by Peter Parken
But Shelby didn’t talk, she yelled. “Nate, that lake is our safest option. I’m going to steer us over there. We’re still going to hit the water fairly fast and hard. When we get about fifty feet above the water I’m going to steer us back into the wind. That will slow us by about 15 miles per hour.”
Shelby looked at Brenda. “Do you hear me, Brenda?”
No expression on her face; no reaction to Shelby’s voice.
“I think she’s in shock, Shelby. I’ll look out for her when we land. What do you want me to do?”
“At thirty feet above the water, I want you to drop Brenda. I’ll yell out the order. You and I’ll keep drifting, so we’ll be a few feet past her when we hit. No chance then of collision. At twenty feet above the water, I’m going to disconnect you from me. You’ll then drop to the water. Do a cannonball; much safer at the speed we’ll be hitting. We’ll just have to hope for the best with Brenda—she’s not responding.”
Nate turned his head back toward her again. “Roger on that. What about you?”
“I’ll hit the water after you. But I need you to drop first well away from the parachute so that you can come after me. I’ll disconnect myself from the chute right after I disconnect you, but the chute will probably still drape on top of me—it’s so big. I might need you to free me.”
Nate just nodded and squeezed Brenda closer to his chest.
They were over the lake and drifting down fast. It was always so deceiving over water, trying to ascertain how close to the surface you were. If they dropped while they were still too high, it would be certain death. Shelby glanced at her altimeter—sixty feet, fifty feet, forty feet…
She spun them around with the toggles, tugging harder on the back toggle to open the canopy towards the wind. She was relieved that the slowdown effect was almost instantaneous.
“Drop her, Nate!”
He shook his head and held on!
“Nate—drop her!”
He shook his head again.
Shelby couldn’t wait any longer. She reached down with both hands and disconnected Nate’s harness at the three spots. He and Brenda dropped toward the water. Shelby was aware of Nate flipping his legs upward with Brenda on top.
As Shelby disconnected herself from the parachute, she could see them hitting the water with Nate in a curled sitting position, arms locked at the elbows and stretching toward the sky, holding Brenda safely above the surface of the water. He took the full force of the hit.
Shelby was free of the chute. She pulled her legs up to her chest and folded her arms over her knees, keeping her head upright. She hit the water hard, felt the searing sting in her bum. She went down deep, and then opened her eyes. Sure enough, the parachute was settling into the water right above her.
Shelby swam sideways for a bit, but then panic caused her to start reaching toward the surface. She felt disoriented—it looked as if she was past the canopy, but once she reached what she thought was the surface, it was nothing but the nylon of the parachute.
The panic was taking over—and the lightheaded feeling was starting to return. She moved along the surface, feeling the pressure on her lungs as the oxygen was quickly depleting. She kicked hard with her legs and pressed up at the surface with her hands.
But the parachute’s death shroud seemed endless. And the feeling that she was about to faint was causing fear to take over. She couldn’t think clearly. And she couldn’t scream now to chase the faintness away. If it happened now, she would surely drown.
And a thought kept nagging at her brain. She had a tool to get her out of this mess. What was that tool? She was starting to feel drowsy—had the urge to open her mouth to breathe, but something in her brain told her not to do that.
Suddenly, she felt a strong arm wrapping around her waist, and a slight pressure at the side of her hip. Pulling at something. What was it?
Then the flash of a knife, frantically tearing into the smothering fabric of death above her.
Chapter 38
Carl Masterson was sitting in his office at Fort Meade, Maryland, enjoying his morning cup of black java. He savored the aroma first, then took a long, labored sip. Ahh…the rush!
He pondered in his mind how his two assassins would pull off the jobs he’d assigned to them. Knew that they’d follow his instructions to the letter, but in a macabre way he was curious to know how they would do it.
He made the decision that Shelby Sutcliffe had to die once he’d learned from Tom Foster—before the coward disappeared—that she was only pretending to join the Class Action lawsuit, and instead had joined the Flying Machines crew to help prove their innocence. He knew that the feisty lady was going to blow the whistle at some point—perhaps even in court, allowing that slob of a lawyer, Feinstein, to think that she was going to testify that the bars disengaged on impact. When in reality she would shock the court by telling what really happened—and that she’d been threatened to testify falsely. Then everything would start unravelling. All due to words from the pretty little mouth of the star witness; someone who not only looked good, but was also a nurse, and a sympathetic character who had survived a horrific accident. She would be entirely believable.
So, it was her loss in not just going along and collecting a cool two million dollars. Now she would…simply…die. And be shut up forever. The Class Action would succeed without her testimony, and the Black Mamba episode would remain classified in official records as simply an accident.
And that John Fletcher guy—well, he was a ticking time bomb. He’d done the investigation, he’d seen the molten metal and deduced correctly that Thermate had been used to bring the rollercoaster down. The self-righteous prick had already used his wife to tip off the Flying Machines executives as to where the wreckage was—and gotten her killed in the process. And now Carl knew that Fletcher had a terminal brain tumor. So, he was not only a ticking time bomb, but also potentially a very loose cannon. Someone who had nothing, and no one, to live out his final year for. Carl was convinced that such a person could not be frightened into silence—he would be completely incapable of feeling fear.
Both of these people were dangers to the operation and they were loose ends that had to be tied.
Carl knew that he probably wouldn’t hear from his two men until both jobs were done—true to their prior modus operandi if they received an assignment to kill two or more parties related to the same case subject, the killings would usually be done around the same time. Or at least within a few short hours of each other. The reason for that was the worry that once word got out about the first death, the other one would go underground, or speak out in public about what they knew just to protect themselves.
So, Carl would wait patiently. He wouldn’t be able to totally relax until he heard that both Shelby Sutcliffe and John Fletcher had gone to the ‘great beyond.’ And, of course, it would be entertaining to hear how his two creative killers had accomplished the task. Carl always liked to enjoy the silver lining of any situation and the entertainment value provided by contract kills was always amusing to him. Sometimes, he laughed out loud at the outrageous methods these guys occasionally used. Well, he didn’t care how they did it as long as neither death looked like murder. She had to die in an accident, and he had to die in either an accident or through the appearance of suicide.
Carl stood up from behind his desk and walked over to a large map of the world that he had just purchased the other day, now hanging on his far wall. He studied the Great Lakes region, in particular Lake Erie, imagining in his mind where the tunnel’s forward movement was at that very moment. In his estimation, there would only be about five miles left to go. They were close, so close.
His eyes roamed down to the great state of California, then over to Nevada, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. These five states were in dire straits from the punishing drought, and food was going to start costing the United States a ton of money. Food they’d never had to import before would now have to be shipped in and paid for at usury price
s. Countries that America had never had to buy food from before would be licking their lips at the opportunity to stick it to them.
Their fruit would have to come from Mexico, Egypt and third world countries in the Caribbean. And their wheat and other grains would have to be bought from Canada. America’s standard of living would fall, towns and cities would fail, farmers would be thrown out of work—and the tourist trade would dry up. Who would want to fly to the United States on holiday if the lakes and rivers were dry, if green foliage had turned brown, and if they couldn’t even get a glass of water—or had to be told that the water they were sipping was simply recycled sewage?
Oil had been the propellant for America’s economy over the last century—and now water, or the lack of, threatened to kill it and also decimate the country’s superpower status. America would become a pathetically needy nation and, while no one liked needy people, a needy country was even more pitiful.
Carl’s eyes moved across the map to northern Africa, and Libya in particular. He remembered back to when they had first strategized the plan that became known as Operation Backwash. A bunch of them sitting around a large table, marvelling at what Muammar Gaddafi had pulled off in Libya. And it occurred to them that they could do exactly what he did, but it wouldn’t have to be even a fraction of the size that he designed. And they would do it in reverse.
Gaddafi had brought water from an aquifer to his cities and the driest areas of his country. The U.S. would take water from a large body of water and divert it into a depleted aquifer and the dying Mississippi.
Yes, the iconic leader of Libya, the man who preferred to sleep in a Bedouin tent at night rather than in one of his palaces, had created the world’s most ambitious civil engineering project. The man who the United States and other NATO countries had propagandized into a madman in the eyes of the world, was actually a genius. Who would have thunk it?
The Great Man-Made River Project, so named, was a vast network of pipes that drew water from the world’s largest aquifer—the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System. This aquifer was discovered by Libya in 1953 by accident while they were searching for oil reserves. Turned out that this marvel of nature had accumulated from the last Ice Age and was just sitting there waiting to be taken. So, Gaddafi, the little Bedouin genius, decided in 1983 to get the ball rolling. He stated his vision to the world: My people will have fresh water for the next 1,000 years and I will undertake a project of “greening” the desert.
The arrogant little bugger actually said that he intended his country to be “self-sufficient” and not dependent on anyone. He wanted certain parts of the Sahara to be transformed into fertile agricultural lands, providing good jobs for farmers and reducing the country’s need to import meats, fruits and vegetables.
The Western media—prodded by governments of course—declared the project as the “pipe dream of a madman.” But, by the turn of the new century, the marvel of what the man had done couldn’t be ignored any longer. Engineers around the world began referring to the GMRP as a “masterful work of engineering,” which it truly was. And the aquifer was so huge, it would indeed last for 1,000 years. Libya would indeed rise to a position of prominence, not just in the Middle East, but in the entire world.
Gaddafi installed 1,750 miles of underground pipes, making it the largest network of pipes and aqueducts on the planet. It was designed to deliver over 5 million cubic meters of water a day to cities all across Libya. Not just for drinking, but for irrigation as well, in order for Gaddafi’s dream of “greening” the desert to be realized. Palm trees started growing in places where they’d never been seen before. A full seventy percent of Libya’s citizens could turn on their taps and receive fresh water, a luxury many had never enjoyed before.
This damn Nubian aquifer was vast—the little desert-dwelling Arab had really lucked out. He’d discovered by accident that he was sitting on top of an Ice Age miracle that contained a mindboggling 100,000 cubic miles of groundwater, the world’s largest fossil aquifer system. Gaddafi had clearly been born with a horseshoe up his ass.
That all changed of course when NATO forces attacked Libya in 2011 and, instead of a horseshoe, someone shoved a knife up his ass just before he was executed. Clearly a war crime, he’d been taken prisoner and deserved to be protected under the Geneva Convention, but America and its allies had never given a shit about stuff like that in the Middle East—Arabs were just a bunch of primitive beings intent on destroying the Western way of life.
That moment and the eight months of bombing that preceded it, ended Gaddafi’s ambitious dreams for his country. He just went the way of Hussein, Noriega, and so many other dictators who’d gotten too big for their britches and had actually started believing their own headlines. We couldn’t have that happening.
Carl shook his head as he marvelled about what the little Arab had accomplished. He still couldn’t quite believe that such genius and vision came from a man who slept in a fucking tent. Who could believe that a man like that could rally the engineering talent to build almost 2,000 miles of pipe through tunnels, and drill 1,300 wells—some of them 1,500 feet deep to access the aquifer.
Carl also remembered a quote that Gaddafi had spouted to the Press back in 1991. It went something like: “After we finish this project, America’s threats against Libya will double. They will create reasons to harm us, but their real reason will be to stop this achievement and keep the people of Libya oppressed.”
Carl chuckled. How right he was! But what Gaddafi didn’t fully appreciate was his brilliance in pulling off this engineering marvel, the envy of the world, without borrowing one fucking cent from international banks! The arrogance! A measly little Arab country of only four million people was able to build this monstrosity without a single dollar of debt. Hell, in America, with a population of 300 million, we can’t even build a fucking bridge without borrowing money!
Gaddafi never really saw it coming though. First, there were the ‘Arab Springs’ popping up across the Middle East—first Tunisia, then Egypt, then Libya—and eventually Syria. Each of those uprisings were stirred up and manufactured by the CIA and other intelligence agencies of the West.
No, Gaddafi just never saw it coming. That alone showed how stupid and naïve he really was. Maybe he wasn’t such a genius after all? Did he really think the world would allow a primitive Arab in a tent to rise to such prominence, waving the resource stick in our face? He already had oil, now he had water. How much more would he want? Well, he had already started musing about an Arab currency for oil sales—ignoring the American dollar as the reserve currency. Sorry—not an option, Muammar.
The bombs and missiles started falling in 2011, and eight months later it was over. NATO decided it had a moral obligation to intervene in the civil war that had been fired up and stoked by the CIA. By the time the intervention was over, parts of the engineering marvel that Gaddafi had created were destroyed, slamming the Libyan people back fifty years. Now, instead of seventy percent of the people having access to fresh water, it was only forty percent.
And the little dictator had been executed. Carl didn’t know the whole story, but from what he did know, the NATO attacks had been most aggressively supported by France. For the first time in their modern military history, France had led the way for NATO. Which Carl always thought was kind of strange—and added credence to reports that surfaced in 2012 that a certain prominent French politician had conspired with Libya to have his 2007 re-election campaign financed by Libyan money—to the tune of fifty million Euros. And added credence also to reports that a French assassin had infiltrated the “mob” that had dragged Gaddafi kicking and screaming out of a sewer pipe. And that after that knife was brutally rammed up Gaddafi’s ass, this same assassin put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Because a dead Gaddafi wouldn’t be able to talk about his special relationship with France.
And to this day, the Libyan people, who were now suffering once again from water shortages, probably weren�
�t aware that tanker ships were leaving Libya’s harbors every week laden with water destined for the United States of America.
Chapter 39
Volunteers with the Virginia Sky Pilots hunted around the countryside for two hours until they found it. Six of them in four-wheel-drive Jeeps scoured the land until they saw an anomaly. A gray sack lying in a field of dandelions.
When they returned to the hangar with the prize, Nate was sitting in a corner with Shelby. He had his arm around her shoulders, which were wrapped in a warm blanket. She’d changed into a dry set of clothes from her locker when they returned. Nate’s clothes were still wet, but he didn’t care. They’d be fine until he got home, and it was still so hot outside that he welcomed the feel of moist clothes against his skin.
But Shelby was a different story. She was shivering despite the ninety degree heat, and Nate knew it was probably more from the shock of what she’d gone through. She’d managed to hold it together during their desperate freefall flight and expertly took care of all of the details to get them safely down into the lake. And had managed to fight off the fainting spells the entire time they were in peril. But landing in the water and getting stuck under the chute had taken its toll on her.
After Nate had succeeded in tearing through the nylon parachute with Shelby’s knife, they broke through the surface, desperate to just breathe again. They gulped it in, both panting heavily, but once the joy of breathing fresh air again was over, they realized they would have to just tread water—there was nowhere to go. They were stuck with their heads popped through a four foot opening in the nylon. Nate used the knife again to make the opening a bit larger but they couldn’t swim until they cut the thing right through to the edge.
Both of them were having a tough time at that point, but especially Shelby. She was exhausted, and told him that she felt a fainting spell coming on again. Nate urged her to just scream away and she did. It helped, but she still seemed disoriented.