Jack Be Nimble: A Lion About to Roar Book 4

by Ben English

  “Good. The shore batteries near us have been disabled, but there are unfriendlies in the trees. Would be much obliged if you set down right on the hill where we’re broadcasting. Should be more than enough room for a flier off Bata’an. We have civilians and casualties requiring immediate evac.”

  “Yes sir! That’s what we do best, sir.”

  Allison lay nearby, unmoving. Was she gray?

  “Airth, warm up your fifty caliber nosegun before you get here. This is still a hot LZ.”

  Beacon and Memory

  “So you’re an FBI agent. That’s kind of like a policeman, right?” asked the twelve year-old riding shotgun.

  “Kind of like a policeman, right. Only about a million times cooler.” They were parked in a thick stand of trees a hundred yards off the runway. There was no sign of movement around the airplane or the hangars, but just because he couldn’t see any guards didn’t mean they weren’t there. For now, they were safe. Far enough off the road they wouldn’t be seen, not so far into the jungle that they couldn’t get back if needs be.

  And not quite so far they wouldn’t be heard. Ian had forgotten how much sound was generated by a group of tightly-packed children. The twelve year-old was the most interesting to talk to; he had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Star Trek, and wasn’t bashful. It served to pass the time.

  Ian’s stomach growled. In theory there were snacks aboard the plane. Also, a radio. Not being in touch with the team was definitely worse, tactically, than missing a meal. He weighed the options and approaches for sneaking onboard, and realized there was no way to go about a snack extraction without leaving the kids alone.

  His stomach growled again. It was loud; should have been enough to draw a volley of laughter from his passengers. Ian realized they’d grown gradually quieter over the past few minutes.

  None of them were talking, or even really moving except to breath. Each wore the same vacant, doleful expression.

  Ian nudged his copilot. “Hey. Hey, which captain would win at poker, Picard or Kirk?” No response. He looked closely at the young man’s eyes. They were dry. So were the eyes of the other kids nearby.

  They were also breathing pretty much in sync.

  Ian felt dread creep down his spine on cool spider legs, but he shrugged it off. What the hell was going on?

  As one, the children all turned and looked uphill, in the direction of the transmitter.

  *

  The clamor of the sea was loudest at the mouth of the cave. Mercedes saw the size of the swells rolling right in to the scarred cliffs, and instinctively knew the water was deep—there was no gentle, sloping underwater beach to diminish or curb the power of the sea.

  Energy from the oldest, largest force on the planet rode right into the rock, set it vibrating with every wave in an unending rhythm, like a giant hammer against an anvil. She felt it with her whole body.

  The overhang was slick and smooth.

  “Do you think we can climb it?” Even as she asked, Mercedes doubted.

  Jack leaned out as far as he dared, taking care to keep his center of gravity as far from the edge as possible. It was at least a fifty foot drop to the waves. Foam hissed on the rocks all around them.

  “If they don’t send the platform down, we’ll have to,” he said. “I did it this morning, before all the rain, and it wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

  He avoided looking down whenever possible. “Sure, okay, let’s go. Just a sec.”

  Jack took off his shirt, stripping all the way to the skin. He laid the garment flat and began folding the corners and sleeves.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. He creased and doubled the fabric with sharpness and precision.

  “Got to keep our hands free. We need something to carry the computer in.”

  “No, I mean, where did you learn that?”

  He squared the computer on the fabric and began making tiny, hard knots in the cloth at the corners of the machine. Jack gestured at the shirt or whatever it was becoming. “There was this book about origami that Alonzo made me read when we were twelve. Think it was for a Boy Scout requirement.”

  “You’re definitely earning your merit badge today,” she said.

  This struck him as funny. “And which one would that be?”

  “How about ‘Reckless Endangerment?’” she said.

  His face sank, so she quickly added, “But I’m so glad you came—I mean, I know you didn’t—I mean, you didn’t come here just for me.”

  “I didn’t?”

  Jack twisted the edges of the shirt around the computer, working one corner after another. “Let me tell you something.” The look he gave her was easy, curious.

  “If there were no trigger, no signal. No hostages, none of that, I’d still be here. I still would have come.”

  He handed her the wrapped computer. “Hold this as tight as you can.” His hands worked the folds of material, and Mercedes felt tension in the fabric whenever his fingers tugged. “I owe you.”

  She’d heard that before. “You said that back in the kitchen. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He considered. “That might not be the right way to say it—maybe the right words don’t exist. You did something to me, all those years ago. You left me with something I can’t explain, or even understand, really.

  “You were the first brave person I ever loved. You had high expectations of me—now that I think about it, I guess I’ve been showing off for you ever since.” He gestured around them. “Part of this is me, showing off.

  “And whether you intended to or not, you set my spin. You increased my capacity for everything good. You make my life taste better. Made it easier to do the hard thing.

  “My wife,” and here his smile was so sad it broke her heart, “she told me once that she thanked God for you, because my feelings for you give me a better capacity to feel everything else, and I recognized love when I felt it again. Victoria was a very religious person, and she knew I would honor and respect the vows you made when you got married, as much as I honor mine.”

  Mercedes started to speak, and he held up his palms. The computer sat snug against her. She sensed tension flood from him as he relinquished the machine, and he grinned, unselfconsciously, with a boy’s delight.

  “You don’t need to tell me anything, Mercedes. Don’t need you to say that you feel anything back—you don’t owe me anything. You give me enough just due to the fact that you’re walking around on the same planet.

  “I can’t explain it, but I remember every single thing I ever saw you do. Layers and layers of details. The way you took care of your cousins and watched out for everybody around you. How you dealt with your feelings for your mom and dad. That time you bought cookies and warmed them up in the oven, then let me think you’d baked them from scratch? The sun on your skin and your hair. Your graceful heart. I can’t pay you back for any of that.”

  Jack looked out at the waves, then turned back to her. “You know what? For all his wealth and intelligence, Alex Raines was really pretty naive.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Remember his company logo, and the poem on the base of the statue of the falconer? He had it completely wrong. ‘Things fall apart.’ Sure. But the center always holds.”

  A flat peal of metal on stone announced the arrival of the makeshift elevator. Jack leaned out into the spray and seized a trailing cable. The light from the sun off the waves caught him in the rising mist. There were rainbows at the edge of her vision.

  Jack pulled a section of narrow scaffolding in, and Mercedes found herself waiting for the rest of the platform to arrive. There was barely enough room for both of them, standing.

  It was the most dangerous contraption she’d ever seen. Less a platform and more a thick beam, its cables were hooked to each corner, then ran together like the edges of a pyramid at a point about seven feet exactly above the center. At the apex of the pyramid, a hand-cranked winch with two handles connected to t
he four lines, and a fifth, heavier cable, which extended up the cliff face.

  Jack gripped one of its lines with one hand and held onto the tunnel mouth with the other. “We’ve got to step on together,” he said. Only a shout carried above the crash from the cresting breakers beneath them. “Since there’s two of us on it, try to stand about halfway between the center and the end.”

  Mercedes remembered their reason for using the tunnel. “Okay.” She squeezed his shoulder and grasped a line. The computer dangled from her neck.

  Their faces were a few inches apart. “Jack,” she said. “I’m really glad you choose to see me the way you do.”

  He grinned. Mirroring each other, they stepped out onto the beam.

  As soon as he released his hold on the rock, their momentum swung them out over the swelling surge like a pendulum. Mercedes held on and tried to find the balance point on the beam with her feet, afraid to look down.

  They pitched back toward the cliff face and didn’t quite hit it. Looking up, she saw where the cable ran to a boom arm about a hundred feet above them. It looked very small.

  Jack reached up and began to work the winch, cranking them rapidly up the cable. “Just make sure the computer stays safe,” he said. “It’s already broadcasting and repeating new instructions, locally. All Steve has to do is feed the signal into the array.”

  No hint of anxiety crept back into his voice, but she realized Jack was talking to focus his attention away from the wind and water, and the drop. She wondered if he thought about his parents. Mercedes freed one hand from the cable and lightly set her palm against his heart.

  As in the cave when he passed her the computer, tension completely rippled out of him.

  “You’re tickling me,” he said. He kept his eyes fixed on the winch, and quickened his rhythm. Someone above shouted down at them, and the speed of their ascent doubled.

  The Only Cure for Grief

  Alonzo could barely stand. Jack and Mercedes grew closer, and looked to both be all in one piece, although Mercedes seemed to have some sort of odd bag around her neck, or maybe her arm was in a sling.

  Steve cleared a wider spot next to his computer and re-checked his cables. “In case anything’s wrong with the wireless signal,” he said.

  Mack and Vern were both assisting with Allison, who was slipping in and out of consciousness. Alonzo didn’t really want to think about that. He started to lean against a tripod leg, and the whole mechanism shifted slightly. He settled for propping his hands on his knees. Ah, better. This also put his eyes on the same level as the boom arm of the tripod, and the electrical winch.

  The motor was ruggedized, designed to move several hundred pounds of metal a few inches. Jack had been optimistic in the extreme to think this was a decent plan B.

  Black smoke curled around the motor.

  Alonzo began to curse under his breath. Then louder. He looked down. Jack was still too far, and too distant from the cliff face to leap over and hope for a handhold.

  *

  The winch high above them whined and shuddered again. Mercedes' breath came quick, through her teeth. "What's wrong?"

  “Here, Mercedes. Put your hands under mine. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  She gripped the winch handles, and Jack touched the small of her back, lightly enough to move her to the center of the beam. He took a step forward as well.

  This was no good; they’d overbalance—

  She felt his gaze on her, and in the instant their eyes locked there was an eddy of complete peace in the swirling, crashing sound. Jack’s hands were doing something to the winch.

  “No,” she breathed, just as pieces of metal came free in Jack’s hands, and the winch yanked her upward. With a sound like the strum of a great steel guitar string, the four cables and the platform dropped away, taking Jack with them. He looked up at her as he fell.

  Suddenly buoyant, the winch head and Mercedes rocketed up. Her legs windmilled over the great expanse of air and the computer bounced against her breasts as she swung about, searching for signs of Jack in flight.

  The vast, million-voiced ocean roared in. She marked the spot where he vanished.

  She came even with the cliff edge, and two men she didn’t recognize muscled the boom arm in. Mercedes hit the ground at a run, tearing the makeshift computer bag off and pressing it into Steve’s hands. “He reset it already,” she said. “Don’t get fancy, just send whatever is broadcasting.”

  Where had all these people come from? The adults from the airplane began to gather around her, and she pushed through them, back to the tripod. “Alonzo!”

  He knelt at the edge with his back to them, obviously exhausted, the personification of disbelief. Mercedes saw in him the same planet-sized, monstrous grief that towered over her like an onrushing avalanche.

  But the only cure for grief is action.

  He was down there, somewhere, alone. She’d never find him on the surface. She’d never find him, looking down into all that dark water.

  “Mack, Vern; help me,” she called. They came. Mercedes explained in as few words as she could, and they each put a shoulder to the lowest point of a tripod leg.

  Alonzo unhooked an anchor chain and joined them, while Mercedes carefully wrapped her hands around the winch cable. Tight, but not too tight. The steel strands bit into her flesh, and very soon she had a palm full of blood. Nothing to be done for it. She took a deep breath, and then another, timing the surf, breathing with the ocean.

  “Here we go,” she said. “Tenere il vostro alito,” and threw all her weight into the tripod. It stuttered over the edge and into space, bouncing once against the rocky face. It would have whipped her right off the cliff had she not leaped out over it as it fell.

  The cable played out a bit below her. She thought, haphazardly, about the trip she’d taken to La Rochelle the previous spring to make pictures of the world cliff diving championships. Finalists dove from twenty-seven meters and hit the water at close to 60 miles per hour.

  She fell nearly four seconds, long enough to observe the slow turn of the tripod legs and cables beneath her. If it didn’t sink fast, or if her momentum carried her into it, or if she didn’t land in the ‘water crater’ it created—

  She hit.

  The water came from every direction at once, knocking the air out of her, spinning her down into the black. The tripod shed trails of bubbles ahead of her, moving like a runaway train toward the siren call of gravity. She sank so fast her ears popped; the pressure in her chest and eyes grew. The tangle of metal ahead ricocheted off of something, sending a shock up the cable. Darkness thickened rapidly as the temperature dropped.

  Mercedes had to use her free hand to pry her fingers loose from the cable and unwrap it from her hand. Immediately a dark banner of blood unfurled in the water around her. She plummeted through it. The sting in her palm was minor compared to the cruel fire burning in her lungs.

  Her diaphragm and throat worked of their own accord to draw anything, anything at all, into her lungs.

  The tripod no longer shed bubbles; she let it pull her down a bit further, then released its tether. Mercedes looked up.

  The sky above looked like a perfect, shiny bubble, a dome of mercury. The tide had pulled the tripod further out into the open sea, and she barely saw any hint of an upward slope. Bubbles escaped her upturned nose, and she felt a violent need to sneeze.

  A broad expanse of coral lay beneath her. The tripod, still sailing downward like some kind of nightmare kite, was far from reaching the sea floor, and the vastness of the ocean bore down on her psychologically as well as physically.

  Just relax. Take your time.

  Two shimmering schools of fish. Blue, green and yellow tangs. A pair of mantas, soaring over an underwater forest as thick and varied as the jungle in the world above.

  From above she would have missed this detail. It all would have blended in to the sea floor. From beneath, with the bright bubble of sky and sunlight—

&nb
sp; There. That could be the silhouette of a man. Far above her, riding an outbound current.

  Archimedes' Principle of Buoyancy

  Deep, quiet, cool green.

  A hint of sound, and pressure against his eardrums and body. It felt quite pleasant, actually, except for that pesky, gnawing need to breathe. He’d have to deal with that, sooner or later. No hurry. No hurry at all.

  Jack felt like someone had pulled him in a thousand directions at once. He couldn’t tell up from down, and his body wasn’t responding to any of his best intentions. He felt like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, with his stuffing all blown out everywhere.

  He supposed he was in shock. What from?

  Ah, right. Cliffs. Mercedes was safe. The thought made him want to smile for a long time.

  The flow pirouetted him through a brilliant, green, heavy light. He didn’t seem to have buoyancy—must’ve knocked most of the air from his lungs on impact. That might explain why his body was so stunned, and why his train of thought couldn’t find its track.

  Now he could see there definitely was a light part and a dark part to the world. It was mostly dark; he seemed to be spinning somewhere in the middle. Jack found himself wondering if Raines was down here somewhere, or Miklos, or Victoria.

  If any of them, probably Victoria, although she never liked to wait around for him. Maybe his parents were down here.

  Motion, below. A shape moved against the darkness, growing larger as it neared. Coming straight for him from a long way off. Maybe a shark. Hey, wouldn’t that make for an interesting story to share in the afterlife! He supposed the topics for conversation in the afterlife would be endless, by design.

  (“So, how did you die?”

  “Eaten whole by a shark, and you?”

  “Parachute failed to open, decapitated by a magician’s trick gone horribly, hilariously wrong, ostrich stampede.”)