Blackwater One

0300 hours. The new moon phase was chosen specifically to give the team the best opportunity to insert undetected in complete darkness. It was standard SEAL team operations, meaning it didn’t exist in any official record. Eight wives at home knew only that their husbands were not at home, and none of them knew when, or if, they would be back.

The light in the aircraft snapped from red to green, throwing a chilling glow across the cabin. The eight men rose in unison and moved for the door. Nobody spoke. Hands cut the air in short, practiced signals, though by now the signals barely mattered. Every man already knew where to be and when.

The jump master watched as, one by one, the night swallowed them. The roar hit immediately, wind dragging at every strap and seam. The team leader counted himself out in addition to watching his altimeter on his wrist. You double up on measurements when the alternative is slamming into the Earth at a hundred and thirty miles per hour. His arms were held tight against his side; his body angled the way ten thousand jumps had carved into every muscle.

“Twelve thousand,” he called over the net.

The others echoed in turn as they passed the elevation checkpoint, voices clipped and steady. Behind the visor, the ground was nothing yet, just dark folding into darker dark. There were no lights visible, no horizon, no proof the Earth even existed beneath them.

“Eight thousand.” Another round of callouts came back, tighter now in both the sky and over the net, eight men correcting toward each other with every second left before canopies deployed. “On my mark, pull at four.”

The altimeter ticked down fast. “Three, two, one…pull!” He yanked the ripcord and the canopy cracked open above him, hard enough to jolt the air out of his lungs. One by one the canopies bloomed against the still black night. Radio silence was all the team leader needed to know. No news is good news. He ripped the mask free. The thick, wet air hit his face. Jungle rot, heat and standing water battled the air for space. He took inventory of the shapes hitting the ground around him. All seven accounted for, precisely where they were supposed to be.

“Blackwater Actual, this is Blackwater One. Radio check, over.” He was met with nothing but static, which he had somewhat prepared for. The dense trees of the jungle, heat and rugged terrain were concerns already mapped out in the mission briefing. “Blackwater Actual, this is Blackwater One. Radio check, over.” Still nothing. Beside him, a second operator, the navigator, caught his eye and gave a small shake of his head, already knowing the answer.

“We’re blind,” the nav operator said, voice low.

“We knew that was a possibility going in,” responded the team leader.

He signaled the team forward with two fingers, and they moved into the tree line in a loose file, weapons at the ready, eyes surveying the surroundings through night vision goggles.

“Blackwater Actual, Blackwater One is on the ground and moving to primary.” He was once again met with static. He nodded toward one of the other operators, their comms guy. “Keep trying to raise them. I have other shit to do than play telephone with command all damn night.”

They hit the river twenty minutes into the jungle. It was wide and the current was not to be taken lightly. The team leader signaled the others in, and the water took them almost immediately, pulling the whole formation downstream. He kept his rifle high and let the current do what it wanted, watching the far bank blur past. Minutes stretched out. The far shore never seemed to get any closer. By the time the pull finally eased, and he could kick toward the bank, they’d been carried the better part of two clicks from the drop point.

“This isn’t even fucking close to where we planned,” the nav operator said, hauling himself onto the muddy bank.

“Yeah, tell it to the river…or the fucktard intel guy that said to expect a mild current.” The team leader checked his bearing and found nothing on it that matched the surrounding terrain. He went with his gut and picked a direction. “Move out.”

“Ping,” the comm operator called from the rear, voice low. “East, maybe two hundred meters. Movement. Six pax.”

The team leader stopped. “That’s not what the intel indicated.”

“Nothing about this mission has been what intel indicated. It’s been a shit show since the moment we left the bird.” The comms operator lowered his radio, static still hissing in his ear. “Command’s still not answering. I’ve got no way to confirm. All I can tell you is there is movement to the east.”

“Then we confirm it ourselves.” The team leader signaled the shift, and the formation peeled east through the undergrowth, stealthy, weapons at the ready. They closed the distance low and slow, and through the brush the shapes resolved. Four men with rifles at the low ready walked a slow circle around two more men stacking ammo crates.

“Confirmed hostile,” the nav operator breathed. “Weapons, ammo, no uniforms. That’s our six.”

The team leader didn’t answer, just gave the signal, two fingers, a fist and a flat hand cutting left to right. The other operators responded with signals of their own, dividing up the enemy targets amongst the team. On his mark twelve suppressed shots thumped out in flat, controlled pairs. The six men dropped almost in unison before any of them knew what had hit them.

The last body had barely hit the ground when the comm operator’s wrist display lit again.

“Second ping. West. Three hundred meters.”

Another operator, the team medic, said, “That’s back the fucking way we came and intel said six enemy.”

“That can’t be right.” The nav operator wiped sweat from his eyes. “We just cleared that on the way here.”

“Display doesn’t care what we just cleared.” The team leader was already moving. “We’re already in it. Let’s go.”

They swung back west, closed in, and found the same picture waiting, rifles, more ammo crates, and no doubt left once they had eyes on it. They put it down the same way as the first group, fast and clean, not even enough time to second guess why the enemy threat kept contradicting what the intel said. By the time they regrouped, two more pings had already lit up. One in the north. One in the south. Nothing in the original intel accounted for anything they were seeing, and intel was never this far off.

“For fuck’s sake. Blackwater Actual, this is Blackwater One, I need anything you’ve got, over.” The team leader’s voice had a sharper edge to it now. Only silence answered him back.

“Fuck it.” The team leader brought the team in tight. He stared at the display blinking on the comm operator’s wrist display. “We’re splitting up. Nav, you’re bravo team lead. Radio in when it’s neutralized.”

They split without another word. The team leader took alpha team to the north element, while the nav operator peeled south with bravo team. Both teams found what they were looking for fast. Same story of rifles, ammo caches and soon to be dead bodies. The team leader was still catching his breath with alpha team when the display lit again.

“Blackwater One, this is Blackwater two. Situation neutralized. Are you seeing this shit!?”

The team leader responded, “If you’re talking about the eight new groups of people who have nothing better to do than die…yes, I’m seeing it.”

The pings had completely surrounded them now.

“Blackwater Actual, this is Blackwater One. I need something here.” The familiar silence answered back, same as it had all night.

The team leader looked at the display, pings surrounding them and felt the math turn against them for the first time since the drop.

“Ammo check.”

“Two mags,” the nav operator answered. “Maybe less.”

The rest of the operators answered in turn with similar responses. They weren’t prepared for this. Intelligence didn’t allow them to be prepared. They were supposed to be in and out with six bodies cooling in the jungle.

Nobody said what all of them were thinking, that this had never been an eight-man job, that whatever the hell they’d been dropped into was bigger than anyone upstairs had bothered to account for.

The team leader checked his own mag and found it lighter than he wanted. “All right, obviously command screwed the pooch, but we’re fucking SEALs and right now there’s eight groups of bad guys out there. Each man takes one. Go!”

Eight directions, eight separate fights that were never supposed to happen, but there was no time to argue the math. The team leader tore off through the brush that tore at him without slowing him down and found the group waiting exactly where the display said they would be. He started working through them systematically, controlled pairs became single well-placed shots to conserve what little ammo he had left. One down, then another, until all six were eliminated.

One by one all the operators reported that their groups had been neutralized, but they were nearly out of ammo.

“Uh is anyone else seeing this shit!?” The comm operator’s voice cracked over the net. “Those eight groups just became damn near fifty.”

Fragments started answering back, overlapping, none of them good.

“In contact. They’re fucking everywhere.”

“Ammo’s gone, I’m down to my fucking knife.”

“Comms, you get anything from command?” The team leader was desperately searching for an answer that wasn’t going to come. He dropped two more and the ground in front of him kept producing bodies faster than he could pull the trigger. It didn’t matter; he too was out of ammo. The net thinned out in his earpiece, voice after voice dropping mid-sentence, no confirmation, no last word, just gaps where words used to be.

He instinctively reached for another mag that wasn’t there and looked up at what was left standing between him and every direction at once.

“Fuck it,” he said, to no one, because no one was left to hear it. “I’m taking as many of you fuckers as I can with me.”

He dropped the useless rifle and pulled his knife, blade catching what little light had started to creep over the horizon. He charged into what he already knew was the end, taking as many down with him as his hands allowed.

He went down fighting, the way all of them had, the way a SEAL should.

As morning truly arrived, it was quiet. Whatever had been moving out there had stopped.

That’s the mission, or what would have been the mission, if there had been a real SEAL team, real comms issues, a real command somewhere refusing to answer the radio.

There wasn’t.

The eight-man SEAL team was actually eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen air dropped into my gullet and entering my high current blood stream. It was cut off the moment it crossed into circulation, no way to reach whatever process was supposed to tell it exactly where the inflammation was. What was once a specifically designed mission instantly registered as pain signals firing from every direction, none of them matching where my lower back actually was, and it went after every one of them anyway. It never had a chance to reach my desired location. It was overwhelmed by a response fighting back harder than eight hundred milligrams was ever built to handle, until there was nothing left to go on.