Hack-of-All-Trades

PrologueWelcome Home – Fortunate Son

The whir of the chopper’s blades made a Fwip, Fwip, Fwip sound that was as consistent as a metronome. Even my noise-canceling headphones couldn’t stop the thrum of the sound as it traveled through the body of the flying transport Chinook, and subsequently from the copter’s body to my own. That was fine. It was a sensation that I was not only used to but found deeply comforting. It was a physical and mental reminder that I was safe, that I’d lived, that I was going home.

I stared out the small porthole windows at the drab, blue-black, desolate landscape of the night desert that passed below as we sped along in the bright light of the full moon and stars. The nights out there had always been more than impressive. They put anything back home to shame. I’d always thought so, even back when I was deployed for the first time over 25 years ago, and every deployment since. That was key to surviving these things. You couldn’t let your mind get bogged down in the minutiae of the missions.

It was a small thing, gratitude, being grateful, sounded stupid, even for someone like me who jumped out of perfectly good airplanes, deep into enemy territory, or disasters, natural or manmade, that 99.9999% of people wouldn’t even dream of entering, to say. Let alone think or suggest to others, but it is what it is, and momma didn’t raise a liar. If something works, it works. And for the last 27 years of my life as a PJ, special forces pararescueman, I’d been grateful, grateful as fuck.

Every. Single. Time.

This had been my last mission, and I’d survived, again. My mind tracked back to the events of the past few hours, going over the whole sordid clusterfuck of the operation, trying to order things in my mind for the debrief that I knew the Commander was going to want the moment the chopper’s wheels touched down. The mission had been a success, in the sense that the objectives were completed, but the way my team had completed them was not technically considered legal under the Geneva Conventions’ current rules.

“Whatever,” I grunted out, earning some looks and raised eyebrows from the members of my team, but I ignored them.

There was only one thing on my mind. I’d survived and was making it home to my wife. My beautiful wife and, more importantly, my unborn child. I couldn’t believe it when she told me that she was pregnant when I left. I didn’t think it was possible. We were both past the age where you were supposed to be able to conceive, yet we had, she did, and we were going to be parents at the ripe ages of 46 and 38.

It was termed a geriatric pregnancy by the Docs, but that didn’t matter. I was going to be a father. It was something that I’d dreamed of my whole life, but when my wife and I got married and began trying, we were told that both of us had ‘issues’ with our reproductive systems, hence no kids for us. But somehow, by some miracle, in our geriatric stage of life, we’d done it. It actually made me believe in God again, and was the impetus for this being my last mission.

Now that I was going to be a father, I was done with the military. I had plenty of years in to get full retirement, and it was time to cash in on my years of risking my life for good old Daddy Warbucks. I’d already spoken with the 3FOX1 HR goons, and they’d confirmed that I’d be getting full Captain’s pay and retirement. 5K a month is not a bad chunk of change for a family of three to live on, and that was without my getting another job, plus I would still have full health benefits, even dental, for my whole family until I died, my kid until he was 26.

I was as prepared as a 46-year-old man could be to have a child at this stage in life. A grin came to my face unbidden as I thought about the future. No more of this shit, no more having to fly into barren wastelands and killing goat-grabbing pedo-poppers, and risking my life to save others. I could finally be a real person, rejoin society, and be a veritable pillar of the community. Maybe I’d coach the little league baseball team or kids’ basketball, maybe even peewee football…

Explosions rocked the Chinook, detonating all around us in the night sky, jarring me from my mental meandering and ripping my mind from its happy place, back into the now. Red lights and sirens had activated in the chopper’s cargo bay as the helicopter dipped, rose, and moved side to side like an epileptic at a Diplo rave. My team, however, had kept it together, like the consummate professionals they were, all looking to me for an order.

I looked back as the deck pitched and jumped beneath us, the Chinook’s frame bending back and forth in the turbulent air, that small grin still on my face, locking eyes with each of my team members and confirming what I already knew. I grunted, this time loud enough to be heard over the chaos as I unbuckled my safety harness and stood up, my team mirroring my movements.

“It looks like the mission ain’t over yet! Get ready to rock n roll, boys! These sheep bangers are getting froggy! Let’s remind them who the hell we are!” I shouted, hoisting my modified M4A1 and adjusting the straps tighter to my chest, just as the flashing red lights turned green and the cargo ramp began opening.

I turned, without even looking to see if my men were following, because I knew without a shade of doubt, they would be, and sprinted across the shaking and heaving deck to the slowly opening ramp’s exit. Then, a few seconds later, I leaped out into the night, my face twisted in excitement and my lips curled up in a huge, vicious smile.

“Kill ’em all!” I screamed, the voices behind me echoing my battle cry.

13 shouts, 13 warriors, and 13 wings burst out from the Chinook’s rear, and began to sail through the chaff and explosion-filled night sky, like angels of death in the tales of old.

The wind screamed and shrieked like the gates of hell themselves as I left the Chinook’s airstream and sailed through the moon and starlit sky thousands of feet up over the arid desert. My suit’s wings snapped open with a body thrumming crack that echoed all the way down to the cockles of my heart, way down where I hid all my emotion, so far down that it and they never saw the light of day.

I pushed away the maudlin thought spiral and instead reframed my mindset as I’d been trained to do so many years ago. A vulpine tooth-filled leer reappeared on my face underneath the Anduril MK. VII suit’s helmet, then the left and right wings’ thrusters fired, and I rocketed forward, turning from a plummeting 46-year-old retiring PJ into a goddamn avenging angel of death. I was Azrael himself, mounting the air of the night sky like it was my bitch, and it needed a good railing.

I had no problem railing the SOB. In fact, I’d rail it as hard as I could. I’d make it say daddy, just like those goat bangers below that started appearing in my vision as my HUD burst into life inside my helmet’s internal screens. The bright, sharp light blue and fluorescent red outlines expanded across my vision instantaneously, causing my contact lenses to sync with my HUD’s interface, giving me a full 360-degree view of my surroundings and the battlefield below.

The enemy was lit up for me like my own personal Christmas light show. They stood out like beacons in the night, alongside the silvery desert alien landscape full of towering glittering sand dunes and razor-sharp, jagged-edge rocks every which way you looked, but loose. The irony of the landscape’s innate beauty hit me at the moment for some reason, even though I was about to deal copious amounts of death, a part of me was already mourning the loss of sights like this.

It was these moments when I felt closest to the man upstairs, and they were among the reasons I kept jumping into the fire again, and again, and again. Even after promising myself it would be the last time I did this shit. Even after I promised her it was the last time. Well, this was the last time. A systems readiness report appeared in the corner of my vision, and I gave it the cursory once-over I did on every mission.

A familiar voice began speaking inside my mind, and I smiled, hearing the calm, sarcastic tone. The type of voice that belonged to a particularly smug butler or extremely gifted conman.

“Good evening, my good Captain Law, your friendly GROK Tactical Assistant here. I just wanted to inform you that I am currently synced up with the entire squad, and everyone is operating at full function and efficiency. On a personal note, these sheep-bangers must really be cruising for a metaphorical bruising, ruining your retirement and all. By the way, I have targeting solutions across the spectrum for all OPFOR. The desert is painted like a Jackson Pollock painting…”

“GROK, you goddamn foulmouthed SOB, send me my men’s readiness breakdown. I don’t have time for your verbal diarrhea!” I shouted into the howling wind.

“…I suggest a quick in and out for these pig-pussies, you’ve got a wife and that beautiful bun in the oven back in the freest state in the union after all. Geriatric pregnancy or not, I bet your little lady is frothing at the mouth at the thought of you being home for the next ultrasound,” GROK finished, his tone merry and in total contrast to the situation currently at hand.

A second later, my HUD pinged and the information appeared in my vision, translucent enough that it didn’t impair my tactical awareness, still giving me a full view of the desert below and sky around me. I took in the information through my peripheral vision while keeping my main focus on the world, and, more importantly, on the glowing enemy combatants.

I flicked the screen to the next window with a thought and went over my team’s roll call, even though I’d carved every single name into my memory and knew them like they were my own family. Even the ones that were gone… especially the ones that were gone…

With a practiced reframing of my mindset, I shoved the maudlin thoughts away and quickly perused my team’s status window.

“Alright, you stupid sons of bitches! Time for one last dance with the devil in the pale moonlight! Now, sound off!”

“GTG!”

“Good to go!”

“Game on!”

“Let’s fucking go!”

Twelve voices called back over the closed systems comms, each with their own unique signature provided by their personal AI, letting me know they were all copacetic and ready to go. With the AI handling all the fluctuations in atmosphere, weather, and all the other micro adjustments that the flight suits needed, we were able to concentrate on the important things, like sending all these goat packers to the nether realm so they could enjoy their seventy-two virgins.

Our squadron dove through the night sky like the titans of old, our two-hundred-plus-mile-per-hour dive faster than a peregrine falcon, covering the hundreds of feet in seconds, before our suits’ plasma thrusters kicked in, flaring a blinding blue-white in the semi-darkness. Our thrusters were so bright it was like twenty-six miniature suns erupting in the desert. The OPFOR scrambled around like rats in a cage, panicked. This cost them even more time, and the whole squadron was able to get in close and personal before they started firing at us.

By that time, the wolves were already in the henhouse. And every single one of these wolves was armed to the teeth and locked, cocked, and ready to rock. The OPFOR finally started firing at us, their 1990s Toyota 4Runners converted into mobile .50-caliber firing platforms, leading the way. All four of those moving tetanus shots, along with their human excrement operators, were our first targets.

My wings retracted into my flight suit’s rear compartment, the backpack, with a satisfying click and a restoration of my center of gravity, allowing me to take aim at my first target. The forced stability of my thrusters fighting against the earth’s physics was a technological marvel, so commonplace to me that I didn’t even register it, as I pulled the trigger of my primary weapon.

The barrel on the rifle of my modified M4A1 ‘Reaper’ carbine began glowing a cherry red as the M855A1 Enhanced Performance Rounds (EPR) left it at two and a half times the speed of sound, one after the other, so fast the firing sound was almost a continuous buzzing. My focus wasn’t on the sound of my rifle. It was on the pattern I was stitching across the first of the enemy SUV’s heavy machine-gunners. I couldn’t help the wolfish snarl and leer that came across my face as each third shot fired a tracer round that lit up the OPFOR like a pinball machine.

The engine block on the old Toyota began to hiss and squeal like a fatted hog on its way to a BBQ, followed by the enemy operators’ screams and shouts in their guttural, ear-wrenching language, which my team and I quickly ended.

“First blood’s mine!” Senior Master Sgt. Biggs cheered gruffly on the team comms.

A chorus of ‘STFU, Old man!’ rang out quickly after, but was quashed in moments by the second Toyota exploding in a huge Michael Bay-style fireball. The second fireball was immediately followed by two more in rapid succession, with another dozen cries to Allah cut short by well-aimed fire from the rest of the team.

Less than five minutes earlier, our extraction chopper was being rocked and blasted by RPGs and .50-caliber fire, but now over half the zipperheads were already pushing daisies. My AI’s voice interrupted my thoughts and grabbed my attention.

“Very well done, team. Over half the enemy are down, and the rest are running for the hills. I’ve taken the liberty of signaling the bird to come back for pickup. The LZ is two clicks to the north,” the AI said in a dry, nasally tone similar to many of the Brit spec ops folks I’d worked with in the past.

Basically, he sounded like a prick, and the rest of the team let him know it. Each of the team’s personal AIs had a unique personality. It was in the programming, the tech nerds told me, but I always had a sneaking suspicion it was more than that. I could never prove it, however, so I shelved it with all the other shit in my mind that I couldn’t change and moved on.

“I suggest heading to the extraction site for…” the AI began, but I cut him off midway.

“Negative that, team. We still have time till the bird lands. Current operational objectives are switching from defensive to offensive. All team members are ordered into hunter-killer mode. Good luck, ladies and gentlemen. Make sure not one of the goat bangers makes it to their stinky ass caves. Beers on me when we get home!” I grinned as I shouted over the comms.

“Ladies? I know you aren’t talking to me!” Frenchie shot back in response. “And I don’t drink beer, it better be a 2012 Bordeaux in my glass!”

“Heard!” I laughed, joining the rest of the team as their thrusters fired and they took off in pursuit of what was left of the terrified enemy.

End of the Prologue