Free KBL by John Weisman Page B

T-Rob and his Red Squadron assault element would hone in their shoot houses at Dam Neck, up north at Fort A. P. Hill, where they practiced fast-roping and assaulting compounds from modified Black Hawk 60-J special operations helicopters, or the one hundred square miles of desert near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, where they dropped out of perfectly good aircraft six miles above the ground and free-fell almost four miles before popping their chutes at eighteen thousand feet and parasailing two miles to their drop zone.
     
    Today T-Rob’s Charlie Troop and his DEVGRU mentor Danny Walker’s Alpha Troop were working a scenario that had been dropped on them at 0630. It was a live ammo drill, their tenth since Red Squadron had been reactivated eight days previously. They’d started with walk-throughs, then progressed to empty weapons. Then, three days ago, they’d commenced live fire exercises. It was all about bringing their shooting and moving skills—frangible skills—back online.
    The problem: Stage a helicopter insertion of a twenty-four-member assault element to capture/kill an HVT living in a multilevel villa in an urban environment. It was the same basic scenario they’d worked for the past two days. Only the shape of the target had changed. On the tenth, it was a two-story townhouse; yesterday, a split-level house; today there were three floors.
    They’d been supplied with a rough drawing of the villa’s exterior and the parcel on which it sat. There was one other structure, a square building that was marked out of bounds, which sat directly opposite the front door. There were no other entrances marked and no windows on the ground floor. They were not given any information about the interior design, but were informed they would be rehearsing a nighttime operation.
    This was SOP so far as the SEALs were concerned. Most HVT missions took place at night. That was when the target was most vulnerable and SEALs were in their element, given the array of night-vision, infrared, and thermal equipment available to them.
    Charlie’s 6-Team of six shooters was the entry team, which would breach the door, then follow 2-Team and work the starboard side of the ground floor. Charlie’s 2-Team, which comprised six assaulters, would clear the ground-floor rooms and hallways. One-Alpha’s shooters would take the second and third floors, and 3-Alpha’s SEALs would be exterior security.
    The two dozen men met in Red Squadron’s workroom, a nondescript space that closely resembled a large, midwestern high school classroom. Two flags, the Red, White and Blue and the Navy’s Blue and Gold, stood on stanchions at the front. The walls bore pictures taken during missions and photographic portraits of Red Squadron’s previous commanding officers. There were individual desks for seventy-two on a spatter-patterned linoleum tile floor, a reference library sporting IKEA shelves, an array of AV equipment whose cost probably went into the mid-six figures, a coffee dispenser, and half a dozen each secure and nonsecure computers.
    The Red Squadron CO, Commander David Loeser, waited until the Sailors settled in. Then he rapped on one of the front row desks and said, “Okay, guys, listen up. We’ve got another scenario from JSOC to work.”
    Loeser, a Marylander who’d grown up on the Eastern Shore near Cambridge, was thirty-nine and would probably make captain by the time he was forty-five. He was pretty happy with the squadron in general, and this particular group specifically. There was a good mix of youngsters and seasoned veterans. They had gelled, too, come together into a real team. They could work in pairs, quartets, half-dozens, or dozens. They were cross-trained and could handle one another’s assignments if necessary.
    They were, Dave Loeser thought as he looked at them, exactly what Roy Boehm, the maverick Mustang lieutenant and godfather of all SEALs, had in mind when in 1961 he’d conceived the idea of a Navy