Heritage (Under Revision)

Chapter 42: Leon

Six months...six months have passed since I could truly say I have had a moment of peace in this whole screwed up mess our politicians call a war. I achieved my goal of joining the SSEALs and am now preparing for the biggest moment in my life, dropping into a full-scale warzone. I’ve never been more nervous than I am now. Knowing that at any moment I could take a bullet is something that weighs heavily on my shoulders every time I think about it. I’m fighting for more than just my planet; I’m fighting for my right to go back to Stella and my family. I’m fighting for my right for marriage, a family, and a life that can only be but a fanciful hallucination as long as this war rages on.

“Alright boys, let’s take another look at the objectives before we drop in,” Our Lieutenant says motioning for us to huddle in.

We create a circle around the map our Lieutenant is holding and stare intently as he begins to point out objectives in several locations on the map.

“Alright, we’re going to be dropping in behind the lines using a good old-fashioned HALO jump. The entire area is infested with those overgrown lizards so we need to stay as close as possible to each other during the drop. When we open chutes, do not create too much distance otherwise you’ll end up landing on a squad of them and we have one less man for the mission. Our top priority is this large bunker right here,” The lieutenant says pointing to a large circled area on the map.

“Our job is to infiltrate the bunker, find the officer’s quarters and confiscate this object,” the Lieutenant says once again pointing to a relic that seems ancient, but mysterious in its origins.

“What exactly is the significance of this package sir?” One of my squad members asks scratching his head.

“It doesn’t matter what significance it has Ryback, just that it’s our job to get it. But if you must know, the report said it’s a religious relic that is supposed to act as some sort of key for a classified place it’s supposed to open. Your curiosity satisfied yet, or do I need to keep playing storyteller?” the Lieutenant explains.

“No sir,” Ryback responds.

“Don’t call me sir, I work for a living. Now, continuing on. When we hit the ground, whoever is first will begin a perimeter, everyone afterwards will follow. When we’re in the clear we will move to the bunker, set up tactical positions and infiltrate that giant lizard tank. While inside, we will strategically place C10 explosives throughout. Once the package is secure, we will detonate and eliminate forces that are inside the bunker. We will then move to exfil’ here, and leave them asking what the fuck, Hooyah?” The Lieutenant finishes.

“Hooyah Lieutenant!” we yell in tandem.

The green light flashes on and we ready ourselves for the HALO jump. We place on our helmets and masks and step to the hatch as the Lieutenant opens it, sending a torrent of cold air rushing through the compartment.

The green light ceases to flash and we’re motioned to begin our jump. One by one we launch ourselves from the aircraft: First, Briggs, our navigation and medical specialist, second, Ryback, demolitions and heavy weapons, third, me, sniper and tech specialist. After me comes Maddock; our self-proclaimed analyst due to the fact that he can recognize anyone’s face if they’re important enough to be recognized. Lieutenant Reiker follows soon after as we tumble through the air, barreling toward the surface below.

I watch my altimeter as it quickly drops; twelve-hundred, eleven-hundred, one-thousand...six-hundred, five-hundred, four-hundred, three-hundred.

I pull my ripcord and my parachute deploys, bringing me to a gentle descent to the ground below. I land seconds after Ryback and position myself fifteen feet away from him to extend the perimeter.

Like clockwork, the rest of the team does the same as Ryback and I as we wait for the Lieutenant to land. As he does, we form up around him as he once again pulls out his map and begins to lay down orders.

“Alright, here’s the plan: Scope, you’re going to plant yourself on the ridge here, overlooking the compound. Ryback, set up charges on all major fuel sources and vehicles on the outside of the bunker then find some cover close enough to give us a hand when we haul ass. Briggs and Maddock, you two stay on me. Let’s move,” Reiker finishes.

Without a word Ryback and I separate from the team and move our separate ways to our respective objective points.

I arrive at the ridge to be greeted by three patrolmen wandering the forest area searching for intruders. I quickly take cover behind a tree. My heart pounds in my chest as I hear the footsteps of one of the Sekrid soldiers drawing nearer. I slowly remove my knife from its sheathe.

The Sekrid stops right next to the tree I’ve taken cover behind and scans the field in front of him. I take a deep breath and swing my arm out as hard as I can.

I feel a sudden stop and then a warming feeling on my hand. I look at my hand and see that it is being soaked in the Sekrid’s lambent blood.

Due to the natural size of the Sekrid, I have seemed to stab him in the midsection rather than the chest.

The Sekrid stares at me with a twisted face and begins to raise his arm to strike me. Before he can do so I pull my blade from his stomach and thrust it up in to his jaw, making him instantly go limp and drop to his knees where I catch his ragdoll body and set it down gently.

I lie down in the brush and gently worm my way to the next Sekrid grunt traversing the landscape. As he walks by me, I slowly get up to one knee. I once again use my knife to stab him directly in the spine.

Sekrid are trained to have a high pain tolerance and therefore, hardly make a sound when attacked with a fatal wound, making them perfect stealth targets.

The soldier drops instantly and I finish him off with a slit of the throat.

“I’m going to kill you!” a raspy voice screams behind me.

I spin around and without thinking run as fast as possible towards the final Sekrid.

He begins to raise his rifle and I launch myself in to the air. I extend my knees and drill them into his chest, knocking him flat on his back before he can get a shot off.

I immediately recover and plunge my knife in to the grunt’s forehead, killing him instantly.

I pull the blade from his skull and roll on to my back, breathing heavily.

I quickly hop to my feet and run for the ridgeline coming to a near diving stop as I drop to my stomach and begin setting up my rifle.

I catch my breath and begin to speak through my com unit. “This is Scope, I’m in position,” I say quietly.

“Roger that,” Reiker responds.

I finish mounting up my AS-52 bolt action concussion rifle, complete with sidewinder reverb rounds. What this means is that with the rifle itself, when fired, and if on the right setting, has a sort of, field generating technology that encases the bullet in an impact reactant field that when striking an object or person, causing the item to blow apart in an implosive manner to reveal the enemy or a specific objective.

The rounds however, contain a built in sonic emitter that sends micro-vibrations at an extremely high and dangerous level throughout a target’s body, which can cause a plethora of internal damage including organ failures, brain hemorrhages, and my personal favorite, thousands of micro-breaks in the bones, completely crippling the target and causing his internal structure to collapse and kill him.

The rifle is standard issue to all Navy SSEAL snipers in this age but the rounds, are an invention of my own; a perfect combination of my mother’s inherited tech skills, and firepower.

I stare down the scope of my weapon, moving my eye from target to target, all of them ignorantly helpless with the power that I hold over them.

Being a sniper is a completely different mindset and it seems that it’s easy to become arrogant with such a job. As long as your crosshair is over a field of enemies, it’s almost a feeling of being higher than them.

Being able to so effortlessly pull a trigger and end their lives without them even knowing is an odd power to have; almost too high for someone as small as a human to hold.

“Ryback, what the fuck is taking so long?” Lieutenant Reiker says through the com in an obvious whispering tone.

“Sorry LT, there was a bit more than I thought, I’m in position,” Ryback responds.

“Moving in,” Reiker says without hesitation.

I fix my scope on the windows and watch Lieutenant Reiker, Briggs, and Maddock enter the building as silent as possible.

I watch Maddock slowly creep behind a Sekrid soldier and hop on his back, swiftly piercing his Kabar into the side of his neck. The soldier drops and they move downstairs, out of my field of vision.

A few minutes seem like hours as I wait for them to emerge from the bunker, objective in hand.

My heart begins to pound and I begin to sweat as time goes on with no contact.

I scan the bunker through my scope from left to right, again and again.

Where the hell are they? I think to myself.

The com unit then kicks on with sounds of gunshots and the Lieutenant screaming through it.

“We’ve been compromised! The place was too small and too heavily guarded! We have the package! We’re coming out the front doors, give us covering fire!”

“Roger that Lieutenant, Ryback and I have you covered, on your move,” I respond calmly.

I shift my scope to the left and take down the two guards at the front doors. Both are headshots and their blood are left splattered across the doors.

I shift my scope down and quickly fire on another three Sekrid before they can understand what’s happening. I turn my sights back to the doors as the Lieutenant and his men blast through the metal doors of the compound, unloading multiple magazines into the entranceway.

I shoot wave after wave of bullets at the doorway myself.

Ryback unloads a torrent of rounds from his drum fed M300 light machinegun, effectively suppressing the Sekrid and making the first twenty feet of the bunker look like a black light party as the Sekrid’s lambent blue blood sprays multiple layers on the walls.

Someone throws a grenade into the doorway and we cease fire. My heart is pumping so fast, I feel like I’m on the Poseidon all over again.

Lieutenant Reiker raises his head from cover and stares at the black fog that’s left by the grenade going off.

I switch my scope to thermal and stare into the smoke. My scope is somehow filled with orange and red heat readings. I fire a round at it to make sure that whatever the anomaly is, it’s not alive.

“What the hell is that about Blake?” Reiker asks me though the com unit.

“Nothing lieutenant...just have some strange heat readings on my scope,” I reply.

Everything goes dead silent after that.

I look over the ridge and watch the Lieutenant stare intently into the doorway. As the mist begins to clear in the bunker hallway I return back to my scope. There seems to be slight movement and I squint my eye, trying to peer closer at the object and then...

I snap my head from my scope and without even bothering to speak in my com I scream “Mech!”

I jump to my feet as I hear a weapon charging. The ball of light piercing through the smoke is glaring at me.

I begin to run as fast as I can, the charging cannon following me the whole time. The weapon discharges and I discover I only have one choice...jump.

I launch myself off of the ridge and hurdle towards the ground below. It’s a high enough drop to kill me instantly.

The energy blast from the mech’s cannon collides with the ridge and blows a large chunk of it to smithereens, causing fragments of rock to rain over me.

I quickly calculate my options and then decide.

I pull the ripcord on the secondary chute stored in my pack. It deploys, yanking me up in the wind. The ground still closes in quickly, as it doesn’t break my fall entirely.

I slam into the ground with a thud and roll a few feet before stopping. The parachute stopped me enough that I could survive, though the fall was still painful.

Lieutenant Reiker bolts over to me and lifts me off the ground. “Get up kid, we’ve got to get the hell out of here!”

The rest of the team swarms behind him as Reiker throws my arm over his shoulders and helps me along at a fast pace to the extraction zone.

The mechanized suit tears through the smoke as if it were coming through hell itself and pursues us.

Luckily enough though, the mech’s size makes it slow so all we have to worry about are its guns. The rest of the SSEAL team creates a tiered retreat. Two of us stop to fire, while two more bring the line down another few feet. Then those two stop to fire while the previous ones retreat.

This goes on until we reach the cleared area of the extraction zone, the mech still on our tail.

The UH-155 Blackhawk, an upgrade of a long-passed chopper model lands in the clearing.

The team rushes toward the chopper and wastes no time jumping in. The lieutenant sets me on the helicopter deck as Ryback pulls me in further.

The deck gunner of the helicopter begins to fire his mounted concussion launcher at the mech, firing large energy bursts that blow large chunks of the mech’s armor and clockwork into shattered pieces of debris and finally causing some real damage.

The lieutenant steps in to the chopper as the mech begins to fall. But, as it’s falling, it shoots a final spray of rounds from its minigun.

Before I can sit up to pull Lieutenant Reiker down, a diagonal spray of rounds zips across his torso, going completely through, spraying blood across my face.

He falls to the side of me, eyes wide open, body still.

I stare at the body in shock for a moment, then place my hand over his face and close his eyes.

The chopper lifts off and we all just sit in silence, letting the white noise of the propellers take our minds to a different place.

“So, is that the entire story son?” The captain of our fleet ship asks.

“Yes sir,” I respond.

The captain sits down at his desk and breathes a deep sigh while scratching his head. “Very well then. You’re all dismissed, except for you Blake, I want a personal chat with you son,”

We all take a glance at each other before the rest of the team does their formal about face and steps out of the captain’s office while I maintain my at ease stance.

“Now, the way I see it son, you showed some defining qualities about yourself out there. You showed me that you know how to pay attention to detail and react in whatever way you need to in order to survive. So, here’s what I’m going to do, I am promoting you to Lieutenant of your squad, and giving you a new man for your team. Understood?”

The promotion seems to hit me like a brick as I flash back to Reiker being torn apart by a spray of bullets.

“Sir...with all due respect, I’m not sure I’m right for that kind of job,” I respond hesitantly.

“Oh really? And why’s that?” The captain questions confused.

“Well sir, I’m no leader, I’m just out there doing my job like everyone else. I don’t wanna be a hero,”

“Is that so? Well guess what, I just gave you a new job, it’s yours whether you want it or not,”

“I’m not my father sir,”

“Excuse me?”

“I said I’m not my father sir. I don’t want special treatment just because I’m his son either, Captain. So please, if that’s what you’re doing then I respectfully decline such a promotion,” I explain.

The captain stares at me bewildered. “Boy, what makes you think I’m doing this just because you’re the son of General Blake? With utmost respect to the man, he doesn’t matter two shits to me son. You earn what you have in my fleet, period. I don’t care if you’re the son of the goddamned president. He has nothing to do with this. I gave you this promotion because you earned it through your actions. My decision is final, dismiss yourself,” The captain states scolding me.

I nod my head in reluctant agreement and formally exit his office.

“So, what happened Blake?” Ryback asks me.

“He...made me squad leader,” I answer.

“You kiddin’ me? The hell did he do that for? You didn’t even go to officer’s training school. Is that even possible?” Briggs asks stupefied.

“I don’t know guys, he just did it, and I had to accept. I’m no replacement for Reiker though, so I won’t try to be. Only thing I ask is that you guys just trust me, alright?”

“Hey man, we’re brothers in this, that’s what we’ll be to the end no matter what. So, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m behind Blake all the way,” Maddock states in complete confidence.

“Hooyah to that,” Ryback answers with a smile.

Briggs stands there straight faced for a moment, “Hooyah it is then,” He says slightly unhappy and indifferent before walking away.

That only seems to drop my spirits on leading this team even lower than before.

Maddock slaps me on the back “Don’t worry man, Briggs will warm up to you, he’s a dick in general. You’re gonna take us far, I can feel it...LT,”

I lightly scoff ”Yeah, I hope so...”