Chapter 14 - Night Drop over the Abyss
The rear cargo ramp of the MC-130J Combat Shadow lowered into the freezing void at twenty-eight thousand feet. The screaming blast of sub-zero air rushed into the red-lit cargo bay, whipping against our tactical drysuits. Beneath us lay only a vast, black abyss: the Pacific Ocean, obscured by a dense layer of rain squalls and low-hanging typhoon clouds.
I stood at the edge of the ramp, adjusted my night-vision goggles, and checked the seal on my oxygen mask. Beside me stood eight Tier-One operators from the Special Tactics Squadron, their faces hidden behind matte-black carbon-fiber helmets, assault rifles strapped tight against their chests.
"Oxygen check, thirty seconds!" Captain Miller signaled through the localized comms net.
I tapped the green indicator on my chest rig. Everything was green. My duffel bag and uniform were gone, replaced by a maritime assault loadout: an HK416 equipped with a suppressed short-barrel, high-velocity armor-piercing rounds, infrared designators, and an encrypted wrist-mounted tactical tablet showing the real-time satellite imagery of the target vessel.
The *Mendoza Star* was rolling heavily in twelve-foot swells ten miles dead ahead. She was completely dark, running without navigation lights, a ghostly leviathan slicing through the storm.
"Jumpmaster, clear!"
"Go! Go! Go!"
We stepped off the edge of the steel ramp into nothingness.
The freefall was violent and disorienting. The wind roared against my helmet as we plunged through the cloud deck at one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Raindrops slammed into my visor like micro-shrapnel. Through the emerald phosphorescence of my night-vision goggles, the swirling gray fog suddenly parted, revealing the churning, foam-streaked surface of the ocean racing up to meet us.
"Deploy! Deploy!"
At four thousand feet, our steerable tactical parachutes snapped open with a sharp, concussive *crack*. The violent descent instantly stabilized into a controlled, silent glide. We hung suspended between the stormy heavens and the black sea, maneuvering our canopies toward the superstructure of the cargo vessel.
Two sentries on the upper bridge wing of the *Mendoza Star* were pacing with automatic rifles, oblivious to the silence of the sky above them.
May you like
I pulled my toggles, spilling air from my chute, and touched down on the container stacks with a muffled thud, rolling instantly into a crouch. Miller and three operators hit the adjacent containers seconds later, collapsing their silk chutes and drawing their suppressed weapons in absolute unison.
The hunt was on.
