EndWar

He waited about twenty seconds, then a familiar voice jolted him. “Good morning, Jon. It’s Donald Stanton.”

“Uh, good morning,” he responded tentatively.

“How much time can you give me?”

Andreas glanced around at the black waves crashing against the equally black skin of his boat. “I’m comfortable with five to ten minutes, Admiral.”

“Very well, then—”

“But, uh, with all due respect, sir, can you tell me the title of that speech you gave in the old sub base auditorium last fourth of July?”

“Oh, that one,” Stanton said with a slight chuckle. “That would be ‘101 Ways Chief Petty Officers Trick Admirals into Believing We Run the Navy.’ ”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Good man. Now I’ll talk fast. The Russians shot down the ELF and Comsat satellite, Michigan’s back online, and we have one SITREP from you that’s two days old. News doesn’t get any better. The Russians have begun moving a large force, perhaps two brigades, into the Northwest Territories, most likely headed for Alberta, for the cities, the oil reserves, the whole shebang. I’ve heard they’re running more sorties than they did in Paris. On top of that, the president ordered the destruction of the International Space Station, since the Russkies used it to shoot down our satellites and were preparing to strike other targets. Now you talk, Jon, I’ll listen.”

Andreas’s mouth fell open, and it took a few seconds before he could launch into a capsule summary of his observations regarding the Russian task force, concluding with, “Sir, request permission to destroy those ships.”

“Permission granted.”

“There’s an opportunity at 0500, when they’ll engage in refueling ops. I’m going to seize it.”

“Excellent. For now, though, get back under, stay safe, and make this your last voice call. We’ll start sending you traffic via the sat phone data link so you don’t need to transmit anything. I’m sure you’ve already surmised this phone is manned 24/7, and right now it’s the only working number on the Iridium system.”

That explained how the duty officer knew who was calling when she answered the phone.

“Aye-aye, sir. I’ll try to poke my nose up every two hours starting from the termination of this call.”

“Good.”

“Oh, and one personal item, Admiral: please have someone call my wife and tell her to change our PIN.”

“Right. I’ll call her myself. Good hunting, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Andreas thumbed off the phone, his thoughts still whirling as he barked out the orders to dive, dive, dive!

It was at Army Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia, that Team Sergeant Nathan Vatz had been taught how to wear a parachute harness and had stood near the mock door, waiting for his turn to learn the proper method of exiting an aircraft.

The parachute landing fall platform had allowed him to develop the proper landings, while the lateral drift apparatus had helped him acquire the proper technique for controlling the chute during descent.

Then there was the good old thirty-four-foot tower, which let you experience a jump into nothingness. And once you got to the 250-foot tower, you were feeling good about yourself — until you saw someone make a mistake.

Still, Vatz had survived, made his qualification jumps, and had kept current by jumping at least once every three months.

Yes, it seemed like yesterday. Felt like yesterday, too. He still got the jitters every time he jumped, despite the hundreds of hours in other training courses he’d attended at Fort Bragg, the ones that had really kicked his butt.

Now that butt was firmly planted on the bright red web seat of a C-130’s vibrating hold with the rest of his new twelve-man ODA team.

Vatz had barely gotten to know these guys, and he still mixed up a few names. That was all right. There’d be plenty of time to get to know one another, after they finished their work.

And thanks to the Russians, the best way to get to work was to engage in HALO operations, an SF specialty.

What you did was you jumped from your perfectly good aircraft at a high altitude, in their case 25,000 feet, allowed yourself to freefall for a while at terminal velocity, then engaged in a low opening of your parachute so you could glide in clandestinely on your target from miles away, the target in this case being the sleepy little town of High Level, population: less than five thousand.

In order to perform such a miracle, Vatz and his fellow operators had to don their heavier helmets and oxygen masks. Their high-speed downward fall, coupled with their forward airspeed and the fact that they wore a minimal amount of metal, would allow them to defeat Russian radars.

A report from the pilot came in: winds were at twelve knots and holding. That was good. If they got up over eighteen knots, they’d have to abort the jump.

Thirty minutes prior they had all been breathing one hundred percent oxygen to flush the nitrogen from their bloodstreams, and the flight psychologist was making sure no one flipped out before the ramp opened.