He’d had to release his main, then resort to his emergency chute. All he could remember thinking was that if he didn’t get it right with that emergency chute, that was the end of his life—and his SEAL career.
All the hard work, the effort he’d put into proving he deserved a spot on the teams would be dashed across the ground in that single, stupid mistake because he had let his lizard brain win.
He had talked with his chief and instructor then. Realized all the mistakes he had made leading up to that moment. That he hadn’t compartmentalized. That he’d let emotion and fear take over. He was far from the only SEAL who had ever slipped up and let that happen. And he bet he would be far from the last.
But good SEALs only made a mistake like that once. Then they learned, if they survived it. They got better. Stronger.
So tonight, even as his stomach did cartwheels, he knew better. There were fifteen other people in the same boat as him, and all were relying on each other to stay calm. To maintain focus. Because all it took was for one guy to freak out, alter his course, and lead those following him into a pileup.
O’Neil slowed his breathing, going into as close to a meditative trance as he could.
The numbers on his altimeter were just numbers. He tried to picture all the satellite imagery of the landscape that he had worked to memorize on the flight over. Tried to picture where he might be. Remembering that his biggest threat might be the tall Soviet-era apartment buildings near downtown or maybe the defunct cranes looming over the port where freighters listed at the pier, abandoned. Maybe one of the towering steeples of a historic church.
Their destination was between all those hazards. But O’Neil reminded himself that those hazards wouldn’t be a threat until they reached a couple hundred feet. Then, they would be forced to make some quick decisions if the clouds still hadn’t lifted.
One-thousand feet, and it looked like maybe those clouds really wouldn’t lift.
That was going to make patrolling through the town and identifying contacts far more difficult than they had anticipated.
But that was for future O’Neil. Present O’Neil just needed to land first.
“Clouds clearing at five-hundred,” Henderson reported. “On target.”
As promised, the clouds finally did clear at five-hundred feet. The landing zone was still hazy with fog, but they seemed to have a fortunate break.
O’Neil could see all the tags from his team blinking below between the skeletal cranes to their west and the churches and office buildings to their north and east. There was a cruise ship still docked at one of the terminals adjacent to their landing zone. It seemed to be listing against the terminal, its decks a mess of chairs and, from what O’Neil could tell, corpses. He couldn’t quite see if they were Skulls or humans, but for now, they weren’t moving.
Already the first of the operators had landed at their target site between the stone-walled ruins of a large castle that had served as a tourist destination. Most of the castle had been lost, but the town had paved the site over, painting it with a two-dimensional diagram of the footprint of the chambers and rooms that had once existed there.
SEALs touched down across that diagram and in the grass surrounding the castle ruins.
O’Neil came down hard, running out his momentum as the parachute collapsed behind him. Soon as he was down, he shouldered his rifle and roved his aim over the foggy streets, watching for Skulls.
Already, Reynolds had set up a perimeter around the LZ with Stuart, Henderson, and McLean. O’Neil detached his harness. As Alpha provided cover for the others, they quickly folded up the chutes and buried them in the rubble of what seemed to have been the entrance to the castle and museum exhibits. Now, it was mostly rubble. The bricks and stones made it easy to secure the chutes and ensure they wouldn’t go whipping away loudly in the wind, warning any Skulls that the team had landed or worse, alerting the Russians to their presence.
“All teams, advance,” Reynolds said once all the chutes were secured and they had stowed their oxygen masks in their packs
They spread into combat intervals. Alpha and Bravo took a path between the massive warehouses lining the port as Delta and Charlie worked their way between the neighboring streets filled with multi-story apartments and office buildings.
The fog thickened as they advanced toward the ambush site until O’Neil could only see twenty or thirty feet ahead. Every time the breeze shifted even slightly, he smelled the mixture of oil and fish coming in from the port mixed with the eye-watering scent of carrion. Far in the distance, he heard a Skull shriek. He signaled for his team to halt behind a truck filled with crates of rotting vegetables.
But no gunfire came after. Delta and Charlie reported their route was still clear.
Block by block, they patrolled toward where the A1 highway met the port at a ferry terminal. That was where intel had last spotted the convoy of trucks waiting for the shipment from Kaliningrad.
According to the analysts that had provided them that intel, the Russians would likely use that highway to get out of Klaipėda with the suspected shipment of bioweapons.
That was still a lot of uncertainty for O’Neil, but all he could do was trust and hope the analysts were right.
The fog continued settling in around them. They kept moving from the shelter of shipping containers to abandoned vehicles to dumpsters and piles of scree from buildings destroyed in the Lithuanians’ attempts to stop the Skulls invasion.
Occasional howls wailed in the distance, and every few minutes, O’Neil thought he heard the tap and click of Skull talons and claws echoing against the warehouses they passed, sometimes inside them.
But the fog must’ve hampered the Skulls as much or more than it did themselves. They came across mounds of picked over bones, and the decaying remains of Skulls killed in previous firefights, but none that were living.
A quick look at his watch confirmed they were making good time. They had accounted for heavy resistance by the monsters—a common challenge in urban areas of the United States. Perhaps the Russians had done a better job cleaning out the beasts from their supply routes. Of course, if they were responsible for the spread of the Oni Agent, maybe they had a way of getting Skulls out of their way O’Neil and the Americans were unaware of.
Whether it was some chemical weapon especially suited for the beasts or maybe some kind of sonic device, like a dog whistle that they couldn’t detect, he was anxious to find out just how they’d made this place seemingly safe from Skulls, despite ample evidence the beasts had overwhelmed this city not long ago.
“Approximately ten minutes from overwatch position,” an operator from Delta called over the comms.
“Copy,” Reynolds replied. “Alpha and Bravo are five from the target.”
Already O’Neil could see the hotel where they were supposed to set up their ambush. All along the sides of the road, concrete barricades had been placed. From the charcoaled, skeletal husks of military trucks and civilian vehicles, O’Neil guessed this had at one time been a secured evacuation route.
The blackened skeletons draped over those barriers and even sitting in some of the vehicles showed that those efforts to save the people of Klaipėda had failed.
His boots pressed through ash as they drew closer to the concrete barrier and the jumbled mess of vehicles. With the heavy fog, he could barely see the shadowy silhouette of the auto repair shop and ten-story apartment building where Delta and Charlie would set up their overwatch positions with the snipers on their teams.