Direct Action - 03 (16 page)

After lunch they drove out to a nearby airfield with their parachutes and wingsuits. A small prop plane would take them up. It was basic familiarization with their equipment. Some of them, like Deckard, had hundreds if not thousands of jumps but had never used a wingsuit before. It wasn't exactly standard issue after all.

As they waited for the plane to spin up, Deckard heard Zach and Paul talking about how they wished Nadeesha was coming along so they could sabotage her parachute and be done with her once and for all. Liquid Sky wasn't like a military unit. It wasn't a brotherhood. It was like the mafia. Everyone was guilty and that guilt was the only thing that bonded them together. That and fulfilling their own self-satisfaction, be it for drugs, for money, for pussy, or whatever it was.

Finally, the pilot indicated that he was ready for the first lift. They set their altimeters and got onboard. They quickly rose to 12,000 feet. When Bill opened the door, the air that rushed in was damn cold. They would have to glide to their drop zone.

Tucking his limbs in, Deckard dived out the door of the plane then, extended his arms and legs to begin tracking forward. With his arms swept back and his legs fully extended, he could feel the lift being generated by the wing suit. He was tracking several meters forward for every meter that he dropped. With the rest of the Liquid Sky team, he glided towards the drop zone.

As they dropped in altitude, it really became possible to see how fast they were moving in relation to the terrain below. With a wing suit, a jumper could get going up to a hundred and twenty miles per hour. That became apparent as the shrubs and desert of the Australian outback below blasted by. At four thousand feet, they deployed their parachutes.

These were much smaller parachutes than the military used. The T-10C static-line parachute and MC-5 HALO parachute had to be able to carry two entangled jumpers to the ground, with all of their combat equipment. By contrast, civilian parachutes did not have any such requirements and were true sport parachutes. They deployed faster and dumped altitude faster. The margins for error were also much smaller.

A MC-5 had 370 square feet of material in the parachute. Their civilian parachutes had about 150 square feet of canopy.

The reality was, they would be deploying their chutes about 500 feet above the target. That wasn't a small margin of error, it was no margin of error. They knew this. There were no high fives or woots when they touched down on their drop zone. Everyone knew that this jump had been child's play and didn't even begin to compare to the insert they would be attempting in Manila.

That night was spent diving through Manila in the simulator.

They had perfected the variables at this point. The jump altitude was finalized, the approach path was on target, now they just had to learn to compensate for the variables that they couldn't control, like wind speed. They also had to have split second timing when it came to deploying and steering parachutes. They only had about ten seconds from the time they pulled to the time they were hitting the deck on top of the Aquino building.

Bill was hitting the rooftop about half of the time. Deckard was hitting it about the third of the time, but he was quickly getting used to the wingsuit's aerodynamics. Zach and Paul were still hit or miss. Rick hadn't stuck a single landing.

It was the eleventh simulation that night. Deckard zoomed over metro Manila, letting the gold-lit buildings guide his way. He had every landmark, every hit point memorized by now. Crossing the river was his first heads-up; then the oval-shaped Rockwell East Tower told him he was getting closer.

The ground was coming up to meet him. He was gliding and dropping at the same time. Running out of air, running out of time. It had to be perfect.

He cruised over the helipad on the top of the Roxas building, just a hundred meters over the roof. The Petron Mega-Plaza passed on his right flank. He shifted his legs to steer left. Next he blasted right between the Four Seasons and the Grand Soko Makati. Suddenly he was over Velasquez Park.

This was it. Reaching back, he yanked out his pilot chute and released it into the wind. The parachute deployed, the pulleys on the simulator lowering him from a freefall position to a vertical position as if he were really under canopy. The Aquino Building was right at the tip of his feet.

Only under canopy for a few seconds, he steered as close to the center of the building as he could with his toggles and yanked down on them at the last moment to brake. The suspension lines on the simulator suddenly went slack, dropping Deckard to the warehouse floor to simulate a real landing.

The screen froze.

Chalk up another touchdown. In the virtual reality goggles, the other jumpers were listed as they hit their assigned dropzone. Bill, Zach, and Paul all made it to the top of the building. Rick was still shitting the bed.

“Rick,” Bill bellowed in the empty warehouse. “Unclip from the simulator and de-kit. You're done.”

“What do you mean
I'm done
?”

Deckard could hear the voices talk back and forth before he flipped up his goggles.

“Exactly what it sounds like. You are not hitting the dropzone. You're done.”

“That's fucking bullshit.”

“What's bullshit is that the most cherry fuck on this team is hitting his targets and you aren't,” Bill said referring to Deckard. “I said, fucking de-kit!”

Deckard flipped up his goggles in time to see Rick unclip from the simulator and unceremoniously drop his goggles and parachute on the cement floor. Tearing off the wingsuit he tossed it and stormed outside, the heavy metal door slamming shut behind him.

“Nadeesha!” Bill yelled. “Kit up and get in the simulator. The rest of you are done for the night.”

Nadeesha looked up from the folding table where she had been going over intel reports and working on the layout of the objective.

“You waiting for a second invitation, sweet pea? Kit the fuck up. You're in for an all-nighter.”

“What the hell is this,” Zach said in shock. “You're taking Rick off the team for some squall?”

“I need pipe hitters on my objective, but that pipe hitter can't even get to the objective. If Nadeesha can get her piss flaps to the top of the fucking building, then a squall trigger-puller is better than no trigger-puller.”

“She does intel and logistics, not operations,” Zach said as if Bill needed reminding.

“She only has to be operational for all of five minutes on target and I don't have time to find someone new. Ramon has the remote devices on batteries to watch the target, but now he is busy working logistics for our infil and exfil.”

Apparently Nadeesha didn't need to be told twice. By the time Deckard had unclipped from the suspension lines and shrugged out of his parachute, Nadeesha was already set to go in what had been Rick's simulator station.

“So, since you don't think she is up to it,” Bill told Zach. “I want you to brew a fresh pot of coffee for her.”

Then he turned to the technician working the computer.

“Feed her a cup after every five simulations once she starts getting tired. I want her going all night. She has a lot of catching up to do to get up to speed with the rest of us.”

Deckard unzipped his wing suit and set it down next to the parachute. Nadeesha was being pulled up by the pulleys into the freefall position. The VR goggles were down over her eyes. The wing suit was going to need some further adjustments for her smaller frame, but they would work that out later. Rick wasn't that tall to begin with.

Fuck that dude anyway.

11

Liquid Sky explosively breached the mockup with a flex linear charge. The explosion sent wood splinters everywhere as the door burst into six or seven pieces. They put Deckard up front as the first man through the door, reminding him that as the new guy on the team, he was really nothing more than cannon fodder to them.

Ramon had called back to the staging area to tell them that he had secured Ingram MAC-10's with suppressors for the mission from the Philippines' extensive black market. They would just have to make do in training with the M4 paintball guns. It was an imperfect world.

Deckard stepped over the broken door and cleared the first corner. It was a wide open living space, framed out by bare plywood walls. Second-hand furniture had also been placed inside the mockup. Ramon's intel was that De Jesus routinely hired hookers from Manila's most famous upscale whore house, Air Force One. Regularly attended by Ambassadors and Generals, Air Force One was where you went to score some “Tier One ass” as Bill had put it.

Deckard also noticed that, although they were expecting civilians on target, all of their targetry in the mockup were shoot targets. None of the silhouettes were no-shoot targets. Everyone in the apartment was being marked for death.

Point shooting the first target, Deckard put two blue paint rounds center mass. He and Zach then cleared the kitchen area, taking down another two targets. Practicing a form of room clearing known as free flow, they had the entire apartment cleared in seconds.

The worst part was that they had to clear the entire objective while still wearing their wing suits. There would be no time to take them off, only to unzip a slit between the legs so they could walk and escape from the wings by rolling back the sleeves. Once they hit the rooftop, they would release their main parachute via a cutaway pillow and begin the killing. How the MAC-10 and spare magazines would be arranged on their kit was something that was still being worked out.

Then, once the apartment was covered in blood and spent brass they had to exfil with their reserve parachute, a stunt chute designed for base jumpers in this case. The entire mission was Hollywood as hell in Deckard's opinion. The only reason why it would work was because no one would be expecting it.

Liquid Sky hit the training objective five more times. Nadeesha had her jet-black hair pulled back, and was now covered in sweat like the rest of them. So far, she was keeping up on target. No one was talking to her though; she was considered an outsider to the assault element.

After dropping their kit, the team guzzled bottled water from a cooler they had brought along and piled into a van to head back to the warehouse. They ate an early lunch and then went into the simulator. Ramon had left remote devices in two rented offices in buildings near the Aquino building. They knew the target was on site. Meanwhile, Ramon had secured their weapons and was building up their logistical infrastructure for the operation.

They were making progress in the simulator. Everyone was itching to do the hit.

Deckard bailed off the ramp of the virtual reality airplane and into the night for what seemed like the thousandth time.

He counted off the numbers.

River.

Rockwell building.

Petron Mega-Plaza.

Thread the needle between Four Seasons and the Grand Soko Makati.

Velasquez Park.

Pull!

Deckard's body screamed into the target as his parachute joltingly interrupted his descent and he crashed onto the rooftop.