On The Black: (A CIA Thriller)

by Theo Cage

  Sumner stopped the car and reached out and took her hand. They sat like that, awkwardly, the monster center console like a barrier they were reaching across.

  “Do you know what happened to Rice?” she asked.

  Sumner hesitated, like he was working out an appropriate response.

  “No. He’s missing again.”

  She caught him glance at her quickly. He looked worried and she knew what he was thinking. Rice could be anywhere.

  CHAPTER 126

  Somewhere over South Carolina

  RICE WAS AN AVERAGE JUMPER at best.

  He broke his left foot once during a parachute landing at Fort Bragg, coming in too fast. As usual. Something he had a reputation for. That was an early morning drop with a dozen other Seals. Normally, a piece of cake. That’s why they called Fort Bragg, John Wayne School.

  This drop, on the other hand, was like no other dive he had ever been on. And when he and Britt finally slammed into the earth, in less than sixty seconds, they would be traveling a lot faster than is considered survivable.

  Rice could feel the drag of Wheeler the second they fell away from the G150, but he had other things to worry about. His mind was on the jet engine and leading surface of the wing. Jimmy told him he had about a ten percent chance of being killed instantly when he struck some part of the jet, which was traveling through the atmosphere at over 500 miles per hour. Controlled jumps stay clear of these kinds of things, but this was as far from controlled as you could get.

  Luck was with them though and they dropped clear - with a minimum of rotation, which was Rice's other concern. Spinning is the number one cause of death on sports chutes. The diver loses consciousness within seconds and never recovers. The G-forces are just too powerful.

  Rice hung onto Britt with every ounce of his strength. She wrapped her arms around his chest when they ejected, but Wheeler's weight pulled her down. The ex-President's foolish last minute attempt to grab Britt was going to kill them all.

  Then Rice felt Britt kicking, and he caught a glimpse of the ex-President, his eyes wide, a look of stupefaction on his face, tumble away from them. The last Rice saw of him was a whirling bundle of arms and legs below them, tinted with a hot edge of red light spilling out from an uncertain dawn.

  The cold air hammered Rice so hard his eyes were soon full of tears. He could feel Britt's warmth against his waist. He yelled as hard as he could, the words swallowed up by the roar of the wind in his ears.

  “Hold on!”

  Then he reached up with his left hand and pulled the nylon cord by his shoulder.

  Regular chutes unfold in a smooth flow, the slider progressing up the lines to prevent fouling. This chute, a competition design, tore out of the slim pack on his back and extended fully in one jarring explosion of red and yellow parachute cloth, instantly catching the wind and tearing Britt out of his grip. She slid down his body, her arms now wrapped around his ankles. He heard her yell, “I can't hold on,” and felt her slip again, out of his reach.

  Rice looked down, trying to gauge the distance to the ground, instantly realizing he had a major problem. He had heard that night jumps were notoriously dangerous. Without flares or ground lighting, the closer you came to the surface, the more difficult it was to estimate the distance. The changing angle of available light made the ground grow darker by the second. A fellow Seal had once described a night jump like diving into a black hole.

  And Rice had other problems.

  The two of them were way over the weight limit on the chute. They were still falling too fast, well over one hundred and twenty miles an hour. There was no way to survive that kind of landing. The sports chute did give Rice one option not available on a regulation H20 military-issue parachute. With a sports chute, he could swoop. That was their only hope.

  By pulling down on the wing controls, just before smashing into the earth, Rice could force the chute to change direction and lift them back up, eating up their descent velocity - a tricky maneuver requiring precise timing.

  Pull up too soon and they would tumble backward, crashing into the earth on their backs or heads without control. Pull up a few seconds too late and, well they would have already met the ground.

  To make the swooping maneuver work, Rice needed both hands free to manage the controls. That meant he only had a few seconds to get Britt repositioned to make a safe landing possible.

  “Britt! Can you climb up?” Rice heard her swear and then felt her struggling to reach his knees.

  “It's no good,” she yelled back. “I'm going to let go. No sense killing both of us.” Rice felt his throat close up.

  He yelled, “No!” as loud as he could. Then they both saw the sky light up above them, an expanding orange flare to the east. Rice knew instantly what they were watching. The Gulfstream G150's fuel tanks had exploded, creating a false dawn.

  When he looked down to try and catch a glimpse of Britt's face, feeling completely helpless, he saw a reflection of the explosion off a shiny surface below. Water. They were above a lake. What was a black inky void only seconds before had revealed itself to be a wide expanse of grey water, the surface as smooth as glass. Unbelievably close.

  Rice turned the chute direction toward the water's edge, realizing the momentary burst of light was already fading, the blast burnt into his night vision. The surface of the lake was speeding towards them at an incredible rate. And quickly slipping back into a trackless void.

  “Britt! Hold your breath!” He felt Britt tighten her grip on his boots. He inhaled and yanked the guidelines. Rice felt his head spin as they lurched up; their descent taking a stomach churning reverse. The parachute webbing bit into his chest like it was about to break away. Then Rice felt Britt lose her grip, and she was gone.

  . . . . .

  BRITT HAD A DEATH GRIP on Rice's legs, her hands wrapped around his boots, her fingers numb with the cold, when she felt him wrenched from her arms. He lurched away from her as if he had stopped dead in the air. She continued her plunge downward, her arms wind milling in the dark.

  For a few brief seconds, she had seen a bright orange light pulse above them, illuminating her arms and Rice's body and the strange shape of the wing-like parachute above them. She didn't look down. Somehow she knew if she could see the ground hundreds of feet below her, she would freeze and give up hope. She hated heights. Even standing on a balcony a few stories up made her legs feel like jelly and her head swim.

  How many times over the past few days was she convinced she was dead? A half dozen? She had been wrong then, but not now. It didn't take a genius to figure out the fireball in the sky was Wheeler's private jet. Rice knew something was going to happen, and that was why he took her with him. It was insane. She always wanted to try skydiving. Now she could cross it off her bucket list.

  She hoped Rice would survive. He deserved some peace and happiness, wishing she could have shared some of that with him. Her spaceman.

  Then she hit the surface of the lake. Head first and backwards, the water as cold and as steel-hard as ice. Like jack-knifing into liquid concrete. She blacked out for a few seconds. Any longer and she would have inhaled a lung full of lake water.

  Then she felt an explosion of air above her, another impact. She drifted up, groggy and uncertain, when she felt lines wrap around her. A spider web of cold rope. Then the slick chill of nylon fabric enveloped her, dragging her down again, covering her face in a freezing caul, filling her with a fear she had never experienced before. She couldn't move her arms, couldn't scream, couldn't see, couldn't breathe.

  Then she felt a bump. At first she thought she had touched the bottom of the lake. Another bump. The parachute nylon was pulling away. Then she felt the lines go slack around her arms. A hand reached under her armpit, pulling her upwards. She could see an orange glow above her, vibrating through a surface that looked like melted glass. Then her head was in the air and she could breathe again, a warm body behind her cradling her. She looked down at the sleeve. Black rayon.
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  “Rice?” she said. “We made it?”

  “Nice dive,” he said. “I watched you. A back flip about twenty feet. And I think we picked the biggest lake in the state to land in.”

  CHAPTER 127

  Ghost Lake, Washington State

  RICE STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE RIDGE, the remains of the cabin he built years ago littered around his feet. He looked across the valley at the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier and the hundreds of square miles of dark-green forest laid out over the undulating foothills. He used to feel so much peace staring across this landscape.

  True, it was a calmness laced with a troubling undercurrent of unfinished business. And a debt not yet paid. But he still had fond memories of life in the Ghost Lake hills.

  Rice had a sense now that the books were balanced and it felt good to stand there, Britt’s hand on his shoulder and the sun warming his face. They had climbed up the washout to hold a special memorial for Wilson McFee. Rice was pleased to see it well attended. His brother and family came to pay their respects, as well as Grace and Jimmy.

  An FBI special agent by the name of Sumner, stationed out of Chicago, asked to attend. When he explained his involvement and why Addie couldn’t be there, Rice welcomed him. Addie and Sumner had moved into an apartment together, but Addie was currently under house detention and couldn’t travel.

  “It’s temporary,” said Sumner, standing next to Grace. “And mostly for her protection. Until we can be sure the Ruffino family has given up its vendetta.”

  “I’m surprised you convinced her to stay. How many agents are watching her and will she be there when you get back?” asked Rice.

  Sumner laughed. “Who knows? Addie gives a whole new meaning to the term flight risk.”

  Later, during a brief ceremony, Rice called Wilson McFee a true hero: a man who gave his life for someone he hardly knew. He mounted a brass plaque to Wilson on the granite slab he often used as a lookout point. The precarious road up to the ridge was now officially named Wilson’s Washout.

  June had become a month of national mourning. Washington hung flags at half-mast for ex-President Wheeler and his wife, whose private jet had gone down over the Atlantic. The news networks milked the Smithsonian Massacre for weeks, profiling Slugger and Kreegar and Ruffino, devising creative and clever scenarios to justify the explosive confrontation in one of the capital's most sacred venues. A popular urban myth involved a hidden treasure and clues secreted in the museum for decades, sought by organized crime, the outlaw biker gang and a team of government agents.

  One surviving security guard already sold the movie rights for over two million dollars.

  Mary Logan, the woman who let them seek shelter in her farmhouse, survived the missile attack. Britt was happy to hear she was working on another novel. Rice wondered if she might switch from romance to thrillers after her harrowing experience with a drone missile.

  After the ceremony, a beer in his hand, Scott wrapped Rice in his arms. He patted him a couple of times on the shoulder, then stepped back. He shook his head.

  "Why couldn't you have just been an accountant or a lawyer. We could all get together for barbecues on weekends. Have big Thanksgiving dinners. Get drunk together once in a while."

  Rice smiled. He had missed a lot. He wondered if it was too late to make up for all the things he had given up, or if he could even learn to live that kind of life. Although Britt was willing to give it a try.

  "I'm sorry about that night they broke into your house. And the broken nose. That was my fault," said Rice.

  Scott waved his hand. "Grace saved us. And a bit of luck with LAPD."

  "The new nose suits you."

  "That's what Jeannie says. She thinks it gives me an edge. Maybe I'll start doing TV commercials again."

  The story about Scott hating his brother and not speaking for years had been Rice's idea. He had planted that detail in his personal file before he left the agency and made sure Scott understood. The reason? Going after close family members was SOP for Kreegar. Even though Rice knew Scott had no idea where he had gone, he didn't want to give Kreegar a reason to hassle the family or draw them in, like he had when they found Rice near Ghost Lake.

  As they were packing up to leave, Rice put his arms around Jimmy, then turned him to face the ridge, the low sun in both their eyes. Jimmy's blond hair was longer than he remembered, whipping about in the stiff breeze that was skimming over the evergreen forest.

  Rice turned to the ex-soldier. "How the hell did you know I was going to end up on Wheeler's jet?"

  Jimmy pushed his hair out of his eyes. "I just figured with all the chaos you were creating, inviting all of those ego-maniacs to your museum party, that nothing was going to turn out the way we expected. I was imagining the most unlikely scenarios. As you know, that’s what happens in battle conditions."

  "Did you figure on Britt being involved?"

  "Never."

  "Well, if I haven't properly thanked you, I am now. But I can tell you - my parachuting days are over." After a terrifying sixty seconds in freefall, Rice and Britt had landed in the shallows of Lake Moultrie north of Charleston; they looked it up on Google maps later - a surprisingly large body of water not far off the coast, a mix of salt and fresh water. They could have landed anywhere and never walked away.

  Rice drained his champagne. It tasted good, despite being served in a Styrofoam cup.

  "Maybe I should rebuild the cabin," Rice said, standing in the same spot that started his cross-country mission.

  "I can help you," said Jimmy.

  "I wasn't serious. Britt misses her hobby farm. And so do I."

  Jimmy looked disappointed. Rice could tell he was curious about the future. He had been on Rice’s payroll, along with Grace, for over a decade. Meanwhile, all of Rice’s bank accounts were still frozen and there was no way to reverse the situation without stirring up a hornet’s nest.

  Rice was like most Americans; he believed politicians and elected representatives ran the country. The closer he got to the seats of power though - the President, Secretary of Defense and the CIA - the more he understood the scale of that lie. The President was a figurehead; a politician who shook hands and kissed babies while the people with the real power pulled the levers and clicked the mice that steered the ship.

  Taking the government to task for the money they owed him might wake some of those people up.

  Rice thought about everything he had at stake. The only family he had left was Scott and his wife and kids. His last contact with normality. And Britt who wanted a chance at an ordinary life again. Even though his resources were completely drained, keeping things normal would still require an investment.

  “Keep an eye on things, Jimmy. You’re still on the payroll. Grace too. Business as usual.” Jimmy’s eyes widened. He knew the cupboards were bare. He was thinking about going back to work for the DIA.

  “Does Britt know?”

  “Britt and I are going to work on her house for a while, take a holiday somewhere warm, maybe buy some horses.”

  Jimmy raised his eyebrows. “Horses?”

  “She loves horses.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “There’s always work to be done, Jimmy. We’ll pick and choose. We’ll get by…”

  Before Rice could finish explaining, a body plowed into him, throwing him off balance, crushing him in a bear hug. His instinct was to attack, but something told him to hesitate. A hint of vanilla musk. It was Addie. He recognized her perfume.

  “How did you…?” he asked, before she kissed him on the cheek.

  “I wouldn’t miss this. I can’t believe you’re even surprised.”

  “Just tell me you weren’t balcony diving again.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “Your live-in FBI special agent told me.”

  Addie looked over at Sumner, who was frowning. Clearly he didn’t expect to see her there. “We’re only on the tenth floor,” she said. “And he worries too
much.”

  . . . . .

  Britt had kept her eyes on Rice’s face during the memorial. He was like a different person. The soldier was nowhere in evidence. He smiled like a man with a future.

  She knew he’d gone down as far into the pit as a human could, touched the bottom, then fought his way back. If you asked him, early in the morning, before the sun had a chance to ignite a new day, he’d admit he didn’t see the universe the same way anymore. There weren’t just two sides now. Everything wasn’t black and white. Britt hoped that was a good sign, but she still had a nagging doubt. She’d give it time.

  Near the end of the day, she caught him looking at the horizon, a tear forming on a cheek he'd cleanly shaved that morning. A tear he quickly wiped away. He’d say it was the wind, but she wasn’t so sure. She smiled because she knew this was the place that forged the man she knew today, not the assassin who came to hide.

  Ten years in the wilderness will do that to a person.

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