Chapter 13

S N A F U

{Situation Naturally All Fucked Up}

HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening. It is an airborne insertion technique designed to keep the aircraft outside the enemy’s detection envelope. The aircraft flies high enough to avoid radar and other detection systems, then the team exits and free-falls until they reach a lower altitude before deploying their parachutes.

The downside is simple: at those altitudes, you need supplemental oxygen just to stay conscious. You keep breathing bottled air until you drop low enough to use the atmosphere around you, which still contains less oxygen than the 21% found at sea level in most of the sensible world.

We were dropping like lawn darts, straight down into the compound where ABLE Team had conducted their last operation.

Yeah.

We were inserting uninvited, directly into the same place where the team before us had gone in and never come back out.

That alone should have told me everything I needed to know.

Things were going to be bad.

I knew just how bad when they handed me two suppressed M9A4 Lunar pistols with tactical thigh holsters. Each pistol had one magazine loaded and three additional magazines carried on my belt—three on either side of my buckle.

I also carried two Cold Steel G.I. Tanto knives mounted horizontally across the rear of my belt. The handles faced outward and overlapped slightly, keeping them from snagging on equipment during movement.