by Tom Clancy
Fisher did a quick mental calculation. By the time he was feet-down on the Gosselin’s deck, it would be four a.m., the darkest part of the night, but it would leave him only a couple of hours before the day watch began. He’d have to move quickly.
“You get that, guys?” Fisher asked.
“Roger,” replied Sandy. Franco, sitting across the aisle from Fisher, was already bent over his folding desk, tapping keys on his navigation computer’s keyboard.
Grimsdottir said, “I’m updating your OPSAT with blueprints and specs for the Gosselin now. What I can’t tell you is where they’re keeping Stewart.”
“I have an idea how we can find out,” Fisher replied, then explained his plan. “Once I’m aboard and in place, we’ll use it to shake the tree. Bird, you got any ideas about getting me aboard?”
“I can drop you in the drink ahead of her—”
“Not enough time.”
“Or I can…” Bird trailed off, hesitant.
“What?” Fisher asked.
“Or we can test out a little trick Sandy and I’ve been practicing awhile.”
“And just how much testing have you and Sandy done?”
Sandy replied, “Enough that we’re reasonably confident we won’t kill you.”
“Oh, well, if you’re reasonably confident… Okay, let’s hear it.”
Bird outlined the plan, then said, “You game?” When Fisher didn’t immediately reply, Bird mock-slapped his own forehead. “Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. Go get a few winks, Sam. I’ll call you when we’re twenty out.”
Fisher walked back into the cabin and folded down one of the bulkhead cots and stretched out. He closed his eyes to sleep but almost immediately knew sleep wouldn’t be coming, so he lay still, listening to the hum of the Osprey’s engines, and thought.
Peter’s dead. Until now, until he’d allowed himself to slow down and open his mind, the truth of the statement had been missing for him. He’d boxed it up and gone through the motions: holding Peter’s lifeless and tepid hand, the autopsy report, the cremation and the memorial. He’d detached himself from all of it — yet another skill essential to this business. Learn how to attenuate or shut off altogether any emotion that steals focus from the job at hand. Fisher felt a twinge of guilt that he had, albeit unknowingly, treated Peter’s death in the same way. Using his mission mind to deal with something as personal as this felt disrespectful and disingenuous.
And what about his promise to Lambert? His first instinct had been to take a leave of absence from Third Echelon and track down Peter’s killers himself, and while that urge still lingered in the back of his head, Fisher also knew there were more important things at stake here. Peter had died of PuH-19, plutonium hydride-19, a substance so deadly most of the earth’s First World countries — even the ones incapable of nuclear weapons or energy production — had banned its storage. Where had Peter picked up the poison? Grimsdottir had said there’d been a week gap between Peter’s last credit card purchase in Halifax and when he was fished from the Labrador Sea. So far, Grimsdottir’s monitoring of the North American and European medical networks had turned up no cases of poisoning similar to Peter’s. It appeared as if Peter had been the only one exposed to PuH-19, which in turn suggested it had been intentional. There were only two countries that hadn’t signed the ban on PuH-19: the United States and Russia. That didn’t, however, mean there weren’t other nations producing PuH-19. So where did that leave him? Still only one option: Track back Peter’s investigation into the disappearance of Carmen Hayes and hope it took him to the source of the PuH-19 and whoever was behind it.
One way or another, wherever the trail led him or however long it took, someone was going to pay.
* * *
“Rise and shine, Sam. Got your target on radar. Eighteen minutes out.”
Fisher opened his eyes; he hadn’t realized he’d dozed off. Unlocking the emotional box into which he’d put Peter’s death had evidently helped. “I’m up.”
“Franco’s coming back to help. No worries, we used him as a guinea pig on this thing. He knows it backward and forward.”
Fisher rolled upright and put his stocking feet on the floor; through the chilled, nonskid metal he could feel the thrumming of the Osprey’s engines. Franco appeared at the edge of the cot and handed him a cup of coffee and an energy bar wrapped in plain white wrapping with the words, in black, ENERGY SUPPLEMENT, FRENCH VANILLA, ONE EACH, A/N 468431 stenciled on the side. It was as thick as Fisher’s wrist and nearly as long as a paperback book.
Fisher took it and looked at Franco. “Got some heft to it, doesn’t it?”
“Another DARPA product. Coming soon, government-issue Kit Kat bars.”
Fisher smiled at him. “Franco, was that a joke?”
“Uh, yeah… I guess so. Anyway, I’ve tried them. Not bad. Three of these a day, and you’ve got all the nutrients and calories you need.”
Next they’ll come up with dehydrated water, Fisher thought with a rueful smile.
“When you’re ready,” Franco said, “I’ll meet you at the ramp.”
Fisher downed his coffee, gulped down the energy bar, which was, in fact, palatable if not wholly chewable, then donned his tac suit and web harness and settled the SVT strap around his throat. “Up on SVT,” he told Bird and Sandy.
“Four minutes to ramp down,” Bird replied.
Fisher walked back to the ramp, where Franco was kneeling at the winch, working.
“Ready?”
“Yes, sir. Same principle as fast-roping except for the altitude.”
This was a huge understatement, Fisher knew. A standard fast-rope insertion by a hovering helo or Osprey was done at an altitude of fifty to ninety feet. What Bird and Sandy had been practicing was still in the experimental stages: HADFR (high-altitude dynamic fast-roping) — in other words, fast-roping at four hundred to five hundred feet above a moving target. There were a number of problems with this, primarily wind shear and targeting, which were different sides of the same coin. At five hundred feet, the force of the wind on the unfortunate soul dangling at the end of the fast rope — also called the worm — was considerable and unpredictable, often driving the worm far behind and to the side of the aircraft. The other side of the coin — targeting — was dicey because the flight crew would have either a degraded visual fix on the target or, in the case of bad weather or darkness, no fix at all.
Bird and Sandy had solved these problems with a custom-designed clear Lexan fairing that would hang, affixed, to the rope before the worm. Much like the curved shield carried by riot control police, the fairing cut the wind and decreased the drag to nearly zero. The targeting issue was solved in two parts: First, by a wireless transmitter that would feed real-time video from Fisher’s NV goggles straight to an LCD screen mounted between Sandy and Bird; and second, by a miniature LTD (laser target designator) pod strapped to Fisher’s wrist and index finger that not only uploaded his desired landing point but also his position relative to it. What Fisher saw, Bird would see; where Fisher pointed his LTD would be where Bird steered the Osprey. Fisher had to only look and point and then unhook himself when he was over the target.
HADFR addressed the primary drawback of standard fast-roping: noise. Helicopters and Ospreys were loud. There was no mistaking either the thunderous chop of rotors approaching your position nor the down blast fifty feet above your head as the craft went into a hover to deploy fast-roping troops. For bad guys the din was as good as an early warning alarm.
The issue that could complicate this particular HADFR was that Legard’s ship, the Gosselin, had a robust navigation radar with an operable ceiling of seven hundred feet. Bird would have to work some of what Fisher had come to call his “aviational magic,” or as Bird himself called it, “sleight of wing.”
Franco finished cinching the rig onto Fisher, then patted him on the shoulder.
Bird said in his ear, “Two minutes to ramp down. How’re ya feeling, Sam?”
�
�Like a flying worm.”
14
Fisher felt and heard the Osprey’s engines slow as Bird throttled back and rotated the nacelles to three-quarters, bleeding off speed for altitude as he dropped the craft into the Gosselin’s radar bubble. The Osprey would be directly over the ship now, Fisher knew, but in one of its radar blind spots — the other being a ring approximately three hundred yards in diameter around the ship at wave-top height, where the radar’s signal would be lost in sea clutter.
“One minute to ramp down,” Sandy called in Fisher’s ear. “We’re matching up the couplers. Stand by.”
Like Pave Low special operations helicopters, this generation of Osprey was equipped with what was called a hover coupler. When engaged, the coupler could lock the craft into either a precise fixed spot over the earth’s surface or slave its position to a designated target, in this case the Gosselin as it steamed out of the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Gaspé Passage.
“Not going anywhere,” Fisher replied. Yet. He felt that familiar and welcome anticipation/adrenaline flutter in his belly. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, centering himself. As it always did, the image of his daughter Sarah’s face appeared before his eyes. This had become a ritual for Fisher, a good luck touchstone he performed before each mission. He opened his eyes. Focus, Sam. Time to work.
Outside, over the roar of the engines, he could hear the hail-like splatter of rain on the fuselage. “Weather report, Sandy?”
“True winds light, three to five from the northwest; relative winds between us and the target’s deck, fifteen to seventeen knots; heavy and steady rain; temperature forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”
“All in all,” Bird added, “a downright lovely day.”
“I’m sure they’ve got coffee aboard,” Fisher replied. “I’ll see if I can scare up a cup.”
“Altitude, four hundred ninety-one. Ramp down in thirty seconds. We’re slaved to the target. As soon as you’re out the door, steering and cable slack on your command.”
The cabin lights blinked out, then glowed back to life in night-vision-friendly red.
“Roger,” Fisher said, and pulled up the hood on his tac suit and settled his goggles over his eyes. A thought occurred to him. He leaned closer to Franco, who was buckling into a safety rig on the bulkhead, and said, “The fairing—”
“Freshly coated in DARPA’s own version of Rain-X. Water should bead up and roll away.”
“Right.”
“Ramp coming down.”
A moment later Fisher heard the whirring of the ramp’s motors. Accompanied by a sucking whoosh of cold air, the ramp’s lip parted from the curved edge of the fuselage’s tail, and a slice of black sky appeared. The ramp continued descending, then stopped, fully open. Outside, Fisher could see skeins of clouds whipping past the opening and, in the breaks between the clouds, the distant twinkling of lights; the ships moving up and down the St. Lawrence showing up as individual specks, the cities and highways along the Seaway as threads and clusters.
Franco patted him on the shoulder again and called into his ear, “Whenever you’re ready.”
Fisher nodded, performed a final check of his rigging, then turned around so he was facing forward, then back-stepped up to the edge of the ramp until his heels were dangling in space, then coiled his legs and launched himself backward.
Per the plan, Franco let out an immediate four hundred feet of cable, which brought Fisher to a halt a hundred feet above the Gosselin’s mainmast, still unseen in the darkness. Though the true wind speed was negligible, Fisher’s relative speed through space was almost eighteen miles an hour, which was enough to turn the otherwise vertical rain into a diagonal, slashing deluge that peppered the fairing like blown sand. True to Franco’s prediction, however, the water beaded up and sluiced away before it could obscure Fisher’s vision. Through his harness he could feel the cable thrumming with the tension, like a plucked guitar string.
“Cable stopped and locked,” Bird said in his ear. “On you now, Sam.”
“Roger.”
Fisher powered up his NV goggles and heard, very faintly in his ear, the familiar hum. His vision went to gray green. And directly below his feet, not more than a third of a football field away, he could now see the top of the Gosselin ’s mast and the crescent-shaped dish of the navigation radar making its slow rotation.
Fisher pushed a button on the LTD pod on his wrist and then extended his index finger, aiming it at the ship’s afterdeck. He’d chosen this spot for his insertion primarily because of the weather. In this rain, if a stern lookout was posted, he or she would have likely withdrawn to the overhanging awning on the second-level aft superstructure. Same for anyone taking a smoke break. He switched his goggles to IR and scanned the afterdeck and superstructure for human-shaped thermal signatures. He saw none. God bless bad weather, he thought and switched back to NV.
“Reading your LTD clearly,” Sandy said. “Confirm designated aim point as afterdeck, midline, twenty feet forward of stern.”
“Confirmed,” Fisher replied. “Give me sixty of cable.”
“Sixty feet of cable,” Franco repeated. “Spooling now.”
Fisher felt himself dropping through the air. He was now aft of the mainmast. The cross-girdered tower, partially obscured by the rain, appeared before his eyes, seemingly rising disembodied from the darkness. He was forty feet above the afterdeck and twenty above the superstructure, almost dead center on the ship’s midline.
Fisher felt himself bump to a stop.
“Cable stopped,” Franco called.
“Confirm cable stopped,” Fisher replied.
Again he scanned the superstructure and afterdeck and again saw neither movement nor heat signatures. He knew better than to do an EM scan; this close to the Gosselin’s navigation radar, all he would see is a blinding swirl of electromagnetic waves that would leave him with a three-day headache. He switched back to NV. Down the length of the superstructure he could see the faint yellow glow of light escaping from the pilothouse’s port and starboard bridge wing doors — and cast in shadow on either wing a lone figure standing at the railing. Port and starboard look-outs. Not a concern right now. Their attention would be focused forward.
Fisher said, “Give me thirty of—” He stopped. On the afterdeck, a door opened on the superstructure, revealing a rectangle of red light. Standing in the rectangle was a man-shaped shadow. “Disregard my last. Hold cable.”
“Holding cable.”
The figure stood still for a second, then lifted its cupped hands to its face. Fisher saw the flare of a lighter. The hands dropped away, revealing the glowing tip of a cigarette.
Fisher said, “Stand by. Got a crewman on a smoke break.”
Fisher dangled in space, swaying slightly in the wind, which was partially blocked by the ship’s superstructure, for another five minutes until finally the crewman finished his cigarette and then leaned forward and swung the door shut.
“Clear,” Fisher radioed. “Preparing to deploy.”
He heard the double squelch of “Roger” from Franco in his ear.
He scanned the afterdeck for a clean drop zone. There. A patch of open deck bracketed by a barrel-size bollard near the port rail and the raised, glassed-in control cabin for the stern winch. Fisher pointed his LTD at the spot.
“Read distance to deck.”
Sandy replied, “Thirty-eight feet. Stand by. Calculating vertical variance.”
In the cockpit, Sandy would be using the flight computer to read the rise and fall of the Gosselin’s deck on the waves. Nothing got your attention or tended to break ankles like landing on a deck that was bucking up to meet you. It was like stepping off what you thought was the second-to-last step on a stairway only to find one more beneath your foot — only much worse.
“Variance of two feet, Sam.”
Four feet in either direction, Fisher thought.
He said, “On my mark, give me a sharp drop — thirty-four feet.”
“Roger,” Franco said. “Sharp drop of thirty-four on your mark.”
Fisher watched the deck heave and drop below his feet. In the corners of his eyes, beyond the port and starboard deck railing, he could see the roiling, curled white edges of the waves. For a fraction of a moment he felt a wave of vertigo; he focused on the deck and blocked out the peripheries.
Wait for it… wait…
The deck heaved upward, paused, then dropped again.
“Mark.”
He felt his belly lurch into his throat as Franco quick-spooled the cable. Half a second later Fisher jerked to a stop. He hit the rig’s quick release, felt himself dropping, then hit the deck on the balls of his feet, dropped his shoulder, and rolled right, behind the bollard.
“Down, safe, and clear.”
“Retrieving cable.”
“Thanks for the ride,” Fisher said. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to shake the tree.”
“At your service, boss,” Bird said.
Fisher did a quick NV/IR scan of the deck around him, then sprinted, hunched over, to the superstructure, where he flattened himself against it. Palms pressed against the aluminum bulkhead, he sidestepped until his shoulder was pressed against the jamb of the hatchway in which he’d seen the smoker. He crouched down, then undogged the hatch a half inch and inserted the flexicam. The lens revealed a red-lit passageway, ten feet long, and ending in a split ladder way, one going up and one going down.
According to Grimsdottir, the Gosselin’s crew numbered eight: captain, first mate, helmsman, three cargo handlers, and two engineers. It was four twenty. Most of the crew would be asleep, with the first mate and helmsman on the bridge and one engineer on duty in the engine spaces. The big question mark was, who, if anyone, was guarding Calvin Stewart? Had Legard sent a bodyguard or two to mind the prisoner? He would soon find out.
Fisher withdrew the flexicam, then drew his pistol, opened the hatch halfway, stepped through, and pulled it shut behind him. He crouched for a full minute, listening and watching, until he was sure he was alone, then holstered the pistol.