Trident's First Gleaming: A Special Operations Group Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

finger at Chris’s helo. Chris grinned and returned the greeting.
    Soon they picked up speed, and the blades’ thwop, thwop, thwop was drowned out by the roaring wind. The three helos hugged the earth so close and traveled so fast that it looked like the ground would tear off the Black Hawks’ skids. The choppers raced northwest along a dry river bed before speeding north through a valley. They dodged and hurdled sand dunes, houses, power lines, and palm trees before crossing the Syrian border.
    Mordet’s men were keeping Young in a dried-up well. Chris knew the tactic all too well. While his parents worked at the US embassy in Syria, he had been kidnapped and held for four days in a dried-up well outside of town, eventually rescued by SEALs. A shiver ran through him, and he tried to push the memory away.
    The helos continued forward then flew up at a steep angle, clearing a cluster of two-story buildings. Then the birds dived at the earth like kamikaze planes. At the last moment, their beaks flared up, halting the birds before leveling above an empty field near Mordet’s plantation. Chris and his teammates quickly stepped onto the skids, then hopped down into a field surrounded by a cloud of dust kicked up by the helos.
    The two squads moved at double time. The fourteen SEALs swiftly reached their objective, the well. Two armed Syrians emerged from a lopsided farmhouse—only to be picked off by the snipers hovering in the Little Bird above.
    Chris looked down into the well with an overwhelming sense of dèjá vu. Suddenly he was a thirteen-year-old boy trapped in that well, again. He struggled to breathe. His chest tightened.
    Breathe, Chris. Breathe .
    But he still wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He had to pull himself together. He was going down there.
    “Young Park,” he forced out. “United States Navy SEALs. We’re here to rescue you!”
    Young looked up from the bottom of the pit. “Help me,” he said weakly.
    Beanpole and Psycho attached two rappelling ropes to the well, and Chris checked Beanpole’s before hooking in. Meanwhile, the other SEALs lay in a perimeter around them, taking cover in a ditch, behind a tractor and whatever else was available. They created the blocking force for anyone who might disturb the rescue.
    “Stand against the wall, Young,” Chris said. “I’m coming down.” The SEALs’ powerful HK416 5.56 caliber rounds cracked the night. Enemy AK-47s staccatoed the air, but the noise became muffled as Chris rappelled into the well—his teammates would take care of the insurgents.
    Before Chris reached the bottom, the stench hit him with the force of a cargo ship at full speed. His feet touched the ground, and he immediately put a rappelling harness on Young. Part of the offensive odor came from Young: a mixture of urine, feces, and something else Chris couldn’t discern. He gagged. Young was missing both ears and most of an arm. In that moment, the wounds were Chris’s, and he wanted to kill Mordet.
    He attached Young’s harness to the free rope and gave it a tug. Chris’s teammates pulled Young up. Fortunately, the harness didn’t require two hands for balance. Then Chris tugged on his own rope, but there was no response. “Hey, pull me up!”
    Chris tugged again, harder. Nothing. “Get me the hell out of here!” Not waiting for an answer, he pulled himself up the rope. He climbed higher and higher—faster and faster. Soon he cleared the top, freed himself from the rope, and took cover behind the well. Oxygen rushed into his lungs like a roaring river.
    Psycho grinned with bloodlust with each insurgent he dropped—he enjoyed the killing too much. Beside Chris lay Beanpole, his neck and face covered in liquid goo—he’d been shot. Chris neither liked nor respected Beanpole, but he was still a teammate, and it sucked some of the life out of Chris to see him injured like that. While Little Doc tried to help Beanpole, Young crouched next to them shaking.
    Chris dropped the