The Crisis (61 page)

“We've assumed so. That was the word on the street.”

“Did you ask Hasheer?”

“No. But I can.”

The RSO shrugged. “Let it go, why rattle the teacups? In case he planned it himself. There's enough on our plate.”

“So what do I tell them?”

“Tell him we're in. Set up the meet, but he's got to let us know
where
as far in advance as he can. Just make sure Al-Khasmi's there, in person. This Yousef the Arab—we'll take him too if we can, but I think I know who he is. We'll have our friends in Saudi talk to him next time he goes home. Okay, he knows you, we'll stipulate you want to personally hand him the cash, to ensure it's really going to him. Make it personal, you and him.”

“Right.” She turned and they started back. “We take him, and then?”

“We hold him till Olowe gets a court set up. They try him, we don't. I don't think the general will mind shooting him in a courtyard someplace.” Peyster shrugged. “Slam dunk, far's I can see. Let's get Olowe's chop on the deal, and get out of here.”

.  .  .

OUTSIDE, in the back courtyard, she stopped to gather herself. Trying to stifle the sense she'd crossed some obscure but fateful line. She'd finally asked the question she'd held in reserve all through the interview. Where the southerners Olowe's troops were evacuating from the city were being taken. But the big man had just smiled blandly, looking off at nothing, answering not a word as Peyster pulled her away, apologizing.

The wind gusted, rattling sheet metal close by. The lights dimmed as the generators wound down. The stars shone out from equatorial black. They were brighter here than she'd ever seen them. They were all but invisible in New York, with its never-sleeping beacons of the electric future.

They seemed to move as she watched, whirling in interstellar cold. Staring up, she felt that chill again despite the lingering heat. As if everything rushed onward faster and faster, a blind gallop toward some horrific denouement no human effort could delay by a microsecond. Was this how God had written the book of their lives?

She didn't think this terrorist in the desert was anything more. An ignorant insurgent, fighting what he didn't understand. The age of prophets was past. But wouldn't it be ironic, if what they said about Al-Maahdi was true. Then she'd be the Muslim who'd set up a Judas to betray the Messenger of God.

“You okay?” Peyster, holding the van door. “Look like you saw a ghost.”

She grimaced without speaking, and got in.

T
HE gunners hugged themselves beside their weapons, sucking oxygen from tanks strapped to their waists. Freezing their asses off, but keeping clear of the SEALs, who took up most of the rear of the aircraft.

Builds character, Oberg thought. At thirty-five thousand feet, in the unpressurized, unheated, almost unlit fuselage of the Spectre, the cold was intense. The 110-knot slipstream howling back from the open gunners' stations didn't help. He wore fleece and underarmor pants and tops. A face cover too. Bulky, but he was glad of it now and would be even gladder outside. He'd been sucking oxygen for forty minutes, but still the lack of air made his heart hammer as he finished dressing out. Not to mention the stabbing in his guts, the worms, or dysentery, whatever he'd picked up. And the impossibility of getting his gear off, or for that matter back on, if he had to shit again.

Which he was going to have to soon. Freidebacher had eyed him when they fell in for the chalk, asked if he was all right. He'd given the major a hearty grin and a cheery aye, aye. No way he was missing a combat jump, even if his bowels were tearing free and getting ready to drop out.

The four SEALs were finishing their preps between the gunners' stations, the forty-millimeter forward and the howitzer farther aft. Obie's arms felt like lead. His lips and face were frozen beef. His back felt close to breaking, and his gut . . . Don't think about that, Teddy. Not till you're on the ground.

No, it didn't get much better than this.

He eyed his watch, getting concerned. They'd been on oxygen longer than usual, since it'd taken longer than scheduled to get to altitude. SEALs prebreathed for high-altitude jumps, to purge nitrogen. If they didn't, the rapid compression as they fell could starve the brain of oxygen. No static lines on HAHO jumps; blacking out meant you cratered. So they breathed
pure O
₂
, connected to an oxygen console. In a few seconds they'd transition to the bottles they breathed from during the long drop. Trouble was, they couldn't take even a single breath of ambient air as they switched, or the nitrogen content of their blood would jump right up again.

None of this was guesswork. It'd been learned the hard way, in death after death.

He illuminated the little square screen on the GPS wrist unit. Course: 274 degrees. They were forty miles south of the Tanagra, paralleling it. In four minutes they'd be over the drop point.

This would be a high-altitude insertion. No need to worry about radar, but they did need to prevent anyone on the ground hearing the unmistakable cracks of five chutes snapping open a couple hundred feet overhead. They'd free-fall for ten thousand feet, then deploy the chutes and go in silent from there.

“Stand by,” the copilot said in their ears. The last blue lights went out. They stood crouched and burdened, like cave bears with blackened faces, in complete darkness. He gripped the safety line and watched a dark slot appear a little above eye level.

As the ramp dropped and the cargo door rose the stars glittered, unearthly bright at the edge of space. Teddy took a deep breath, held it, flipped the switch, and disconnected his hose. Sucked warily, and got a click and the hiss of dry gas. He checked the gauge, sucked a deeper breath. Good.

He gave the jumpmaster a thumbs-up and waddled toward the maw where the dropped ramp of the C-130 led off in a single long step into the roaring blackness of a thirty-five-thousand-foot fall. Behind him Donoghe and Cooper and Kowacki dragged their 105 pounds each across the aluminum deck: oxygen masks, packs, drop lines, separate pack with double parafoils, weapons, bipods, ammunition, medical packs, radios, knives. The Spectre's loadmaster pushed a square bulky pallet of Oh Shit gear on casters after them: machine gun, rations, water, batteries, more medical consumables, everything else they'd need for a mission that might last a week. No Walmarts where they were going. Just empty desert, and skinnies eager to kill them.

Dickinson and Freidebacher and Lenson, all the gold braid had planned Operation King Vulture. The silent, covert insertion. The helo feint miles to the north. A second diversion,
Squall
and
Shamal
getting under way and heading south along the coast. The intel, about where the turnover would take place. A lot of smart folks had put their heads together. But it was up to Teddy Oberg to bring back the trophy head for over the fireplace.

That was fine. That was the SEAL way: self-discipline, not discipline
from above. Why they didn't always play so nice. And how they got things done some people said were impossible.

His bowels squirmed. Sweat prickled his forehead. He had to get his pants down, or things were gonna get messy. But the timing . . . it
really
couldn't be worse.

“On my count,” the copilot's voice crackled. Usually there was a green “go” light, but teams didn't usually jump from Spectre gunships, either. But there were only four of them this time, and the Spectre could circle to cover them on the way down, should they land somewhere unlucky. Such as, in the middle of an insurgent encampment.

He concentrated, squeezed. . . . Twisting his upper body he searched the faces behind him. Cooper, no problems there. Kowacki, a steady regard back. But Donoghe's eyes were jittering like greasy marbles behind the jump mask. Teddy gripped the web of his shoulder. Bent his helmet to put them together, like spacemen in a Mars movie. “We cool, dude?”

“Way cool, bro.”

“Up for this? We can do it without you.”

“Fuck, no way, man. Let's bounce.”

The copilot's voice echoed. Teddy faced front again and bent slightly. Eyes open. Chin down. . . . “Five,” the voice said. “Four. Three. Two. One. Go! Go! Go!”

He couldn't hold it any longer. His sphincter let go. Screaming inside the helmet, he charged for the square of darkness. Proper exit. Check body position. As the last metal dropped away beneath his feet, as his guts emptied in a liquid stream, he tumbled, locking his knees back, spreading his arms. Batman, falling out of the Gotham sky.

Facing the black and enormous Earth as it sucked him down.

 

THE universe spun, then stabilized as he picked out a bright planet and slipped left and steadied on it. The roaring air buffeted his ears. The agony in his belly ebbed. He didn't fall, he floated. His heart pumped harder, slamming in his ears, but under the mask he was smiling so hard it hurt. The desert shimmered for uncounted miles, burnished to mercury by the starlight, the horizon faintly visible as a blacker threshold where the stars began. Nothing better than a jump. Except a jump followed by a firefight.

There'd be no nights like this in LA. Just chasing dreams other people owned. This was living. If he caught a bullet, or a grenade, like Sumo, it'd been worth it. To hang here, an eye suspended in infinite night.

He just hoped nobody collided with him. He hated being first out, low man, but he was team leader. The stick would be following him, all the way down.

The biggest danger after lack of oxygen was one SEAL tracking through another as they descended, either before or after deploying chutes. That'd happened to two team guys not long before, on a training mission. One had fallen right through another's chute as it was opening. The first man had two thousand feet to think about how hard he was going to hit.

Teddy had told them over and over again in the prebrief: spread out, don't track on each other, open up like the fingers of a hand. “And I'm the fucking thumb, down here. None of this skydiving shit. I don't care if we land a fucking mile apart, as long as we're all walking when we get up off the ground.”

The grin beneath the mask held, though. He swallowed, vibrating as if charged with a thousand volts. The old SEAL saying: “Hey, if it don't suck, why would they need us to do it.” But this didn't suck, it was great, dropping at 120 miles an hour, terminal velocity, fixed on Jupiter, through a black and silver night into the great swelling pit of Africa. He tilted his body and rotated 360 degrees, catching jagged darknesses that must be the southern mountains. Above him, less presences than hints, specters, other absences, falling swiftly as murderer angels banished from an already forgotten Heaven.

Yeah, he was a fucking poet, fucking Dante or whoever. Get with the mission, Teddy. He checked the glowing screen on his wrist. They needed to come left. He reoriented to put the planet above his floating, buffeted right glove, and fell slanting so he made a hundred feet forward for every thousand feet they dropped. The altimeter flickered. They'd redesigned them with numbers, not needles. In hypoxia you couldn't read a dial, but numbers still penetrated. But those were blurring too. He had oxygen, what was wrong? He slammed his wrist against his faceplate and squinted. Better.

Thirty thousand. Every seven seconds, another thousand less. His sodden trou and underarmor were icy cold. Ignoring it, he made one more rotation. The air was thicker. Warmer. It slashed and cut, its voice a growl now where it had been shrill.

When he looked up the horizon was rising around them like a hydraulically powered black cylinder. Now he gazed up at the stars from the bottom of a well. The tornado buffeted him but he rode it, arms outstretched as he plummeted. Twenty-six thousand.

Five hundred.

Twenty-five. He slammed his hand across his chest and grabbed the toggle, sensing the others above, behind, willing them and the cargo not to be in the wrong place when he popped. Got his fist tight, and yanked.

The opening shock on the parafoils was much softer than with the T-10s he'd first trained on. He glanced up; the black squared-off arch arced reassuringly.

A flash of motion against the stars. Cooper, if he was in the right place. Teddy examined the foil again, steering experimentally right, then left, making sure he had the stable sink regime that meant all the cells were inflated. It responded, so he concentrated on the GPS, lining himself up on the “roadway.” With a lift-to-drag ratio of three to one, from this altitude they had a covert run in to the LZ of almost fifteen miles. He wasn't going to stretch it that far—the meteorology wasn't favorable for the next couple of days—but they'd be able to fly in to less than five miles from the meet point.

The next few minutes glided as smoothly past as the foils whispered through the air, trailing edges faintly luffing. He had a good sink rate. They were on course. Opening at twenty-five thousand, at this rate they'd have almost twenty-five minutes in the air.

After a while he looked around. This time he caught two shadows, one to the left and another almost directly above and a little behind him, enough so he could glimpse it around his own canopy. He checked glide path and the sink rate again, obsessing a little, but you didn't want to land short. Or go long, either.

He took another little vacation in his head. Not exactly nodding off. Still monitoring the situation. But enjoying the view. Mile after mile of shining desert. Mountains, slowly rising to meet them below his dangling boots.

Some time later he checked again, then focused on the ground, matching his approach course with what the surface wind had been briefed at. But the wind was never what they told you it would be, and he slipped right, slipped a little more, trying to sense it through the risers without being able to feel or see it. The ground rushed up, closer every moment, but it was just a confused jumble of shadow and starlight, much rougher than he'd expected given the long study of the overhead imagery.