about the young kids, but Riley liked them. Sure, they could do foolish things at times and were occasionally immature, but overall they were smart, most of them having spent some time in college, and they added a youthful enthusiasm to things. The process of allowing first-termers into Special Forces had been discontinued a few years ago; Smith was one of the last of the breed.
Behind his innocent-looking face, Smith had a devious mind. Combining him with Hoffman, the team's senior engineer, made for an extremely effective demolitions team. Both were young and inexperienced, but extremely intelligent. Hoffman, with his mop of red hair and thick glasses, had been dubbed Little Einstein by the team. Give him a problem, and in a few minutes it was solved.
As the three men passed into the tree line, a voice called out to them in the dark: "Running."
"Cloudy," Riley replied, followed by Devito and Smitty, calling out their mission code names as running passwords. They entered the small assembly area nestled among the trees. Five other members were already there — three providing security and two digging. They'd have to dig a mighty big hole for ten parachutes and helmets, Riley knew. For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of being angry at his new team leader. During mission planning, Captain Peterson had insisted on caching the parachutes, despite Riley's arguments to the contrary. That's the way the young captain had been taught in the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg and, by God, that's the way they were going to do it. By the book. Riley felt that a man who didn't let common sense overrule the book was a dangerous fellow. He had seen enough of this type in his twelve years in the army.
Riley took a quick count in the dark. Eight of ten present. He was missing the new team leader — that figured — and Comsky, the team's junior medic. On first impression Riley had wondered how Comsky had made it through the extremely rigorous Special Forces medical school. He just didn't seem to be clicking on all cylinders at times. He even looked slow and dumb. Only five and a half feet tall and barrel chested, Comsky had thick, bushy eyebrows and a body covered with hair. He'd been dubbed the Ape by the other team members when he had first walked into the team room, and the nickname had stuck. He played the ape role sometimes to amuse the rest of the team, scratching his arms and swaggering around the team room. However, given a medical emergency, he seemed to come alive and worked as well as any Special Forces medic Riley had seen — in fact, better than most. Comsky was also one of the strongest men, pound for pound, Riley had ever met.
After fifteen minutes, the last two members straggled in, beating their way along the tree line. Riley checked his watch. Fifty minutes to assemble. Piss poor, he thought. On a real mission, if they'd been spotted jumping in, the drop zone would have been crawling with enemy forces by now. And the team leader wanted to sit here just off the DZ for a couple of hours while they dug a big hole to dispose of their parachutes. Not only that, but there was no way they could properly camouflage the hole in the dark. Anybody coming by, unless they were blind and stupid, would instantly recognize that something was buried here. They might as well put up a sign: "Parachutes Buried Here!" But Riley would play the game. He'd give Captain Peterson a little more rope to hang himself. That was the only way the man was going to learn.
The training mission tonight was to move about six kilometers from the drop zone to a power line and simulate destroying it with dummy demolitions that the team carried. The mission had to be completed by 0400 the next morning; at this rate, Riley knew they'd never make it. It was already 2315, and he estimated another two to three hours to finish the burial cache. Riley settled down for the wait as the team members rotated between burial detail and security. Digging in ground laced with roots and rocks, while trying to be as quiet as possible, made for slow progress.
At 010 °Captain Peterson started getting nervous. Riley figured that Peterson had finally gotten it through his head that they weren't going to make it to the target on time. Peterson came over and whispered to him.
"Sergeant Riley. I don't think we're going to make the target at this rate. The men don't seem to be digging fast enough. Here's what I want to do. Leave four men here to finish the cache and the rest of us go up and hit the target. We'll link up at the exfiltration point. You pick the men to stay. In fact, I want you to be in charge here. I'll take the other element up to the target."
Lord give me patience, thought Riley. Sounds like he memorized that little spiel. There's nothing worse than changing a plan in midoperation, especially if contingencies haven't been planned for. The captain's intimation that the team wasn't digging fast enough pushed Riley past his limit. He had had enough of this nonsense. Time for the captain's Special Forces schooling to really begin, Riley thought.
"With all due respect, sir, would you care for my opinion?" Without waiting for a reply, Riley drove on, speaking in a quiet, biting, forceful tone that the captain had not heard in the week he'd been with the team. The captain stood silent as he watched Riley's dark face in the moonlight.
"First off, sir, I told you that we'd never get these chutes buried in time. Secondly, we don't even need to cache the damn things because once we blow the power line, under the enemy scenario in this exercise, any so-called enemy with half a brain is going to figure out what happened. If we don't make exfiltration by 0700 it isn't going to matter if we made the parachutes disappear by magic into the fourth dimension, because we're going to be running so fast and hard, we're going to have a lot more important things on our mind. Like staying alive. So forget the parachutes. We leave them here as they are. I'm signed for them. If they get ripped off it's my ass. We hit the target like we planned with all ten team members and we go now!"