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 place flat. Well, maybe not the Plaza, but definitely any other concentrations of enemy personnel in the midtown area. She had to move quickly.
Some tree cover had survived on the far side of the Pond, and Caitlin used it to safeguard her approach to the hotel. The hammering of weapons fire, the dull crump of air-dropped munitions, and the continual drumming of artillery all drifted up from the lower end of the island, helping to mask her approach as she double-timed it from one scrap of cover to the next, looping around from her hiding place to the southern edge of the Park. Central Park South was jammed with the wreckage of hundreds of vehicles that had piled into one another when they lost their occupants. She perched behind a yellow cab that had been knocked on its side by a truck, taking a few minutes to scope out her final approach.
She didn't intend to effect an entry directly into the Plaza. Without knowing the disposition of the enemy inside, that was asking for trouble. A much smaller building abutted the hotel on Central Park South, however, and after observing it for a few minutes through the night vision goggles, Caitlin felt confident enough that it was empty to use as her way in. It appeared as though the roof of the building, housing apartments, perhaps, ought to give her access to the fifth or sixth floor of the hotel via a window. She unholstered her pistol and took a moment to fix the suppressor that Gerty had given her back at the London Cage. With the merest hint of gray, dismal dawn pushing back the shroud of night, Caitlin closed in on her quarry.
46
New York "Go ahead. Try again. See what happens."
The man glared at Caitlin over the fat black tube of the silencer-suppressor. A girl was huddled on the bed with her knees drawn up under her chin and a white cotton sheet pulled tightly around her. Her eyes were large with fear, flicking from Caitlin to the dead man bleeding out on the carpet just inside the door of the hotel room.
"No, please," Caitlin said to the man. "I mean it. Try and call for help again. It's been all of two minutes since I killed a man. I could use the practice."
He looked European, possibly from the south. Caitlin gestured with the silenced pistol, and he raised his hands above his head.