“Of course not. I agree with your thought to get them off the system, like we did with Olivia’s daughter. No FBI handlers. No FBI safe houses. And bring them down here, where we have options. I completely believe that if we continue operating this way, Hastings won’t find us because he doesn’t have any moles planted in our little group, so he’s probably pretty frustrated since he’s used to getting his own way all the time. I’m just questioning the timing given that we were almost caught. Do you think it is safe to go get them now?”
“I don’t have a choice,” he said. “I have to try. The longer I wait, the higher the chances of Hastings finding out the location of their new hideout.”
Angela patted him on the shoulder. She understood of course. Family was family, and Riggs was willing to do whatever it took to ensure their safety just as she had done from the moment Jack vanished off the screens.
“You do what you need to do,” she finally told him. “Just be careful. There’s a chance he could be using your family as bait.”
“I know. I will.”
“Then I’m going with you,” Pete said. “In case you need backup.”
Angela looked at both of them, her stomach souring at the thought of them walking right into a trap, but again, she couldn’t argue with rescuing family. “Atlanta’s a seven-hour drive,” she said. “If you leave now you can be there before noon and be back in the evening.”
Angela watched them drive away, before turning to Dago and Art-Z.
“Ready to turn up the heat?”
* * *
She had already anticipated the heat he would be experiencing during a fitting session and had lowered the thermostat to sixty degrees, turning the beachfront into a meat locker.
Jack wore the undergarment plus the battle gear underneath the dry suit before stepping into the one-piece restraining layer, which she zipped up to his neck while Dago sat in the corner, wrapped up in a blanket, his massive hands holding a cup of steaming coffee.
“How does it feel?”
He walked around the room, stretching his arms, moving up and down and to the sides, before slowly dropping to a crouch and standing back up.
“I can move in it,” he said. “At least before pressurization. And it’s lighter than the OSS. Is it going to hold?”
“It’ll do the job,” she said in a reassuring tone. “Plus it’s still missing layers and most of the plumbing.”
She made adjustments, took measurements, tucking this and that, working the neck, stiffening the edges that would meet the helmet’s base with stainless steel wire, which she looped multiple times around the opening, leaving enough space for Jack’s head, before folding the nylon over the wire frame and hand-stitching a seam all around using Nomex thread, careful not to stab him with the curved needle, going over it several times until she felt it was sturdy enough.
She reinforced it with a circle of half-inch-wide nylon lanyard, again hand-stitching it before turning her attention to the sleeves, also getting them ready to accept the Russian gloves.
“All right,” she said, holding a measuring tape and tailor chalk to mark the locations where she would insert the rubber restraint joint mechanisms to help localize air displacement.
Jack knew exactly what she was doing, having been through this more times than he cared to remember. The concept was to place those rubberized structures so that bending one joint, like an elbow or a knee, didn’t result in another joint being forced to move due to the air pressure inside the suit.
Angela applied marks to the elbow areas as well as the knees, shoulders, and upper thighs, before also marking the spot across the shoulders where she would fasten perforated metal ribbons to keep the upper section structurally sound to allow Jack freedom of movement during the jump. The ribbons also formed the foundation for the heat shields.
It lasted close to two hours, and Jack was glad to be out of it probably as much as Dago, who had bailed on them and waited out back, sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs watching the waves. Jack joined him after helping Angela lay out the suit on the dining room table.
“Too cold for you, man?”
“Brrr,” the biker replied. “I’m a south Florida guy. Don’t get how people live up north.”
“I just reset the thermostat. Should be back to normal in a little while,” Jack said, sitting down next to him.
“I gotta tell you, Jack, these have got to be the most bizarre days of my life. What a mind fuck.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Especially for Angie. She’s still in there working on the suit I’ll use to leave this world. I don’t think she’s slept much in the past couple of days.”
Dago crossed his arms. “She did that before, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“After you … died, she spent time down at the shop.”
“I didn’t know that.”
The biker kept his gaze on the breaking waves. “Getting her hands dirty somehow helped her process her loss. She would work for days on end overhauling engines, rebuilding transmissions, welding frames—doing anything to keep from thinking about you.”
Jack stared at him.
“And I’m afraid she’s doing it again in there. She’s already began her mourning process … even before you leave.”
“Yeah. Assuming I can leave. We still need to get that solar antenna from Pete,” he said, before pointing a finger at the sky. “Plus find a way to get me back up there.”
Jack headed back inside after a while and helped Angela cut the aluminized Mylar panels, deciding that three layers should be enough insulation buffer from the outer layer of flexible insulation material. As expected, the latter was the hardest to manage because it was so bulky, but together they marked it and cut it, before stressing the sewing machine during stitching.
By mid-afternoon the suit had all of the layers it would need, and it was time for another fitting, which ran Dago out of the house.
Jack got dressed layer after layer, doing it by himself, starting with the undergarment and the battle dress, followed by the dry suit, the restraining layer, which had the Mylar layered over its surface, and finally the outer shell.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Again, Jack walked around, feeling the weight, deciding that he could still manage by himself. The suit was certainly bulkier than the OSS, and that was before pressurization. But he gave her a thumbs-up.
Angela helped him out of it, but told him to keep the liquid-cooled undergarment on.
“Time for a little test,” she said after they took the suit back to the dinner table.
“What kind of test?”
“Stand still, Jack,” she ordered, taking a few minutes to connect a modified aquarium pump to the manifold built into the garment at waist level.
She plugged it in and the pump began to circulate the thermal liquid, which was distributed over four quadrants, two symmetrically for both the upper and lower body. No active heating would be incorporated into the closed system, but Angela felt that the parasitic heat transfer from Jack’s body should be enough to keep his temperature reasonably comfortable as long as the outer layers—especially the Mylar and outer shell—did their jobs.
Temperature control would be critical during the ascent phase, and Angela planned to use a pair of car batteries connected to an inverter to generate the required AC current to drive not just the aquarium pump but also the pressurization and oxygen delivery system.
Once he jumped, however, Jack would be at the mercy of a small oxygen canister to deliver air until he reached normal atmospheric conditions.
“Seems to be working,” she said, walking around Jack to inspect the entire garment. “I don’t see any leaks. Circulation looks nominal.”
“Good,” he said.
She unplugged him and he changed back into jeans and a T-shirt.
“Tomorrow I’ll work on the plumbing,” she said, returning to the table and taking more measurements. “While you and Dago fetch me the l
ast components.”
Jack nodded, grabbed two beers, and headed back outside.
“Here you go,” he said, handing one to the biker, still staring at the ocean.
“Thanks, Jack,” he replied, tipping it toward him before sitting down.
They drank in silence, listening to the sea, the evening breeze whistling.
Jack gazed into the dark horizon, letting his eyes get used to the darkness, like he did in his SEAL days, scanning the ocean beyond the breaking waves, remembering the training at Coronado, the insertions, the missions, the—
Dago stood, walking up to the short railing. “It’s peaceful out here,” he said.
But Jack had stopped listening, his eyes trying to focus on a shadow just beyond the break and the silvery surf.
Squinting, he leaned forward, staring at it through the bottom of the railing, catching the sudden glint of glass flashing from the middle of the shadow.
“Dago! Get down!”
But the large biker didn’t, his hands gripping the top of the railing as he jerked, a circle of blood forming on the back of his denim vest by his left shoulder.
Instincts took over.
Jack grabbed the biker by the waist and yanked him down to the deck as a round splintered a post, followed by another one hammering the steps leading to the sand.
Jack stayed low, reaching the door, crawling in, dragging Dago behind him as the biker groaned, a hand on his wound, his face twisted in pain.
Angela looked up from the table. “What the hell?”
“Pack up everything,” he said, turning off the lights in the living room, before scrambling to his feet. “Hurry.”
“Why? What’s going—”
“Now, Angie,” he said, reaching in one of the duffel bags and extracting a field dressing before kneeling by Dago and tearing off the vest with the SOG knife.
“Don’t move,” he hissed, pressing it hard into the wound to stanch the blood, before securing it just as he had done countless times in places he’d rather forget.
“It went through clean, man. You’re lucky,” he added.
“Th—thanks,” Dago replied, breathing heavily, clenching his jaw, taking the pain.
Jack turned to Angela and said, “Put everything in the back of the truck but do not open the garage door.”
She stood there, in apparent shock at Dago getting shot as Jack helped him to his feet.
“Angie! Now! Everything! Except for my bags and the battle dress.”
14
RISKS AND COSTS
There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.
—John F. Kennedy
He never liked surprises, especially coming from his primary contact in the Department of the Treasury, who was approached discreetly by the vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve system making an unofficial inquiry about a set of large deposits made from numbered bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Switzerland, and Russia.
The accounts could never be traced back to him, according to his financial team, who had set them up to belong to front companies that didn’t exist beyond brick-and-mortar facades—companies that were erased from the face of the planet an hour ago.
Hastings hung up the phone after spending thirty minutes trying to calm down his Treasury associate, assuring him that those accounts and their respective foreign corporations were dissolved the moment they were breached, and no amount of probing would yield anything.
He then returned to the more pressing matter of covering that loss. Services had been rendered by dozens of suppliers and payments were expected.
On time. No excuses.
Hastings spent the next hour in a meeting in the rear of his C-17 with his financial and IT wizards, trying to unravel what had happened. He remained calm, though he knew this had to be the work of Dr. Taylor and her hacker friends. She had managed to change the descent profile, hijacked his phone, hacked into SkyLeap, and did who-knew-what to Salazar’s facility.
She was brilliant indeed, and quite the fighter, certainly possessing the genetic makeup to enhance the Hastings family tree.
But she also needs to be stopped.
Although this was nothing more than an annoyance for Hastings, whose team discussed options and solutions that would have the problem solved within the hour, Dr. Taylor and her little scruffy—though highly effective—team were starting to get too deep into his business, into his master plan. Today she had scratched him. Tomorrow she could deliver a fatal blow to his operation.
As his people worked the problem, he decided that the time had come to activate a new option—one he had been unwilling to trigger because of undesirable side effects. But given the circumstances, he saw no other alternative. His security continued to come short every time they dealt with her, even after the FBI tip, missing her by what appeared to be a few minutes. On top of that, he’d just gotten word that Riggs’s family had vanished from protected custody in Atlanta, and that Olivia’s daughter had disappeared from school.
That had been the final motivating factor.
He walked away from his team and dialed a number he had committed to memory long ago.
The general had used him in the beginning, when Hastings had needed his help to break in, recruit, train, and establish a beachhead.
Over the years, the general had repeatedly engaged his services whenever a problem came up that required skills beyond the reach of his operatives, from incentivizing—or eliminating—certain figures in cartels, organized crime, and foreign governments, to motivating the occasional Washington politician who couldn’t be persuaded to bend through conventional means.
But Hastings hated using him simply because he didn’t own him.
No one did.
Meaning he couldn’t be fully controlled.
And Hastings hated not having full control.
But at the moment, it came down to choosing the lesser of the evils, selecting this option and its associated costs and risks for the sake of eliminating a much larger risk.
“General?” the man’s deep voice said at the other end in a thick Latin American accent, also pronouncing the G as an H. “It has been a very long time, my friend.”
“It certainly has, Javier,” Hastings replied, closing his eyes. “It most certainly has.”
* * *
Jack had to assume that the threat would come from all angles and in larger numbers than the last time.
Pete wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
And that meant Jack would need a new approach, a different way to counterattack.
“Front still looks clear,” Angela said inside the dark house, peeking through the blinds in the foyer. Dago was already in the truck, happily sucking on a Fentanyl lollipop.
“Trust me. They’re out there,” Jack said, reloading the M32 grenade launcher with a mix of armor-piercing and incendiary rounds, strapping it across his back before loading backup rounds on the utility belt around his waist.
“Looks like a lot of firepower.”
“That’s because it is,” he said, latching a twenty-round box magazine to the MK11 sniper rifle and chambering a round before securing two backup boxes to the Velcro straps on his abdomen, right above the belt, and hauling the rest of the gear into the back of the truck.
“All right,” he said. “Get in and wait for my signal.”
She hesitated, before opening the door and looking at him.
“Wait for my signal,” he repeated. “No matter what you hear out there.”
“Jack,” she started, putting a hand to his face.
“I know,” he replied, closing the door before rushing to the rear door, the place where no one would be expecting him after that initial attack. That yacht was the flush team, working the rear to force him to the front, where he knew would be an even larger force waiting for him.
But he couldn’t get out through the back just yet, not while that vessel had at least one sniper t
rained on the rear porch, ready to put a bullet in his head.
Jack needed a distraction, a way to even out the playing field long enough for him to reach the sand, to get himself away from the house and blend with the dunes leading to the ocean.
The answer was the MK79 Mod 0 flare gun.
Jack slowly inched open one of the living room windows just enough to squeeze the hot end of the cylindrical signaling device through, angling it toward the vessel, now visible beyond the break, a long shape swaying in the waves.
The snipers had to be using nightscopes to have any chance at accuracy in the darkness separating them from the beach house, which Jack estimated to be around five hundred feet—give or take. And that meant someone looking through a device that magnified the amount of photons from all natural sources, like moonlight or starlight.
But like anything else, night-vision scopes had a weakness. A sudden increase in light, such as an incendiary grenade or a flare gun—or even a fork of lightning—had the nasty effect of flashing right into the user’s pupils, momentarily killing night vision.
Jack adjusted the MK79, before firing the flare, which arced over the railing and the beach, detonating high above the surf, over the boat.
He rolled away from the window and pushed through the door in a deep crouch, the MK11 leading the way, scrambling down the steps, the spring-action soles of the battle dress pointing his momentum toward the safety of the sand, below the immediate line of sight from snipers he knew would be rubbing their eyes right about now, as the flare hovered above them.
Jack felt the sand beneath him as he zigzagged, dropping in front of two low dunes, placing the long barrel in between them, resting it on the Harris swivel-based bipod.
He trained the crosshairs on the vessel, painted in flickering hues of crimson and yellow-gold by the suspended pyrotechnic.
Jack used the Leupold rifle scope to locate the three figures on the top deck, aligning the crosshairs with the closest one, and exhaling while pressing the trigger.
The bullet found its mark an instant later, and the figure dropped from sight just as his companions turned to look in their fallen comrade’s direction.
Jack used that distraction to switch targets, scoring a second hit before the vessel’s captain gunned the engines, accelerating into the night, cruising away from the vanishing red glow.
The Fall Page 30