exchanging glances before returning to their study of the land.
The pilot was flying in a methodical grid pattern so that the group could better appreciate the area in which they’d spent the last six months. Professor Calvin Reynolds, a rail-thin man with a largely bald head and round, steel-rimmed spectacles, pointed to a small clearing in the distance.
“There’s A-7. Looks pretty remote from this far up, doesn’t it?”
They slowly drifted towards the site, climbing another few hundred feet in an effort to find calmer air — the heat rising from the earth was creating unpredictable updrafts, resulting in an uncomfortable ride, and the pilot was sensitive to providing as pleasant a trip as possible.
A swarthy, heavyset man wiped his neck with a red bandana and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, obviously ill at ease. The occasional turbulence from thermal drafts wasn’t helping; every time the helicopter jolted, he clutched the sides of his seat with a hawkish grip. He hated flying, but especially hated helicopters. He’d read about their aerodynamics, or rather their lack of them. As far as he was concerned, they were death traps — a conviction that Reynolds ribbed him about mercilessly.
“It looks that way because it’s in the middle of nowhere. I don’t care if I never see the place again, frankly,” he declared in a tone of disgust.
Oscar Valenzuela was a highly competent geologist with over twenty-five years of experience in Central America, but one of his personality quirks was that he complained incessantly about everything. His colleagues had long ago grown used to it, but not so his first and second wives, who eventually couldn’t stomach his worldview and moved on to more palatable possibilities. Oscar threw the pilot an evil glare, as though the turbulence was a personal slight, and swallowed with difficulty, his complexion decidedly pasty.
Professor Reynolds gifted him a humorless grin. “You know as well as I do that we’ll probably be spending a lot more time here,” he said, with a condescending nod of his sunburned head.
“Just my luck. Filthy place. Bugs the size of buses. Malaria, dengue, yellow fever, typhoid-”
“And those are the positives,” Reynolds reflected.
Another jolt hit the cabin as they encountered more bumpy air, causing Oscar’s sweating to intensify. He was preparing to complain about the heat and the roughness of the ride when a loud beeping sounded from the cockpit. The pilot fought with the controls, and then leaned forward and tapped on one of the gauges. The helicopter shuddered as the motor stuttered, then it resumed purring as it had for the last forty-five minutes, the strident screeching of the failure warning dying abruptly.
Oscar’s eyes were now saucers of panic.
“Wha…what the hell was that? What’s wrong?” he demanded in a shrill voice a full octave higher than normal.
The pilot was turning to address him when the alarm clamored again, but this time the vibration intensified before a muffled grinding sound tore through the cabin. Another louder alarm began howling as the chopper’s rotor stopped turning.
Oscar’s stomach lurched into his throat as the helicopter stalled. The screams of horror and panic around him battled with the din of the engine failure alarms — his worst living nightmare playing out in real time. The drop began gradually for a quarter second and then accelerated like a runaway elevator, freefalling into the embrace of gravity. All Oscar had time to think was “Oh, God — no, no, no…”
The explosion from the chopper plowing into the earth was audible fifteen miles away in Spanish Lookout, and the plume of smoke from the wreckage was visible all the way to the Mexican border. By the time rescue craft mobilized and made it from Belize City, the flames had exhausted themselves, and all that was left was the charred skeleton of the frame.
Chapter 5
Jet steered the maroon Lada Kalina to the roadside and stopped to check her GPS coordinates. She was outside of Grozny, on a minor artery that ran south to Alkahn-Yurt, a quarter mile from the target, and there was no traffic at a little past midnight on a Tuesday. Even so, she didn’t dally, and inched the small vehicle back onto the pavement before pulling onto a side road a hundred yards farther up — a farm access-way, according to her study of the satellite images.
Once out of the city, the surroundings quickly became rural, with large crop fields separating the farmhouses that punctuated the landscape. It was a quiet region where neighbors kept to themselves and didn’t poke their noses into the business of others. Everyone would be asleep by now in the nearby homes, few as they were, as tomorrow would bring another twelve-hour stint in the fields, commencing at daybreak.
She killed the headlights and engine, and exited the hatchback, moving to the rear compartment to secure her backpack and weapons. As was her custom, she had loosened the interior bulb and the brake lights so they wouldn’t alert anyone to her presence — particularly valuable if she had to run dark once the operation was over and she was making her getaway.
The PP-19 Bizon submachine gun she pulled from the duffle in the back was a Russian weapon, as was the compact PSS pistol, capable of delivering six shots in nearly complete silence; one of the true feats of Soviet ingenuity — the Mossad had gotten their hands on three almost a decade before to reverse engineer for their own purposes. One of the pilfered weapons had been sacrificed to Jet for this mission. The PSS used a special cartridge with an internal piston that blocked the escape of the explosive gasses that made noise; it was as close to a silent killing firearm ever developed.
A complement of throwing knives, as well as her main blade, were of Russian paratrooper stock. All of her clothes, weapons and ammunition had been sourced in Moscow, so in the event she was captured or killed, the trail would end in Russia — standard procedure for this kind of assignment. The night vision goggles she slid on were the only non-Russian device — a consumer type readily available anywhere online, so foreign manufacture signified nothing.
Jet slid her arms through the backpack straps and then hoisted the Bizon before taking off at a trot into the brush. She knew all about the motion detectors on the outside of the compound and was carrying countermeasures that would neutralize them. Beyond that, this was a straightforward sanction — the target was verified at the location as of this evening, the security detail had been watched for weeks and its schedule was well understood, and nobody at the site was expecting anything. She had performed dozens like it — rescue operations, assassinations, diversionary missions. The essentials were always the same. Get in and out with a minimum of fuss, achieve the objective, and live to fight another day.
Unlike many of her peers, she didn’t work with a team unless it was absolutely necessary. In this case, she had argued convincingly that she could easily handle the operation on her own. Her control officer had disliked the idea, but ultimately acquiesced. Given her track record, what Jet wanted, she generally got.
She had been operational now for four and a half years, which was forever in her specialized niche of intelligence work.
That hadn’t surprised her. She’d discovered while in the military that extensive discipline and a rigorous regimen of physical demand was the perfect antidote for the seething fury that had boiled inside of her since childhood. She’d been an angry and confused six-year-old following the death of her parents in that tragic car accident, but then when her foster father had betrayed her and begun to…
She had tried to channel her rage and hurt by studying martial arts and spending most of her free time at a dojo run by one of her counselors in Tel Aviv, but that hadn’t filled the hole in her soul. Neither had the almost obsessive study of languages, mastering a new one every year. No, the pain and outrage had no outlet until she’d joined the military, and it had translated into a fearlessness and ability to execute that knew no equal. Mossad recruiters had been alerted, and after poring over every aspect of her background, decided she was perfect for the
