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It had taken Doc about ten minutes to get down out of that damned tree, but he'd finally made it. While he didn't have any climbing line on him, he had perhaps the next best thing. Carefully, he'd reached up to his shoulder and grabbed the rip cord for his reserve chute, yanking it out and down. With a rustle of nylon, his reserve had spilled from the pack and dropped toward the ground. Next, Doc had unlocked his harness quick release, and then, grasping hold of his reserve chute's risers, he'd unsnapped his harness. His chute had slipped a foot or two and the branches supporting him had creaked and swayed alarmingly, but he'd managed to slide all the way down the reserve, landing in the snow at the base of the tree with an agonizing thump a moment later.

God, his ankle hurt. First things first, though. Swiftly, he broke out his primary weapon, fished a magazine from his load vest, and snapped it home. The HK CAW had originally been developed as a contender in the U.S. military's search for a combat shotgun. It looked more like a gadget out of science fiction than a serious weapon, all clean lines and sharp angles and with a bull-pup receiver in the butt, set behind the hand grip. The ten-round box magazine could be emptied one shot at a time, or with a twice-per-second cyclic that was death incarnate at close quarters.

Too bad most of his ammo was gone now. He had just five loaded magazines for the thing tucked into various pouches in his vest — four after he'd untaped the weapon and snapped a mag into the receiver. Fifty rounds was enough to do some serious hurt, but when they were gone Doc would be left with his Beretta secondary, and four clips. Alone, he wouldn't last long.

Weapon ready, he checked his ankle. He was pretty sure from the feel of the thing that it was sprained rather than broken. Gingerly manipulating it, he felt no crepitus — the grinding sensation of two jagged ends of bone grating across each other — and he could still flex it up and down, though he couldn't move it back and forth. With care, he could put weight on it; it hurt like hell when he tried, but he could manage it. He could feel the ankle swelling inside his boot.

Well, there was nothing for it then but to strap himself up and make do. He didn't remove the boot; if the ankle ballooned too much while he had it off he'd never get the thing back on afterward. Instead, he unlaced the boot, then relaced it as tightly as he could manage. After that, he found a branch — there were plenty lying nearby that had fallen when he'd hit the tree — and fashioned a splint out of two inch-thick sticks and a roll of gauze from his first-aid kit. Could he walk? He tried a mincing step, using his CAW as a crutch. Shit… he could walk, but not very well, and anything requiring climbing or jumping was definitely out. Facing south, he could make out a bit of a glow beyond the trees where the castle lay about a half a mile distant. The dogs were still barking.

His options were limited. He had his tactical radio, of course, but he was out of line-of-sight from the rest of the team and they might not hear him. Even if they did, he couldn't risk calling them until after the raid had started and then they would be too busy to bother with him. So he could sit tight and call in a rescue chopper once the second-wave elements arrived, but that could evolve into a pretty complicated rescue mission in its own right, especially if hostiles were running through these woods. He could hobble back down to the beach and signal for a pickup there.

Or he could make for the castle.

James Ellsworth, Doc to his friends, did not consider himself to be a hero. When he'd joined the Navy five years ago, he'd been a simple, relaxed, laid-back kid from Tennessee, best described by the kids in his boot company as "Old Mellow." He'd volunteered for BUD/S because Joe Saraglio, a good friend at his first duty station, had done so. It had sounded like a lark, learning to scuba dive and to blow things up. Certainly it would be more fun than bedpan duty and morning reports on a naval hospital ward.

One of the first things he'd learned at Coronado was that laid back and relaxed simply didn't cut it. A dozen times during Hell Week he'd come that close to quitting… and rejoining the sane world of showers and clean uniforms and six or eight hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep.

Why hadn't he quit? Even now, two years later, he wasn't sure. Part of it, at least at first, had been the knowledge that he'd already signed for an extension to his original four-year hitch so that he could take SEAL training. If he left, he was still obligated, and he would be facing ten years of bedpan duty instead of four.

But gradually, he'd realized that there was more to it than that. He loved the Teams, loved the feeling of belonging. Loved the people most, he guessed, though some of them were thorough-going bastards. He'd toughed it out because he'd wanted to belong, and because BUD/S had already taught him that he could do things that he'd never thought himself capable of doing before.

He couldn't think of any other reason to carry on, especially after Joe had managed to get himself killed in a training accident, the silly bastard. That episode had nearly killed Ellsworth, left him feeling like he was caught between two worlds, the SEALs and the rest of the Navy. He couldn't go back… so all that was left was to go ahead.

He'd changed a lot in the years since. Laid-back and relaxed cut it no better as an active-duty SEAL than it had at Coronado. He had a wild rep now, one that he worked hard to live up to. The guys in his platoon joked that Doc's idea of the SEAL acronym wasn't even Sleep, EAt, and Live it up, but that he'd improved on that by changing to SEx and ALcohol.

Okay, so some small, tucked-away part of himself kept telling him that he was trying to die. Like Joe. But Doc's reason for living was the Team, the other guys in the Team, and he wasn't going to let them down. He might get there late, but by hell he would get there!

With the CAW as a crutch, he began hobbling painfully along the hillside, making for the castle lights.

0128 hours Below Gorazamak Lake Ohrid, Macedonia

"Okay, Red," Murdock said softly, punching the man's shoulder. "You're on."

The SEAL Teams tended to assemble odd accumulations of talent. Both Murdock and Jaybird had experience sailing, for instance, and Kosciuszko had a pilot's license and flew his own Beachcraft. Red Nicholson's means of unwinding before he'd joined the Navy had been mountain climbing, both free climbing and with all the trimmings. He stood at the bottom of the crevice now, a light nylon line snapped to his belt and trailing out behind. He removed his gloves, stooped to tighten the laces of his boots, then pulled his gloves back on and cinched them snug.

"Heads up," he said. "Climbing."

Murdock and MacKenzie watched as Nicholson ascended the cliff, one arm up, then one foot… then the other arm… the other foot. From there at the bottom, the cliff looked unscalable, at least without pitons and climbing gear, but they were too close to the sentries on those castle ramparts to risk striking steel to rock. At this point, the ravine was perhaps thirty meters deep, a little taller than two telephone poles stacked atop one another.

Nicholson vanished into shadow almost at once. Even in the soft green glow of NVD goggles, it was almost impossible to separate his form from that of the cliff, though Murdock's electronic optics picked up enough IR to pick him out from the cold, black rock.

Leaving Mac to pay out the line as Nicholson climbed, Murdock picked his way back down the steeply slanted floor of the ravine, to where the remaining members of Blue Squad were waiting. Roselli, Magic Brown, Professor Higgins. Nick the Greek Papagos. So few, with both Garcia and Doc missing. Damn! What had happened to Doc? Jaybird Sterling, along with Nicholson because of his climbing skills, had been shifted over to Blue Squad to fill out the numbers. DeWitt and the other five had already left to carry out their part of the mission approach.