by JT Brannan
The attitude of the agents towards him was one of hostility and barely controlled violence. It was just a matter of minutes though, and a radio message received through their earpieces relaxed their demeanours completely; although still suspicious, they had obviously been told he wasn’t the bad guy.
Cole had asked again and again to see the President, but to no avail. But then a thought had occurred to him.
‘Tell her the Asset wants to see her,’ he had told the nearest agent, and then – much to his surprise and relief – his request was granted just five short minutes later.
And now he sat before her in the Oval Office, china cup of specially brewed coffee in his hands. He knew her own mind must have been going at a thousand miles an hour, her emotional state off the charts – her own bodyguard, a man she had entrusted her life to for the past two years, had just tried to kill her – but Cole could detect almost no hint of distress in her manner. She was cool and calm, just as she appeared on TV, although she looked at him with a barely concealed curiosity.
‘So what is it you need to tell me?’ she said at last.
37
An hour later, Cole’s briefing was complete. In addition to a verbal explanation of the events, Cole had also shown her on a computer his entire collection of evidence from the downloaded files.
Ten minutes into the briefing, Abrams had called in the Director of the Secret Service and demanded the immediate arrest of all the names on the list. She also asked for Elizabeth Harden to be taken straight into an interview room as soon as she regained consciousness.
Half an hour later, the meeting was again interrupted as Grayson came back in, saying that none of the people named on the list had been found. It was almost as if they had been warned, and fled at the last minute. He was instructed to order a nationwide alert for them, and left again to make the necessary arrangements.
As Cole drew to an end of his briefing, Abrams regarded him with her intelligent eyes. ‘You’re really quite a man, Mr Cole,’ she said in admiration. ‘And something of a legend. The Asset …’ She trailed off, deep in thought, and Cole wondered if his services had been used by Abrams herself at some stage in the past. It was more than likely, he decided.
‘There is a lot I need to do now,’ she continued finally, ‘as I am sure you will appreciate, but I hope to learn more about you when we have the time. I trust you’ll stay here and help with the investigation? I’ll be tied up with sorting things out with Danko and Feng, but we could use your help with tracking these people.’
Cole cleared his throat and put his cup of coffee – his fourth since starting the briefing – down on the antique cherry wood table that sat between the two sofas in the middle of the oval room.
‘Ma’am,’ he began sincerely, ‘I’m afraid that is not going to be possible.’
He went on to tell her about his family, their travels across Europe to Austria, their psychotic pursuer, and his treacherous old friend Steinmeier.
Abrams expressed her shock and sympathy, considering the matter. ‘We don’t have any local forces unfortunately, nothing useful we can get there within forty-eight hours or so,’ she said with regret, sorry she could not help the man who had saved her life and given her the information she needed to put a stop to the escalating events of the past few days. ‘Is there anything else I can do to help?’
It was Cole’s turn to pause as he thought. Finally, he looked up at her. ‘Is the Aurora available for a little trip?’
38
The FBI Washington Field Office SWAT Team descended on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence just before midnight, on the direct order of the President.
Phone calls to the ODNI’s own security staff had confirmed that Charles Hansard was still on the premises – he had not signed out, nobody had seen him leave, and his car was still in its reserved spot in the secure underground parking lot.
The team had marched through the office complex, led to Hansard’s office by the head of the building’s security force.
They marched straight in, weapons aimed and handcuffs ready.
There was nobody there.
The SWAT team, along with the ODNI security team, searched the building for more than an hour. They searched the grounds. They reviewed the central CCTV recordings.
But there was no sign whatsoever of Vice Admiral Charles Hansard, Director of National Security for the United States of America, and now a wanted fugitive.
39
The B-780 Super Wing was the US government’s physical incarnation of the ‘project Aurora’ myth, a stealth plane with the capability to achieve hypersonic flight in excess of Mach 6. The existence of such an aircraft had been consistently denied by the US military, but when Cole requested its usage, Abrams didn’t even bother lying. It was clear Cole knew of its existence from classified documents, which revealed it to be an incredibly advanced long-range bomber which was completely undetectable by even the most finely-tuned radar currently in existence.
Abrams immediately arranged for one of the craft to be fuelled and flown directly from its secret base at Groom Lake in the Nevada desert to Andrews Air Force Base, where Cole would be taken by Marine helicopter.
The distance from Andrews to Kreith near Innsbruck in Austria was over four thousand miles. In a conventional aircraft, that might take up to eight hours; in a fast fighter jet, it would still take three, not including the necessary re-fuelling intervals. As he stood in the hanger, dressed in a dark blue flight suit, Cole looked at his watch. It was now midnight, and every second counted.
The Aurora would get him over the hamlet of Kreith in less than an hour.
40
‘Good luck,’ David Grayson said to Cole in the air-conditioned hanger. The Director of the Secret Service had accompanied Cole to Andrews as the President’s own representative, being one of the people she could still trust. Cole took Grayson’s offered hand, shaking it firmly.
‘The President has found you some backup after a fashion – she’s made arrangements for a Marine Force Recon team on exercise with Dutch special forces in Holland to fly over, but they’ll be at least three hours,’ Grayson told him.
Cole nodded his head. ‘Tell her thanks from me,’ he said. ‘But it’ll all be over by then, one way or another.’
41
The Aurora aircraft was unlike anything Cole had ever seen. Secrecy surrounding the plane meant that all Andrews aircrew had been replaced with specialists from Groom Lake, much to the chagrin of the base commander; Cole was honoured to be amongst only a handful of men and women in the world who had seen it.
It was not entirely unlike a schoolboy’s paper aeroplane – it was low, wide and very flat, in a very characteristic triangular shape with the wings turned up at each end. It was painted a dull gunmetal grey, but was captivating in its eerily alien quality.
A runner came over and escorted him to the side of the aircraft. The crew of two was already undergoing their pre-flight checks in the narrow, pointed cockpit at the front, and Cole was invited to climb a small ramp into the side entry door. A man waited for him there, helping him aboard, and then the ramp was removed and the door swung shut with a heavy clunk, the man securing it from the inside.
‘Welcome aboard sir,’ said the man, without offering a name.
‘Thanks,’ said Cole. ‘Have you got what I asked for?’
‘Sure have,’ the man replied. ‘You must be one crazy son of a bitch.’
42
Just over forty-five minutes later, the flight engineer helped Cole change into the large, bulky suit. He checked the gauges and the monitors, and made sure that the extra equipment boxes were securely fastened to the suit, placed so as not to affect the aerodynamics of the fall.
Although the Aurora was travelling at more than four thousand miles per hour, high above the cloud level near the edge of space, Cole curiously didn’t feel the sensation of speed. In the pressurized cabin, it was surprisingly serene and comfortable. Cole knew that
this sensation wouldn’t last for long, however, and he would soon be anything but comfortable.
Both men turned as they saw the warning light flash on next to them, and the engineer picked up the heavy helmet and secured it in place onto the reinforced neck of Cole’s suit.
‘It’s time.’
43
The bomb doors were lowered and Cole found himself looking down through his tinted visor to the cloud layer miles below him. He checked the coordinates on his wrist computer, and knew the bomb mechanism would soon release him.
The suit he wore was somewhat akin to an astronaut’s, but he still felt a chill as the wind whipped past him at incredible speed, although the Aurora had now slowed its approach to a relatively modest Mach 1.
Cole could see both the sun and the moon across the horizon, so high he could see the incredible curve of the planet itself, and then he was released. The immediate drop knocked the wind out of him, his stomach seemingly left behind in the bomb bay, and then he was caught by the slip stream and found himself tumbling and twisting wildly through the thin air thirty miles above the world.
44
The freefall had lasted an incredible seven minutes, during which time Cole truly wondered whether he would live. Falling though the upper atmosphere in the limited air, his streamlined body had broken the sound barrier, although he had not heard anything through his helmet.
But he had seen the world around him as he first fell, the curve of the earth flattening out as he reached the cloud layer, and then he was shooting through those clouds and out the other side before he even had a chance to realize, through and travelling to the earth at over seven hundred miles per hour.
He had performed countless parachute jumps in the past, both in training and on operations; high altitude jumps, low altitude jumps, he had done them all. But he had never done anything like this, freefalling from the edge of space out of the bomb doors of a secret stealth aircraft. A normal high-altitude jump was done from 35,000 feet; Cole was jumping from 120,000 feet, which was why he needed the helmet and the special suit – without them, the pressure and lack of oxygen at such a height would kill him within seconds. Such a high altitude jump had certainly not been done before in quite the same way, and it was unlikely to ever be done again.
He had managed to control the tumbling effect soon after he had been released, forcing his body into the right shape to attack the atmosphere, flying straight down, head first like a human arrow.
It was pitch black, and he just had to rely on his instruments. Moving his hands from their position at his sides at this speed would have radically compromised his stability however, and he was glad to have a secondary set of instruments on his chest, angled upwards so that he could see them.
He still couldn’t see the ground, but saw that his coordinates were good. His altimeter read one hundred thousand feet, and he started to angle his body, flattening it until he was spread out, his speed decreasing slightly in relation to the increase in surface area he now presented. He stabilized in that position, and then checked the altimeter again. Twenty thousand feet.
He opened the chute, and immediately felt the shock of the huge braking effect generated by the billowing canopy, pulling him seemingly back up into the sky.
He could have pulled the chute lower – common practice to get in under the radar – but he knew Steinmeier didn’t have such a system, and whoever was at the house would simply be making best use of the Mark One Eyeball, and human eyesight would be unlikely to pick up the black camouflaged parachute against the pitch dark, cloudy night sky. The controlled descent from 20,000 feet, however, would give him the time necessary to deploy his other equipment.
45
As the parachute sank slowly towards the earth, Cole started to be able to make out the house below and slightly off to the southwest.
Steinmeier’s house was situated on a minor road off the L227 through Kreith, a large, three-storey Alpine chalet-style detached house at the end of a long driveway. The approach road had a fair few houses, and then the land was wooded before opening out to fields around the house. Visibility around the property was good, which was probably one of the reasons it had been chosen.
Cole knew the layout of the house, and of the grounds, and knew where lookouts and sentries would be posted, if Hansard had had time to arrange such things.
He was never going to be able to see anyone ten thousand feet below and hidden in the tree line, so he locked in his course, let go of the parachute’s steering handles, and pulled off the helmet from the suit’s neckpiece.
The cold hit him even through his woollen balaclava, but the helmet’s removal was necessary if he was to use the equipment he had brought with him; equipment that would even the odds and give him a chance to make it to the house and rescue his family.
46
By the time he was at eight thousand feet, Cole had the Zeiss M-760 thermal-imaging night-vision goggles secured around his head, the butt of the Accuracy International Arctic Warfare Super Magnum sniper rifle nestled securely into his shoulder.
The rifle was engineered for cold weather conditions, and was one of the most accurate rifles available – reports said that back in 2009 a British sniper had killed two Taliban machine gunners in Afghanistan from 2,475m away, which equated to more than a mile and a half.
The conditions for that kill had been perfect, however, which was definitely at odds with what Cole now faced. Not only would he be firing from an unstable platform high in the air above the house, but the weather was bad, visibility nonexistent, and he would be using a modified sight.
To make his shots count, he was going to have to account for current altitude, his drop in altitude that would occur between the pull of the trigger and the bullet leaving the barrel as he continued his parachute descent, the effect of the wind for both the normal current, and the unnatural altitude-induced ground effect. They would be the hardest shots he would ever have to make.
47
As he descended closer, goggles sweeping the area constantly, he began to pick up the eerie, red and yellow images of people stationed around the house, contrasted against the luminous green of the background night vision.
There were six of them stationed in the grounds directly surrounding the house, with six more spread out through the tree line, below and to the front of him as he drifted in from the north east.
The rifle’s magazine held six rounds only, and he knew he would not have time to reload – by the time he had fired six shots and reloaded, he would already have landed. Therefore, each shot would have to count.
It made more sense to use his altitude and the element of surprise to go for the men in the tree line with the six rounds. They would be snipers, using trees for cover as they monitored the grounds. If Cole took out the men around the house instead of the snipers, he would be shot as soon as he landed. He therefore decided to leave the grounds guards for later, and dedicate his initial resources into getting rid of the snipers.
From his current altitude he could just make out their positions, seemingly prone on the ground with sniper rifles of their own, completely unaware of Cole coming in towards them from above.
The faint, coloured images were small, ridiculously so, but Cole made mental notes of each of their positions, and clicked up the goggles from his face.
He then pulled his rifle in and up, his right eye fitting into the rubberized cup of the modified Zeiss sniper scope, which was essentially a barrel-mounted version of the goggles, including close magnification of the thermal night vision image.
As Cole descended through the thin, cold night air, he selected his first target, on the far left.
He controlled his breathing, his right eye concentrating fully on the fuzzy thermal image of the sentry. He checked windings, adjusted the sight according to all the other factors he had considered, checked his aim again, breathed out slowly, held the breath, and caressed the trigger.
48
Six thousand feet be
low and five hundred feet ahead, Shane Trejo lay on the soft loam of the pine forest floor and waited, checking the house through his own night vision scope.
Dan Albright and some of his men were already in the house, some guarding directly outside, whilst Trejo and five others covered fields of fire from the safety of the tree line.
He had already been there nearly six hours, and was coming up for relief, changing positions with someone inside the house, which meant he would be able to get some food and a hot drink.
He moved his left hand around and checked the luminous dial of his watch. It was 11.42pm, just eighteen minutes until his break. He turned to look back down through the sight, but never made it, as a 300-grain .338 Lapua Magnum bullet entered the top of his spine from the top right, blowing half of his left rib cage out across the soft loamy ground as it exited his body in an explosion of blood and cartilage.
49
One down, Cole registered, even as he turned the fearsome weapon towards the memorized location of the second sentry.
Again, he made the adjustment, controlled the breath, caressed the trigger. The red and yellow figure in his sight visibly slumped down, and although Cole couldn’t be sure where the bullet had entered, he knew it had struck home – and if it had struck home, the man would be dead, it was as simple as that.
Four thousand feet. Third target … Target down.
Three thousand feet. Fourth target … Target down.
Two thousand feet. Fifth target … Target down.
One thousand feet. Sixth target.
Cole was close now, dangerously close, and even though the weapon was suppressed, even the racking of the bolt was enough to give position away, travelling uninterrupted across the cool night sky.