Prime

by Jeremy Robinson

  For a few seconds, everyone just stared in disbelief at the twitching remnants of the monster. Then Knight, with a shudder of revulsion, pushed the bodiless corpse away, inadvertently putting it right into Queen’s arms.

  “Oh, hell no!” She shoved it back at him.

  King put an immediate stop to the gruesome game of hot potato by reaching back and heaving the remains out the open window, and for a moment thereafter, they all just slumped in their seats, too physically and mentally drained to say a word. Even Rook seemed unable to add his customary pithy insights.

  It was Bishop that finally broke the silence. “Guys, we’ve got another problem.”

  That was when King heard the sound of sirens in the distance. Behind them, weaving through the traffic on the road and quickly gaining ground, was a long serpentine chain of flashing police lights.

  FORTY-TWO

  King counted seven different sets of flashing lights, the nearest perhaps two hundred meters behind them. Then he became aware of something else; Deep Blue, was telling them that they’d missed a turn.

  In the mayhem of the battle with the frankenstein, the task of navigating the unfamiliar roads hadn’t seemed all that important. “Sorry, boss man,” he broke in. “We’re a little busy here.”

  “The road you are on will end in less than half a mile. You have to turn around.”

  Bishop glanced over at him. “Now he tells us.”

  King masked his concern with a sigh of mock-frustration. “I guess you should turn around.”

  “Yep,” agreed Bishop and slammed on the brakes.

  King was thrown forward against the dashboard, and he heard a collective howl from the back seat as everyone succumbed to the sudden deceleration. The Toyota skidded forward, enveloped in the tumult of noise and a noxious cloud of rubber smoke, and then it drifted across the road. It almost went into a spin, but Bishop kept making minor corrections with the front wheels to keep its nose forward until most of the momentum was gone. When the SUV was nearly at a complete stop, he let off the brakes and cranked the steering wheel hard to the left.

  King felt his center of gravity shift and thought for a moment that the Surf was going to roll, but Bishop knew what he was doing. He stomped the gas pedal down, racing out of the turn, and headed back the way they’d come…and right down the throat of the advancing squadron of police cars.

  For just a moment, King thought Bishop was going to challenge the Iranian National Police to a game of chicken. It was just the sort of thing Bishop might do, and—live or die—King felt certain that his teammate would never ‘lose’ in such a game. The police however, had no intention of playing along; as the Surf swung around to meet them, the lead chase vehicles broke formation and spread out to block both lanes. It was a hasty affair, and King felt sure that they could blast through with a minimum of damage. Unfortunately, the Toyota wasn’t the only vehicle on the road, and now a traffic jam several cars deep was piling up in front of them. Bishop, undaunted, kept accelerating toward the impasse.

  Rook leaned forward, staring into the sea of bright red brake lights. “Ummm…”

  King resisted the urge to comment, waiting to see what fancy evasive maneuvers Bishop would employ to get them past the barricade. As they closed the gap however—eating up the distance in mere seconds—King started to question his assumptions about Bishop having a plan…or for that matter, being sane.

  A millisecond or two after passing what King thought surely must be the point of no return, Bishop nudged the wheel to the left. The Surf missed the rear bumper of a stopped car by millimeters as it veered into the opposite lane, now cleared of traffic thanks to the roadblock.

  The next few seconds were like an amusement park ride from Hell. King was thrown sideways by the sudden turn, and then pitched forward as the SUV slammed into the front end of a blockading police cruiser. The impact sent the smaller vehicle spinning, but barely slowed the Surf. Bishop cut back and forth, attempting—not always successfully—to thread his way through the maze of vehicles. The Toyota’s bumper absorbed most of the damage, but each impact crumpled the fenders and the hood, and as Bishop slipped past the roadblock and into the now wide-open lane, King saw wisps of steam rising from the front end.

  “There’s a turn coming up on your left,” Deep Blue intoned.

  Bishop saw the side road, which angled away from the opposite lane, before anyone else. Without warning, he cranked the wheel over hard. To his credit, he managed to keep all four tires on the pavement, but everyone inside was subjected to more punishment. Over the screech of the controlled skid, the sound of gunshots was audible, but none of the rounds found their mark, and as Bishop straightened the wheels, the tumult momentarily diminished.

  “Stay on this road,” Deep Blue said. “It will get you to the pick-up zone.”

  “How far?” King said.

  “Twenty klicks, give or take. Senior Citizen will meet you there.”

  King covered his microphone so that only Bishop would hear him. “Can we make it that far?”

  Bishop glanced at the dashboard where the temperature gauge was starting to climb, and then shook his head.

  Behind them, the police had regrouped and were now filing onto the side road to resume the pursuit. Even if they were able to reach the rendezvous, the police would overtake them as soon as they stopped.

  They needed a new plan.

  King glanced up, through the gaping hole the frankenstein had torn in the roof. Somewhere up there, a supersonic stealth transport plane was racing to a rendezvous that Chess Team would never make.

  Suddenly, he realized the answer was staring him in the face.

  He twisted around to the others. “Queen, get Sasha into a STARS harness. Rook, Knight… We need to turn this thing into a convertible.”

  Rook was the first to figure it out…or at least the first to say something. “Tell me you are not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  “It’s fundamentally the same thing we were planning to do anyway.” King wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince Rook or himself.

  “I can think of one pretty fundamental difference,” Rook grumbled.

  Knight rolled his eyes and started digging in his pack.

  “Don’t be such as sissy,” Queen chided. “It’s probably not the craziest thing you’ve ever done.”

  She had already retrieved the large rucksack that contained the STARS gear, and after digging out a rig of nylon web belts identical to the ones they were all wearing, she rested a hand on Sasha’s shoulder to get her attention. The cryptanalyst, who had been practically catatonic since the battle with the frankenstein, nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” Queen’s manner was surprisingly soothing, a striking contrast to the tone she’d used with Rook. “It’s all going to be over in few minutes.”

  She’s right about that, thought King. One way or another.

  While Rook and Knight set to work, affixing small shaped charges to the door posts and support beams that held the SUV’s roof in place, King called Deep Blue and told him the new plan.

  There was a long silence.

  “Deep Blue, did you copy my last?”

  “I copied, King. I’m just not sure it will work.”

  “Unless you’ve got a better option, we’re going to make it work.”

  “I admire your ‘can-do’ attitude, but this is a question of physics. I’m not sure this can be done. Or that you will survive it.”

  King eyed the temperature gauge. The needle was creeping toward the red zone. “No time to discuss this,” he said. “We’re going ahead with it. Let Senior Citizen know. King, out.”

  “Jeez, it sounds like you’re asking grandpa for a ride,” Rook muttered. “We really need another name for that damn plane.”

  “Put it in the suggestion box,” King replied. “Give me some detcord. I’ll get the front.”

  Knight passed forward a spool of what looked like thick orange wire, but which was ac
tually Primacord—plastic tubing filled with a thread-thin strand of the high-explosive compound pentaerythritol tetranitrate. King reeled off about two feet and carefully cut it with his KA-BAR.

  “All set here,” Queen announced, giving Sasha’s harness a final cinch for good measure.

  As King wrapped a length of detcord around the front doorpost on his side, Rook and Knight signaled that they were ready to go. There was a blast of warmth from the Surf’s vents. Bishop had turned on the heater in an effort to bleed off some of the rising engine heat. It was a stopgap measure, and one that wouldn’t keep up with the spiking temperature from the near constant acceleration. King tied the detcord off and then pressed a small blasting cap into one end of the tube. He repeated the procedure on the driver’s side, awkwardly reaching past Bishop to do so, and then settled back into his seat.

  “All set.”

  “Get down if you can.” Knight’s voice was eerily calm, but everyone took his admonition seriously. “Three… two… one… Fire in the hole.”

  The charges all detonated simultaneously with a noise as loud as a gunshot, but the smoke and heat of the small explosions was whisked away in the rush of air that swept through the now exposed interior of the SUV. The roof, cut loose from its supports, was gone, skittering along the road in their wake.

  King now had an unobstructed view of the landscape in all directions. They had left Maragheh behind and were now traveling through the lightly wooded countryside. That was something in their favor at least. The open road meant almost no traffic to impede them, but it also meant there was nothing to slow down the pursuit. Behind them, the line of flashing colored lights swerved around the remains of the Surf’s roof; the lead police car was perhaps only a quarter-mile behind them.

  Queen passed King a pair of heavy-duty locking carabiners, both of which were connected at intervals to a long rope that sprouted from the rucksack. Everyone in the back seat was already clipped in. He hooked one to Bishop’s harness and then secured the remaining one to his own.

  Despite the noise of rushing air, King could now hear a rapid ticking sound, the noise of the engine block starting to expand as it heated up. In a few seconds, one of the pistons would probably seize and the motor would stall, leaving them at the mercy of their pursuers.

  “Rook, send up the balloon.”

  Rook pulled a shapeless mass—it looked like an enormous deflated red football—from the rucksack and held it over his head. “Ladies and gentleman, in preparation for our flight, please make sure that your seat backs and tray tables are in the upright position, and I want to stress this, make sure that your seat belts are not fastened.”

  There was a whooshing sound as the object in Rook’s hands suddenly expanded, filling up with pressurized helium. The wind whipped against the inflating bladder, but Rook held on until it was nearly bursting at the seams. When he let go, the rush of air seemed to yank it straight back, but as soon as it was clear of the Surf, it started rising, trailing a heavy line out behind it—the same rope to which they were all attached. There was a weird zipping sound, like two pieces of fabric rubbing together, as the cable spooled out from the rucksack. The balloon rose up and out of sight, and then with a twang, the line went taut.

  Sasha gaped in disbelief, finally overcoming her shell-shocked paralysis. “That balloon isn’t big enough to lift all of us.”

  “Nope,” agreed Rook, sounding almost miserable. “But grandpa is.”

  “What?”

  King heard a new voice over the radio. “Chess Team, this is Senior Citizen. We have visual contact. Hang on to your nuts.”

  Queen gave a derisive snort…and then she was gone.

  FORTY-THREE

  In 1950, the CIA and the Air Force decided to tackle the problem of how to quickly retrieve personnel who were deep in enemy territory, well beyond the range of the helicopters of the day and in areas that were too unsafe for a plane to land. The ultimate product of that endeavor was the Fulton surface-to-air-recovery-system—STARS—named for inventor Robert Fulton Jr. who had spent nearly a decade designing and refining the system. It was known more commonly by the nickname ‘Skyhook.’

  Subsequent advances in aircraft design and stealth technology, as well as improvements to air-tracking radar systems employed by unfriendly nations, had rendered the Skyhook system effectively obsolete; there were much better ways to rescue downed pilots and deep-cover agents, much safer and much more pleasant ways.

  The principle behind Fulton’s system was fairly simple. A transport aircraft would make a foray into enemy territory and airdrop a package containing all the necessary equipment: a harness, five hundred feet of high-tension rope, and a self-inflating balloon. The man on the ground would don the harness, connect himself to the balloon and then send it aloft. The whole process could be accomplished in just a few minutes. Once the balloon was in the sky, the plane would make one more pass, driving straight at the balloon. A special trap attached to the nose of the aircraft would snag the rope and yank the man into the sky.

  That was where the really uncomfortable part began. The first thing the person in the harness would experience was sudden rapid acceleration—zero to two hundred miles an hour in the blink of an eye. The elasticity of the rope alleviated some of this effect, but the G-forces involved were enough to make some people black out. Next, came the high-altitude double whammy: freezing temperatures and low air pressure. While the plane beat a hasty retreat back to friendly skies, the unlucky CIA asset would experience the equivalent of climbing an Alpine mountain in the space of a few seconds. Last but not least, there was the spinning; an object trailed at high speed through the air had a tendency to spin like an out-of-control kite. This spin could induce dizziness, nausea or even unconsciousness. Fortunately, there was an easy way to stop the spin: the disoriented man dangling at the end of the rope needed only to extend his half-frozen arms and legs, spread-eagling like a body-surfer, until the air crew in the plane managed to reel in their catch.

  Capture and torture by the enemy was almost a preferable alternative.

  Officially, the Air Force ceased using the Skyhook in 1996. Unofficially, the equipment and the capability to employ the Skyhook was maintained by the Joint Special Operations Command as a ‘just in case’ measure.

  No one had been especially thrilled by King’s suggestion that they use the Skyhook to whisk them out of Iran, least of all King himself, but with time and resources in short supply for the team, and with secrecy a paramount concern, Deep Blue had signed off on it. There was the matter of retrofitting Senior Citizen to accommodate the thirty-foot long horns that would be used to snare the balloon—no simple task since the craft was designed for super-sonic travel. There was also the question of whether the pick-up line could hold the weight of six passengers; it was theoretically possible, but the system had never been used to pick up more than two men at a time.

  What was most certainly not in the original plan was deploying the STARS from inside a moving vehicle while being chased down a rural highway by half the Iranian National Police force.

  In a rare instance of serendipity, the forward momentum of the Toyota actually made things easier. Like with a kite pulled along by a running child, the line pulled taut, and the balloon—which was festooned with blinking infrared lights—cut through the sky in an almost perfectly straight line, providing an easy target for the pilot sitting at the controls of Senior Citizen.

  Unseen by anyone on the ground, the stealth plane came from out of the west and streaked across the sky. Even without the constantly updated GPS coordinates supplied by the mysterious entity known only as Deep Blue, the pilot would have been able to find the target vehicle simply by following the string of flashing red and blue lights trailing behind it.

  The pilot banked the aircraft to the right, carved a tight turn in the sky and with his computerized targeting system, locked onto the balloon. The plane advanced unerringly toward the blinking lights, and then, with textbook precision, it
snared the balloon in the V-shaped trap.

  One at a time, like an unraveling chain-stitch, the six passengers in the SUV were plucked from their seats. The empty vehicle cruised forward a few hundred yards before veering off the road and crashing into a stand of trees. By the time the police cars arrived, the plane, still trailing the Chess Team plus one, was already several miles away.

  Because they were already traveling forward at about seventy miles per hour, the effect of the sudden acceleration was considerably reduced, though understandably, this was of little comfort to the six people dangling daisy-chained from the nose of the aircraft.

  King had imagined that being jerked out of his seat would feel a little like what happened when his parachute opened during a jump—a sudden bone-jarring snap. He would later reflect that his erroneous assumption had been for the best; if he’d actually known what to expect, he never would have gone through with it.

  For several long seconds, he struggled through a barrage of sensory inputs, all of them unpleasant. Biting cold ripped into him, blasting his face with such intensity that he couldn’t breathe, much less open his eyes. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he was spinning uncontrollably, but the accompanying disorientation, coupled with the relentless assault from the wind, confounded his efforts to take any sort of action to arrest the spin. Mustering his last vestiges of will power, he unclenched his limbs from the protective fetal curl he had instinctively assumed, and extended his arms.

  The sense of vertigo started to abate after a few moments, emboldening him to stretch his legs out as well. Now, instead of corkscrewing through the sky, he felt himself bouncing up and down, buffeted by invisible currents of air. He felt like he was trying to swim up Niagara Falls, but there wasn’t a single thing he could do to end the ordeal.

  Then, almost without being aware of the transition, the pervasive Arctic blast and the jarring turbulence stopped, and he felt something solid beneath him. His face felt like a frozen mask, but he managed to open his eyes enough to see two men in cold-weather flight suits dragging him up a metal ramp and into the relatively protected interior of the stealth transport’s cargo hold.