Chilton had asked him personally, The Hammer, to get the job done, and he’d get it done the only way he knew how, by hammering. He sat back and smiled. The toughest jobs were the ones Joe Public never knew even existed… just the way they liked it.
Once again Hammerson checked Alex’s vital signs on his monitor — strong and calm — the man could be taking a stroll in the park, instead of where he now was.
The B1R Lancer cut through the atmosphere at 20,000 feet doing just under Mach 2. The high speed, high altitude bomber had departed from the southern tip of Australia several hours back, and was already approaching its destination — the edge of the ice shelf of Antarctica.
The single pilot began to ease back on the throttle, the plane immediately slowing among the freezing clouds, and dropping down below Mach 1 with an associated boom. He turned to look back into the small hold. There was one delivery package — a single passenger, designate unknown. He was simply referred to as Mr. Hawk, and that was it.
The huge figure hadn’t moved a muscle the entire trip. He sat like he was carved from stone, with hands clasped together and resting on his knees, his head tilted down at the now closed bomb-bay doors. He looked more machine-like than human. The pilot eased back around; he wasn’t paid to ask questions.
“Crazy bastard,” the pilot whispered. No one was going to survive the descent, even if he was wrapped in all the freaking tech in the world. The bulky outer suit the guy wore had rigid folds between the legs and under the arms. Normally a Spec Op high altitude drop would mean a torpedo frame made of high tensile steel, but as no metals could be worn that would cast a radar signature, it had to be a ceramic and polymer framework. He doubted it would be effective when fighting the cold, and speed, and then there was the final impact with no chute. At least he’ll be an invisible dead man, the pilot thought gloomily.
The radar pinged and the pilot turned back to the controls momentarily before switching the cabin lights to a deep red. He swung around and held up two fingers. Eerily, the figure was now facing him, and he nodded once. His head and face were encased in a bullet-shaped helmet, his eyes impossible to make out. He could have been a robot for all the pilot knew — a robotic human-shaped wing.
The pilot exhaled, opened the bomb-bay doors, and then hunched over. Even from where he sat he felt the murderous waves of ice-pick cold air screaming up into the interior. He gritted his teeth, and then after another moment, turned again. The cabin was already empty.
“Good luck… Hawk.”
He switched on the mic. “Package away.” He banked and kicked the dart-shaped bomber back up to Mach 2. He’d be long gone before the guy’s body even hit the water.
CHAPTER 13
Alex stayed rolled in a ball for the first few thousand feet, falling fast. He needed to minimize surface area exposure to the biting cold. Even though he wore multiple layers, and had a metabolism that could deal with extremes, he would be powerless to stop his extremities freezing solid, making fingers useless when suddenly called to do rapid or complex work.
He had a simple job to do — take out the Kunming’s offensive strike capability. The Chinese destroyer could not be allowed to rain hell down on the McMurdo base. Defang the dragon, Hammerson had said to him. Defang the dragon, and then all you’re left with is a big ugly lizard, he thought and smiled.
Alex reached a number count in his head, knowing it was time to slow his descent. He unrolled, opening his arms and legs wide. The effect was instantaneous, as the folds of synthetic material acted like a combination wing and air brake on his body, slowing him from 220 miles per hour, down to just over a hundred.
Alex bit down hard on the air tube pumping warm oxygen into his lungs. The rising atmosphere was punishing as it pummeled his body, and the cold was a thousand razor blades slashing and stabbing at him, furiously seeking any exposed flesh. He grinned around the breathing tube inside the contoured helmet. He was looking forward to hitting the water.
As he finally dropped through the cloud cover, he saw he was slightly off-target. The Kunming was a mile out to his left, and he angled his shoulder and one arm to tilt toward it, and then swept his arms back, and legs in tight together. Alex became an accelerating arrow shape. He was an insignificant dot, invisible to radar, and traveling again at 200 miles per hour. Even if someone happened to be looking in his direction, the color of his suit against the leaden sky was the perfect camouflage.
Directly below him, Alex could make out the huge torpedo shape of the USS Texas, lying about fifty feet under the surface… and then, he was in position. Once again, he opened his arms and legs, engaging the folds and struts of his suit to slow his speed — he counted down: nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… impact.
The water surface collision was enormous, battering his entire frame. Multiple smaller bones in his body immediately fractured, and muscle, cartilage and tendon compressed and bruised. He had held his arms folded up and over his skull, but for several seconds he was stunned senseless. It was only the icy water that shocked him back to consciousness.
He sunk down several dozen feet, peeling himself from the wing-suit. He’d been lucky, since he’d missed all of the tiny bergs that dotted the water. They were impossible to see on the descent, and even though they might have been little bigger than a coffee table on the surface, below, they could easily be the size of a Buick. If he had struck one of those, he would have been paste and it was game over. As it was, he could feel the massive trauma to his body, but knew that his system rushed to repair the damage, while his mind screamed its urgency — the Southern Ocean, freezing water, the Kunming, USS Texas. His mind reset, and he let the drop-suit fall away into the dark water, leaving him just in the specially thickened wetsuit, with a slim pack attached to his stomach.
Alex kept the full helmet in place, as it provided both airflow and goggles. The keel of the Kunming soon came into view, and in another few moments he was clinging to its stern, praying they wouldn’t need to start the huge propellers as the churn would have drawn him in and shredded him in an instant.
His first task was the easiest — he needed to make the vessel go dark. To do that, he’d shut off all incoming and outgoing communications.
Alex opened a pouch in the pack on his front and brought out a flat disk which he attached to the hull, switching it on, so it first adhered, and then started to generate its white-noise net around the vessel. By the time they figured out it wasn’t a problem with their own technology, and began a search for the source, the Kunming would need to deploy divers before they found it — and that should give him more than enough time to finish his work below the ice.
Alex looked up at the shimmering gray surface, steeling himself and then rising slowly. He breached the surface and paused, taking off the helmet, its air supply exhausted. He let it fall. He then attached caps to his palms. Time to join the party, he thought, and began to climb the two dozen feet to the rear deck.
Agony; the cold air on his bare skin was a thousand daggers, but he ignored it and slowly looked along the boat’s guard rail — his plan’s success was predicated on the crew and officers’ focus being on the area where they knew the US submarine would be submerged. Then, one hand after the other, spider-like, he came up the side of the destroyer. He paused again and then slowly lifted his eyes above the railing. He slid over, tossing the suction pads back over the side.