Troubleshooters 16.8 - Free Fall by Suzanne Brockmann

Chapter One
     
    Timeline: This Troubleshooters story takes place in early January 2010, about eight months after the end of Breaking the Rules , and several weeks before Home Fire Inferno (Burn Baby Burn) the TS short story included in Way of the Warrior benefit anthology (coming May 2015 in ebook and paperback from Sourcebooks, with all proceeds going to The Wounded Warrior Project.)
     
     
     “ Shit. ”
     Tony Vlachic’s voice came through the radio headset loud and clear, right as Izzy hopped and popped.
      Shit was right. The force of their chutes opening was intense—they were all gonna feel it for days—and Tony V wasn’t the only SEAL giving voice to his pain. Izzy chimed in with a little inadvertent Holy what the fuck falsetto descant of his own, even as Markie-Mark Jenkins gave forth with a sternly worded reprimand to his sweet baby Jesus. Meanwhile, the FNG, Ferd McTurd—not his real name, but it would do until the youngster had earned the team’s respect—laughed his crazy ass off.
     “Let’s at least try to pretend it’s the dead of night,” their LT and CO “Big Mac” MacInnough said mildly.
     “Radio silence,” their newly minted chief, Jay Lopez, ordered and all complaining stopped.
     It seemed pretty pointless to play at stealth when the sun was shining with all its might. Still, it wasn’t all that hard to shut-the-fuck-up, considering the awe-inspiring splendor of the scenery.
     Up here, the world was a pretty freaking beautiful place.
     The sky was crystal clear over the desert, but not too many miles away, well before the curving horizon, there was a full array of picture-perfect clouds stretching as far as the eye could see. And up here, Izzy could see pretty freaking far.
     Beneath him, his fellow SEALs’ open parachutes stacked in formation, one atop the other. Mark Jenkins had jumped first and was on point, with Tony V just after him, then Jay Lopez—the chief, gonna take some time to get used to that —then young Ferd, then Big Mac, then Izzy’s SEAL-in-law Danny Gillman, then finally Izzy himself, last out of the plane and still at the highest altitude.
     Of course, they were currently all at such a high fricking altitude, the few hundred feet between them didn’t mean squat.
     This was a HAHO jump—high altitude, high opening. They’d hopped out of a rather swiftly moving aircraft and within seconds popped open their chutes. The force of doing that was always teeth jarring.
     Long before Ferd had joined the team, when Izzy himself was the Fuckin’ New Guy—just a wee tadpole fresh out of BUD/S—he’d heard a story about a SEAL who’d dislocated his jaw on a HAHO when his lines got tangled. That had to have sucked—dude had had to cut away and slam his own jaw back into place to be able to talk so he could tell his teammates WTF. Happily, the gentleman had survived. SEALs were good at that—in fact, honing their survival skillz was one of the reasons they regularly did training exercises like this one.
     And that initial brain-shaking jolt was usually the worst of a HAHO. After that, it was all slow and peaceful and gentle, a seventy- to eighty-minute ride, just gliding silently down from thirty thousand feet to the waiting earth below.
     Assuming, of course, that enemy troops weren’t also waiting for them to come within deadly rifle range. Which was why HAHOs were usually done in the dead of night at oh-dark-thirty, when the SEALs and their chutes would be invisible as well as silent.
     Today’s training op had been originally scheduled to include the covering pitch of black, but their flight had been delayed, and then delayed some more. LT MacInnough eventually had decided to jump despite the fact that the sun was already up. Izzy wasn’t sure if that was because the BigMacster loved jumping or hated it.
     Either way, here they were, flying through the bright blue morning sky.
      Up! In the at! Mosphere! Up! Where the air is clear . . .
     It