by Glynn James
The line went dead. Martin regarded the phone before him.
The door to the room flew open. Martin dropped the phone, raised his sidearm, and nearly shot the man who came through it. It was one of the MARSOC marines, cradling a .45-caliber H&K UMP sub-machine gun and appearing slightly wounded. After almost shooting Martin in turn, he surveyed the room. “You’re the Brits.”
Martin and Wesley both nodded.
“You loyal to this vessel?”
They both nodded again, more vigorously. “God, yes,” Wesley stammered.
The marine nodded his acceptance of this. “Stay put. Don’t open this door.” Then he stepped back into the passageway, one hand on his weapon, the other on the hatch handle to pull it closed. A round took him in the head and knocked him over backward.
He lay dead and still on the deck before Martin – who suddenly got an overwhelming sense that this deck wasn’t in fact going to be retaken. “Come on,” he said to Wesley. “I think we’re going to be overrun if we stay here.”
Wesley had to swallow an enormous bolus of fear before he could make himself step out that hatch.
* * *
They went the direction the marine hadn’t gotten shot from. Soon they were amongst running throngs of sailors, and the odd marine, who were scrambling, loading weapons, shouting at one another, and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
“Well?” Wesley shouted over the tumult. “What now?”
“I say let’s go find Drake. I think I can get us to the island from here.”
Wesley wasn’t sure that was the best idea he’d heard all morning, but that route at least seemed to take them away from the fighting belowdecks. Or so they thought – the route Martin knew took them first up to the flight deck, which they’d then have to cross to get to the island.
Martin poked his head up over the ladder first. He could hear gunfire from the direction of the island – and every few seconds a stray tracer would flash off into the dimness of the gray and heavily overcast morning. From the wind coursing over the flight deck, and the sound of the surf, the ship seemed to be moving, and moving briskly.
Just as Martin gave Wesley the (more or less) all clear, and they both clambered up onto deck, a raucous and terrifying explosion rocked the outer edge of the deck, knocking them halfway back down the hatch again. Much of the world to their right went up in a red and white inferno, which briefly lit up nearly every inch of the deck like stage lighting, tore a hole in the cloudy sky, and totally seared the vision and hearing of the two refugees.
“What the fuck was that?!” Wesley shouted, looking away and covering his eyes.
Martin was no expert, but he clocked the location as being that of the starboard Sparrow missile launchers. “A weapons magazine, I think!”
“Jesus Christ! Is this safe?!”
Martin realized that was very much a question worth considering.
But then he spotted the flaming figures lurching toward them across the deck – from right out of the flames at the site of the explosion.
For just one second, he thought they were wounded and burning sailors.
But then he recognized that walk.
“Ruuunnn!” he shouted, pulling Wesley up the ladder, and both of them into a headlong flight toward the island.
Wesley went with it and came up running, hand over head – but he spared a look over his shoulder trying to make out their pursuers. “What?” he stammered, “what is it?”
“It’s the dead, you fool…!"
A long hundred meters lay between them and that island.
Bullets began snapping the air over their heads.
And urgent moaning grew louder behind them.
DROP ZONE
Ainsley’s GPS fix was coming on and off. On the upside, the storm was starting to blow itself out, clearing from in front of a strong wind off the lake – or what was really a large inland sea posing as a lake. The captain and Alpha commander squinted to get a visual on the target building. He began flaring his chute and hauling on his steering lines to get himself and his team on a heading that would intersect it, before he was too low and on an express elevator for the probable wild west of street level. The others, slightly behind and above him, had a little more space and time, and thus a little more room to maneuver.
Ainsley fought a stiff tailwind from off the lake, as it tried to push him past the drop zone. The rooftop was coming up fast, and Ainsley, and all of them, were still too far to the north of it. Ainsley’s biceps strained against his lines like the reins of a runaway stagecoach, and his face beaded sweat, despite the chill air. He, and the others, had all ditched the oxygen masks as they passed through 7,000 feet.
He spared a look behind him. The formation was slightly ragged, but they all seemed more or less on the same vector. As to whether he was going to be able to master both the wind and gravity in time to make the drop zone… well, the cluttered rooftop raced toward him on three axes – left, forward, and down – and Ainsley hauled on his left riser for all he was worth.
The wind slackened slightly and the building finally lined up under him. They were going to make it. Ainsley flared his canopy at the last second to slow his rate of descent; a broken leg or other serious landing injury would really mess up everyone’s day. But his descent instantly slowed much more than he’d intended – reversed in fact, lifting him back up into the sky.
It was a massive updraft, driven by the low-pressure zone left by the storm, fed by the warm air off the lake, and coming up the vertical cliffside of the building. Ainsley found himself rising radically, while still moving forward – the updraft was going to take him right over the edge of the building. He was going to miss the rooftop entirely.
Nothing else to be done, and no time to do anything else anyway. Pulling the quick releases on his canopy, he fell from the chute and plummeted straight down, more than twenty feet to the hard rooftop. On landing, he still had forward momentum, and rolled into it, hoping to absorb the force across his side and shoulder. While desperately trying to survive his landing, he was also completely aware that he had no idea what was happening to the rest of his team.
Until, that is, everyone started shouting into their team radios at once.
The squad net had gone completely hectic.
And Ainsley tumbled toward the building edge end over end – a tangle of man, equipment, and webbing.
* * *
Predator initially kept his mouth shut and off the radio. He wasn’t one for sending traffic when things in his sector went to shit. It was too much like whining. He much preferred to deal with a crisis and then bring the others up to speed as and when. Of course, there was a fine line between operating independently and neglecting team comms and coordination. But very often there was just no time, and that was the case now.
The same updraft that blindsided Ainsley caught him – but higher and farther from the target building. He tried to steer to correct, but after the towering wave of air took him to its apex, a crosswind caught his big body and bigger canopy, and slung him off to the side like a rock in a sling. For the moment, he was basically out of control, and watched the next rooftop, maybe five stories lower than the target, race at him at train-wreck speed.
He figured now might be an okay time to radio something in. “Uh… Pred going in hard. Mayday, motherfuckers…”
The surface of this other building’s roof was a tangle of antennas, aerials, satellite dishes, and duct pipes. One particularly tall radio tower, which probably had the building’s aircraft warning light, back when there were lights, looked like having Predator’s number on it. As he whirled in a spiral beneath and outside of his canopy, he thought to himself:
Yeah… this is gonna hurt.
* * *
Juice had been descending less than twenty meters behind and above Predator. But due to the vagaries of micro-weather and low-pressure systems, the updraft that caught his friend left him in peace. He was still working hard to control his flight and descent
, but he was on a solid vector for their drop zone – when everything went to shit.
He saw Ainsley, in the lead, head up toward the troposphere – then drop right out from under his canopy. He lost track of him after that, as his gaze snapped to the right – where Predator was doing some kind of para-gyroscope routine, spiraling down into the next building over. His final rotation took his lines dead across a tall radio tower. After that, his rate of spin increased, wrapping tightly around it. He stopped when his body smacked into its side with a crack so loud it was audible above the wind, and a hundred yards away.
He came to rest hanging upside down by his lines, fouled in risers and soggy chute. The weight of his kit bag levered his leg at a sickeningly unnatural angle.
And that was as far as Juice had time to follow it. Because he also had to decide on his own course of action in an instant, and did so – hauling on his right steering line, coming around, passing over the edge of the target building, and soaring down toward its neighbor. He flared two seconds later, coming to rest perfectly upright, both feet planted, a textbook landing, totally squared away.
Just on the wrong building.
His big brown beard twitched beneath his black tactical helmet as he sniffed loudly, once, then paused in that spot for a single second.
Then he shrugged out of his harness while drawing a six-inch Spyderco knife from his chest harness, used it to cut free his leg bag, then advanced with it through the gloom toward his friend. If there turned out to be any Zulus up here with them, well, he figured he’d just have to deal with them the old fashioned way. He flipped the enormous knife up onto the back of his hand, then palmed it again.
Overhand grip – right down through the top of the skull.
* * *
Ali’s final approach was going pretty well, actually – until Ainsley’s released and now free-flying chute came flapping back at her through the damp gloom like Mothra in some kind of gray and storm-tossed hell. Only a decade-plus of intensive training and operational experience in disaster management allowed her to keep her cool.
If that chute hit her anywhere – her body, her lines, or especially her own canopy – she’d be fouled and mostly likely fall out of the sky like a meat rock. She yanked on both lines with every ounce of her strength, flaring and turning. At the last second, she tensed and pulled both her knees into her chest. (Thank fuck for all that ab work…) The snapping, splashing, whistling mass of parachute slipped beneath her with inches to spare.
Having survived that, and getting her bearings, her next crisis was obvious: having slowed her descent to dodge the chute, she’d overshot the target building. She sailed now into the canyon of skyscrapers with no building tops of any sort any longer in her line of sight… and beneath her nothing but the major artery of West Lake Street. Nothing but the near death-sentence of street level.
She got on the squad net, speaking normally. “Ali to Command. I have overshot drop zone. Repeat, overshot drop zone. My new location is about to be, uh… downtown. Stand by.”
No, scratch that about there being only the street below. There was also the Chicago River, which was only now resolving to her through the near darkness. And also the elevated train platform, providing a complex hazard thirty feet above the hard street.
And both of those were coming up pretty damned fast, too.
* * *
Homer was perfectly in the pipe himself, set to hit his marker with precision.
But then he saw everything go wrong. He saw it all: Ainsley’s rise and fall, Pred’s whirl-a-gig, Juice’s diversion – and Ali’s death-defyingly close call. And then her sailing off toward downtown. It was all laid out before and below him, like box seats to an opera of fatal errors.
And he decided his own fate in a second as well. Their orders from the pre-mission briefings were completely clear – force protection was not a mission priority. Nobody went back for anyone else. Everyone went forward toward the mission objective – no matter what. But…
There was no way Homer could make himself leave Ali on that street alone. Not at this point, not after everything. No, he’d much sooner die down there with her, than listen to her die from the safety of a rooftop. This loved one he was coming for – no matter what.
Heck with it, he figured in his own head. Guess I’m just not in an order-following mood today…
He flared early, overshot the rooftop with plenty of room to spare, and followed her down.
He figured he’d update command on that one when he got where he was going.
* * *
Handon, Henno, and Pope, at various points upon the actual target rooftop, got out of their harnesses, charged their weapons, and got to Ainsley at about the same time. There was a wire fence that ringed the rooftop, and protected anyone up there from a 24-story fall. But Ainsley had crashed through it – with his helmet.
Now his head and shoulders stuck out into open air, hundreds of feet above the cement. He seemed lucid, but not quite ready to try moving. Henno and Pope each grabbed a leg and pulled him back in, while Handon faced behind them, took a knee, put his rifle to his shoulder, and pulled security. Parachuting accidents didn’t mean the enemy wasn’t going to show up, or would give you a time-out.
“Sitrep,” Ainsley said, sitting up and shaking his head. He also rubbed his left shoulder, where he had taken much of the force of the fall.
The four of them pieced together what had happened, and worked out everyone’s current, or probable, location. This project was aided when Juice and Homer reported in from their improvised rescue ops.
“Right,” Ainsley said, climbing shakily to his feet. “So I guess it’s just disobey fucking orders day, then, isn’t it…”
Pope and Henno dealt with distributing the combat load in the leg bags, while Ainsley and Handon tried to put together a plan to salvage the mission.
Or at least to keep all their people alive through the next few minutes.
ALL OVER THE PLACE / NO PLACE
“Roger that, Top,” Juice said, after briefing Handon over the radio, and getting general instructions from him in turn. “What I’ll do is strongpoint here for now, while I see about Pred’s mobility – and then look at options for getting down off this building.” He grabbed the top of his head to scratch his scalp with his ballcap – but found only his tactical helmet, which was strapped down tight and didn’t shift. “Yeah, we’re always careful. Yeah, just like church mice… Juice out.”
He went down on one knee, just in front of where Predator lay flat on his back. This was after Juice had cut him free, lowered him to the ground with sheer arm and back strength – and then straightened his right leg out for him. The brittle cracking sound had only been audible because Predator had declined to scream. He’d also declined morphine.
Juice waggled a syrette of morphine sulfate in front of his face, which was drenched with sweat. “Ready for some of that sweet fruit of the poppy now, tough guy?”
Predator snatched it and crushed it in his hand. The oozing liquid did smell sweet, like vanilla. Pred tossed it away and wiped his hand on his assault suit. “You show me another one of those, you son of a bitch, and you and me are going to have words.”
Juice wasn’t surprised. Giant unstoppable badasses like Predator generally preferred to bull through pain, rather than dull their senses and reflexes mid-mission. Though it was looking an awful lot like Pred’s mission was over before it had begun.
“All right,” Juice said, knowing it was totally pointless to argue. “You sit tight. Gonna check the roof access.” As he hefted his SIG assault rifle, he saw Pred draw one of his .45 pistols and lay it across his chest. Juice stepped off into the sooty maze of the rooftop. The sun was just cracking on the horizon somewhere out there, and the morning lightening.
After doing a full circuit of the roof, rifle at low ready, he quickly found the two roof-access doors, most likely to emergency stairwells. Circling back to the first one, he tried rattling the doorknob. Locked. That of
course could be fixed. He tried knocking lightly. Nothing. Back to the second door. He rattled the knob. Locked. He pulled back his gloved hand to try knocking.
The doorknob rattled, from the other side.
As he leapt backward like an electroshock victim, eyes going wide, the whole door began shaking violently in its frame. Juice stopped his backward lurch, solidified his stance, and used biofeedback techniques to bring his breathing and heart rate back down.
As much as he and Pred wanted off this rooftop… clearly, someone badly wanted in.
Predator came in over the squad net, from across the rooftop. The noise of the rattling door had obviously carried. “Dude, what the fuck? Over.”
* * *
Ainsley and Handon stood off to one side, in conference. Their situation was slowly clarifying. And it seemingly got worse with every revelation, with every decision point they had to consider.
“So what’s your call?” Handon asked.
Ainsley looked grim. “I think we need to get the QRF moving.” Handon raised his eyebrows at that. Ainsley persisted. “We’ve got one wounded, one missing, and two separated, at exactly H-hour plus zero seconds. We’re already down to half strength.”
Handon shrugged. “True. But on the other hand, we’re not in contact yet. And we’re guaranteed to be if those Sea Hawks come screaming in here.” If the QRF launched now, they’d have to do it in the helos – their prop plane wouldn’t reach the carrier again for another two hours.
Ainsley nodded. “We could execute the waterborne infil option.” This contingency plan called for the MARSOC team to put down in rigid inflatable boats a mile out in Lake Michigan, then motor in.
Handon didn’t look impressed. “With the storm over, plus the wind off the lake, I’m afraid the engine noise would still carry. And if it didn’t, those Zodiac engines would when they got near the shoreline. I say we just get on with it.”
Ainsley seemed as if he was starting to see it his way.
“And I can’t raise the JFK anyway.”
“What?” Ainsley’s eyebrows went for his helmet.