Countdown to Midnight, page 24
“Which you didn’t do,” Flynn pointed out.
The security chief smiled thinly. “Of course not. At least not until we’d thoroughly vetted them.” She sighed. “We’ve had them under surveillance ever since. And their story, such as it is, seems to check out.”
“And you think they might be able to help Nick with this operation?” Van Horn asked narrowly.
“Possibly,” Park allowed. She frowned. “Letting strangers inside Avalon House is against the rules. My rules, I mean. But I don’t see any other realistic option in this particular case.” She held up her smartphone. “I can have them here in minutes. If you’re interested?”
Flynn nodded. “Oh, hell, yes.”
A short time later, Park knocked briefly on the half-open door to the study and looked in. “Our guests have arrived,” she reported. Then she half-turned and crooked a finger down the hall, signaling someone. “In here, gentlemen.”
Flynn’s eyes widened at the sight of the two men who ambled somewhat sheepishly in behind the security chief. Cole Hynes and Wade Vucovich had been part of the Joint Force security unit he’d briefly commanded on Alaska’s frozen north coast. After a risky parachute jump into a winter blizzard, they’d all tangled with a Spetsnaz detachment hunting for Russia’s missing stealth bomber—a fight that had ended in victory, but with half of his men dead or wounded. He hadn’t seen any of them since he’d been medevacked out to San Antonio for his own injuries. He stood up.
Hynes, short and square-shouldered, nodded to him. “Hey there, Captain,” he said uncertainly.
Vucovich, taller and wiry, shyly echoed him, “Hi, sir.”
They bobbed their heads at Laura Van Horn. From the appraising looks on their faces, they recognized her as one of the C-130J pilots who’d flown them on that last airborne drop. “Ma’am.”
“Cole. Wade. It’s . . . well, really good to see you both,” Flynn acknowledged, trying less than successfully to conceal his surprise at their appearance here at Avalon House. “But you can drop the ‘captain’ and ‘sir’ bit, you know.” He indicated his jeans and polo shirt. “I’m not in the Air Force anymore.”
“Yes, sir,” Hynes said. “We know that. But we’ve got to call you something . . . and Mr. Flynn doesn’t sound right somehow.”
Flynn grinned at them. “You could try calling me Nick,” he suggested.
“Yes, sir,” Hynes agreed. “We could.” But their stoic faces told him that was a nonstarter.
He studied their own mix of civilian clothes. “So I guess you guys are out of the Army now, too?”
Hynes nodded. “That’s right, sir.” He shrugged. “The brass wanted me to reenlist when my time ran out. But they offered me Fort Polk,” he said in disgust.
“Ouch,” Flynn said sympathetically. Fort Polk in Louisiana had a well-deserved reputation as one of U.S. Army’s worst duty stations. “That sucks.”
“Yeah, Polk. And on a PFC’s lousy pay? Forget that,” Hynes said. “So I told them to shove it.”
Flynn stared at him. “I thought you got your sergeant’s stripes back after our brush with the Russians?” Hynes, a superb soldier otherwise, had a pugnacious streak that had cost him his noncom’s rank and landed him with Flynn’s band of exiles in northern Alaska.
“I did,” the shorter man said evenly. “Lost ’em again. Had a disagreement with a dickhead civilian outside a bar in Anchorage a couple of months later.”
Flynn hid a grin. He should have figured. Outside of combat, Cole Hynes tended to get bored. And when he got bored, it was all too easy for that temper of his to get the better of him. The veteran infantryman didn’t suffer fools gladly. He just decked them.
He turned to Vucovich. “What happened in your case, Wade?”
The other man reddened slightly. “Had a little trouble with the MPs,” he admitted. “So my new CO and I came to an agreement that I wouldn’t reup when the time came.”
“Not another exploding still, Wade?” Flynn asked sympathetically, hearing a muffled snort from Laura Van Horn. Vucovich had tried building a jury-rigged still at the isolated radar station they’d been assigned to guard. The resulting explosion had spewed half-fermented potato slices far and wide across what seemed like half the polar ice cap.
“No, sir,” Vucovich replied, sounding hurt. “The next one worked just fine.” He shook his head. “But the first sergeant wanted a bigger cut of the proceeds and ratted me out when I turned him down.”
“Uh-huh.” Flynn looked them over. “So you’re both out of the tender mercies of the United States Army, wandering around footloose and fancy-free?”
“That’s about the size of it, Captain,” Hynes agreed.
“Which leads me to the somewhat more important question of just what you’re doing here?” Flynn asked carefully, seeing Gwen Park lean in slightly. This was obviously the same question she wanted answered.
“Well, sir, it’s like this,” Hynes said. “All of the guys, Sanchez, Pedersen, Kim, and the rest of us, were real curious about what happened to you after that bomber crashed and blew up and they packed you off to some hospital. Since we all got sworn to secrecy by a bunch of spooks about everything that went down, we couldn’t ask any questions while we were still in the service. So when Wade and me got out, we decided to go look you up.”
“And just how did you plan to do that?” Flynn wondered. “Since I’m pretty sure my personnel records were sealed.”
“We visited your folks in Texas,” Hynes said patiently. “And since your mom thought you might want to see us, she gave us your address.”
“My mother did what?” Flynn said in disbelief.
Hynes nodded again. “Sure, Captain. She said she figured you were probably off causing trouble somewhere and that you might be able to use a couple more hands.”
Van Horn was red-faced now with suppressed mirth. She swiped away tears of laughter. “Now I really have to meet your mother, Nick,” she forced out. “She’s got you pegged perfectly.”
Flynn ignored her. He stared hard at the two former enlisted men. “Even my mother doesn’t know where I work. And my address is a post office box,” he pointed out quietly.
They nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes, sir,” Hynes said. “But it’s a P.O. box here in Winter Park. So we just found the post office in town and waited for someone to pick up the mail. Then we followed ’em back here.” He looked admiringly around the room. “Heck of a nice place, Captain.”
Flynn shook his head in disbelief. They made it sound so easy. And the funny thing was that it really had been that easy. So much for the Quartet Directorate’s vaunted aura of secrecy, he thought, fighting down the temptation to burst out laughing himself. Now he knew why Gwen Park looked so embarrassed. Hynes and Vucovich turned out to have slipped straight through a gaping, completely unsuspected hole in the net of secrecy she’d oh-so-carefully thrown around Avalon House. He would not want to be the member of her detail who’d been assigned to pick up their mail. Either her security officer had been woefully inattentive, or the two ex-soldiers were a lot better at being sneaky than he would first have imagined.
“And just what sort of work is it that you thought I might be doing now, Cole?” he asked curiously. The brass plaques outside the mansion would have told them it housed offices for the Sobieski Charitable Foundation, the Concannon Language Institute, and Sykes-Fairbairn Strategic Investments.
Hynes shrugged. “Well, Captain, I don’t guess you’re just working as a translator for some language institute. And I doubt you’re handing out charity money. And I sure don’t see you as a banker.” He grinned. “So I figure all that stuff outside is just bullshit window dressing. And that your mom was right. You’re still raising hell. For someone.”
“Nick,” Van Horn said softly. “What was it that you were saying about Four finding itself short of paramilitary daredevil types?”
He smiled back at her, and then turned to Hynes and Vucovich. “As it happens,” he said carefully, “I do have a project in mind. One you guys might be interested in.”
Hynes thumped his taller friend in triumph. “Told you so, Wade!” he crowed.
“But it’s also extremely hazardous,” Flynn warned them. “The chance of getting killed is pretty high.”
Vucovich spoke up now. “Yeah,” he said simply. “We sort of expected that, sir. You can deal us in.”
Twenty-Nine
In the Hill Country, Northwest of Austin, Texas
Two Days Later
Laura Van Horn tweaked her BushCat’s centerline control stick gently to the left, banking into a slow, wide orbit a couple of thousand feet over the low, wooded hills of Central Texas. A stretch of mostly open, mostly level ground appeared through the windshield—grazing land for one of the local cattle ranches. She glanced at Fox. “The training area’s just down there.”
The head of the Quartet Directorate’s American station nodded and raised his binoculars to scan the small valley. Bright white chalk lines, like those used on baseball fields, had been laid down across the close-cropped grass. They created a highly visible, mostly rectangular shape with one rounded side that was roughly eight hundred feet long and a little more than a hundred feet across. More chalk lines had been drawn inside this larger outline, suggesting a maze of piping, catwalks, gangways, bollards, and other structures. He lowered his binoculars and turned to Van Horn. “Is that supposed to be a mockup of the Gulf Venture, as seen from the air?”
“Yep.” She shrugged. “It was the best we could do in the time available.” She grinned at him. “We thought about trying to lease a tanker of our own for practice. But that turned out to be way outside our budget. Plus, sailing around in the Gulf of Mexico with a rented ship that size would be a bit too likely to draw attention from the media and the government that we could do without.”
“Yes, I’d imagine so,” Fox said with a thin smile of his own. He craned his head again to take another look at the chalk-drawn deck plan. He frowned. “So our Mr. Flynn has decided to take his team in by helicopter after all? Despite the tanker’s air defenses?”
Van Horn shook her head. “Nope. Nick’s got something a little different in mind.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Different in what way?”
“You’ll see,” she said cryptically. She spoke into her radio mike. “Dragon, this is Tiger Cat. We’re in position. Standing by.”
Through their headsets, they heard Flynn’s laconic reply. “Understood, Tiger Cat. Dragon Team dropping now.”
Van Horn banked again, bringing the little plane around so that they could see another aircraft—this one a larger, twin-engine turboprop—flying several miles away and several thousand feet higher. Its wings winked in the spring sunlight.
Fox raised his binoculars, seeing tiny black specks spilling out of the distant plane. He waited for parachutes to blossom against the clear blue sky. None did. His frown deepened. Something strange was happening out there. Instead of plunging almost vertically toward the ground, the men who’d just hurled themselves out of the aircraft were slanting downward at an angle—gliding straight toward the tanker mockup at high speed. Perplexed, he focused carefully and managed to catch a brief, close-up glimpse of one of the jumpers. The helmeted man was diving headfirst. His arms and legs were spread apart, with layers of nylon fabric connecting them to create an airfoil.
“They’re wearing wingsuits,” Fox murmured, suddenly realizing what it was that he was seeing.
“Pretty nifty idea, right?” Van Horn said archly.
Starting a couple of decades before, experienced skydiving enthusiasts had begun taking to the air wearing those individual flying suits. Worn in combination with parachutes for the final landing, wingsuits added significant amounts of lift and enabled their users to greatly extend the range and duration of every jump—whether out of airplanes, or off tall buildings, mountains, and cliffs.
One by one, as they arrowed closer to their chalk-outlined target, the jumpers pulled their chutes. Steerable rectangular canopies snapped open, slowing their descents, and they drifted down the last couple of hundred feet. They were clearly aiming for the clear patches of grass and dirt inside the outline—while trying to avoid the white lines that represented pipelines, catwalks, fake shipping containers, and the other obstructions which littered the real oil tanker’s deck. In a real combat jump, anyone who slammed into one of those obstacles would almost certainly be seriously injured or killed. Small clouds of dust and chalk puffed up as each man flared his parachute and came down to a soft landing.
Once all eight jumpers were down, Van Horn brought her BushCat around, descended, and landed in the pasture close beside the tanker mockup. By the time Fox climbed out of the light aircraft, Flynn was already on his way over with his wingsuit and parachute bundled under one arm.
“Welcome to the Dragon Exercise Area,” Flynn greeted him, coming up with a big grin on his lean, dirt-streaked face. “Otherwise known as the Big Dusty to some of my guys.”
Fox stared at the chalk-outlined target area and then shook his head dubiously. The list of things he could imagine going wrong was already depressingly long. He turned back to Flynn. “There’s a pretty big difference between hitting your marks on a stationary, one-dimensional target on dry land, and landing safely on a ship steaming at high speed at sea, isn’t there?”
Flynn nodded calmly. “Yes, sir, there sure is. And between landing in broad daylight and coming in at night, for that matter.” He shrugged. “Which is why we’re going to be running this drill over and over, steadily upping the tempo and difficulty level each time. Once we’ve mastered the basics of flying these wingsuits and steering our landing chutes, I’ll have a contactor come out to the ranch and put up some scaffolding so our mockup’s more 3D.”
“How long do you plan to train?” Fox asked.
“If possible, practically right up to the moment when you give us the actual target,” Flynn told him frankly. “When we do this for real, it’s going to be a HALO drop from high altitude. The farther we are from the Gulf Venture when we jump, the less likely we are to spook the bad guys until we’re right on top of them. It’s our best chance to avoid being blown out of the sky by their antiaircraft guns.”
Fox narrowed his eyes in thought. The younger man was right. Given the defenses their enemies had fitted to that oil tanker, achieving almost total surprise was their only hope of putting an intact assault team aboard. “How far away do you plan to be when you make your drop?”
“The world wingsuit distance record right now is around twenty miles,” Flynn said quietly. “I hope to beat that.” He smiled tightly. “We’ll manage it for sure—and by a considerable margin—if the experimental high-tech wingsuit gear I’ve ordered from Germany gets here in time for us to train on it.” Then he shrugged. “But since I can’t count on that happening, we’re training to go using the equipment we have on hand now.”
Fox nodded slowly, taking in what he’d been told. The opening phases of this plan might not be quite as crazy as he’d first feared. The tanker’s Iranian captain and crew shouldn’t automatically assume that an aircraft crossing their course twenty miles or more ahead was launching an attack on them. And that ought to make them hesitate to unmask their concealed weapons—since doing so risked blowing the Gulf Venture’s cover as a genuine merchant ship. That was especially true since the Dragon team’s transport plane would be flying well outside the effective range of their 35mm guns and surface-to-air missiles. So at least the aircraft’s crew would be safe no matter what happened. Of course, the same thing couldn’t be said for Flynn and his men. If the tanker’s weapons were manned and ready when they jumped, the gun crews would need less than thirty seconds to drop their camouflage and open fire.
Knowing that revealing his misgivings wouldn’t help anyone, Fox did his best to hide his fears. Throughout its long history, the Quartet Directorate’s audacious covert operations had helped guard the United States and its allies against their most dangerous enemies. But there was always a terrible price to be paid—a price in brave men’s and women’s lives. The secret war waged on behalf of the peoples of the free world without their knowledge or gratitude had been costly from its very outset. Sadly, it showed no signs of becoming any less deadly with the passage of time.
Instead, he waved a hand at the tanker mockup and at the group of tough-looking men who were now busy loading their gear aboard the vehicles that would take them back to the local airport for another practice jump. “Has there been any reaction from the locals to all this unusual activity of yours?”
Flynn’s grin grew bigger still. “Some, but not a lot. There aren’t a lot of people in this part of the state in the first place. And the folks who do live here are mostly the get-along, go-along kind. If it’s not obviously illegal, they pretty much reckon it’s none of their business.” He fished a business card out of his breast pocket. “For when we run into any real nosy parkers, I had these printed up. It usually satisfies them.”
Fox took it. Almost unwillingly, his own mouth twitched in a slight smile. The fake business card read: flynn’s flying circus—team aerobatics and stunts. air shows and movie spectaculars our specialty. Then he sighed. If this fun-loving Texas daredevil got himself killed, the world would be a much darker place. Unfortunately, he suspected that was by far the most likely outcome of this hazardous operation.
Later that evening, after the Dragon team had finished the last of its three scheduled practice jumps for that day, Fox briefed Flynn, Van Horn, and the others on the search program the Quartet Directorate had instituted to try to find the converted Iranian oil tanker. They all listened intently. Unless Four could somehow detect and then track the Gulf Venture at sea, all of their training and hard work would be in vain.
“Analysis by our top planners confirmed that relying on aircraft for the initial search would be a complete waste of time and resources,” he told them bluntly. “So instead, we’re using satellites.”
