Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [23]
Gradually the boats dropped even lower until they were following the irregularities in terrain, barely a hundred meters above the surface. They scooted up till they were practically grazing the top of a jagged outcropping, then dropped suddenly to cruise along the base of a wide crater. The tug of the asteroid’s gravity was barely perceptible but present: a gentle pull that held the men in their seats and added a sense of lightness when the boats suddenly dived.
Side by side, Tommy and Mikey came to rest on a relatively smooth patch of stone just beyond the large crater. The upper hatches slid back, and the SEALS popped out, weapons ready. Almost floating, the men came down in a defensive perimeter around the landing zone.
“We’ll wait here for orders, Lieutenant,” Coxswain Grafton said on the short-range transmitter. “Good luck, sir.”
Jackson gave a thumbs-up in thanks and turned his attention to the Team. The heavily laden SEALS formed up in two files about a hundred meters apart. Marannis and Sanchez, as usual, took the lead, one man on point for each file. Unique among the SEALS, the scouts wore camouflaging ghillie cloaks, filmy covers over their pressure suits with a nearly magical ability to mimic the background color and texture of their environment. When the two scouts moved off by themselves, they were almost impossible to see.
Naturally, the men had loaded up on ordnance, taking advantage of the low gravity even as they remembered the lessons they had learned on Mars: Just because you could lift a small truck, that didn’t make it any easier to stop once that small truck got moving forward. Once more they had fitted the vented barrels onto the weapons and carried the recoilless rocket rounds for the G15s. Each man had breaching charges, spare magazines, extra grenades, and other toys attached to every spare inch of the outer surface of his pressure suit. They looked almost robotic as they lunged along, the shape of the human inside the suit distorted by the helmet, the multiple packages attached, and the bulky backpack that was the suit’s life support module, providing air, water, and heat against the harsh, hard vacuum of space.
Advancing in long strides, they made good time over the initially flat terrain of the LZ. Soon they came to a jagged ridge of rock where the terrain soared upward in a virtual cliff. Despite the light gravity, the SEALS had to work hard to climb the steep slope, using hands as well as feet for purchase. Jackson’s breathing came as a steady rasp in his earphones, but he didn’t want to risk even a low-power transmission as they drew closer to the target. He simply trusted his men to remember their training and recognize the peril of a slip or a fall: As with forward momentum, the kinetic energy of a tumbling heavily loaded man would be very difficult to reverse if one of them lost his balance.
But they made it to the crest in formation, and Jackson instinctively lowered himself to the rock as he crept up beside the prone figure of the scout Sanchez. He could see, barely a kilometer away, the outline of several manufactured domes. Just beyond, jutting up from the surface of the asteroid like a needle pointed at space, was the sleek, powerful shape of the pirate ship that nearly had destroyed the Lotus.
They had reached the target, and the presence of the ship confirmed beyond doubt that they had found the pirate base. The Team, separated into the first and second squads, deployed along the crest of the ridge, every man visually inspecting