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a beach volleyball player would envy. Her short brown hair had streaks of premature gray, more coming with each op, and it had never occurred to her to get it colored. “Eagle. Stay at altitude, just in case.”
    The rest of the team was startled at that last sentence.
    “That’s not Protocol,” Eagle said, his voice carefully neutral to mask his concern. “I will descend to be on station overwatch at five hundred AGL to give you cover and provide exfiltration as needed.”
    “Don’t hit us on the way down,” Mac added, because Mac always had to add something, but also to cover Moms’s gaffe.
    “Follow me,” Moms said, shaking it off and stepping from the ramp. Without hesitation, the others followed.
    The four got stable, then pulled, getting full canopies. The quick pull was because they were conducting a high altitude–high opening drop, designed to give Roland some time with feet on the ground before they touched down. It was Protocol, the way the Nightstalkers normally ventured into an unknown and abnormal situation. One team member on the ground first for the quick recon, and the rest following right behind. Protocol was what the team lived and breathed, what kept them alive, but lately, it had started to fray at the edges.
    “Time hack on the countdown?” Moms asked Eagle.
    “Ten minutes, thirty seconds,” Eagle responded.
    Moms was focused on the mission ahead, listening to some last-second updates from Ms. Jones back at the Ranch; Mac was mentally running through nuclear warhead Protocol, cut the blue or red wire sort of thing; Kirk was monitoring Moms’s radio traffic and scanning local freqs to see if word of a problem had gotten out; Doc was focused on trying to fly his parachute and dreading the inevitable impact with the ground.
    It occurred to Nada as he twitched his toggles to get his position above the rest of the team that they might see a mushroom cloud race up toward them as they descended. Such thoughts filled Nada’s dark mind when he was on an op.
    It was why he was still alive and the longest-serving member on the Nightstalkers.

    Roland could see the compound—a gray concrete blockhouse surrounded by a high fence with razor wire on the top. The gate to the compound was wide open.
    He could also see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles from various government agencies racing
away
after having secured a far perimeter on Ms. Jones’s alert. The
spear
was
bent
, according to the official government code, but if it went to
broken arrow
or
nucflash
, they’d better be damn far away to survive.
    For a moment, Roland pondered spears and arrows as weapons, because Roland always pondered weapons when he wasn’t actually using them. He decided he’d prefer the former, because while the arrow had the advantage of range, the spear gave a definite advantage close in.
    These thoughts, however, did not stop Roland’s mind from processing the ground racing toward him. He’d done enough jumps to have a fairly good idea of altitude. Five thousand, five hundred feet give a hundred, he experience-estimated. He took a quick glance at the nav board on top of his ruck. Five thousand, six hundred. Off slightly, not important at this height, but fatal closer to Mother Earth.
    Roland pulled his rip cord and the parachute blossomed above him. The opening shock pulled him upright and he did a quick check for full canopy and grabbed the toggle on each riser, a slightly more difficult task given the hazmat gloves encasing his fingers.
    He hated hazmat suits, not for the same reason as the others—because it meant an NBC op: nuclear, biological, chemical—but because it restricted his movement and meant he had to leave his body armor in the team box lashed down in the Snake’s cargo bay. Roland felt naked without body armor.
    He turned his attention back to the compound. He spotted a cluster of concrete-covered silos to the north. Another to the west. A few sprinkled to the east and south. “Moms, do