Ten minutes later they found the southern edge of Central Park and Jake stepped forward to take the lead.
“Central Park at night isn’t as safe as they say it is, and that’s on a normal day. We go straight up, toward the lake, then hit 72nd Street, okay?” They nodded in turn, Cal and Louise in total ignorance of the best way to tackle the big, dark obstacle, and followed Jake as he led the way into the inky night.
G.T.F.O.
Saturday 12:26 a.m. – Fort Campbell
The alarm sounded loudly inside the barracks. It was called a barracks, but it was bigger than some towns that the occupants had originated from. It was a city, and it bristled with more ego than many thought possible. It was an army base, but some of the elite operators under the umbrella of the 5th Special Forces Group, as well as their dedicated helicopter pilots and crews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also called it home. It seemed that these crazy, hard-bitten, and stone-cold operators needed pilots who were just as crazy and stone-cold as they were.
There were hospitals, training groups and schools, military police, and bomb disposal. All of which were now woken by a god-awful noise which none of them had heard in years since the training drills for a terror attack.
In the accommodation block of the 5th SFG, Captain Troy Gardner sat bolt upright to the sound of the siren and simultaneous chirping of his satellite phone. Unlike almost every other unit in the military the world over, Gardner’s team of specialists operated solely within their own orbit and answered to pretty much nobody. Gardner got their orders, the team worked out the mission execution as a unit, and then Gardner got the resources he asked for. They were nominally part of one of the three battalions currently based there, with one on a training exercise and two midways through foreign tours. The team, named Endeavor by their command structure, had access to the best gear and suffered none of the military discipline that other units faced daily. Few of them bothered to shave, and many wore fierce beards which could be combined with sunglasses and shemaghs to allow them to blend into obscurity in whatever country they were operating in. Physical training was a personal issue, not regimented like every other unit, and he fully expected his team to be in peak physical condition just as he was. Only a few of them were army, as ever the top-tier of special forces operators came from various sources and branches of the military on their way up, and the rivalries between Recon Marines, Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs was a daily source of amusement for them.
Troy Gardner, called Horse—short for Trojan Horse—by his team although not too often to his face, was instantly awake and fully conscious: a trait of an operator at apex predator level.
“Gardner,” he said into the handset, then listened and grunted in response for a few seconds before clicking off the phone. He threw himself out of bed and into the dark fatigues folded on the chair beside his utilitarian cot. He opened the wooden locker and shrugged into his heavy vest and equipment rig. He didn’t have his weapons with him, but their own armory was at least in the same block. He walked out of the door without a second glance and began to walk the corridor from one end to the other, casually kicking the doors on the left as he went then turned and walked back kicking the doors on the right. His operators appeared at their doorways, similarly shrugging themselves into their equipment.
Troy waited until all the expectant faces were assembled and gave a short speech, speaking loudly over the din.
“Word just came down,” he said, “we’re out of here. Clear the armory, I’ll get our rides ready. Helipad in thirty.” With that he turned and left, going via their armory to finish dressing himself. He gave no specific orders for who should do what, but trusted his team of nine other operators to do what needed to be done. Swiping his ID and entering a six-digit code from memory, the heavy door bleeped and swung open when he pulled it. He picked up his heavily customized FN SCAR rifle which he preferred chambered in the heavy 7.62 caliber; he hated having to scour the bodies of the enemy forces and find so many of them still alive from the lighter ammunition. It was decorated in dappled tan and brown, a testament to how much of his active service was spent in various sandboxes all over the world, with a fat tube slung under the barrel and a thick suppressor protruding over the end of it. He hefted it, picked up a twin magazine and seated it before pointing the barrel into a sand-filled steel tub and racking back the bolt to chamber a heavy round.
He filled his pouches with spare ammunition, enough to dangerously weigh down lesser men, before clipping the heavy rifle to the sling threaded under his vest. He selected two M9 Berettas, one going into a holster on his vest and the other into the drop-leg holster on his right thigh, and filled the similar rig on his left thigh with six spare magazines for the weapons. When he was finished, he looked less like a man and more like a one-man-band who played a multitude of different instruments. He cast his eye over the ranks of other weapons, the personal weapons of his team which they knew more intimately than they ever would their own families. He smiled a small smile, albeit one laced with sadness, that they were finally going to work.
Inside of a minute he was swiping himself into the accommodation block of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or SOAR for short, and found them similarly climbing into their black flight suits.
His team had dedicated access to two MH-60L Black Hawk helicopters and their crew, as well as a support bird modified as a gunship with no troop-carrying capability. All three helicopters had extended fuel range, night vision enhanced sensors, and all were configured for stealth infiltration missions.
“Fully fueled and loaded, personal gear to a minimum, wheels up in twenty-five,” he told them, nodding once before turning to leave again.
“Captain?” asked a female voice from down the corridor. Troy turned back to look at the speaker, Lieutenant Gina Pilloni, Sardinian by way of Birmingham, Alabama and the newest member of his extended team. She was young, too young in Troy’s opinion to be worthy of a gig in SOAR, but she was confident, fit, and courageous. Being the lowest ranking, at least in experience, she was by far the baby of the group and was set apart as the only one not to have gone to war with them.
“Lieutenant?” Troy replied, not wanting a debate but unable to be openly hostile without provocation.
“Where are we going, sir?” she asked him, naivety and excitement showing evident on her face.
“To the helipad with minimal personal gear, fully fueled and loaded, in twenty-five,” he answered patiently, then turned on his heel and left, leaving the six pilots and four crew to get it done.
Twenty-two minutes later, Troy stood on the tarmac in the dark as his team filed out and filtered into the two Black Hawks in their respective fire teams. They carried an array of personal weaponry as well as a large crate each between two of them. The odd man at the rear, and Troy’s second-in-command, as well as fire team leader and long-time friend was Master Sergeant David White, better known as Chalky by the team. The military fashion for witty nicknames had long ceased to amaze either of them.
“I’m guessing this isn’t my sudden call-up to OCS?” Chalky asked Troy as he approached, pushing another ammo crate on a trolley. Since completing his bachelor’s degree by correspondence, Master Sergeant David White had formally been accepted to Officer Candidate School on an accelerated program for experienced NCOs.
“No,” Troy told him, “this is for real.”
Chalky shrugged, hefted the ammo crate onto the loading area of the helicopter, and turned to watch the trolley be blown across the tarmac by the rotor wash to fall on its side at the grass edge. Both Troy and Chalky watched in silence as the combined helicopter engines picked up their intensity to a screaming whine, then turned to their respective rides.