“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
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.