A voice came over the loudspeaker announcing the commencement of boarding, and the departure lounge roiled with sudden motion as the passengers queued up for the Air France flight. She listened as two French businessmen bickered in front of her, their handmade silk suits gleaming in the artificial light, and felt a pang of envy. Their universe involved jockeying for advantage, negotiating the next deal, counting their profits and bemoaning their losses, insulated from the world she inhabited by the invisible shield of ignorance and privilege. If only she could live in their reality and forget what she knew.
The problem being, of course, that she couldn’t purge her memory of the things she’d seen and the deeds she’d done. They would always be there, coloring things, whispering warnings even when there were no more wars left to fight, her enemies vanquished, the menace an illusory phantom, an artifact not based in anything but her imagination.
It was time to put down the sword and walk off the battlefield. She’d put in her time. Now she was flying to a new beginning, filled with possibility, with a chance to start over.
Standing in line, she tried Alan’s phone one more time, with no answer, and then dialed Magdalena again with identical results as she moved with the other passengers. The queue inched forward towards the attendant at the gate taking the boarding passes, gifting each new arrival with a plastic smile and a blank stare. Once past the officious woman and in the jetway, heavy rain blew against the steel siding as she walked towards the plane, matching her mood. In spite of her calming mantra, the fact was that she had talked to Magdalena yesterday with no problem. And now, suddenly, both Alan’s phone and hers were out of commission? At the same time? Her field instincts screamed in her head that there was no such thing as coincidence, even as her civilian logic argued that of course there was – random, odd events happened all the time, and correlation did not imply causation.
Her heart beat so hard it felt like it would burst out of her chest, and once she’d taken her seat she had to force herself to relax, to lose the tension and the seed of anxiety that threatened to burgeon into full-scale panic. It was over. There was no more danger. Alan’s flight had probably been delayed, or his battery had run out of juice. It happened. There were myriad innocent explanations she could think of. Just as there were countless to explain why Magdalena wasn’t answering. None of them requiring a belief that something bad had happened, or that the boogeyman was alive and well and coming for her.
The jet backed out of the gate with a creak from the landing gear as the stewardess gave a dispirited safety presentation in French, and Jet pretended interest in her magazine as her mind whirred at ten thousand RPM. There were a million reasons for her not to be worried, and yet all she could think of as the plane leapt into the gray drizzle was that it might not be coincidence that the only two people on the planet she cared about had gone dark while she was poised in the sky like the mythical son of Daedalus, hurtling through space at over five hundred miles per hour towards a destiny that now seemed as tentative as a first kiss.
Afterword
Parkour is a popular combination of gymnastics, martial arts, and sport practiced by “traceurs.” Perhaps its most impressive characteristic is its practitioners’ ability to do the seemingly impossible and defy gravity. Some incredible videos of parkour and free running are available for consideration on YouTube. My favorites are Oleg Vorslav, this variety of traceurs, and one of the sports’ stars, David Belle.
Anyone who imagines that I stretch the limits of what is physically possible in my JET series might want to watch these clips in their entirety before arriving at a final conclusion.
The conspiracy that acts as the basis for JET III is based on a number of disturbing reports, one of the most accessible being this one.
While not all conspiracy theories hold water, not all are gibberish, either. I would advise interested readers to spend some time researching so they can draw their own conclusions.
(Links active at time of publication, November 2012)
Excerpts from JET IV – Reckoning and Silver Justice
JET IV – Reckoning
By Russell Blake
Jet IV – Reckoning pits Jet against the deadliest threat yet – an enemy with endless resources who will stop at nothing to destroy her. From the mountains of Indonesia to the streets of Washington, Jet discovers in a breakneck-paced roller-coaster of action that danger lurks in the unlikeliest of places and nothing is as it seems.
Go to JET IV – Reckoning excerpt
Silver Justice
By Russell Blake
Manhattan. A ruthless serial killer is butchering financial industry high rollers. FBI Special Agent Silver Cassidy, the head of a task force that’s on a collision course with disaster, finds herself fighting impossible odds to stop the murderer before he can kill again. Struggling to balance the hunt for a savage predator with the challenges of being a single parent, Silver finds herself thrust into a nightmare of brutality that will demand every ounce of determination she possesses to survive.
Go to Silver Justice excerpt
Purchase Silver Justice
JET IV – Reckoning
Prologue
Papua, Indonesia
Hulking yellow ore trucks sat quietly in a sprawling gravel lot, their huge, battered carrying bins empty. A bored guard lounged in the gate house protecting the nearly two hundred vehicles, listening to a CD on a small portable stereo. After a long day of grinding routine, the shifts had departed and the incessant roar of motors and machinery had subsided, leaving the area eerily quiet compared to the daytime cacophony.
The torrential rain had finally slowed to a drizzle, a remnant of an unseasonal monsoon that blew in earlier in the day and dumped six inches of water on the mountain peaks in as many hours, and the access roads were muddy, as was frequently the case in September.
The largest gold mine in the world was shut down for the night, awaiting the return of the nearly twenty thousand workers who would arrive at dawn to operate the machines that had stripped the top off a nearby peak, methodically separating the precious ore that held gold, silver, and copper – natural resources that should have made the region one of the wealthiest on the planet. In reality, the prosperity was almost entirely leached off by the Indonesian government and the private company that operated the mine. The jewel in that company’s crown, it was responsible for unimaginable profits, while the majority of locals lived in primitive tribal conditions, much as they had for thousands of years.
That lifestyle was doomed, the toxic sediment from the open pit mine having clogged the rivers and poisoned the animals, intruding into every area of the ecosystem and sullying everything it touched. Fishing, hunting, and virtually any endeavor that required clean water or land were finished forever in the region – an acceptable cost for the company that earned billions each year from the mine’s operations, if not for the natives whose land was forever ruined.
A roaming sentry shined his flashlight beam in the direction of the man watching the silent vehicles from the guardhouse, and then roamed over their shapes before returning to the path in front of him. The security force was equipped with pistols and shotguns, but there hadn’t been any problems at the site for several years, so the men were relaxed about their duty – one of near endless drudgery.
Headlights bounced up the rutted access road towards the entry gate, and a pickup truck pulled to a stop, the bed filled with laughing local men, their chocolate skin glistening from the rain – a nuisance to which they were inured, having grown up with the monsoons; the periodic storms as routine as the sun setting into the sea that surrounded their island.
A guard welcomed the graveyard shift maintenance men with a wave and exchanged a few words with the grinning driver, and then raised the barricade and motioned for it to pass. The vehicle lurched off with a groan, its springs straining with the human cargo. The guard lowered the barricade back into position, his sole errand for the next six hours completed.
&
nbsp; The local islanders didn’t mix with the transplanted immigrants from Indonesia, preferring to keep to themselves in one of the company towns that had been built to house the workforce. The islanders were bitter that they had gone from owning the island to being a minority, the influx of immigrants having swelled the non-indigenous ranks to over fifty percent of the population, encouraged by the Indonesian government, which was anxious to minimize the power of the natives.
Efforts to create an independent nation had been stymied when Indonesia had effectively annexed the western half of New Guinea and imposed its rule, ratified in a sham election in 1969, where the population was prevented from voting, except for one thousand twenty-five “representatives” of the New Guinea people, who were instructed by their governors to vote for an Indonesian regime or be slaughtered. Unsurprisingly, the vote was unanimously in favor of Indonesian governance, which was approved by the United Nations in a shameful acceptance of the shotgun wedding election.
Much of the island’s population lived in extreme poverty in spite of the wealth of natural resources, which included the gold that was pulled from the earth and shipped to other lands. Over a third of the locals lived on less than ten dollars a week, and subsisted on primitive farming in conditions of misery and squalor. Malaria killed a huge number of the islanders each year, largely because of inadequate health care and basic infrastructure. In the eyes of Indonesia, the sooner the locals were wiped out, the better for everyone – a state of affairs that resulted in a prevailing and understandable tension between the natives and their interloping masters.
The night air was thin at fourteen thousand feet, and the gunmen were winded after the long trek from their base camp. Bright spotlights illuminated the barren mine production area, operations having ceased hours before, and only a security detachment remained to guard against vandals or theft. The outline of the massive open pit gashed into the heart of the mountain was just visible in the gloom, the yawning expanse stretching over a mile.
The leader of the group of five men pointed to his right, at the aerial tramway that ran down the side of the mountain. A short, muscular man with a large backpack strapped securely in place nodded, then broke off from his companions and made for the control area. The others watched him disappear into the dark and then turned their eyes to the leader, who pointed at the buildings below them.
“You know the drill. Let’s get this over with. I want to be out of here in half an hour, tops,” he said, then gestured at the buildings – a hospital, school, and the production facilities.
The men had run simulations on the most efficient way to achieve their objective and were prepared for what was to come. Each was equipped with a modified M4 assault rifle with a sound suppressor, visible laser, infrared illuminator, and PVS-17A mini night vision sights. But in spite of the firepower, the goal was to penetrate their objective, place explosive charges throughout the facility, including on the sluice pipelines and all communications wiring, and then slip away – not to get involved in a full-scale gun battle if they could avoid it. Although if they had to fight their way out, they had come prepared. In the end, it didn’t much matter to the men either way – they’d all seen more than their share of combat and were as used to it as humans could be.
The leader motioned to the men to split up, and they made their way to their pre-assigned targets, slipping through the night like ghosts.
A truck carrying two security men crawled along the perimeter road, the engine barely turning over, the patrol rounds obligatory. Everything seemed in order. Which it had been every night for as long as either of them could remember.
“Hey, you thinking about what you’re going to do once you get a little time off?” the driver asked, making conversation, trying to kill the boredom that was a constant of the job.
“No, not really. I mean, I have to worry about the kids, and my – wait, did you see that? Over by the sluicing pipeline?” his partner demanded, agitated, pointing at the big pipes, his tone surprised.
“See what? You hitting the bottle early tonight?”
“I saw something.”
“Something. What was it?” the driver asked, slowing further and cranking the wheel to the right, to bring them closer to the huge pipelines that carried the slurry – the mixture of gold, silver, and copper concentrate – to the port at Amamapare seventy miles away, where it was filtered and dried before being shipped all over the world.
“I don’t know. I thought I saw someone.”
“At the pipes? What would they be doing there?” the driver asked caustically. “There’s nothing to steal.”
“Can’t hurt to take a look.”
The truck crept towards the pipelines.
“I don’t see anything, do you?” the driver asked again, and his partner shook his head.
“No. Wait a second. What is that over by that seam? Can you make it out?” The guard shined his LED flashlight at the pipes.
“What are you talking about?”
“Over there. I see something.”
“I don’t. This is a waste of time.”
“You’re probably right, but let’s check it out on foot. You never know.”
The driver rolled to a stop and both men got out, the passenger carrying a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun in addition to his sidearm.
They moved around the concrete wall that separated the pipeline from the access road, the beams of their lights shining along the freshly painted metal surface of the three pipes, and both stopped at the same point twenty yards away. Two rectangles protruded from the surface, near a welded seam where the sections had been joined.
“What the hell is–”
The driver’s chest exploded in a bloody pulp as three silenced rounds tore through it, and his exclamation was cut short by a gurgle as he flew forward and landed face first in the wet dirt. His partner swung the shotgun back towards the road where the truck sat idling, but never made it, two slugs blowing off the side of his face and the top of his skull with a wet thwack before he could find a target to shoot.
A figure in black stepped from the shadows adjacent to the nearby maintenance shack, leading with the silenced snout of his M4, and quickly trotted to the two corpses and removed a radio from the driver’s belt before glancing up at the rectangles. A small red LED blinked at him. He double-checked his watch before tapping his ear bud and murmuring into it.
“This is Jupiter. I took out two guards. I’ve got their radio, but we need to presume they’ll be missed. Where are we? Check in. Over.”
A whispered voice responded within seconds. “Tram’s wired. I’m five minutes out from getting my secondary target finished. No interruptions so far. Saturn out.”
“This is Mars. Ten minutes away from my target being completed. One patrol came by, but I didn’t engage.”
The others checked in. They’d be ready to boogie in twenty minutes, tops.
“Pluto here. I’m headed to their communications center. See everyone at the rendezvous point in twenty. Check in if there are any more casualties. Don’t leave any survivors.”
The group’s leader considered the latest and shook his head in silent disapproval, then returned to sighting through the night scope at the guard standing under the overhang of the darkened building that housed the cables and communication equipment that connected the mine to the outside world. They had always known there would be collateral damage, but the more of the security detail that went missing, the greater the chances that the operation would be interrupted before all the charges were placed.
He made a quick judgment call and then lightly squeezed the trigger of his rifle, and his weapon spat death into the night. The hapless guard collapsed in a bloody heap. It couldn’t be helped. He’d been watching the man for five minutes, but the drizzle had kept the sentry glued to the building, and now he was short on time. There was no room for failure or partial completion of their mission. The orders had been clear – cripple the mine so that it would be out of co
mmission for months. It had been made clear that payment hinged on the success of their work, and no qualms had been voiced about any casualties that resulted. The objective was paramount, and anyone who got in the way was expendable.
He trotted to the building and without glancing at the dead guard, moved to the locked door and affixed a small charge to the deadbolt. Ten seconds after he flipped the switch, the small detonator gave a dull thump and the door blew open, the noise muffled by the cloudburst. He swung around, checking to verify he was still alone, and then edged into the gloom of the darkened interior, taking care to swing the door closed.
Four minutes later the leader stepped back out, scanning the area, then sprinted to the dead man’s security truck and pulled away, pausing to give the rest of his group an update as he drove towards the main gate. The guards there would also have to be executed, but he’d planned to do so once all the charges had been placed, signaling the conclusion of the night’s work.
His ear bud clicked and another report came in – four of the group were now done and ready to roll. The fifth man murmured a terse update – he would be finished shortly.
The truck’s headlights swung towards the gate that protected the mine’s primary entry road, and just as he was drawing near it the distinctive roar of a shotgun boomed from one of the buildings near the crushing area. The guards stiffened and then the radio the group leader had lifted from the dead driver crackled to life.
“We have at least one intruder in sector C. He’s shooting at me. David got off one round with the shotgun, but he’s down. Doesn’t look like he’s going to make it.” The voice sounded panicked, and then the leader heard two smaller caliber shots from the same area, and then three more. Pistol, by the sound of it.
Jet 03: Vengeance Page 26