Wheels Up by Annabeth Albert

Author:Annabeth Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

If you’re not scared of jumping, it’s time to quit jumping. The words of Wes’s first jumpmaster at SEAL training rang in his ears as they assembled in the Arizona sun for more HALO/HAHO training in the sort of high-altitude military parachute jumps that SEALs specialized in. He’d made the desert trek with his Little Creek team more than a few times, but he was still adjusting to how his new team handled training operations.

And how Dustin handled things. They were in an increasingly weird place—not unlike the terror of the freefall before the chute opened when death seemed imminent—where they couldn’t seem to help themselves from continuing to message even as the ground was rushing up at them. Fall’s not going to kill you, but landing just might. Out here though, they were all business. Dustin was his commanding officer, period, not the guy who begged so seductively in the dead of the night or the guy whose confessions and inner demons kept Wes awake a long time after each conversation was done.

At the moment, Dustin was miles away from the uncertain man who had kept Wes talking the other night after his brother’s bachelor party, and was in full-on commander mode, going over every detail with the LT, the aircraft commander, the jumpmaster, and the PT technician who would monitor them for altitude effects, since they were jumping from 18,000 feet that morning. In addition to the checks by the jumpmaster and PT, each of them went over their own equipment, including the oxygen required by jumping at such a high altitude.

Once in the air, the team waited in anticipation for the two-minute warning, no one talking much. They’d been at this since before dawn, and this would be their third jump of the morning, and the highest altitude one so far. Shiny, the newbie SEAL, had the least jump experience out of all of them, and looked distinctly green around the edges of his pale lips.

“It’s going to be fine,” Wes shouted at him, over the roar of the plane. “You’re doing great.”

“Yeah,” Curly added. “You know what to do.”

They all did—hundreds of jumps under their belts, hours and hours of practice and training. And soon, they’d be out on another mission, doing this for real in enemy territory. Just like an active mission jump, they had gear and equipment spread between them, weight carefully distributed so that the lighter guys like Wes and Shiny had heavier packs in order to fall at the same rate as the bigger guys like Curly and Dustin. They couldn’t risk some of the team falling at a faster rate and ending up far from the landing zone, even in practice.

Dustin followed the PT and jumpmaster down the line of SEALs waiting to jump, checking the connections and bottle pressure in their equipment and watching as the PT checked for signs of hypoxia. Wes looked away when he reached him, not wanting to risk making eye contact as Dustin passed.

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