Shit.
Focus. Swim. Kick. Breathe.
Before the jump, he’d thought this exercise would be good for him. He’d be forced to get out of his head. Solve problems. Lead his team. How could he think about betrayal when swimming in thirty-five-degree water?
He turned his mind to the cold. Leaned into the pain of it as he swam, fast and hard, carrying a watertight bag filled with the gear he’d need to survive the coming days. He focused on that.
Old friend or not, Rivera wouldn’t let mistakes slide. If he failed this training, Rivera would be right to flag him as unfit for ops. He could be a danger to his team.
Now that his marriage was ending, if he lost his spot on the team, he’d have nothing. No one.
The thought added power to his stroke as he swam toward shore. For this first exercise, they’d divided the sixteen-man platoon into four Fire Teams. Each team knew their extraction point from the lake and mission once they were on land. If they didn’t free the hostages in the first few hours, they’d rendezvous in the forest to the northeast of the lodge at oh four hundred and hatch a new plan.
Chris’s team had selected an extraction point near a campground on the west side of the lake. They’d have to hike a fair distance around the north end to get around Kaxo Falls, but they’d be able to approach the lodge complex from an unexpected angle, taking the tangos from behind. Two Fire Teams would have the direct approach, flanking the lodge compound from the north and south, while the fourth would extract from the water directly opposite the lake from Chris’s team.
If he knew Rivera and Cohen, they’d have set up some nasty surprises in the woods for all four teams—but the trainers didn’t know where each Fire Team had chosen to extract from the water. They were as in the dark as to the planning done by the platoon this afternoon on Whidbey as the team was clueless as to what was in store for them.
Rivera was a big fan of expecting the unexpected and could be diabolical when coming up with ways a mission could go FUBAR. But then, he and Rivera had survived some messed-up operations together, and they both understood the need to put the team through extreme tests.
Rivera had barely survived the last op. Memories of that night, hauling his wounded teammate from the building, would haunt Chris for the rest of his days.
At least in training, if the op went FUBAR, no one would die. That was sort of the whole point.
Chris reached the shoreline. He could see the dark outlines of NPS campground signs on the beach. He chose a spot to the east, where trees abutted the water, and slipped from the lake directly into the cover of the forest.
Raindrops dotted the lake surface, the patter growing more rapid in the moments it took for his teammates to follow him into the woods. They’d barely beaten the predicted storm.
The thick forest camouflage wet suit kept him warm, but they’d be here for days, so they’d take turns changing in one of the campground shelters while the other three acted as guards.
Chris had wanted to parachute onto the meadow above the lodge and skip the hassle of swimming, but the sadists in charge had wanted the frigid swim to be part of their ordeal.
What the hell is Rivera preparing us for?
Grimly, it occurred to him that he’d managed to forget Pam for several minutes. Nothing like freezing his balls to change his perspective.
Jonas, Huang, and Phelps followed him into the woods like silent shadows. They located a pit toilet and took turns changing. Huang and Phelps used the break to touch up the dark greasepaint on their faces, to hide their pale skin. Jonas and Chris were both Black with skin on the darker end of the spectrum and didn’t bother with face paint.
As he waited for his turn, icy raindrops pelted him and wind whipped through the branches of the trees. The storm was coming, but he cursed the wind and rain only in his mind. Why would anyone attempt a hostage rescue in these conditions? This training was full of obstacles for obstacles’ sake. He couldn’t imagine a good enough reason to infiltrate an enemy stronghold in such piss-poor conditions. The odds of failure were too high.
Once he was changed and dry—but still fricking cold—he tucked away his wet suit in his pack, then tapped his earpiece to check in with the other Fire Teams’ progress.
The receiver didn’t make a sound.
He clicked the mic button and hailed the other teams again. Nothing.
“Shit,” he said softly to his team. “Signal jammer.”
Huang pulled out a cell phone and checked the screen. “Cell’s out too.”
Chris pulled their Fire Team’s only satellite phone from his pack. It too couldn’t get a signal. Could be due to forest and cloud cover, but he didn’t think so.
Jonas cursed and tapped his mic button. “Looks like we’ve found the first hurdle.”
Chris didn’t pick up anything from Jonas’s headset, meaning the radios didn’t even work when a mere three feet apart. Yet his NVGs worked. If he still had night vision, then their electronics hadn’t been wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse. An EMP wasn’t selective. It took out all or nothing. So this wasn’t your average signal jammer, and it wasn’t an EMP.
Fucking great.
Phelps, who was usually the glass-half-full type, also swore. “Assholes. It’s not bad enough that we’re dealing with a freezing monsoon? They had to cut out communication too?”