When Totems Fall (26 page)

Another pocket of warm air. Lurching to the left and up, forcefully. They endured a good twenty seconds more of this before settling on-trajectory again.

Dalton smacked his head on the bulkhead behind him in the process. Rubbing the spot, a small trickle of blood presented as he pulled his hand away. Nothing serious. A bump. As his head came back forward, Zeb's eyes stole a look at his partner, not five feet across from him.

Loch.

Silent as a baby and sleeping through it all.

THIRTY SIX

Near Middlefork Campground, twenty-five miles northeast of Snoqualmie Falls.

Five hundred feet. Three hundred feet. Two-Seventy-Five and falling. Zeb's wrist altimeter raced downward, signaling impending contact with the unforgiving, nearly frozen ground.

Too fast.

Zeb fought to maintain descent speed and trajectory. The sum total resistance of chute material, flight suit, and body mass were not doing the job; more drag was still needed. To this point, every attempted maneuver to slow him had failed. To make matters worse, he was also flying blind.

This two-man unit's unauthorized entry into sovereign Chinese territory required stealth, demanding they plummet into inky blackness above the Cascades during pre-dawn hours. Inclement weather, draping and clinging to the raw mountain scape, served only to increase these difficulties for the American intruders. As such, an unimpeded visual would come only in the last seconds of their descent.

The team back at Ft. Clark anticipated this need as well. Besides the altimeter, Dalton's wrist unit sported GPS functions that mapped location, even in the remotest of regions, to within six inches. The tone-based app, beeping for the last two hundred feet, was an annoying rhythm indicating what he already knew: his speed was off. The other component of the audio alerts, though, the actual pitch of the tone, told him his flight path held true. At least there was that. Too dark to see anything beyond a few feet in front of them, he and Loch had navigated by sound only over the entirety of the jump. Though the men were kitted with night-vision capable headgear, these units were unusable against the soupy gray backdrop they were falling through. Not optimal, sure, but everyone involved knew the deal: this might be the first and last step of their mission. So, they flew blind but not deaf as these last, harrowing few feet came upon them with a vengeance.

Zeb plunged all the way to two-fifteen before getting a better look, finally piercing the last layers and into the clear.

No.

Overhead imaging had indicated a reasonable landing zone, across a creek bed and some twenty yards from an abandoned campground. The dense green around the LZ had been duly noted in planning sessions. The margin of error would be small. Eyes-on now, the actuality? More like a life and death obstacle course in which the primary survival skill consisted of avoiding hundreds of unyielding hardwoods thrust skyward like a medieval soldier's pike while simultaneously dropping and swaying in the unpredictable winds.

There must be another way in.

Zeb scanned the scene, his eyes taking in as much as he could while his amazing mind went into overdrive. Previously factored information melded with new, on site data in a firestorm of mental calculations.

There.

Manipulating the chute's controls, Zeb maneuvered hard right, away from the planned-for LZ, heading instead toward another stand of gigantic trees. The frantic calculus in Dalton's head showed this way as the next best option. The wooden cleft appeared to be equally as dangerous; that is, unless he nailed everything just right. The new plan wasn't looking like much of an upgrade. Massive branches, mid-way up the two closest trees, extended outward like protruding arms, overlapping at the elbow. While the space in-between didn't exactly provide an "opening", Zeb wagered that ramming the limbs at 30mph still amounted to a better deal than slamming headlong into their stout trunks. Though an admirer of forests in general, this sort of tree hugging Dalton could do without.

Here we go.

Zeb twisted his body left, violently so, working to create as small a profile as possible as he approached the entry point.

Three-two-one.

The succession of gasping for air, pain on impact, and muffled grunts was concluded surprisingly quickly. Deadwood. The branches snapped too easily to be healthy, growing appendages. A formidable veil of moss now draped Zeb after flying through to the other side. Hovering in place with a small patch of grassy meadow beneath him, Dalton felt relieved, but only minimally, because he also knew what was coming next.

Zeb's parachute line caught in the mass of wood chips he'd plowed through and could only play out so far. The point at which the cord stuck in the trees now served as the fulcrum for an enormous pendulum, with the former soldier coursing along its outer arc. For the briefest moment, Dalton relived the feeling every kid loves on the upside motion of a playground swing set; freedom from gravity's usual demands. This time around the experience turned out to be more sickening than joyful. As expected, the cordage played out and the forces of the universe exacted their revenge. Taught as a piano string for just a second, the tendenous fabric stopped its forward momentum and then abruptly slackened.

Dalton fell backward, down, out of control. Zeb wrenched his back away, anticipating, trying to avoid the full force of the back of his head colliding with the tree trunks holding him captive. Unexpectedly, he found a somewhat softer end to this unplanned experiment in kinetic energy as a row of underbrush received his frame as gently as a down comforter on a king size bed. It wasn't the hard impact he'd prepared himself for but it was wet, through and through.

On the ground now and shaking off the disorientation of the last few moments, Zeb looked around for his partner. Radio silence was the rule for descent, so Zeb had no way of knowing what Loch decided when he had burst through the clouds, seeing the realities of their original LZ as well. Had the sergeant attempted a touchdown there? Maybe he spotted the same breach as Zeb? Maybe he had gotten strung up, wedged in between the clutching limbs of these woodlands monsters or blown off course, crushed into so many pieces against an unforgiving rock face.

Nah. I pity the rock-face meeting up with Loch at 35mph.

"Loch?" Zeb half-whispered.

The attempt to re-establish contact needn't be as quiet as he'd assumed. There were no other humans, anywhere around. This was, after all, an incredibly foolish thing to attempt. A million to one.

And Zeb was proving them wrong.

Again.

The voice
startled him.

"Well, don't yuuu look all comfy now, LT."

Clearly, his partner had fared at least as well.

"Dalton, this is nooo time for a nap. We got a meet on in abooot, oh say, ten hours. Lots of ground to take in the meantime."

Loch, always such a pleasure. The Scot reached out, extending his thigh-sized forearm toward Zeb, currently on his butt, entangled in all kinds of brush and polychord chute line material. Though he shouldn't have been, Dalton became surprised again by how little effort this small man needed to lift him off the ground and up onto both feet.

That's not right.

"Thanks, Loch."

Flicking a few pine cones and leaves off his chest, Zeb began to cut away the lines holding him in place.

__________________________________

Sanchez, out of Lakewood now
and beyond the greater Tacoma area, was making superb time. Sunlight crested over peaks to the east as she paralleled State Highway 18, winding through the wooded areas surrounding Maple Valley. From there and on toward Snoqualmie, little traffic wandered these lonely roadways. No big surprise. The first phases of the take-over had primarily been concerned with controlling the everyday activities and movement of the populace. In time, the patterns might ease. For now, though, a firm grip was the norm. Sanchez counted on these towns and roads becoming more remote as each hour passed. That was a good bet, as entering the rural foothills this side of Seattle meant logging, not farming, and logging these days meant ghost-towns. Every once in a while a filling station or a mom-n-pop shop emerged in the muted environs but that was about it. As always, vigilance was the key. Fifty meters off the roadway at all times, she kept her left ear inclined toward any sounds or sensations that trouble might be afoot.

Mid-morning, the seasoned soldier stopped beside a hollowed log, pulling out her canteen for a moment of pause. She was doing fine, temperature-wise. This altitude was now post-winter so frostbite and hypothermia wouldn't present a challenge. Liquids, though, she would need to keep track of. Early on her training officers had warned of the counterintuitive nature of ops like this one. Hydration, they'd pressed, was the ever-present concern, obvious when stationed in the biggest sand pits the world has to offer. Iraq, Yemen, Qatar. Places like this though, where the surroundings obscured the need, could spell real disaster, real fast. In habitats where glaciers, gravity, and precipitation reign, water seems easy to come by. It is just as true that many of these sources are not mission-beneficial. Micro-bacterial foes might be invisible but they could be as fatal as someone pointing a gun at your head. And if they didn't do you in outright they could certainly make it hard to perform at a combat-ready level. Nobody wants to have engraved on their headstone that they succumbed to the enemy while attending to some kind of digestive malady. There really isn't a sense of valor in that.

Her wilderness ops class had laughed together at the thought while at the same time taking the lesson dead seriously. This duality about the professional, all-volunteer military; laughing hard, throwing barbs back and forth and then getting down to work was something she had grown to deeply appreciate. Taking on the absurdities of life and death with the dignity and gravity of their task never coming into question. It was the truest form of community, of brotherhood, she had ever been privileged to know.

Sanchez was not
her birth family name.

She loved her adoptive parents, thinking often of them, almost daily, since their deaths a few years back. Together fifty-three years and, except for dad's brief tour of duty at the end of the Korean conflict, never apart for long, it made a certain cosmic sense that her mother and father had parted from this life in close succession. Mom had been diagnosed with a vicious cancer, found by the docs in its last stages, ravaging her body. Dad succumbed in a tragic car accident, only nine months later. They were all Jessica had known, yet this stable, loving environment had not been her beginnings. Her saviors—yes, but not, strictly speaking, her tribe. This eagerness to connect, to be a part of something authentically her own DNA, had been a lifelong yearning for this woman. Parts of this thirst for identity she found satisfied in the Army. So she ached for her co-warriors stationed on the other side of these mountains. She missed them. And she longed for them to have a chance to do what they did best.

Sanchez screwed the cap back on
her canteen, leaving the momentary calm of the six-foot diameter Spruce and moving into wilderness ahead. The next ten miles were harder going, ankle high scrub and thorns at every step, but both her instincts and training kept her from getting sloppy. Too much to gain and far more to lose, in her estimation. Sanchez had come alive with the realization a signal had been sent, and the possibility of an actual response to China's aggressions. She would not jeopardize it with carelessness or lack of focus.

She glanced down, checking the current time on her wristwatch. Her pacing, as always, was perfect.

THIRTY SEVEN

Late morning sunshine filtered through the canopy a hundred feet above. Beams of broken light danced off mossy green and the spray of pine needles at their feet, like a laser show at a rock concert, albeit with a greater sense of reverence.

These wooden icons
didn't prance about, drawing attention to themselves. Instead, they set a most beautiful scene; one of stillness and glory. The two men present in these magnificent surroundings, Dalton and Loch, walked quietly forward, through the grand setting that communicated such peace and authority.

Zeb reached into his left shirt pocket to remove a small figurine, given to him in General Steven's office following their final briefing. His fingertips ran over distinct segments of carefully painted wood, drawing up images in his head. An eagle: the topward, most prominent figure. The symbol of strength, clarity of sight, and wisdom—the ability to make right choices for everyone in the tribe.

Not uncommonly, Zeb knew, men and women carried tokens of some sort into battle. Most of them, though, weren't literally totems, like this one. For generations, religiously-inclined soldiers embarked on the worst of missions with medallions of Catholic Sainthood around their necks, facing mortality with a James or an Athanasius along for the ride. With over ten-thousand choices you're sure to find a good fit eventually, right? Others favored pictures of loved ones or the emblems of memberships in fraternities and societies. Whatever the form, the piece always spoke their best hopes, their trust and values in the face of possible, sometimes certain, death.