Free Last Man Standing by David Baldacci

chance to do it again a few minutes later with a hundred-and-fifty-pound
     dummy on your back.
    Crammed in between all that was tens of thousands of rounds fired, classroom drills that would have perplexed and confounded
     Einstein, fitness grinders that would have left many an Olympian heaving from exhaustion, plus enough paralyzing split-second
     decision-making scenarios to make a man give up booze and women, crawl in a padded room and start talking to himself. And
     every step of the way were the real HRT operators grading your sorry butt on every mistake and every triumph, and you just
     hoped you ended up with far more of the latter, but you never really could tell, because the HRTs never talked to you. To
     them you were scum, busting-your-ass scum, but still scum. And you knew they wouldn’t even acknowledge your presence until
     and if you graduated. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even attend your funeral if the tryout managed to kill you.
    Web had somehow survived it all, and upon graduation from the New Operators Training School, or NOTS, as it was known, he
     had been “drafted” as a sniper and spent two more months at the Scout Sniper School of the Marine Corps, where he had learned
     from the very best the skills of field craft, observation, camouflage and killing with rifle and scope. After that Web had
     spent over seven years as first a sniper and later an assaulter either being bored to death at long standoffs, often in miserable
     conditions, or else shooting or being shot at all over the world by some of its most deranged inhabitants. In return he got
     all the guns and ammo he wanted and a pay scale equivalent to what a sixteen-year-old could earn programming computers during
     his lunch hour. All in all it had been really cool.
    Web walked by the hangar facility, which housed the team’s big Bell 412 helicopters, and the much smaller MD530s, which they
     all referred to as the Little Birds, because they were fast and agile and could carry four men on the inside and four more
     on the skids at a speed of 120 knots. Web had ridden the Little Birds into some hellish situations and the 530s had always
     brought him back out, a couple of times dangling upside down from a rope hooked to the chopper’s swing arm, yet Web had never
     been picky about exactly how he survived a mission.
    The motor pool was behind a chain-link fence. Web stopped and zipped up his jacket against a chilly wind. The sky was quickly
     becoming overcast as a storm system swept into the area, something it routinely did this time of day at this time of year.
     He went inside the fence and sat atop the team’s sole armored personnel carrier, a hand-me-down gift from the Army. His gaze
     swept across the row of parked Suburbans. The vehicles had been reconfigured with ladder packages such that they could drive
     right up to a building and extend the ladder and go knock-knock-surprise! on the fifth floor of some criminal’s lair. There
     were mount-out trucks that carried their gear, Jet Skis, food service trucks and a rigid-hull boat with inflatable gunnels
     that had been designed by Navy SEALs. The thing had twin Chrysler V-8s whose effect Web could only equate to being inside
     a building while it was being demolished via wrecking ball. He had ridden in it on numerous occasions—or more aptly had survived
     it.
    They had it all here, from equipment for jungle assaults to arctic expeditions. They trained for every contingency, put everything
     they had into the work. And yet they could still be beaten by coincidence, by the blundering luck of inferior opponents or
     by the skillful planning and insider knowledge of a traitor.
    It started to rain, so Web ducked inside the training facility, which was a large warehouse-style building with long corridors
     to simulate hallways in hotels and moveable, rubber-coated walls. It was very much like a Hollywood studio back lot. If they
     were lucky enough to get the blueprints of a target,