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

to enter and exit, especially during emergencies. The helos turned east and pulled forward. “RPG, six o’clock!” a voice came from the rear of Chris’s helo.
    “RPG, six o’clock!” others in the middle of the chopper echoed.
    “RPG, six o’clock,” the pilot acknowledged. He banked the helicopter hard and turned south.
    Gravity pulled mercilessly on Chris, and somebody bumped into him, almost knocking him off his bench. It was Young: unable to hold on with one arm, his feet slid out the door and kicked Chris. He had remembered to connect a tether to Young, securing him to the helo, but in all the excitement, he couldn’t remember if he’d secured himself.
    Chris strained to hug the helo, but gravity continued to pull at him, and the wind continued to whip his body mercilessly. He was losing his own grip. If I can hold out just a little longer—until the RPG passes and the helo straightens out.
    Boom! The RPG blew up, shaking the helo. Chris slipped. His heart leaped just before Psycho caught him, stopping him from falling off.
    The Black Hawk leveled off, and Chris no longer had to fight with gravity. He noticed that he had attached his tether. He looked around and was glad to see that no one appeared injured. Now they were in the homestretch. More importantly, Young was free. Chris exhaled long and hard.
    Psycho put his mouth close to Chris’s ear and shouted above the wind, “When we get back, are you really going to give Mordet that piece of your ear?!”
    “Are you on meth?”
    “It wouldn’t be very reverend-like of you to break a promise!”
    “Mordet can eat my badonkadonk!”
    Psycho laughed. “Be careful what you wish for!”
    “I’m finished!”
    “What do you mean?” Psycho asked.
    “I mean I’m finished with this shit! I’m not going to re-up!” The words came out of his mouth so naturally. It was what he had to do.
    Psycho’s face became serious. “Really? What are you going to do?”
    “Become a preacher!” Chris said.
    “You’ve got to be shitting me!”

PART ONE

    …Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.
    — S T . M ARK 9:24

3
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    SPRING 2014
    T he darkened sky dumped rain on the roof of a church in Dallas while Chris stood behind the pulpit and opened his Bible to St. Mark 9:14-29. As he looked out across the congregation, a beautifully familiar figure entered the church and took a seat at the end of a pew near the back.
    Hannah. It’s been years.
    She lit up God’s house with a devilish grin.
    He smiled, too, wanting to run to her and greet her, but he had a sermon to finish. “Jesus approached his disciples,” he continued, “where they were gathered around arguing with a group of people. A father explained that his son was possessed by an evil spirit. The boy had seizures—foamed at the mouth, scratched and bit people. Sometimes the evil spirit caused the boy to throw himself into fire and water. The father asked Jesus’s disciples to cast the evil spirit out—”
    Chris’s parents had told him about the terror they’d felt when he was held hostage in Damascus. As he gave his sermon, he thought of their pain. And his own.
    “—And so it is with us,” Chris summarized. “With a little bit of sincere faith, we can perform stellar miracles.”
    The head minister had given Chris the useful advice to include personal anecdotes in his sermons, helping the listeners connect to his messages more easily, but now only the horrors of war came to mind, and Chris dared not share them, so he concluded his sermon.
    Three women, including Hannah, lingered to talk to Chris. In the back, men and women socialized with each other, and the rest filtered out the door. “I really enjoyed how you explained the story of the father and his son,” a not scantily endowed woman in a lemon-yellow jumpsuit said.
    Chris politely thanked her. Her husband was an alcoholic and had frequent brushes with the law. Chris and Reverend Luther had helped her out more than once when her