by Peter Telep
His reservations were voiced by Briggs, who’d suddenly broken radio silence: “Dense canopy down there, Sam. I can’t . . . I can’t find a good opening.”
“You’ll need to call it at the last second. We’re on our own here.”
“Shit, the wind’s knocking me all over the place.”
Fisher grimaced. “Just get off the channel and focus. You own this landing.”
“Roger that.” Briggs cursed again and then, out ahead of Fisher, with the smoke about a quarter klick north of them, Briggs was swallowed by the canopy.
Even as Fisher was tugging his lines, buffeted hard by the wind and fighting for a spot between two giant pines, a long string of curses erupted from Briggs, followed by a breathy groan . . . and then . . . silence.
“Briggs, you all right?” Fisher cried, just as he came slicing between the trees, his seven-cell canopy missing the branches by only inches before he thumped down hard on some patches of snow and beds of pine needles. He ejected his parachute and pack, then turned back and gathered up the chute. “Briggs, you there?”
No reply. Shit.
He unbuckled his helmet and oxygen gear and buried them in a pile of snow, then did likewise with his chute and pack. Holstered at his right hip was his FN Five-seveN, which he immediately drew, and on his left hip he’d packed a secondary weapon, one equally impressive and having a lot of sentimental value: his SIG SAUER P226 semiautomatic 9mm pistol, the one he’d carried as a Navy SEAL. The gun was now known as the P226 MK25 and was one of the most reliable firearms in the world.
Fisher’s updated OPSAT, or operational satellite uplink, was strapped to his left wrist, facing inward. The full-color screen, which could also be set to dim green stealth mode, glowed and provided real-time data integration with field intel collection. Fourth Echelon comms and onboard access to the SMI analytics engine up on Paladin were newer additions to the software. The OPSAT was like having a powerful computer, a satellite phone, and a smartphone in one device. It even offered ambient sound readings to check his own movements, along with light and temperature measurements. As its name implied, the OPSAT also linked Fisher to Keyhole spy satellites and drones like the Hummingbird wheeling overhead. He was capable of downloading data directly from them and from Grim on Paladin. The device even offered a rudimentary alarm system in the form of a T-shaped rod that nudged his wrist.
Willing himself into a moment of calm, Fisher worked the touchscreen, keying in on Briggs’s GPS location. A satellite map with glowing grid overlay marked each man’s position. He sprinted off in the direction of Briggs’s landing zone, with the OPSAT serving as navigator, muttering course corrections to him via his subdermal.
The OPSAT screen flashed with an encrypted message from Grim, and Fisher slowed to read it:
No RF jamming of those enemy birds yet. As soon as we begin jamming, they’ll be onto us. I’ve plotted your course to Briggs. Keep heading straight. I’ve told him to shut down his beacon, so if you lose it, just stay on the coordinates of his last signal. Then you shut down yours. Total blackout now.
Fisher raced around a pair of trees, spun, then checked his OPSAT while trying to catch his breath in the much thinner air of the mountains. The beacon was gone, meaning Briggs had to be conscious. However, Fisher was on top of his last signal. He moved around the largest of two pines, then spotted the man’s helmet off to his right. He winced and looked up. “Aw, shit.”
Briggs was dangling nearly ten meters above the forest floor between a pair of thick, snow-covered limbs, his lines caught in the web of smaller branches. He was trying to swing himself back toward the nearest tree, but he was too far out.
Fisher sent Grim a three-word status report: Briggs in tree. Then he holstered his pistol, took a deep breath, and began hauling himself up and across the sticky bark, wrapping his legs around the tree trunk until he reached the nearest branch. After that, he ascended much more quickly, reaching Briggs within a handful of seconds.
He immediately got to work, digging into a pouch on his belt near his spare magazines to produce a twenty-yard length of 550 paracord. He unraveled the cord, broke off a small branch, then tied the rope around the branch so it would serve as a weight or small anchor. He reared back and tossed the branch to Briggs, who caught it on the first try and reeled in some line.
Fisher ascended even higher into the tree, drawing the rope with him. Once he neared the branch on which Briggs’s chute had become tangled, he began drawing in the rope, then wrapped it over another, thicker branch to serve as a winch. Bracing himself, he began hauling Briggs back up toward the limb above.
With both of them gasping and grunting, Briggs finally got his hand wrapped around the branch, and then, with his free hand, he triggered his quick release, breaking free from the chute.
Coaxed by Fisher, he swung his legs up and did an inverted log crawl toward the trunk. Fisher hauled him to safety on the supporting limb, and Briggs took a deep breath. “Thank you, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Fisher nodded. “We need to move.” He glanced at his OPSAT. Grim reported the launch of two Mil Mi-8 transport choppers/gunships from the new Russian military base in Tskhinvali, Georgia, 120 kilometers southwest of the crash site. Their ETA was approximately eight minutes.
They descended the tree, and once on solid ground, Fisher helped Briggs remove and hide his jump gear.
As the sun disappeared behind the ice-slick canopy and their breaths turned heavy on the air, they tugged down their trifocal goggles with high-frequency sonar detection and sprinted for the crash site.
7
AS part of the team’s investigation into Kasperov’s disappearance, Fisher had reviewed a lengthy catalog of the software giant’s personal assets—jets, yachts, vacation properties, and even an automobile collection that rivaled talk show host Jay Leno’s. In regard to planes, Kasperov had a fleet of seven private aircraft that ran the gamut from smaller luxury jets to a giant Airbus A380 fit for an Arab sheik. Two years prior, Brazilian aerospace conglomerate Embraer S.A. had constructed for Kasperov a Legacy 650 they described as an airborne palace and state-of-the-art mobile business suite. The plane had a crew of two with optional flight attendant and total capacity of thirteen passengers plus one in the cockpit jump seat. The 650 was eighty-six feet long, with a wingspan of sixty-eight feet, and was powered by two Rolls-Royce AE 3007/A1P turbofans. Her max speed was 518 mph, with a service ceiling of 41,000 feet.
The price tag? A whopping thirty-one million dollars.
Kasperov probably had great insurance, too, and he’d need it, because as Fisher and Briggs ran parallel to the burning trees cordoning off the wreckage like giant torches, they thought the plane had entirely disintegrated, leaving only a blackened slash mark across the valley. Finally, in the middle of a clearing below more pines littered with debris that resembled metallic confetti, they observed a large portion of the tail section and fuselage, both miraculously intact.
Briggs shot HD video of everything, while Fisher slid his goggles up onto his forehead. The burning trees were doing an exceptional job of lighting the scene, with waves of heat billowing into his face.
He picked his way around the shattered fuselage, navigating between the twisted and charred seats, then he directed a powerful LED penlight into the cabin, whose bulkheads had been blackened. He was searching for charred skeletons, imagining one appearing in his light, but found only mangled metal and melted plastic.
With the stench of all that kerosene-based Jet A fuel and a dozen other chemicals wafting in the air and beginning to get to him, he hustled back outside and jogged forward, following the ragged edge of a huge furrow until he found a small portion of the cockpit lying inverted and jammed between two trees.
The seats were still attached. Seat belts thrown off. No pilots. Had they bailed out? Fisher examined the seat belts again: no signs of tearing, stretching, or strain.
“Hey, Sam? Over here!” cried Briggs.
Fisher raced away from the cockpit, bac
k along the furrow toward Briggs, who was holding a backpack with a large logo embroidered on the outside pocket: four red squares forming a diamond pattern with gray shadow boxes behind them. Beneath the image were the letters “CSCS.” Briggs proffered the bag, and Fisher zipped it open and rifled through textbooks and notebooks.
“The daughter went to school in Zurich,” whispered Fisher. “We got her bag, but where’d she go?”
“Yeah, and if they wanted to fake their deaths, then where are the bodies?” asked Briggs.
Grim, who’d been analyzing the video Briggs had sent, chimed in over the radio. “Break radio silence now, guys. I’ve been monitoring the Russian army’s transmissions, and they’re onto us. Picked you up with infrared before Charlie could start the jam and GPS spoofing. Those Mi-8s are three minutes out now.”
“Sam, it’s Charlie. Like I mentioned, if you can deploy the drone, I’ll remote operate it from here. I’ll be another set of eyes and ears.”
“He’s got soldier envy,” said Briggs.
“What he’s got is our backs,” Fisher corrected. “Charlie, roger that. Deploying the drone.”
From a custom-designed holster sitting low on his right hip, Fisher slipped free another of Charlie’s prototypes: a micro tri-rotor drone even smaller than the first one they’d fielded during the Blacklist mission. Fisher simply tossed the UAV into the air like a softball. The drone’s rotors automatically unfolded and purred to life. After gaining some altitude, the tiny bird boomeranged back toward Fisher, now controlling it from his OPSAT. He plucked two CS smoke grenades from his utility belt pouches and attached them to the drone’s undercarriage via custom release clips that served to pull their pins so the canisters could be deployed down on the enemy. The drone was also equipped with a self-destruct system and served as a remote sonar beacon to watch enemy movements. The larger model could be fitted with a micro 9mm semiautomatic gun on a pivoting mount, but Fisher had chosen the smaller model since the plan here was to go in “ghost,” evade detection, and not engage the enemy. The CS gas would both screen them and give the Russians a tearful moment of pause as it wreaked havoc with their respiratory systems.
“Okay, Charlie, the drone’s all yours.”
“Sweet. I bet that S&R team will fast rope into the crash site. The best time for you guys to extract would be while they’re infiltrating.”
“Yeah, in a perfect world,” said Fisher. “Not sure we can get to the LZ in time. You keep them busy with that drone. I want SITREPs every couple of minutes or sooner,” said Fisher.
“You got it, Sam.”
Fisher looked to Briggs. “Take the backpack. Spot anything else?”
Briggs shook his head. “You know, the bodies could’ve been ejected far away from here, could be dangling from trees, hard to spot now . . .”
“Pilot seats were empty. They weren’t torn free and the seat belts were unbuckled,” said Fisher. “Either the pilots bailed out, or the jet was fitted with some kind of remote with a pilot on the ground transmitting to the tower while the jet took off.”
“So they flew it out here and deliberately crashed it? Man, that’s an expensive diversion.”
“What does he care? He’s got more money than God. Grim, we need to know if the pilots bailed out.”
“I’m already on it, Sam. Best we can do there is gather HUMINT from witnesses on the ground who might’ve spotted their chutes.”
Fisher gritted his teeth in frustration. “I want to know what happened here.”
Briggs turned around to regard the wreckage. “I still say if Kasperov was really smart, he would’ve planted bodies. That would buy him a little more time until the corpses were ID’d and ruled out.”
“Agreed, but maybe he ran out of time. Just like us. Let’s go!”
Fisher took off running to the west. Their rally point lay .8 kilometers away in a depression where the mountainside grew more level and the trees tapered off into a more barren belt of ridges and ravines. The LZ—landing zone—was just wide enough and just flat enough for their UH-60 Black Hawk with Turkish Air Force insignia and an American flight crew to set down. The chopper’s call sign was Paladin Two.
“Sam, one of the Russian choppers is breaking ahead,” said Grim. “Past the crash site.”
Fisher glanced up as the whomping troop transport cut overhead like a black cloud, running lights flashing. “ETA on our extraction helo?”
“Another fifteen minutes. We kept him on the ground to avoid being intercepted.”
“Sorry for the delay, Sam,” Charlie cut in. “I usually have no trouble disrupting the Mi-8’s radar system. I’m jamming their FLIR now, sending phantom blips to get them off our extraction bird. Two soft kills to be sure, but if those pilots visually ID the Black Hawk, there’s not much I can do about their door-mounted guns, which, according to the specs, have a thousand rounds apiece.”
Confusing a radar electronically was what Charlie called a “soft kill.” The method Fisher preferred, the “hard kill,” involved ramming a Hellfire missile down their throats.
He watched the chopper fly ahead of them, then wheel around and hover. “Shit, they’re trying to cut us off.”
“Exactly,” answered Grim.
“All right, tell our pilot business as usual. We’ll worry about those troops. Charlie, you pick the drone’s targets very carefully. You gotta buy us time.”
“It’s cool, Sam. Looks like the Mi-8 can hold up to twenty-four troops, so the odds aren’t bad at all: forty-eight to four! We got this!”
Charlie wasn’t much of a math major, it seemed.
Fisher knifed past two more trees, broke hard left, and kept moving, with Briggs hard on his heels.
They both had activated their sonar systems. The deep hues of the forest dissolved into the black-and-white contrast of an X-ray. The system relied on sonic pulses, combined with an advanced AI controller, to penetrate through objects and walls so that they could literally see through them to mark targets. Downtime between echoed bursts along with jamming vulnerabilities and distorted images while they were on the move were the system’s chief weaknesses, but the sonar did come in handy when obstacles and terrain made threat assessment difficult.
Through that stark imagery Fisher watched as the chopper descended another twenty meters, then the crew chief lowered a pair of ropes. Two teams of troops came zipping down the lines like beads of crude oil across gleaming gossamers.
“Sam, if I can say so, this shit is not good,” gasped Briggs.
“It’s not bad, either,” Fisher snapped.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, because if we get out of this, we got one hell of a story to tell.”
“A story? Who’re we gonna tell? We don’t exist.”
“Don’t overthink it. Now, come on, pick it up.” Fisher raced up and over a small rise, kicking up ice and gravel.
“Sam, Charlie here. I count nineteen on the ground behind you, range six hundred meters. They’ve fanned out in three squads with an officer and some other logistics dickhead hanging back. We called them a search and rescue team, but these guys look like Spetsnaz, Special Forces, man. Hard-core mothers.”
Fisher snorted. “That’s perfect. They’ve got bigger egos, so when we escape it’ll piss ’em off even more.”
They were sidestepping down another slope, heading to the southwest, but Fisher swore as the forest broke off, and they would soon be forced to cross a series of rock-strewn hogbacks whose drop-offs on the left side brought flashbacks of Bolivia. The ledge was about thirty meters long but barely two meters wide, and above it, outcrops of stone jutted like awnings layered with snow, their bellies sharpened by icicles. On the other side lay more forest, and off to the northwest, their rendezvous point with the chopper.
“Wait a minute,” said Fisher, raising his palm. “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
Briggs arrived at his side, panting and confused. “You found us a good place to die?”
Fisher hoi
sted his brows. “Not us, Briggs. Them.”
8
LESS than three minutes later, they were crouched low behind two fir trees nearest the hogbacks. They each had a fragmentation grenade in their strong hands, pistols in their weak. Training, equipment, and terrain were all force multipliers, and Fisher had recognized that. Briggs, a student of military history, had agreed and reminded Fisher of the ancient battle between the Greeks and the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. A mere 7,000 Greeks held off between 100,000 and 300,000 men for seven days in one of the most remarkable battles ever fought.
“Here they come,” whispered Briggs.
Like their comrades to the east, these troops had formed three squads, six men in each, with two squads hustling through the forest toward the pass. The third was holding back in overwatch positions along the outcroppings above the pass.
“Sam, I’ve just deployed the CS canisters,” reported Charlie. “Probably took out at least six or seven of them, but the wind’s picking up again. Looks like the rest are converging on the crash site, at least for now.”
“Roger that. Do a sweep over the tree line surrounding the jet. Double-check for bodies.”
“No problem.”
“Sam, it’s Grim. One of you needs to move ahead, pop smoke, and do some combat control for the chopper. GPS coordinates are a little off, and the pilot’s having a hard time seeing the LZ. It’s real tight down there.”
“We’ll get on it,” answered Fisher.
“Uh, and yeah, uh, excuse me, you’ve got twelve hostiles inbound with another six overhead,” she said.
“I know, Grim.”
“Why aren’t you moving?”
“You’ll see.”
The first squad of Spetsnaz ventured tentatively onto the cliff, the point man hunkered down and waving his assault rifle toward the shadows ahead. His comrades followed, their spacing well practiced, their fingers at the ready to cut loose volleys of superheated lead.