It was difficult to hear Stevens’ voice through Morgan’s helmet, especially since the sound had to travel from the speaker on the wall through the rapidly thinning atmosphere air in the cabin as they approached 40,000 feet.
They couldn’t use helmet radios because any radio signals could, potentially, be “heard” by the Chinese. So there had been no transmissions from the aircraft for hours.
“Entering Tibetan airspace, sirs,” Stevens said. Morgan gave him a nod. Well, as a practical matter, they were entering Chinese airspace, since the people of Tibet had no more control of their sky then they did over their land. They’d lost that control to the Chinese army in 1950.
However, that was not the reason Morgan and Conley were there today. Their mission was much more…targeted.
“I’m coordinating with our CIA and naval contacts. They will be ready for you on the other side,” Stevens said.
Morgan felt his blood run cold and shot Conley a look. “You’re kidding me,” he said.
“Stevens, we may have a change of plans,” he called out.
“Sir?” Stevens said.
“Morgan…” Conley began.
“We talked about this,” Morgan cut in. “I don’t work with the CIA. Ever. What part of that do you have trouble with?”
“There is no CIA directly involved,” Conley said.
“What?”
Conley turned to Stevens. “What’s their role here?”
“Logistics and support, Mr. Conley,” the young man offered. “We’re using their naval liaison,” Stevens continued nervously, clearly not knowing what was going on.
“Indirect…paperwork mostly,” Conley said. “Barely even errand boys on this one.”
“What part of no—” Morgan began, his temper rising.
“The country needs this mission, Morgan. You know why we’re here, you know it’s true,” Conley said evenly.
That stopped Morgan cold, as Conley knew it would.
“One day you’re going to play that card and it’s not going to work,” Morgan said.
“Not in this lifetime and you know it,” Conley said, the easy smile back on his face.
Morgan felt his anger slowly melting away.
“Stevens, why don’t you tell your CIA contact to—”
“Morgan,” Conley interrupted.
“Tell them to what? What’s the message, sir?” Stevens asked.
“No message,” Conley replied. “Don’t make trouble for him. It’s not the kid’s fault,” Conley said to Morgan.
“No, it’s yours,” Morgan shot back.
Conley checked the clock on the wall. “Almost time to go to work,” Conley said.
“Opening the jump door in two minutes,” Stevens called. “Good luck, sirs,” he added.
Both men waited until they heard the click as the door started opening. The plane jolted as the opening changed its aerodynamics before leveling out.
Looking out at the open door, Morgan saw a nearly black sky. Beneath that, he could actually see the curvature of the Earth. Well, they were in the stratosphere. And the air pressure was closer to the vacuum of space than it was to standard air pressure at sea level.
He felt the additional chill. Though their protective jumpsuits were the best available—knowing Shepard, probably better—there was no getting around the fact that it was 70 degrees below zero out there.
He and Conley worked quickly. They disconnected their oxygen hoses from the fuselage of the plane and re-connected them to the small bottles of oxygen at their waists. Then they checked the line that tethered them together at the hip, and the smaller one that connected their helmets.
The helmet tether had been Morgan’s contribution. Shepard and his engineers had struggled with a communications system for Morgan and Conley on their way down. Simple radio would have been best, but any signals risked being picked up by Chinese satellites, a particular concern given where they were going.
At Zeta headquarters, Morgan had watched the engineers squabble over how strong a signal would be safe for hours. The next day, he’d told Shepard he’d cracked their problem and tossed the young man two soup cans connected by a dozen feet of string.
Now he and his partner were depending on a variation of the same system to keep in touch during their fall to Earth.
Morgan took a few breaths and knew the pressure in their helmets was good; the low-oxygen, low-pressure atmosphere outside would have rendered them unconscious in less than thirty seconds if the helmets weren’t working.
He and Conley made their way to the back of the plane and the jump platform. The digital clock above was counting down from sixty seconds.
Then forty seconds.
Morgan gazed out at the Earth and was struck by fact that it appeared as if they were literally jumping into space.
He shot Conley a look.
Ten seconds…
He kept his eyes forward, finishing the countdown in his head.
When he was a kid, he had briefly dreamed of becoming an astronaut.
Well, now was his chance.
Two…
One…
Morgan and Conley jumped at the same time.
His first thought was that they were falling too fast. Morgan had been on jumps before, but not from anywhere near this height, and none of them had felt anything like this. The almost non-existent air pressure didn’t provide the normal pushback, and the acceleration was startling. Yet they had to work quickly. Morgan maneuvered himself until he and Conley were both falling face down and he felt the tether at his hip pull tight.
Then he counted to three and spread his arms and legs open, engaging the lift areas of his wingsuit as Conley did the same. Almost immediately, their downward velocity was cut in half as they glided forward, the GPS units on their right wrists telling them which direction to go.
Together, the two men adjusted their position until their heading was correct.
The normal glide ratio for this sort of jump was 2:1, or two feet forward for every 1 foot down. Because of the distance to the landing site, they would have to do a little better, but Morgan trusted that the modifications Shepard had made in the suits would get them there.
Morgan gave his head a slight tug to the left, tightening the second tether that connected their helmets.
Conley’s voice filled the air around him.
“How you doin’ over there, Morgan?”
“Okay, but I’m thinking of complaining to the airline,” he replied. “There really ought to be a meal on a flight that long.”
“I hear you brother. Not even peanuts,” Conley replied.
“And no movie.”
“I was almost glad when they opened the door and kicked us out the back,” Conley said, with a chuckle.
The ground still seemed a long way from them. “How do our numbers look?”
“Heading…airspeed…all solid,” Conley said. “We’ve got a ways to go, but we should hit the target.”
That was good. If they didn’t hit their mark precisely, they would miss their even narrower time window. If they were even a mile or two off, they would lose precious time walking to the base. And that meant they would almost certainly run into the soon-to-be-visiting Chinese General and his honor guard.
There were fifty things that could go wrong on this mission if everything went according to plan. The last thing they needed was to face another couple of dozen heavily armed, highly trained, and dangerous troops.
After a couple of minutes in the air, Morgan realized the activity, adrenaline, and exhilaration of flight had almost made him forget the cold. Now that they were more than halfway down it was a bit warmer, or rather, less freezing—barely ten below zero.
By now they were close enough to the ground that Morgan could see mountains and hills. He checked his own headi
ng and identified the mountains that ringed their landing site.
“I see it too,” Conley said.
They dropped a little altitude and adjusted their course for approach.
“There,” Morgan said, getting his first visual of the small space between the two mountains north of the objective.
“Approach is good. Altitude is good. Speed is right on the money,” Conley said. “Thank you for flying—”
And then they dropped.
To Morgan it felt like a giant hand was pushing him down for several long seconds. Then the hand let up.
“What the…”
“Downdraft,” Conley spat out.
They were losing altitude fast, too fast.
Less than two miles away, the pass loomed. It was straight ahead, the bottom of the pass just below their flight path. At this rate, if they were very careful and very lucky when they reached the mountains they would be just a couple of hundred feet below the lip of the pass—which meant they would hit the rocky face of the mountain at a couple of hundred miles an hour.
Morgan had been concerned that there were fifty things that could kill them on this mission.
Turns out it would only take one.
Chapter 2
“Angling up,” Morgan said.
“Just a little,” Conley replied.
They could gain some altitude now, but it would cost them speed, which would cost them distance. In the long run, it would still cost them altitude as they lost momentum and started dropping out of the sky.
“Level out. That’s a little better,” Conley said.
“Better as in we’ll make it? Or as in we’ll almost make it but still hit the side of the mountain?”
“Could go either way,” Conley said. “If we hit, it will be higher up the mountain at least.”
“We need to work on our plan,” Morgan said.
“We can abort if we do it in the next twenty seconds, but then we’ll be walking home.”
They had both understood from the beginning that there would be no extraction. They would have to get their own ride out, and that would happen only if they succeeded in their mission.
Morgan did a little math in his head. “Well, there’s definitely a chance we’ll make it.”
“Exactly,” Conley said.
“I’d hate to walk home,” Morgan said.
“And I’m looking forward to our new ride,” Conley said.
That was all the conversation they needed. It was decided. Morgan counted off in his head and then watched as they passed over their last chance to pull their chutes and end the mission early.
And then they dropped again. Not as fast or as far as before, but it was enough. At their current course and speed, they would slam into the mountain ahead of them in less than a minute.
He heard Conley muttering.
Morgan saw the ground rising up—not because they were falling but because the ground under them was now part of the mountain rising to meet them.
“Two thousand feet,” Conley said.
Not enough.
“I have an idea,” Conley continued. “Angle down, about thirty degrees.”
That didn’t make sense. That would get them to the side of the mountain quicker, but he didn’t argue.
“Mark” Conley said.
Morgan angled himself downward.
They raced toward the ground.
“Pull up,” Conley said.
They angled back up and then leveled off at twenty four hundred feet. Pretty good given that they were about 1,000 feet out.
But their speed was down and their 2-to-1 glide ratio was closer to 1.5.
They would never make the pass unless they hit an…
Updraft.
It forced them up as fast and as hard as that first downdraft, though not for as long.
But it was long enough to put them just over the bottom of the pass…maybe.
Morgan could see the mountain below them, almost close enough to touch. He kept his concentration and his focus forward. They’d either hit the rocks below…or miss them.
In three.
Two.
One.
Morgan and Conley shot out through the pass and into the open air, their altitude increasing as the mountain fell away from them.
There were five hundred feet between the two men and the ground. Then a thousand, then two.
Morgan let out his breath.
“Nice,” Conley said. “Close enough for you?”
“Just right,” Morgan said.
“Two o’clock,” Conley said.
“I see it,” Morgan replied.
What happened next was relatively easy. They kept their eyes on the landing site as they detached their hip tether.
“See you on the ground,” Conley said.
Then they disconnected the helmet line, breaking their communications link, which was fine, since they didn’t need it for this part.
Morgan watched his position and altitude.
Seven hundred feet.
Then six. Five hundred was the floor, the lowest they could go and still have a good jump—a jump they would walk away from.
Of course, that would only work if the chutes deployed. If the parachutes failed, they still had their reserves—which would open at almost precisely the same instant they hit the ground.
Morgan pulled his ripcord and felt the tug of the open chute. His peripheral vision told him that Conley’s parachute had deployed as well.
The landing was softer than Morgan had anticipated. He kept to his feet and didn’t have to roll, which was fine with him, given the weapons and other gear he was carrying.
A few seconds after he hit the ground, Conley came down a few yards away. By then Morgan had his mask off. “Glad you could make it,” he said.
Pulling his own mask off, Conley said, “You made it down first, but I hit the bull’s-eye.”
Morgan saw that Conley was dead center in the circular clearing that was their landing target.
“So we’re tied,” Conley said. “And congratulations, we just set the world record for horizontal distance on a HALO jump from 40,000 feet. Of course, no one outside of Zeta will ever know.”
Morgan grinned. That was the life they had chosen. “Now for the hard part.”
The two men collected their jumpsuits, helmets, and masks and dropped them into a Mylar bag with one of Shepard’s incendiaries. Morgan set the timer on the explosive for four hours. Whether they succeeded or failed, they had to make sure there would be no way to trace the operation back to Zeta, or the United States.
Morgan inventoried his weapons. Two of his Walther PPK pistols were holstered around his waist. He assembled his sniper rifle while Conley did the same. They also turned on the phones and ear comms that they had turned off during their descent.
A few minutes later, they were looking down on the Chinese military base. It was nestled inside a ring of mountains, the tops of which the two agents had barely cleared during their jump.
Conley recognized the layout from the satellite photos and the interactive computer walk-through that Shepard and O’Neal had created. The dominant feature was an airstrip that ran most of the length of the “valley” that held the base. At one end was the hangar that held their objective. At the other end there was a physical plant that held the generators and water pumps that fed the base, as well as offices and troop dormitories.
Fortunately, those dormitories would be mostly empty. The base had a small garrison of soldiers, whose main job was making sure that no locals wandered in.
“Impressive, for an installation that doesn’t exist,” Conley said.
Morgan agreed. “Of course, they are about to be taken down by agents who don’t exist.”
And if all went well, the Chinese woul
d lose their prize new fighter jet that also didn’t exist—at least not yet. According to official reports, the aircraft was not going to be ready for another two years. Intelligence suggested that this plane could rival the F-22. By itself, those two pieces of information weren’t critical.
Misinformation about timelines for new military hardware was standard for most nations. And even if the plane was a match for the F-22, the Chinese couldn’t hope to match the sheer number of fighters in the United States’ arsenal.
No, the real reason they were there was because of the new weapons system that the plane contained. According to Diana Bloch, the new system was top secret and even if Zeta’s contacts in the government knew what it was, they weren’t saying.
But if all went well, the plane and any secrets it held would be in U.S. hands by the end of the day.
“Okay, we know the drill. Power first,” Morgan said.
“Copy that,” Conley said.
Their landing site had placed them almost directly behind the low building that held the generators.
However, their first stop would be the rear of the administrative offices a few hundred meters to their right. If they kept to the rocky base of the mountain behind them, they would be hard to spot. The agents took up position about 600 yards beyond the storage shed in the back of the building.
Intel said that it held office equipment and cleaning supplies. It was the least important location on the base. It was also their first stop.
Both men took position with their sniper rifles. Usually, Morgan didn’t favor the .308—it was small caliber and low power. As a result, it was almost impossible to get a kill shot past 700 yards with the weapon; the rounds just didn’t have the momentum. But the benefit for this mission was that the rifle was low in weight, and thus worked for the HALO jump. It was also perfect for this particular application.
Morgan and Conley took their positions and set up the rifles on their tripods. Morgan noted the wind and temperature, and did some quick calculations in his head. Then he adjusted the gun until one of the two small security cameras came up dead center in his scope.
He knew Conley was doing the same to the other camera.
Threat Level Alpha Page 2