“Yeah, a nice long rest,” Ferguson said. “So Alston wants to chew my butt in person, huh?”
“Well, I don’t know that she wants to chew you out.”
“Oh, come on, Jack. But hey, who knows? Maybe some hot-looking blonde who graduated magna cum laude at daddy’s law school can run covert ops better than I can.”
“Listen, you don’t have to like it,” said Corrigan. “You just have to do your job.”
“You know what, Jack? I’m going to take your advice,” said Ferguson. “Tell
I his time when he tossed the phone, he got up and left the room.
3
A cold hand grabbed Thera Majed as she fell from the aircraft, wrapping itself around her throat and squeezing tightly. Her heart jumped in her chest, and she felt her eyeballs freeze over. She was breathing oxygen from a small bottle strapped to her side — a necessity when parachuting from 35,000 feet — but even her lungs felt as if they had turned to ice.
“Looking good,” yelled Ferguson over the short-range radio they were using to communicate.
Guns and Rankin had gone out first. Thera’s unfamiliarity with the procedure had cost the second pair a few extra seconds, which at four hundred knots translated into nearly two miles.
And counting.
Between the wind howling around her and the tight helmet, Ferguson’s words sounded more like “luck of gold,” and it took a few seconds for Thera to decipher what he was talking about. By the time she figured it out, the Douglas DC-9 she’d jumped out of had disappeared.
Thera struggled to get her body into the “frog” position she’d learned nearly two years before at the Army Airborne school. Since that time, she’d made no more than two dozen jumps, only three of which had been high- altitude, high-opening forays like this one, and none had been at night. Everybody said it would be easy — her body would remember how to do it once she stepped out of the plane — but the only thing her body remembered was how cold it had been… not half as cold as this time.
Ferguson, arms spread and legs raised as if he were a miniature aircraft, zoomed toward her. On his left wrist he wore a large altimeter, which had a sound alert wired into his helmet’s earset. On his right he had a CIPS device that looked like a large compass. An arrow dominated the dial, showing the direction to their destination and a countdown of the mileage. A pair of lightweight night-vision glasses were strapped beneath his helmet like goggles. The aircraft had been going nearly four hundred knots when they jumped out, which meant they were, too. Their trajectory to the landing zone had been calculated before takeoff, then tweaked ever so slightly a few minutes before the jump to account for the wind.
“Let her rip,” he told her, the altimeter buzzing in his ear as they fell through 30,000 feet.
Thera’s first tug on the handle was too tentative, and the parachute failed to release. But her interpretation of the problem was that she wasn’t in the proper position — true enough, as it happened, though this had nothing to do with the chute deploying — and she struggled to push her head downward and get her arms out before trying again. As she did, something whipped by and tapped her on the head.
It was Ferguson. Worried that she was having problems, he shaped his body into a delta to gain speed in her direction, then flared out to slow down. He misjudged his speed slightly in the dark as he pulled close and rather than paralleling, flew past. He recovered, sailing to the left and then back around, inching forward.
It felt like inching. In fact he was moving at over a hundred miles an hour.
“We have to pull now,” he yelled into the radio. “We’re getting off course. Hey! Hey! You ready? Ready?”
Thera thought Ferguson was the one having trouble, and she started to maneuver toward him.
“Pull!” said Ferguson, motioning at her.
She reached to the handle and yanked, feeling the gentle tug of her harness as the chute unfolded above her. And now it really was like they said it would be: her arms moved up as she took stock of the chute and herself, making sure the cells had inflated properly and orienting herself with the aid of a GPS device wrapped around her right wrist. She was back in control or at least as much in control as anyone being held up in space by engineered nylon could be.
Rankin reached the bluff overlooking the Iraqi border ahead of Guns. He put down the bike and increased the amplification on his night-optical glasses, which looked like a pair of very thick sunglasses. The wrap-around glasses combined generation-four infrared and starlight enhancement technology with electronic magnification to a factor of ten. While not as powerful as the new gen-four devices being tested by Army Special Forces units, the glasses’ light weight was more than fair compensation; they were more than powerful enough to illuminate the rocky desert terrain below.
Rankin could see a warren of “rabbit” holes and days-old tracks through the gritty soil. The holes were the entrances to tunnels used by smugglers, who used them to avoid the new Iraqi government’s surveillance aircraft and patrols.
“What’d you do, tune the bike?” Guns asked, walking up next to Rankin.
“Less wind resistance.” Rankin rested his right hand on his Uzi as he surveyed the desert. While the fewer than ten thousand American troops still stationed in Iraq were concentrated near Baghdad and the northern oil fields, Rankin figured the Iraqis and certainly the Syrians could stop the smugglers if they really cared to. But smuggling goods was a lucrative business, especially for the local commanders who averted their eyes.
“We can put the main post down in the those caves. Watch the border from here,” Rankin told Guns. “Let’s go mark a landing spot for the Rangers.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Ferg?”
“He knows where we are.”
Thera stepped forward as the ground finally came up to her legs. She twisted slightly and crumpled to the ground as she landed, falling on her side. It wasn’t pretty, but at least she was down. She got up, expecting Ferguson to fall on top of her any second. Gathering in her parachute, she looked around for a convenient place to hide it. Ten yards away a small collection of boulders huddled together on the ground. That would do.
With the chute stuffed between the rocks, she took stock of her situation, checking her position with a GPS device. Their rendezvous point was about five miles away, on a ridge overlooking the nearby valley.
She was supposed to hit no farther than a mile away. It was an inauspicious start to her first real mission with the team. She knew Ferguson only by reputation. Depending on whom you talked to, he was either easy to get along with or the biggest SOB in the world, but everybody agreed he was driven; he’d probably be mad that she had fallen so far away.
Thera checked her radio, then decided it would he better not to call in until she was a little closer. Trudging in the direction of the rendezvous area, she’d gone about a quarter of a mile when a rich baritone echoed in her headset.
“Ferg?” she said.
Thera dropped to one knee, scanning three hundred and sixty degrees around her. The only thing nearby were rocks.
“Where are you?” she said. “Ferg?”
The sound of a motor in the distance made her freeze. She brought her submachine gun up.
“Ferg?”
“Yee-hah!” he shouted over the radio.
