Cabrillo remained aloft as long as he could, twenty minutes according to his watch, but eventually he had to make his landing. The ground below him was nothing but endless waves of sand, dunes that rose and fell with the regularity of ocean swells. He flared the chute just before touching down, intentionally stalling it so he landed at no more than a walking pace and managed to stay on his feet.
Dumping air from the canopy as quickly as he could, Juan gathered up the nylon in a tight bundle so the wind wouldn’t carry it away. He unhooked the straps and thankfully dropped the parachute pack and what little gear that had remained with him. His upper body smoldered with a deep burn that would take days to ease, though already he had an idea that would add further strain to his aching muscles.
He’d touched down just a couple of feet from the caravan’s tire tracks and taking a sip of water from his only canteen he noted they were widely spaced and that the tires that left them were heavily lugged—trucks specially fitted for the deep desert.
That meant there were three options, two of which were good. Either they belonged to Namibia’s military or a safari company and would gladly help a man stranded in the trackless wastes. Or they were smugglers and would likely kill him as soon as he approached.
Either way, it wasn’t in him to wait for a couple of days until Max could locate him through his subdermal transmitter and send a team to rescue him. Cabrillo would rather get himself out of this mess on his own because he’d never live down his best friend’s ridicule when he got back to theOregon .
Juan laid out all of the equipment that hadn’t been attached to the main chute. The pile was meager. He had his machine pistol, Glock automatic and plenty of nine millimeter ammunition, a knife, a medical kit, the canteen, and a small survival kit containing matches, water purification tables, some fishing line, and a few other odds and ends. He had his chute and its pack, which had a hard plastic plate that was molded in the shape of his back and helped alleviate some of the stress of deployment.
All in all there wasn’t much to help him catch the caravan, but Cabrillo had an ace up his sleeve. He patted his artificial leg, thinking,Ace up my cuff, actually .
FOR fifty minutes Eddie, Linc, Mike, and Ski glided gently across the night sky. Because he’d been a field agent for the CIA, Seng didn’t have the jump training of the former soldiers on his team but like nearly everything he did, Eddie was a natural. It was the decades of martial arts training, learned first from his grandfather in New York’s Chinatown, that allowed him to channel his focus into any new task.
He didn’t have the combat experience of the other Corporation gun dogs, either. He’d spent his career working deep undercover, always without backup, pretending to be someone he wasn’t in order to build a network of informants to gather intelligence. However, only a few months after joining Juan made him head of shore operations because Eddie simply wouldn’t let himself fail in any situation.
Using GPS he guided his team unerringly to the Devil’s Oasis, arriving above the forlorn desert prison with enough altitude so they could loiter for a few minutes to scan the featureless roof and enclosed courtyard. Infrared showed a trio of guards sitting just inside the closed gate and a vehicle with an engine that was still warm. Eddie guessed it had driven a perimeter screen at least an hour earlier. The other vehicles, both inside and outside the courtyard, were as cool as the night air.
He tapped his throat mike in the prearranged signal for Linc to go in first.
Franklin Lincoln eased up on his toggles to begin his approach, turning into the wind just as his feet cleared the crenellated parapets as far from the guards as possible. He touched down with the barest scuff of his boots and collapsed his canopy. He took a few seconds to shed most of his gear and weigh down the nylon so it wouldn’t flap. When he was set he tapped his own throat mike.
Like a wraith, Eddie came out of the darkness, his canopy spread wide like a hawk’s wing. He angled in so the dirt bike hanging from its tether would land right next to Linc. The big SEAL grabbed the handle bars as soon as the balloon tires hit and steadied the bike so it wouldn’t fall over. Eddie’s landing was perfect, and by the time he had his chute off and secured it was Mike Trono’s turn to touch down. Again Linc made sure the bike didn’t clatter against the thick wooden roof and alert the guards.
Jerry Pulaski was the last one in. As his bike settled onto the roof and he flared his chute a gust kicked up and suddenly yanked him backward. Linc had a firm hold on the bike, but the pressure of the wind against Ski’s parachute was like trying to push a billboard into a hurricane.
“Help me,” he whispered, the strain making his voice raw as Ski frantically tried to collapse the chute.
Linc’s boots skidded in the talcumlike grit that coated the flat roof so Pulaski now dangled over the edge of the building.
Mike wrapped his arms around Linc’s waist, digging in his heels while Eddie braced himself at the front of the bike and pushed with every ounce of strength. They checked Ski’s inexorable slide for a moment but the forces in play were too great. In just a few seconds, Eddie was only a foot from falling off the roof.
He made a snap decision. He whipped a knife that had hung inverted on his combat harness into the air, allowing Ski to see it and know what he was about to do, and then touched its edge to the tether. Under so much tension the cord separated with the slightest stroke.
Once more able to control his chute Ski dumped air and spiraled down the side of the prison, landing hard in the sand piled against the foundation. He lay stunned for a moment as the chute billowed and whipped across the desert floor, relieved that he hadn’t blown the mission. And then he saw the stake thrust into the ground thirty feet in front of him. On top of the wooden post was a piece of solid-state electronics, and he knew immediately it was a motion sensor pointing outward to warn the kidnappers of anyone approaching the prison. The nylon canopy was already under the sensor and a slight breeze would inflate it and trigger the alarm.
He grabbed at the riser lines and frantically pulled the chute toward him in a hand-over-hand motion that puddled nylon behind him. But it seemed no matter how much material he gathered he still couldn’t get the section under the sensor to withdraw.
The wind shifted, and like a child’s balloon, the parachute began to fill with air. Ski leapt to his feet and raced for the sensor, diving headlong so his body flattened the chute just before it blocked the motion sensor’s electronic eye. He slid on the slick nylon and would have crashed right into the pole if he hadn’t snapped his body over. He ended up on his back, his hip mere inches from the sensor.
Ski could see three dark silhouettes peering over the top of the fortress and, careful so as not to trigger the alarm, he gave them a thumbs-up.
He carefully retrieved his chute, bundling it in his arms like so much laundry. At the base of the prison he used the molded plastic insert from the pack to bury his entire rig in a shallow hole. He noticed that there were vent holes along the bottom of the foundation and recalled from the mission briefing that there were a series of tunnels under the prison designed so the prevailing wind would scour away waste from the latrines. When he finished with his chute he climbed the rope that Linc had unfurled.
“Well,that was fun,” he whispered when he reached the top and was helped over by Eddie and Mike.