Chapter 1. Watch that first step …

It was a long, long way down to the ground. In the dark, too, as Harry's boots stepped out into empty air. Sure he had his shrunken broom and his wand handy (why would anyone pass up such an advantage, if they had it available) but at nineteen thousand feet he fully expected to ride his very much modified parasail parachute to the ground. Once he opened it.

The broom was "plan "C", if "A" and "B" had both failed. As the SEAL's unofficial motto ran "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." Harry had no desire to find out how hard water, much less land, was … if you fell nineteen thousand feet unarrested.

Sixty seconds into free fall and nothing had gone wrong yet.

However, besides believing in "place not your faith in an Ace kicker", Harry had learned that somewhere, some guy named Murphy, had been given seven star rank over the whole bleeping universe, trumping Merlin even. He like to play dice with your fate.

Harry had wondered more than once if "Murphy" was just an alias for Loki. He had learned about the Viking gods from Neville Longbottom, after they had become comrades as well as friends. With the name Longbottom, his heritage was obvious, if you thought about it.

Harry had undergone unimaginable pain and hardship just to be here. Or so the 'powers that be' believed. Unimaginable, perhaps, to someone not raised by one Vernon Dursley, and his son, and his wife. His scarred body had given him a lot of "street cred" in the service and even more in BUDS.

Letting his mind drift back to Hell Week in his SEAL training which was officially known as BUDS, he smirked at the misery the Instructors had doled out to all and sundry tadpoles, wannabe 'frogmen', trying to break your will in every way possible.

Making you wet, and cold, and raw (from rolling wet in the sand), and then running. Carrying heavy things over your head while running (wet and sandy), and more running, and more running. Swimming, in cold dark water, swimming and more swimming.

"Harry hunting" had made his quite a good runner. It was a skill he had never lost. Beach sand was tough but Harry was tougher. He had mastered swimming before he could join the US Navy. He got a lot better at swimming during BUDS.

The 'survivors', the barely 20% they could not somehow make to quit, would only be those whose will could not be broken. After first making it so difficult to ever begin BUDS, they made it so darned easy to quit and walk away, no black marks, no hard feelings. Just ring that bell and set your helmet you had to wear as a trainee on the ground.

You would be transferred out that day, no questions asked. No recriminations.

If Harry could have been broken by people who were not actually ALLOWED to try to kill him, he would never have survived to climb onto the Hogwarts Express that first time. Or survived the Battle of Hogwarts, where he had put down Voldemort. Permanently.

Now he was ready to pull his ripcord. This was a HALO drop, high altitude, low opening. The altimeter on his wrist told him it was time, fifteen thousand feet above the surface, so he didn't go "splat".

His backpack chute slipped out, he felt it go, then opened with a jerk, which paid high dividends to those who tightened their straps properly when donning it. Suddenly he was spiraling wildly, twisting where he should have been falling straight. So much for perfection. One of the cells in his modified chute had failed to open and catch the air. Harry jerked repeatedly on his risers trying to fix the problem. So much for perfection.

Knowing he was falling too fast, carrying about a hundred pounds of equipment, he finally cut away the failed chute with his combat knife. Honed to a razor's edge, the tough nylon riser cords parted before the steel's edge. Time for plan "B".

Pull the cord on the reserve chute. Of course after one failure what was going to happen next but the second chute failed to inflate properly, and he was back to twisting, unable to steer toward the island they were to land on, having been dropped far out over the sea. Less chance for the enemy to realize you were coming for them.

Before falling back on his broom, which would be hard to explain, he ejected his wand from the invisible holster with a peculiar wrist movement, and sent some gentle spells aloft, forcing the chute to spread and inflate properly without being torn. Now he could land as he was supposed to.

This one was supposed to be "for real" but he had noticed his preloaded bullets were fakes, and he was sure this was another training exercise in disguise. But play it for real so he saw how he could handle real conditions. He was pretty sure most of his savvy fellow SEALs had caught on, too.

Moving like shadows through the trees and scrub of Vieques island, the team communicated entirely by hand signals. The used no lights and carried nothing reflective that was visible. Across a shallow, mud bottomed canal someone once dug for some reason in this god-forsaken place, they made their way, now gifted with water and mud in their jump boots.

Slowly and quietly they made their way, as they had been trained by the first generation veterans of SEAL Team Six. The disciples of the legendary Richard Marcinko, the man who was 'too crazy' for most 'normal' SEALs, who were themselves defined as crazy by most military service personnel. He was one of those you either loved or hated. His hand-picked men were of the same cut of cloth, and all of them loved him.

The demolitions experts had placed the breaching charges around the big equipment door on the building, and the other, smaller, doors too. All of them went off together, like the world's largest "Flash bang" grenade, which the SEALs carefully weren't watching.

Then they did what SEALs do,, and went running into the building, dodging left and right, and rolling as they went.

Then the shooting started.