Chapter One – The Growler Gets It

The late-afternoon sun had dropped to the point where it hung little more than a fist’s distance above the horizon, but the day’s heat would not begin to wane until after sunset. Talion Camisade turned his head away from the orange, stabbing rays that shot through the occasional breaches in the leafy canopy. Sweat-stained and dirty, smelling faintly of the funk that inevitably permeates dampened clothing within hours of exertion in Southeastern seaboard humidity, he and his soldiers slipped noiselessly through the darkening woodland.

Fatigued, but doggedly keeping his senses tuned to the environment around him, Camisade replayed the morning’s mission and its sudden firefights in his mind, looking for details that indicated his team might have performed better and as a result avoided their one casualty. It was the introspection of a leader who never quit worrying at a problem until he was confident he understood it from all sides. In this case, the problem was the mortal wounding of Tommy Maretti and how it might have been prevented.

Camisade had almost thirty-seven months of Raider team experience—an unthinkably long time in a profession where many people failed to last a year, and most of those that did retired as soon as they reached that ripe tenure. Camisade never stopped applying lessons learned and the need to be better and better at his profession drove him mercilessly. His brown eyes were dark with his characteristic concentration, as sharp and focused as his muscles were hardened by the nearly inhuman demands he and his chosen profession regularly placed on them. The fact that his team had suffered a major casualty galled him. Muscles under his cheeks rippled, born of the physiological tautness that went with leading men operating in a lethal environment.

Behind him, his Alpha section moved in a spread wedge formation. At its center, two men carried Tommy “Growler” Maretti’s body. The men lugging the corpse, wrapped in a freezer bag with its head securely gripped within heavy stasis clamps, bore the task stoically, not showing the ire that Camisade held inside himself.

Since haste was no longer the foremost requirement for this mission, the team was saving a few bucks by dragging their “D&W”—dead and wounded, Maretti, in this case—out with them, rather than paying the ubiquitous ghouls, mercenary clean-up crews, to retrieve him later. Captain Woods, Camisade’s boss, encouraged economies like that. Of course, he encouraged the sort of performance that avoided casualties even more. In this case, there was nothing like carrying a buddy’s corpse out of the woods to make you reflect on your performance under fire. It was about the only time the Captain and the bean counters at corporate agreed on operational philosophies.

Unfortunately in this case, for Camisade’s men, dragging the Growler out with them was a shoulder-straining reminder that sometimes you can be one of the best at what you do and it’s still not always enough to keep you alive. Growler’s catching a round almost certainly wasn’t due to his doing anything John Wayne stupid; Growler was always competently cautious whenever flying lead was potential. It wasn’t due to a lack of teamwork or a battle drill gone awry or because the Raider Team he’d fought with for the last eight months hadn’t been good enough that morning. Sometimes the fates just conspire so evilly that even the best people get screwed. Not that Maretti would have ever admitted that. He had always been a stickler for high performance and attention to detail, to the point where he touted those characteristics as being absolute guarantors of success. He had embraced the traits like talismans.

Of course, we all think that to some degree, thought Camisade. Maretti had just snarled about it in his gravelly baritone more constantly and harped about minor mistakes more critically than most, thus his nickname. And up until now, no one could contradict his maintaining that perfection would keep you alive. Prior to today, the Growler had managed to go statistically beyond—way beyond—any likely period of time that should be possible without being wounded or suffering an enemy-inflicted scratch. That was a helluva feat in an environment where every day consisted of either hard, realistic training or real, live-fire combat. Where being ballistically delivered to remote parts of the world, air dropping into combat environments in rugged terrain, and frequent firefights, were the demands for receiving the extraordinary raider team paychecks that started at $20,000 per week..

In three years, Camisade had been seriously wounded twice, and incurred minor wounds six different times. At that, he was beating the averages himself. So far. Mentally, he knocked on wood.

When they moved into an area of relatively sparse tree growth, one of Camisade’s Bravo team members dropped back and took Growler’s weight from the man who had carried the heavy end for the last kilometer. Shaking out his fatigued shoulders, that man, Hawkins, moved up to take his benefactor’s original position. The rest of the team maintained their steady pace, one which saw them covering a kilometer about every seventeen or eighteen minutes—professionally quick, considering their encumbrance and the need for vigilance.

Today’s mission had gone down hard.

When your intel is good, Camisade reflected, your dropship tech is a deadeye nav who has predicted the winds perfectly, your team is clicking, and you manage to fill Murphy’s seat with Lady Luck, you occasionally get away with the Triton crystals and never see a soul, coming or going.

Usually that ain’t the case.

Today, a combination of an inaccurate drop and a problem on the launch pad—no fault of his men—all contributed to mission failure. Getting to the contest zone late, they had re-entered troposphere too far from Ground Zero—the site of the Triton meteorite impact. High winds at altitude had pushed his free-falling team further from the objective. That was something you might kick yourself for, even though it wasn’t your fault. Things like that just happened now and then on a Raider team drop. After those two SNAFUs, on the ground, they crossed paths with another Raider team. The meeting produced a furious firefight. For about five minutes, things had been frighteningly exciting—par for the course when people on the other end of your gun barrel were trying to incapacitate you. Though Camisade’s team disengaged reasonably quickly, they were still more than a klick from the payoff point—the impact site where a meteorite comprised partially of raw triton crystals had struck—when the race ended because someone else had already been there and gone.

The firefight, thought it had contributed to their losing out on the race for the Triton, was one of the additional reasons why the Raider team was a profit center for the corporation. Their corporate production department would alleviate today’s net loss by selling footage to the news channels or to one of the popular Raider-based drama series on television, where suitably handsome actors could be digitalized into his team member’s places. No doubt today’s video, taken by mini-cams integrated into each team member’s combat gear and already transmitted via satellite back to the support center, was already being pieced into a highly promotable segment. Those hairy few minutes would make good copy, and that was worth some money, at least.

Nothing even remotely close to the value of an ounce of triton, but better than nothing.

Tal Camisade ducked under a low-hanging branch, his eyes never ceasing their scan of the surrounding terrain and never needing to watch where he put his feet on the uneven ground.

If that firefight had been the last exciting event of the mission, it would have been palatable. A skirmish—though usually to be avoided—wasn’t necessarily a mission killer. And the first one hadn’t been. But there had been two firefights this morning.

Soon after the first battle, they’d begun moving only to hear the mission called “over.” That happened when “End of Mission” was broadcast over the common “net,” or radio frequency. It meant another team had dropped faster or dropped closer, or both, and breezed its way in. It had successfully snatched the triton crystals and E&E’d to its pickup zone, slick as you please. Game over, for today.

Sometimes you get chicken, sometimes you onl get feathers….

So Talion had turned the team around and headed them out toward their pickup zone. Then, on their outbound leg, Talion’s team crossed paths with a second enemy team.

Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

When an event like that happens very shortly after end of mission, men on all teams are often still on edge, a bit frenzied, like sharks left in the vicinity of a dissipating chum cloud. The big chunks of meat may be gone but there’s still plenty of blood in the water. Everyone was still stalking that edge, awake for any opportunity for ambush and the chance of materiel loot that could sometimes keep a mission from being a total financial loss. Good teams don’t make a habit of coming home completely empty handed; that kind of performance really shrinks the bonus checks and guarantees you’re not going to get the best equipment your corporation can buy.

Once end of mission goes out over the net, firefights sometimes sputter out immediately. Ambushes might be good business, but pitched battles are bad for profits. Most teams do not, as a rule, keep launching expensive bullets or risk the cost of taking casualties and being forced to use backup mappings when the potential for profit had evaporated. Today, however, shots cracked when Bravo Team rubbed against another corp’s team and the other team turned “aggro,” aggressive. In a split second both teams were burning cordite and littering the woodland with brass casings. Talion’s Bravo team was down and working on establishing fire superiority, and Alpha team was beginning to maneuver. A moment later, Camisade’s team found out rudely and suddenly they were outgunned. Really outgunned. Their first clue was the inbound sizzle of two streams of deceptively harmless looking cyan plasma bolts. Those were accompanied by the hair-raising, rapid-fire zipping sound of depleted uranium darts passing through hardwood trees like they were soft butter. It didn’t take a Hawkings to figure that out when you were throwing conventional lead at the bad guys and the bad guys were hissing plasma slugs and zipping DUDs—depleted uranium darts—back at you, that discretion would be the better part of valor…and it had better be exercised in a damned hurry or there’d be nothing left of your team but a bunch of hamburger.

One of life’s little suck points is how little conventional body armor does for you when you’re hit with a uranium dart, let alone a plasma slug.

They now lugged along Growler’s body bag as evidence of that.

Risk of temp-death, and potential real death, of course, was one of the reasons the job paid so damned much.

99.9% of the time, the paycheck seems like a big one….

Camisade high-stepped over a dry deadfall, careful not to snap any branches. Behind him, those carrying Growler opted to maneuver around the obstacle.

Talion wondered who the victorious team was, wondered who funded them and where they were headquartered. He might find out later this evening in the after-action review, once the S-2 section had had a chance to review and analyze the footage. Today, for that team, things must not have been greasy slick either—they didn’t get the crystals any more than Camisade’s team did. The firefight had smacked of frustration. Each round that cracked through the air seemed to be pushing a snarling shock wave cast from the shooter’s emotions. Or maybe Talion’s personal frustration had made it seem that way.

Camisade frowned through the fatigue that inevitably followed combat’s adrenaline rush. It was a rare mission nowadays when you didn’t pop caps. There were just too many corps—raider team slang for corporations, pronounced like in cadaver, not like in esprit de—for non-contact drops to happen very often. Every year it was getting hairier being on a Raider team.

Imagine a couple square klicks of terrain, swarmed by so many armed squads that there’s hardly room to swing a cat. The corporate Producers that edit and sell the mission videos were wizards at making it look dashing and exciting. For them, firefights meant higher ratings and higher payoffs, precious little of which was paid back to the soldier who carried the camera. For those on the teams, a firefight meant more sweat and more scare for almost the same amount of money.

Yeah, we’re great dinner fare, tucked in between sitcoms.

Demand for triton crystals outstripped supply at exponentially increasing rates.

The bloody mess where Growler’s sternum used to be was the result of that economic force.

Camisade had had his team pull a fade from the over-gunned zealots they’d run into, but the friction of that little rub had generated a lot of heat. Growler took the burn. Otherwise they would be listening to Growler’s grumbled bitching right now, rather than dragging him along by the handles on his hyper-chilled body bag, trailing an eddying mist of freezer fog. Luck is a fickle bitch and when she turns, it’s like a snapping rubber band.

Camisade glanced around, his eyes falling on the limp rucks the crystal recovery team packed in and were now packing out empty. His thoughts returned to wondering which corp got a boost to its bottom line today. Hopefully today’s pennies-from-heaven drill wasn’t a large fall. Losing at all was bad enough. Finding out the take was minute would ease the sting. It would also reduce the chances that they’d be sent against the retrieving team’s compound, assuming S-2 could discern where it was. That was always a possibility that gnawed at a man’s guts, and something to be thankful for when it wasn’t ordered; people always died during compound raids. In that kind of battle environment, where you may not get the opportunity to recover your own wounded or dead, bodies sometimes weren’t recovered quickly enough. Then it was finito Charlie for any poor bastard that fielded a 5.56mm line drive, unless the enemy team decided to burn a stasis clamp in hopes of ransoming the other Raider team member’s corpse.. With so much at stake—a recent triton haul and possibly the entire compound, perhaps with laboratory and everything, compound raids got out of hand too easily, often becoming chaotic fights to the death for one team or the other. If the impact today was a small one, the bean counters would be more willing to write off this mission and wait until next time. They’d bitch and write their memos, make their excuses and pin blame, and probably take glee in not having to cut any bonus checks, but they would get over it. They would swallow their sunk cost and hope for better luck next time.

Unless some overly bright desktop tactician thought that there would be enough of an element of surprise in pursuing a small Triton haul, because no one would be expecting it, that it might be worth the risk to go for it.

Of course, a voice in Camisade’s head spoke, if the bean-counters at corp HQ would fund my team the way it needed to be funded…. Snarling to himself, he choked off that line of thought. That argument wasn’t worth the breath and it sounded too much like sniveling. Bring back more triton, and we’ll give you more funding—in the mean time, your soldiers are expected to partially equip themselves out of the generous pay they receive. Still, it rankled not to be able to provide his crack team with the best equipment available. It was asking for more than heroism from a group of mercenaries to win every time when they went into combat out-gunned to the point where they might as well have been carrying BB guns. …and then had to ride to the party in a drop ship whose ballistic guidance hadn’t been correctly programmed for the current winds at altitude. Three klicks from Ground Zero might be fairly close on some days, given the cost constraints put on a disposable delivery platform that has to be able get a team to the other side of the globe within forty-five minutes. But it wasn’t close enough most days, and certainly hadn’t been today.

Camisade’s thoughts were interrupted by his c-link, which pinged twice against his jawbone where it was implanted, indicating a transmission from higher. Incredibly distracting when first emplaced, it was now such a part of him that receiving a transmission was taken in stride. “Romeo team, papa zulu change to golf lima seven one five, six two niner. Confirm and say ETA, over.” Papa zulu was phonetic alphabet for PZ, short for pickup zone. The golf-lima string was the map coordinate where they would get picked up for extraction. The reason for the change was not given, did not really matter. Probably another team already using our original choice, Talion thought.

He flicked over to the net the call had come in on and confirmed the grid coordinates, then added he would transmit ETA in five mikes—minutes—and had one “t-KIA”—Growler. He added that the Growler was on ice and that they were dragging him back.

“Roger, facilities prep coordination process started,” came back over the radio. “Out.” Camisade flicked his comlink over to transmit on the team net.

“Quick patrol base, Raiders,” Talion transmitted. His radio’s low-power, frequency skipping transmission had virtually no chance of being intercepted by a nearby team, assuming there was one interested in doing so. The murmured command, sub-vocalized, went out to his surviving eleven men. He took a couple steps off the line they traveled through the trackless brush—no following paths for this team—and hunkered to the ground.

While his men dropped into relaxed alertness in a cigar-shaped perimeter around him, he unfolded his 1:50,000 map and pinpointed their location himself before verifying the coordinates against his wrist GPS. Some of his newer hires liked to chide him about his habit of not relying totally on the technology he carried, but he hadn’t yet budged on it, and didn’t plan to anytime soon. Prior to Camisade being recruited for this Raider team, he had worn the distinctive beret of a U.S. Army special forces soldier—a community where land nav skills were religion. It was before global positioning system receivers became common as dirt and lighter than crackers, back in the days when map reading was a learned and painfully perfected art. He wasn’t the type to get lazy on survival skills and he counted land navigation chief among them. Especially when jamming technology, now also man portable, could skew a GPS reading six ways from Sunday. While he was scanning the map for the best route to their pickup zone, his team leaders, having completed their rapid checks of their teams, jogged up and squatted in front of him.

“You good, Jenkins?” he murmured to his B-team leader. Jenkins had been in the teams for two years and was a damned good head when the bullets started snapping through the leaves around you. When they rubbed another team, Jenkins usually led the maneuver element. “Cussman” Pitt, Camisade’s A-team leader, usually provided suppressive fire support. Their skills complemented each other and made Camisade’s job a helluva lot easier. Jenkins could train people to move through woods like geckos—fast, hard to see, and instinctively taking advantage of cover that sometimes Camisade didn’t even sense at first. Any enemy team that opened up on them and then allowed Jenkins to disengage was an enemy that soon had its ass hanging in the breeze with fire coming in from two sides. Cussman—so named because in a firefight he never shuts up and his epithets had been known to make sailors run for cover—had a knack for figuring out where the enemy were, then ramming fire superiority down their throats. That suppression made Jenkins’ team’s job safer and easier. They both had an uncanny knack for knowing what the other person was doing—so much so that Camisade sometimes thought they used the c-link largely for his benefit.

Jenkins nodded, but didn’t say anything. His eyes smoldered. Growler had been his man. Camisade understood. Surprisingly enough, relatively few people actually bought the farm on these raids. It always sucked, even if such a casualty had a good chance of being reversible under the right conditions and with a little luck.

The low number of permanent fatalities certainly wasn’t due to lack of trying by the bullet launchers on the Raider teams. It was a result of three factors. The first was equipment—primarily the lightweight ballistic armor that was the first thing most men new to a team bought—and medical technology. Both were largely spin-off benefits of the continued escalation of inner city violence and increasing frequency of 3^rd-world brush wars and the chronic terrorist actions that plagued the world. Law enforcement officers, peacekeeping troops, and counter-terrorist forces needed more and more firepower and protection every year, and every year emergency rooms enhanced their trauma treatment knowledge base. Also in the equipment category was the practical consideration of weight—the expense of delivering mass to a Triton impact site via ballistic vehicle also did its part to keep armament and its corresponding lethality relatively light. Of course, this meant more in the days before shoulder-fired, plasma weapons and other recent innovations in small arms technology. And the key word there was relatively….

The second factor responsible for keeping fatalities low was the Geneva Accord of 2017. It limited the firepower a raider team was allowed to take into action and set rules of engagement.

In a nutshell, the rules of engagement for a Raider team on a triton raid were simple:

1) No fully automatic weapons were allowed.

2) No explosives, fragmentary rounds or devices, or weapons of mass destruction were allowed.

3) No external support or firepower could be called in. Equipment had to be man-packed and man-portable.

4) Civilian casualties would be prosecuted in accordance with the laws of the host country, with corporations liable for tort damages in accordance with the laws of their host country or the country in which the casualty was caused, whichever was preferred by the plaintiffs.

Naturally, the Accords, which were drawn up by the crème de la crème of the shyster industry—those who navigated the labyrinthine tangles of international law—were several hundred pages in length. But the basis and intent of the document was explained quite easily. Since the meteorites that brought triton to earth could strike anywhere, countries agreed to limit the personnel and armament that would be dropped into a sovereign nation in pursuit of those invaluable crystals.

There was also an official length of time a Raider team could stay in a foreign country before it had to be evacuated, but Camisade didn’t know what that length of time was—no one ever pushed that. Once a team had snatched the crystals, there was no point in hanging around. That time was better spent prepping for the next drop. Besides, a Raider team was a valuable corporate asset and there was no law preventing a country’s armed forces from taking foreign Raider teams hostage if they could catch them. Ransoming Raiders was big business for some countries, especially those with advanced technological capabilities. It was also a revenue generating option for other Raider teams.

The third factor in almost eliminating permanent fatalities was the brand new field of rejuvenation technology, a discipline that had exploded onto the medical scene shortly after the benefits of triton treatments began changing the world’s economy. One of the most startling developments of this new science, derived from the incredible resistance to trauma that regular treatments of triton conveyed, was the possibility of surviving the most fantastic of organ transplants—removal of the brain and its placement into another body. This, combined with the evolution of cloning science, gave those who could afford regular Triton treatments a virtual immunity from death by any means other than massive head trauma. The process of moving one’s old brain into a waiting, fully developed clone, then re-loading that brain with previously stored electro-encephalopatterns was called re-mapping, or a re-map.

It could literally bring a person back to life, with his memories and self restored to the time and date of his last cerebra-mapping—the process of taking a snapshot of the brain’s electrical patterns and storing them.

With luck, Growler would be eligible for a re-map once they got him back and prepped.

If it worked, he’d be good as new, though a good bit poorer. And he’d have to replace his recently upgraded body armor, since the current piece had an ugly, smoking hole in the middle of it. That smoking hole, Camisade thought, was no doubt weighing heavily on his men’s minds. For something that was basically an uncomfortable pain in the ass to wear, it hadn’t done Growler a damned bit of good. Many of the men were also probably weighing Growler’s odds of coming through the re-mapping. Unfortunately, a re-map didn’t always take. Failures could be partial, resulting in some loss of physical or mental capacity, or total, in which case there was nothing to be done for the person but put him back down and notify his next of kin.

Re-mapping was the miracle and the curse of the professional soldier these days. That also went for anyone else who could afford it and had the requisite access to regular Triton treatments. It was a miracle in that it allowed such incredible surgeries as brain transplants and allowed one to survive the shock associated with receiving a full-depth cerebral scan from storage. It was a curse in that it was damned expensive to have your clone grown and maintained for you. It was also damned expensive to keep current on one’s periodic map update, so that in case of emergencies like the one Growler had just suffered, one didn’t lose too much of one’s recent experiences. The combination took a huge chunk out of even a rich man’s bankroll. A clone, grown, synchronized with the owner, maintained in peak condition and ready for occupation cost about $350,000 a year. A full cerebral mapping, with storage until needed, ran about $100,000, with incremental updates running about $35,000 per session. One full mapping could be updated with about three updates before you had to start from scratch again. Sometimes four or more updates would work, but when the process failed it failed completely. No one gave refunds when that happened.

Similarly, any number of map updates beyond three increased the chances that a re-map would fail if the time came to actually burn the map to one’s brain in a newly inhabited clone. And when that process failed, it also failed completely, ruining the clone. Few people could afford to maintain a second clone for that eventuality. It was a damned certainty that Raider team grunts didn’t collect that kind of pay. And it wasn’t like a map could be imprinted on anyone else. A map only worked on that person’s clone, against that person’s brain, effectively killing what would have otherwise developed into a smashing black market in immortality.

It was a hell of a dilemma. It varied with rank and tenure, of course, but raiders usually earned between one and three million dollars (U.S.) a year, half of which was held in trust and payable only upon retirement from the team. So, how much did one salt away for retirement, and how often did one see that one’s mind map was updated? How much did one risk extending their raider team tour, since tour duration was measured by each individual Raider’s subjective time? That is, if one served eighteen months on a Raider team, then managed to get one’s self killed, but had let six months go by since the last cerebra-mapping, then one was brought back to life with credit for only one year’s service. Since the Raider no longer had the benefit of the previous six-month’s experience or training—he’d lost that with his old body—he didn’t get accorded any of the pay or bonuses accrued in that time. It was bean counter logic, but that’s the way the enlistment rules worked. Raiders had a term for it: map shock. Map shock was waking up on a mapping table and being told that the date was several months further along than it was when you lay down on the mapping table.

That meant you’d bought the farm on a mission, but due to your having a waiting clone and a workable cerebra-map, it had been bought back.

Raiders joked that map shock also manifested when the poor mappee looked at his trust balance and saw it decreased by the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the fact that the Raider’s pay rate no longer synchronized with date of enlistment.

And not getting re-mapped, say because you really wanted your money to go to your poor starving family or something, was not always an option either. In some organization’s, including Talion’s, you were a corporate asset and the corporation wanted its full contracted value out of you. Never mind the fact that some corps ran their own map shops as yet another profit center. Wheels within wheels, and the economics of conflict, Camisade reflected.

“Down.” Though he was right next to Camisade, Cussman sent the command out over the unit command net. Jenkins and Camisade, and every other soldier on the team melted to their bellies. Slowly, Talion inched his face around so he was looking in the same direction Cussman was. Less than seventy meters away, on the ridge the team had been paralleling, another Raider team was headed for their extraction point. They were carrying two wounded with them. Incredibly, it looked like they had stood completely down for the day. Their weapons were slung or being carried one handed and a couple of the men were actually puffing on cigarettes. If they wore dynamic cammie suits, the units had either run out of juice or were powered down.

Out of the corner of his eye, Talion saw Cussman shake his head in disgust. Catching his team leader’s eye, he nodded. Since no one on the other team had sensed their men, both leaders realized they could probably decimate the other Raider team before the poor bastards knew what hit them. Just because most teams go to weapons hold when the crystals have been taken out of the area doesn’t mean everyone does. What Camisade’s team was watching was a good demonstration of the best way for a group of men to cost their corp a helluva lot of money. It was also a way for Camisade’s team to recoup some of the expense of this drop.

Camisade weighed the risk against the potential gain. A rapid assessment showed the other team to be carrying fairly decent equipment. While its sale would bring some money, the real judgment lay in whether he thought the enemy team’s owning corp could or would pay significant ransom to get any captured team members back. All things considered, the risk and cost of having to send the pick-up bird back until later, combined with the pitiable lack of competence being displayed by the enemy team, drove his decision to let the opportunity pass without engagement.

“Stand fast. Weapons hold,” he sub-vocalized over the team radio net. He relaxed, suddenly aware of how he’d so quickly climbed back into taut readiness at the possibility of violent action. He then observed his two team leaders do the same. Jenkins looked angry, and more disappointed than relaxed.

Tough shit, Camisade thought. It might have been easy goods, but a firefight is never a sure thing. And this one would not have paid off enough to make the risk a good business decision. This time they would let the other team go.

“Somewhere,” Cussman whispered, “some fuckin’ corporate accountant just got heart palpitations without knowing why.” He grinned, and a moment later Jenkins did relax and join him.

“If I ever let us look like that, Cussman, shoot me.” Camisade whispered after the other team was gone.

“Betcher ass, sir,” Cussman snorted. He didn’t crack the slightest smile.
Lying next to them, Camisade pointed out their location on the map. Both men nodded, concurring. The surrounding terrain and the terrain they’d been following matched that indicated by the contour lines on their map. “Our PZ is thirteen hundred meters Northwest. Right here.” They both marked the PZ on their maps. “I want us there in thirty-two minutes. Traveling overwatch until here,” he designated a covered location two hundred meters from the pickup zone, “then an armed occupation of the PZ. The show’s over today, but we didn’t accomplish shit, so let’s get a little training out of this movement. Radio listening silence from now on, and hand-and-arm communications only. From this point on, we’re ghosts, and if another team sees us before we see them, we’ll go back out again as soon as we get back to the compound. Then we’ll do training until I’m convinced we’re better at this than a bunch of Girl Scouts. Maybe next time we go chasing a snow ball, we won’t blunder into another raider team like a herd of elephants. As soon as we’re in the patrol base on the objective, Cussman, secure the PZ and bring our dust-off in.” Cussman nodded. Usually Jenkins secured the PZ, but by now both squad leaders were versed in Camisade’s habit of cross training as one of his core operating foundations. “If things go to hell in a hand basket and we get fired up, our intermediate rally point is back here.” Both leaders nodded again.

“Any questions?” It was an informal, simple field order. Most of their procedures were SOPs that come as second nature to the team. That kept things simple. Neither team leader had any questions. “Good, execute violently.” Camisade ended the meeting and both team leaders keyed their respective team net to disseminate the situation and give the frago—fragmentary field order. Within one minute, Jenkins had picked up his men, fanned them out into a wedge, and moved out. Camisade rose and followed them at thirty meters. Cussman’s team fell silently into their wedge twenty meters back.

They made the PZ without incident. Cussman swept the PZ, secured it, contacted the inbound chopper and popped the locator beacon to bring it in. Moments later, they were in the air, heading for the airport. There, a corporate jet would carry them home—or close enough to home that another Raider team chopper would ferry them to their compound, and home. This shot had put them across the continent, so they had about seven hours of travel time ahead. Twenty-seven minutes to get here and seven hours to get home, Camisade reflected.

Ain’t technology great?

Camisade began writing his reports. After that, he’d get some sleep. There was always a lot to do upon return to base.