Free Free Fall: A Prelude to Hidden Order by Brad Thor Page A

Carlton, had offered were nuts. There was no way anyone in their business could guarantee a job like this, and Carlton knew it. The problem, though, was that their firm had just suffered a tremendous loss, and they needed the business. In a crazy turn of events, they had been so good at their job that Carlton and his top operators had recently been targeted for assassination. Harvath and the Old Man had survived, but they had lost their best people. Without operators to carry out assignments, the Carlton Group was hamstrung and the Department of Defense had cancelled their contract.
    Now, while they tried to care for the families of their deceased colleagues, they had to scramble to bring in revenue. They needed a big payday to help get the Carlton Group back on its feet.
    To that end, the Old Man had dreamed up the biggest price tag he could for this assignment and then doubled it. He’d done his homework and not only knew about the prior failed rescue attempt, but also what the pirates’ demands were. He also knew that the insurance company wanted to give in.
    All things considered, Carlton’s offer was a steal. The fact that the client had to pay only if the assignment was successful was the icing on the cake. The supertanker’s owners had jumped on it.
    Harvath, though, had reservations. It wasn’t that recapturing a supertanker taken by Somali pirates didn’t appeal to him. It did. With an extensive counterterrorism background in the SEALs and then the Secret Service and DHS, this was the kind of action he both trained for and lived for. It was something that, once it got into your bloodstream, was nearly impossible to purge.
    But while fitter, faster, and more adept than men half his age, he was entering his early forties and knew all too well that life was eventually going to catch up with him. As long as it wasn’t tonight, he’d deal with that question later.
    Right now, he was speeding toward earth like an asteroid and needed to create as much drag as possible in order to slow down. Plunging the toggles of his chute toward his boots, he locked out the muscles in his arms. As the canopy flared, his muscles burned and it felt as if the cords would rip right out of the fabric.
    He came in hard and ugly, slamming into the deck and being dragged for several feet. To the untrained eye, it looked like the work of a total amateur, but Harvath was anything but an amateur. He had made more jumps under adverse conditions than he could remember. Only someone with a similar background could appreciate how complicated it was to pull off such a landing.
    Harvath quickly collapsed and then released his chute. After pulling off the harness, he bundled it all together and threw it in a ball over the side and into the ocean.
    Taking up his position, Harvath heard a voice over his earpiece. “Next time, I’ll just paint a handicapped parking stall. Would that be easier for you to hit?”
    The voice belonged to his teammate Matt Sanchez. Without taking his eyes off the six-story superstructure in front of him, Harvath raised his left hand and extended his middle finger.
    “Nice, Norseman. Now let’s see if you can count to two,” Sanchez snarked from his position across the deck.
    Norseman was Harvath’s call sign. Sanchez’s was Streak . He was a good kid and Harvath liked him. He had not only been a SEAL, like Harvath, but he was an incredibly accomplished parachutist. He had been on the U.S. Navy’s Leap Frogs parachute demonstration team and as a SEAL had conducted some of the most challenging parachute insertions into enemy territory ever attempted. The kid had brass balls, and considering that this jump was an eleven on the one-to-ten difficulty scale, he was the perfect choice to hit the deck first and place the IR markers for the rest of the team.
    Looking up, Harvath could make out the approaching figure of former Delta Force operator Pat Kass and gave a warning to Sanchez over the radio, “Next package