SEAL Team 666: A Novel

Fratolilio was an anachronism. His was a join-the-Navy-or-go-to-jail scenario, but instead of boosting cars or stealing hubcaps, he had been a hacker who’d been caught changing the grades for all the seniors in his high school. For the first time in the history of Clara Barton High School, everyone graduated—one hundred percent, including the three unwed mothers taking the year off to have babies and the young man doing time for selling X during the homecoming dance.

Johnny Ruiz was another anachronism. To close your eyes and listen to him, you’d imagine a white West Virginia cracker. To look at him, with his swarthy skin and coal-black hair, you’d wonder if he was in America illegally. His southern drawl delivered from a Mexican-American mouth was sometimes too odd to witness. Ruiz was another join-the-Navy-or-go-to-jail recruit. He was caught purchasing marijuana in a drug bust for his mother’s habit. Ruiz’s expertise had always been explosives. His father, uncles, and brothers had stayed behind to work the West Virginia mines, something they’d done for generations. Ruiz learned at an early age the correct amounts of explosive to blow things sky-high, whether it was something as small as a tin can or as large as a bulldozer. Walker would bet that in Wheeling, West Virginia, Ruiz was a big man on campus and wasn’t self-conscious at all. But on SEAL Team 666, he was the quietest among them and always seemed concerned about how people saw him.

Timothy Laws was just plain weird. Unlike the other two, he hadn’t been forced to join the Navy. His father had been a set designer for MGM and Universal Studios in Hollywood and Timmy had grown up meeting the famous and infamous, befriending stuntmen, and helping with set designs since he was ten. School was easy for him—too easy. It wasn’t until he was in junior high that he realized his ability to memorize everything he heard wasn’t something everyone could do. When he joined the Navy, his language testing was off the charts and he was soon learning the first of eventually four dialects of Chinese.

Walker opened up to them as well. He told them about his experience with the Somali pirates and a little about growing up in an orphanage in Manila. For a few moments during the preparations, they felt like a small brotherhood. Walker liked that feeling. This was what it was all about. Being part of something.

The last thing they did was zero the sniper rifle. The best way to accomplish this would be on a rifle range with a spotter, but they’d have to make do with the space they had inside the fuselage of the Starlifter. Walker set up near the front bulkhead and lay prone, the Stoner aimed toward the rear of the plane. In actuality, he wasn’t actually zeroing the rifle, but the Leupold 4.5–14 × 50mm Mark 4 scope. He attached it to the Picatinny-Weaver rail mount system on top of the weapon and set it to factory standard. Then he grabbed a laser sight with a universal mount from the case and attached it to the front of the barrel. It made the weapon heavy, but he attached the bipod, which alleviated the weight and would keep the rifle still. Using a digital leveler, he aligned the laser with the barrel, then turned it on. A beam of light shot from the device down the length of the plane. He aligned it so that it hit the center of the target, then concentrated on the scope. It took a few moments of adjusting the knobs to get the illuminated mil dot within the crosshairs aligned. Then he tightened the knobs in place.

Next he got with the rest of the team and conducted pre-breathing, which consisted of intaking one hundred percent oxygen to flush the nitrogen from their bloodstreams. They’d be jumping from higher than twenty-five thousand feet, and the lack of pressure could lead to hypoxia or decompression sickness if all the nitrogen wasn’t flushed. So for thirty minutes they sat side by side, using the Starlifter’s oxygen supply and going over the mission in their minds, preparing for what would be an intense physical challenge in less than an hour.

Finally it was time to load up.

Over Walker’s body armor went the MC-4 free-fall parachute system, comprising the chute, an altimeter with a compass, an automatic parachute activation device, and a bail-out small oxygen tank, the latter which he’d eject once he was below seven thousand feet. The bulky reserve chute went in front. As always, he found himself resting his arms on it.

His Stoner was in an M1950 weapons case that was attached to the chute on a D ring to a lowering line, used just before impact to lessen possible damage to the weapon. Lastly, he put on his Protec skate helmet modified for MBITR.

After a commo check, they were ready to go. All the remaining gear had been tied down. They now stood at the edge of the closed ramp. The red light above it switched to yellow. The ramp began to open.