[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (26 page)

I tumbled out of the plane into the slipstream, struggling to get my body into a frog-like position. Skydiving is a lot like riding a bike—you never forget how to do it.

Then again, it’s not a big deal if you do. You
will
land. One way or the other. After all, you don’t really fall through the sky—the earth just comes up to meet you.

Quickly.

*   *   *

Junior was not with me. I had sent him back to the States the day before. I told him I needed him to help Danny as he set up surveillance on Veep, which was true enough. We’d need someone with high-tech skills to monitor bugs and whatever electronic intelligence we gathered.

I’d also told Danny to keep an eye on him, and gave him a quick rundown of what had happened.

I can’t say that Junior was happy to be going home, and he would have been even angrier if I’d told him that I was jumping from the plane—he had night-qualified for parachute jumps a few weeks before, and undoubtedly would have loved the chance to strut his stuff.

But I was concerned about him. His outburst at the border camp, and the effect the little girl’s death had on him, weren’t good. He was still wearing his heart on his sleeve. Even at SEAL Team Six, I didn’t expect my people to be automatons without emotion. But they had to be able to control it. I didn’t like what I’d seen from Junior.

The perils of
parenthood:
Was I being too hard on him because he was my son? Was the real issue the fact that I was worried he would be hurt, or worse? Was I the problem, not him?

Those thoughts crossed my mind as I plummeted downward. My position was marked on the visor in my helmet, which included handy little arrows to show me where to go. The unit could even give me advice on how to correct my course, if asked. Made by my friends at Innovate Technologies, the unit came with a money-back guarantee—if it sent me more than thirty meters off-course, the price of the helmet would be refunded.

My estate would no doubt be overjoyed. I had a similar guarantee from the parachute company; put them together and half my funeral would be paid for.

I was feeling awfully cold, even with the thermal layer and wet suit. Nothing like plunging through several thousand feet at terminal velocity to chill your blood.

A few more technical notes on the helmet while I’m falling: from the stern, it looks a lot like your basic military-style A-Bravo half-shell. It’s black, lightweight, and has the basic four-point suspension with a Bungee Molle fastener. Come around the side and you start to see some differences. There are small but noticeable wedges above the ear area for the embedded antennas. The helmet shield is made of a substance similar to the Gorilla Glass found in iPhones and other electronic gizmos. Gorilla Glass—made by the fine folks at Corning in New York—uses a special ion-exchange process to make the surface hard to scratch or break. In the helmet, there’s an LCD layer sandwiched inside to provide the displays. The LCDs are embedded and arranged in a way that you can still see reasonably well through the visor.

That will change in the next version, where the image will be synthetic, provided by small cameras at the top of the helmet—basically you’ll be watching a movie of your life, not only in living color, but in infrared and whatever other imaging system occurs to the geeks at Innovate Technologies. And I suppose if you’re bored on the long trip down, you can always catch Netflix or Hulu.

“Prepare to engage,” said a voice in the helmet. It sounded English—the engineers at Innovate apparently believed men would pay more attention to a girl with an accent … or they were married, and accustomed to taking directions from a female.

I checked the screen. I was coming down toward four thousand feet. She was right on time.

“Three seconds. Two…”

At 3,800 feet, I pulled the ripcord. An instant later—

Ugh…!!!

The sound you heard was the tightening of my body harness against the tender morsels of my anatomy, resulting in a plaintive cry from all of my future generations.

Better than the alternative, certainly, since it meant that my parachute had correctly deployed. I did a quick check above, making sure I had good cells, then got down to some serious navigating. I was no longer a brick—I was a certifiable flying man, moving with purpose and some amount of grace toward the red triangle that appeared in my helmet.

The triangle was homing in on a radio signal from the small boat I was heading for. I’ve made over 110 night jumps, enough to lose count but not to lose the memory of each one. They’re all the same, and different—you remember the tugs and the way the wind kicked you, the spray of water when you landed, or the time Murphy played with the lines.

Tonight was an easy one, with no wind to speak of, or at least not enough to interfere with me as I glided toward the radar signal. I was just passing fifteen hundred feet when an almost imperceptible light flashed ahead of me—Shotgun and Mongoose were watching from the boat, and gave me the high sign.

Sure now that I had the course set, I turned to the next problem—a water landing. The boat the boys were in was too small for me to touch down on, which meant I had to hit the waves next to them. Land on the waves when you’re not quite ready for them, and you might as well be landing on concrete.

Actually, concrete is a little better.

Because it was dark, I had little depth perception—at night, depth perception over water is nil, since there are no horizontal reference points to gauge height against. Thirty feet off the water looks the same as three hundred feet. So I had to rely on the helmet to know when I was going to hit, er, touch down. In theory, that was great—a high-tech visual aid to assist in what is one of the trickier problems of a night jump. But the best theory takes quite a bit of practice to become a reality, and it had been several months since I’d last jumped with the helmet. So I got my feet out a second or two early, then wondered what the hell was going on when I didn’t splash when I thought I would splash.

A second later I did “walk” into the ocean, a little off-balance, but down at least, and only a few yards from the Zodiac I was aiming at.

You’ve heard of a paper trail; I had a nylon trail streaming after me. My first order of business was to shed it, slit it so there’d be no air pockets, and then bundle it up to be weighted down and sunk as shark bait. I worked quickly, not because I was afraid of being seen, but because I didn’t want to spend more time in the water than necessary.

The Indian Ocean is the world’s warmest sea, with surface temperatures that have been measured at just under 37 degrees centigrade. But the average human being’s temperature is 0.5 degrees higher, and even on the hottest day in the warmest part of the ocean, everything around you is cooler than you are. Thermodynamics being what they are, your body tries to accommodate the temperature difference by warming up the rest of the world; sooner or later, you’ll freeze your butt off.

“Hey, now, Dick, about time you dropped in,” said Shotgun, adding a few choice words of greeting, mostly of the four-letter variety.

Mongoose, meanwhile, leaned over the side and helped pull me into the small craft.

“Target is five miles away,” he told me as I settled in. “They’re just chugging along. We can catch them easy.”

“Want some licorice?” asked Shotgun.

“No saltwater taffy?”

“Damn. I should have thought of that.”

We set a course for the ship. The boys filled me in on recent developments, such as they were, as well as the latest on what was going on with the ship.

According to the company records, it was bound for passage in the Suez Canal, and from there to ports in Greece, Cyprus, and France. Our plan was to get aboard, find the shipment, and put some bugs in it. Then we’d hop back on the Zodiac and return to Djibouti.

It wasn’t clear whether this was my shipment or not. It might be, and that was one reason I wanted to tag it. But even if it wasn’t, following it would give us more information about the smuggling network, and potentially more data on connections with the bank, our friend Veep, and Allah’s Rule. It would also keep us at least one step ahead of the Christians in Action, who as far as we could tell didn’t know about the shipment or the connection to Bangladesh.

The craft we were using was not your plain vanilla Zodiac, if there is such a thing. Longtime readers—and shouldn’t you all be?—will remember my good friend Steve Seigel,
27
aka “Indian Jew,” among other embroidered titles. Steve is now CEO of Zodiac North America, and despite admonishments to the contrary, continues to associate with riffraff like yours truly. Even more incredibly, he has opened the doors of the factory and its R&D department to Red Cell International. It’s an arrangement that benefits us both—we get to play with their newest toys; they get to see what they can do in real-world situations.

Clearly, I have the better end of the deal.

The craft Steve’s people had loaned us featured a motor that made use of a new fuel technology. Combined with technological improvements related to the hull, it had a tremendous range and a decent speed, without sacrificing anything in the way of seaworthiness—assuming you didn’t mind getting wet.

Even so, we couldn’t carry enough fuel and still have room for weapons and ourselves. Because of that, we’d arranged to be refueled in the morning, with a helo drop courtesy of Trace. Assuming she could tear herself away from Garrett for a few hours.

A navy operation would choose from a variety of tools to find the target; everything from satellites to small UAVs could be employed to track down the needle in the haystack. All we had was Shunt’s access to the company computer system, a pair of infrared glasses, and a small marine radar unit. Shunt got us into the general vicinity, but a night fog rendered the IR practically useless. The radar, however, came through. Made by Raymarine, it had roughly a fifty-nautical-mile range, and we found the cargo ship with no trouble.

I wish I could say that about our approach. Murphy was working overtime as Mongoose plotted to take us up into the ship’s wake, where we would be especially difficult to detect. The wind, which had been nonexistent when I jumped, had gradually whipped itself into a frenzy. That diminished the fog, but the whitecaps rose so high that it felt like the bow was being pummeled.

“Weather report said this was supposed to hold off for another couple of hours,” groused Mongoose, struggling to keep us on course. I’m not sure that Noah could have done a better job against the sudden tempest. A sea squall literally materialized from nowhere, constructing itself from a momentary depression or whatever it is the meteorologists use to explain Murphy’s various whims.

In one way, the sudden surge was good news—it meant there would be less of a chance that anyone would see us coming aboard, let alone be on deck when we climbed up. But we still had to get there, and for a good half hour that seemed to be an impossible mission. A blind man climbing Mount Everest on his hands and knees would have made more progress than we did.

The worst of the storm suddenly slipped past, and Mongoose found himself struggling to keep us from ramming the side of the ship. He pulled us alongside the stern of the heaving monster, bucking the waves as Shotgun and I prepared to go aboard.

There are a number of ways to get onto a ship at sea clandestinely. The easiest is to find a line trailing off the stern or one of the sides. It sounds ridiculously inept, but more often than not someone aboard has forgotten to square away a line (or rope, for you landlubbers). The line inevitably ends up trailing off through the water, a veritable escalator to the deck. But the sailors aboard the
Indiamotion
—our target ship’s name—were operating under the supervision of a competent master and mate; nothing dangled off the side.

Shotgun took a collapsible aluminum pole from the side of the boat and began uncollapsing it, extending the base and adding a similar pole until he had a veritable Empire State Building of tubular aluminum in his hands. At the tip we rigged a hook and a thin but strong line, and as our little rigid-hulled boat bounced in the water, Shotgun tried to lasso the line onto the ship above.

Indiamotion
was a medium-sized vessel that could be used for bulk carrying and containers, though it carried most of its cargo in the latter on this voyage. The ship had a relatively low gunwale amidships, and the three rails gave us plenty to aim at. However, the waves not only affected Shotgun’s judgment but his balance in the boat, and he had a hell of a time getting his hook into position. The pole clanked and clattered until finally a good nudge from the waves—or Murphy—sent Shotgun flailing backward. He just managed to keep himself from the drink.

The same could not be said for the pole.

I fished it and the line out while he cursed at Mongoose for not keeping the boat steadier. This led to a terse debate about the fine points of seamanship. In the meantime, I took matters into my own hands—I grabbed the grappling hook, made sure our line was clear, and pretended I was a cowboy.

I got the hook around the rail and a post on the first try.

“All aboard,” I yelled at Shotgun.

“You lucky son of a bitch.”

“Skill,” I told him, swinging up on the line.

Murphy must have heard me bragging. With my first pull the ship lifted suddenly and our boat ducked down. I smacked my right knee against the side. It felt like I’d been kneecapped with a sledgehammer. It was all I could do to hang on.

“You goin’ up, or what?” yelled Shotgun behind me.

I grappled my way to the deck, falling rather than climbing over the rail. Sucking some serious wind, I righted myself, got my MP5 into position, and scanned fore and aft to make sure we hadn’t been spotted.

I almost wished we had. Shooting someone would have taken the edge off my pain.

Shotgun popped his head over the rail and came aboard. I moved across the deck to a spar connected to the cargo crane. Pulling off my waterproof ruck, I took out a small package wrapped in plastic. Cutting the covering away revealed what looked like a slightly oversized pack of off-brand cigarettes wrapped in a thin filament wire. The wire was an antenna. I twisted it around the spar and taped the box beneath it on the side opposite the deck, hidden from view. The box held a satellite radio scanner, which would pick off radio frequencies used on the ship and transmit them back to Shunt, literally phoning them over our own circuits. Once he had the frequencies, he could then use our equipment to monitor the transmissions.
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There was also a GPS sending unit in the box, which would help us keep track of the ship independently of the shipping company’s system.