The Warfighter, the Storm, and the Moon

Chapter 51: Penetration

'Penetration'

27-Nov-2030, 2100U

LCDR Percy Jackson, US Navy, Son of Neptune

Joint Operation with Task Force 101 and Legio XII Fulminata

Airspace of Southeastern California, USA

Tyson really pulled through on this one... not only did he stand up his own special operations force in the form of Task Force Redeye, but he had made it into a combined arms unit on par with a Marine Air-Ground Task Force. I'll bet SOF legends like Demo Dick and Chargin' Charlie, along with conventional legends like Ike, Daly, Patton, and Van Riper, would be proud.

Hell, I was proud of him, prouder than I'd ever been in my life. Not just because he'd created a modern warfighting force on his own, but his sheer nerve, leadership, and intelligence was utterly awe-inspiring, on par with only a few leaders I'd ever met.

Okay, enough of the sentimentality. Now, onto Operation Clairvoyant Trident... which came not from me, not from Leo, but from Tyson's XO: an eight-foot cyclops built like an Abrams tank named Chad. Chad was heading up the joint operations center (callsign "Overlord") as something of a "battle captain" alongside Minerva, constantly receiving, analyzing, and distributing information throughout the entirety of Joint Task Force 12. This freed up Tyson and his deputy commanding generals (who are apparently different from an executive officer) to handle their own tasks. Tyson was leading the assault on Mount Othrys (with limited support from Father, who was in the Gulf of the Farallones for some reason), the Deputy Commanding General-Operations was coordinating the assault on the Mojave staging area from a P-3C orbiting overhead, and the Deputy Commanding General-Support was working closely with Mercury to conduct mission sustainment and resource management on the operational level.

Okay, now that I think about it... how the hell did the Torrent Troopers figure out the bureaucratic nonsense of the United States Armed Forces in just a few months while I still don't understand most of the jargon after two decades?! I thought to myself for a moment, before ultimately shaking my head. Wait, that shit doesn't matter right now... time to focus on the present.

And the present was pretty important, considering that we were about to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. "We" referred to two of the four recon teams, Yankee 1 and 2, shoved in the back of a C-130 with our Polaris DAGOR UTVs and a shitload of extra equipment (with the latter two strapped down to pallets), ready to static-line jump into our drop zone and roll in the darkness to find the bad guys and kick off the op... all without getting killed. We couldn't HALO or HAHO in, since most of us weren't qualified or trained for that. Jason, who was actually snoring in the seat to my left, along with Frank, who was sitting in the seat on the opposite side of the plane, were probably the only non-Torrent Troopers (apart from me) who could've carried out a high-altitude jump just fine... but of course, it wasn't like they needed parachutes.

Simply put, once we arrived at DZ-1 (just north of McCullough Mountain, around 10-15 miles northeast of the California-Nevada border), the vehicles would be launched out and we would follow. Yankee 3 and 4 would be doing the same at DZ-2 (just west of Spirit Mountain, also 10-15 miles northeast of the California-Nevada border). X-Ray and their Light Strike Vehicles would be dropped at DZ-3 and DZ-4 via HALO (the Clipper Mountain and Dead Mountains Wilderness Areas, respectively), since they all had learned high-altitude parachuting and it was too risky to attempt static-line jumps in those DZs, as they were fairly close to outermost enemy positions.

Now I know what you're thinking: so the recon teams (Yankee), responsible for finding the bad guys and supporting the snipers already present, are using static-line jumps. The anti-armor teams (X-Ray), responsible for carrying out hit-and-run attacks with their TOW missiles and other heavy weaponry from their dune buggies of doom, are using HALO jumps. What about the super-scout platoon (Zulu) responsible for establishing mini-firebases and providing additional sniper overwatch all throughout the AO?