Nightstalkers (17 page)

Nada was checking the time, and he looked forward, toward Moms. Her head was cocked at that strange angle she had whenever she was on the direct link to Ms. Jones.

Moms slapped Eagle on the shoulder as Russia and Japan triangulated with the Can under Area 51 to get the first rough approximation of the pending Rift. “North or South Carolina.”

Eagle hit the thrusters and they were racing east.

UNC was ahead and only two minutes to go. The DVR cut to commercial and the jerks at the cable company didn’t allow fast-forwarding on some things. Ivar picked up his iPhone and checked his texts and e-mails, relayed from the small wireless transmitter he’d hooked up to the Internet line running into the lab.

“Frack!” Ivar exclaimed as he saw Doctor Winslow’s e-mail about the dampener. It was time-stamped over three hours ago.

Ivar looked at the computer. There was the slightest of golden haze around the mainframe. Anxiously, he checked the monitor and breathed a sigh of relief. All within parameters.

He went over to the keyboard and began to type in the code that should have been typed in three hours previously.

Winslow could barely sit back down. He felt drawn to the computer with an urgency he couldn’t comprehend. Lilith was still fuming at her end of the table. Winslow tried to remember what had initiated it. Something about prenups?

Lilith fixed him with her gaze. “Stephen here wants to know more about your experiment. Your
new
experiment. You know, the one you haven’t told
me
about.”

Winslow glared back. Stephen the chemist was an ass. He’d correct you if you called him Steve or even Steven as if you were ignoring his silent syllables. Winslow downed his glass of champagne and thought of the laptop. The golden glow. He noted that his wife’s hand was on Stephen’s arm. He’d never considered the fourth possible end of the evening—Lilith with someone else.

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand it, Stephen,” Winslow said.

All the grad students were tracking him now, because it was one thing to be left out of the loop concerning what was going on at the lab, but it was another to see him in his cups and his wife provoking him. This would make great social media chat later.

Mary thought she was saving him by jumping in. “Yes, Doctor Winslow. What is this experiment?”

But that was just throwing gas into the fire. Winslow jumped to his feet, startling everyone. “I’ll show you.”

He took the stairs two at a time, his rage steadying him. The drawer was partly open. He unplugged the laptop and cradled it in his arms as he took it downstairs.

He was tempted to slam it down on the dining room table, but a small part of his brain that was still functioning knew that would be dangerous to the program running inside.

Stephen laughed, fueling Winslow’s rage. Stephen, who’d invented a time release for the pills that made overactive children go limp. “I hope your lab equipment is newer than that laptop.”

It
was
old. Under the bright light of the chandelier he could see a fading sticker for John Kerry, buried underneath a couple of band stickers. His real guests, not the students who were too young, hadn’t voted for Kerry. When a person got into houses like this, no matter what they’d chanted in their youth, most tended to change, as they had too much money. Which was funny because he’d met Lilith at a rally for liberals and he remembered what his own postdoc supervisor had told him at the time: everyone’s a liberal until they buy their first sofa. Students and liberals bought couches. For a moment, through the alcohol fog, he tried to tally how many sofas were in his house, but realized it was futile because there were rooms he’d only been in during the Realtor tour.

He heard Lilith give that girlish laugh, which meant she was now more inclined toward oral sex than evisceration and lamenting, but it was directed at Stephen, whose right arm was angled toward Lilith, under the cover of the table, which helped explain the sudden shift. He realized he’d zoned out, caught again by the golden glow.

Lilith was calling his name and he let the counting and memories go. “Yes, dear Lilith?”

“Are you going to show the rest of us?” Lilith was pointing at the laptop, the charm bracelet that she adorned with a new trinket every year, like a soldier accrued battle ribbons, dangling from her wrist.

Winslow turned the computer so that they could all see why he’d be standing on that dais in Stockholm. Everyone stared back blankly.

“Cool screen saver,” a less-than-quick grad student complimented.

“I can’t believe you got that old screen to be so bright,” another noted, as if that was what he was working on. “Did you figure out how to increase the refresh rate?”

“You fucking idiots,” Winslow said. “Don’t you see? And Lilith, why don’t you just blow Stephen right here under the table?”

The mainframe now glowed. Ivar stared at it, trying to figure out what label he could put on it. He dropped the labeler and hit the enter key for the dampener again and again.

Nothing.

The glow was expanding, covering the entire table.

Even though he had no clue what Doctor Winslow’s experiment was, Ivar had a bad feeling about the golden glow. If he screwed this experiment up, Winslow might derail his PhD.

They’d topped off once from a KC-135 tanker, somewhere over the emptiness of middle Kansas. Eagle had kept the Snake in lockstep with the bigger plane as the boom from the tanker descended in front of them, sucking in the precious fuel.

There was no discussion about who was going to jump first. Roland rigged, as Eagle began a descent when they crossed the
Smoky Mountains, down into breathable air, and started depressurizing.

Moms held up an iPad from the copilot seat as Mac passed leg straps between Roland’s massive thighs. “We’ve got it pinpointed from the Japanese and Russians. Outside Chapel Hill.”

Nada took the iPad and passed it back to Roland, who paused in rigging. He checked the Google maps display, searching for landmarks he could reference on the way down. Jordan Lake was a great one for the FRP—far recognition point—that he could spot as soon as he exited the aircraft.

Then he zoomed, searching for an IRP—immediate reference point—to lock down his landing spot. Roland frowned. It looked like the target was inside a compound. “What kind of place is this?” Roland asked. “Some sort of secure research facility?”

“It’s a gated community,” Moms said.

“A what?” Roland asked.

“Bunch of houses surrounded by a fence, with a guard at the gate,” Moms said. “Sort of like Fort Bragg, except it doesn’t have the soldiers or the training areas.”

“It will have a golf course,” Eagle said.

Roland ran his finger over the screen. “It does have a golf course. You could land an entire stick of jumpers from a 141 on it.”

“I want everyone to rig,” Moms said. “We’re all going in via drop, even you, Doc. Mac, set his automatic opening device at one thousand AGL just in case. But please pull earlier, Doc, like you were trained, and follow us down. Eagle, you’re going to Wall the community’s perimeter. Put in probes to block any Firefly from getting out of that place.” She checked the time. “It’s going to be tight, but we can contain this and we have to go in quiet for concealment. Roland, right on the house, top-down, go in fast. HALO,”
she added, meaning he would free-fall for most of the drop, then pull at the last minute to keep from crashing through the roof. “The rest of us are going out HAHO, right after you. So you don’t have much time on your recon before we land, because gravity rules.”

“Roger that, Moms.” Roland squatted and cinched his leg straps tight. A loose leg strap on opening shock would be literally ball-busting. Ready, he scooted out of the way as Moms climbed between the seats—careful not to hit any of Eagle’s controls—to join the rest in rigging and then inspecting each other. There were elbows, knees, parachutes, and weapons all over the place, but every member of the team had done in-flight rigging—not approved for amateurs—many times.

Doc looked very unhappy, having been forced to go through parachute training when he became a Nightstalker, but never liking it. Moms never had him jump if she could help it, but this was the exception that made the rule for the training. And it was the price he was willing to pay to be on the inside.

By the time the Snake crossed over the Uwharrie National Forest where several of them had conducted their Robin Sage graduation exercise for the Special Forces Qualification Course, the Nightstalkers were rigged, passing the iPad around, memorizing this unique target.

Winslow wiped the Champers off his face. His guests were making their excuses, scurrying to the door, eager to get away from the coming debacle. He pressed his special card into Mary’s hand and leaned close. “Call my private number in a bit.”

Mary blinked, glanced over her shoulder at his wife, and let the card drop to the floor.

Winslow was impressed. Smarter than she’d appeared. “Winslow.”

Doctor Winslow turned. A colleague, albeit from Duke. “Yes?”

“That isn’t right, is it?” And with that, the colleague was gone with the rest of them.

At first Winslow thought it was about his wife and the Champers and his telling her to go blow Stephen in front of everyone, but then he saw it. The screen of the laptop was going crazy. The gold field was writhing; that was the only way he could describe it.