carbine. The Kimber CQB pistol she had picked up at the London Cage. And two Gerber fighting knives, one at her hip and one tucked into a scabbard on her reinforced jump boots. The rest of her equipment she wore or carried in some of the many pouches sewn into her black, insulated jumpsuit and combat assault vest. A GPS unit with locator beacon and IFF transponder, a small but rugged PDA, altimeter, goggles, gloves, spare oxygen tanks, a full-face mask, and the FF2, a pressure-activated device that would pop her chute if she happened to pass out from hypoxia on the drop.
The engines whined in protest as the pilot brought them around on the correct heading for an HAHO insertion over the city. She could not see New York yet. She could see nothing in the darkness outside the cabin windows, which were streaked with freezing rain. The plane banked as the pilot made one final adjustment, and then she was just able to make out some of the city skyline far below and to the south, silhouetted by angry flashes of light.
At two minutes out the jumpmaster lowered the rear ramp and raised his arm, telling Caitlin it was time to stand up. He extended the same arm with the palm up at shoulder height before bending it to touch his helmet. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly and powerfully as she pushed up out of her seat and moved to the rear of the MC-130. Her equipment was secured and the ram-air steerable chute hugged her like a child. Even with every inch of her body covered, she could feel the drop in temperature as the damp, subzero air swirled in.
As she stood in the dim red light looking out into the darkness, Caitlin imagined that her own child was out there, sleeping safely in Bret's arms. Red lamps clunked over to pale green, and the jumpmaster gave her a pat on the shoulder. She stepped on the ramp, flexing her knees slightly against the buffeting of the plane. She didn't look back or wave. She strode forward and stepped into the infinite dark.
The drone of aircraft engines, muted by her helmet, fell away completely as she dropped toward the earth. The weather was poor-foul, really-and she had only intermittent visibility before she popped the chute after a few seconds of free fall. It deployed with a fierce tug, and she allowed herself a minute's glide through the inky gloom before checking her altitude and position via the GPS unit.
She was thirty miles north of the insertion point, the Great Lawn of Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. The PDA attached to her right forearm fed a continous stream of updated weather data, helping Caitlin adjust her glide path toward the landing spot. For the first few minutes she descended through a black void, enveloped in clouds and rain. Droplets beaded her goggles and the readout of her instruments, necessitating a continual juggle between steering the chute, checking her position, and cleaning off the small green-lit screens.
At twenty-one thousand feet, however, she emerged from the cloud cover to find herself where she should have been, gliding south-southeast over the lower reaches of the Hudson, with the New Jersey Palisades passing by far beneath her boots. The U.S. Air Force was maintaining a clear corridor for her to drop through, but she saw that far away in the gloom the skies over southern Manhattan were alive with military aircraft. The great battle caused a curious inversion in the scene, with a terrible storm appearing to rage on the ground within the canyons of the city, lighting the gray featureless clouds that formed a ceiling over the tempest. Caitlin noted with professional detachment that very little antiaircraft fire chased the fighters through the bleak diorama, but she knew it would be different for helicopters dawdling close to any of the enemy hidden high above street level on the upper floors of office buildings or apartment houses. A lot of choppers had been raked out of the sky by low-tech countermeasures such as RPGs. That wasn't the reason she was parachuting rather than riding in, but she was still grateful not to have to contend with that sort of bullshit.
Another check revealed that she had drifted off course by a mile, pushed off her line of approach by a freshening westerly. The slightest gap between the glove on her left hand and the cuff of her jumpsuit let in a knifing wind to cold burn her skin and remind her of just how hostile was the environment through which she was passing. As Caitlin steered herself back on course, a small rain squall blew through, making the correction that much more difficult. She fought the chute, the elements, and her momentum as she angled across the dark void of the river just north of the George Washington Bridge. Here and there below her, she could make out single points and occasional small clusters of light, far distant from the fighting in the city. Were they small pirate bands, perhaps? Or possibly even the camps of Baumer's people? The latest intel digests she had read on the flight from Berlin to upstate New York to change planes had spoken of small camps of civilians, previously thought to be wildcat settlements, now possibly tied in with Baumer's crazed colonization scheme.
She checked her position again as she lost more altitude but gained on her landing spot. The singular points of light were so tiny and isolated, they did not look as though they could have any connection to the vast conflagration tearing at the heart of the metropolis. But Caitlin knew better than that. Even the smallest, most insignificant things could be connected to the great engines that drove human affairs at the level of states and peoples. The eastern bank of the Hudson passed beneath her, all but invisible in the gloom. GPS and altimeter readings had her back on track, and she put out of her mind any speculation or idle thoughts about anything but her mission. She was coming up the most dangerous part of the insertion, navigating over the city itself, a city unlit save for the fires of combat at the other end of the island. High-altitude jump specialists in the army had calculated her approach, and she couldn't fault it on paper, but even so, it was a hellishly difficult business falling through the night in bad weather over a blacked-out, war-torn city to land in a small field without being detected by hostiles or simply crippled by a bad landing. As she floated down over City College-or what the GPS told her was City College-she checked her watch and peered south into the murk and the fires of battle. The guns would begin firing soon.
She thought she detected the flash of artillery as she sailed in over the northern corner of Central Park. The hard, angular lines of the built environment, visible in the flash of exploding ordnance, gave way to the much softer, undefined shapes of the natural landscape. She reached above her head and pulled her night vision lens into place over her goggles, being careful not to stare off to the south. Within a few seconds she heard the first of the shells come shrieking in from the firebase at Governors Island, dropping on the southern reaches of the park, where they detonated with extravagant malevolence, uprooting ancient trees, utterly destroying the carousel, and, she hoped, drawing the attention of any onlookers away from the black figure silently dropping through space toward the waist-high swards of grass that covered the Great Lawn.
Caitlin focused on her landing site. With the ground so overgrown, there was no guarantee she wasn't about to break her legs crashing into a hidden concrete bench, but that was a risk she mitigated by aiming for the center of the large open area. Through the NVGs, the earth rushed at her with unpleasant speed. She flared at the last moment, then touched down at a run, her feet finding hard ground and good purchase.
She was down. The artillery barrage was short-lived but effective. Caitlin disposed of her chute and free-fall helmet, allowing her to fit the night vision goggles more comfortably before she moved out for the first objective, the Plaza Hotel. She wasn't challenged as she pushed through the park. Her briefing notes had predicted she would find the area unoccupied. The open space was simply too dangerous for insurgents or pirates to move through without being interdicted from the air or by an artillery bombardment such as the one the army had used to cover her landing. Central Park was very much a no-man's-land.
She stuck to the paths as she ran, moving forward in small increments to avoid running headlong into trouble, should there be any. If she had been confident of her footing, it would have been better to avoid the pathways, but so much of the park was overgrown and pitted with shell holes that she could not risk it. It took her nearly half an hour to make her way to the tumbledown ruins of a little stone bridge near the pond at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. She could smell the freshly churned earth and the metallic burning tang of high explosives from the diversionary attack. A few flames licked at the ruins of the old carousel off in the distance, but the persistent drizzle had put out most of the fires.
Caitlin could see that the Plaza was occupied. It wasn't ablaze with light or crawling with activity, but here and there a few rooms appeared to be lit with the dim flickering of candles, and once or twice she saw figures outlined in those windows. In the fifteen minutes she lay concealed in the rubble of the old bridge, she saw three men leave the building and head downtown; two arrived at a trot, jogging through the Pulitzer Fountain. Her briefing documents had speculated that the Plaza was being used as some sort of rest and recreation facility. It had not been targeted partly because of the White House policy of preserving as much of the city's infrastructure as possible but also because there were some indications of Americans and possibly other nationals being held captive there.
To Caitlin that felt a lot more like Baumer than this whole bullshit Jolly Roger routine. It would amuse that rapist motherfucker no end to fill his camp brothel with prisoners taken locally. It would probably also help establish his credibility as a player with some of the cruder gang lords he had recruited as muscle. It seemed as good a place as any to begin the search for him. She checked her watch. The sky was lightening just perceptibly in the east. She had maybe half an hour until dawn and then seven hours until the U.S. Air Force came through and pounded this
