Shadow zero, p.4
SHADOW ZERO, page 4
It was a tedious process, as was every process on this island. Masveriyaa had to clean the water boiler, condenser, bathtub and fresh water barrel religiously. The boiler especially was prone to corrosion from the salt that the distillation process left behind. The sediment filter needed almost constant replacement, which involved gathering and cleaning sand and gravel, trading for cloth or paper coffee filters, and treating charcoal leftover from his fire by placing it in a cooking strainer and steaming it for several minutes to open pores that would trap smaller impurities.
All of this work, combined with the work of fishing, tending to his garden, preparing food and the general necessities of survival, kept Masveriyaa very busy, very healthy, and reasonably happy. He was content.
But Masveriyaa had left more behind than the comfort and convenience of the modern world. From time to time, when he looked across the ocean, his soft smile would fade, and his hazel eyes would darken with memories he never shared.
Still, he had enough. Most days that kept his thoughts away from what he no longer had. He had good reason to focus on what was here and not what wasn’t any longer.
He kept only one reminder. One risk, so minor as to be inconsequential. That risk—a small radio—usually sat on a table behind his hut that faced the sun. It was brought inside only during the rains and quickly placed back outside when the rains stopped. Some days he hoped to use it, but most days, he was content to ignore it. After all, there was no point in chasing what no longer existed.
He completed his daily circuit of the island, checking his nets and the traps he set for crabs and the occasional sea turtle. Most of the fish he caught he caught a few hundred yards out to sea on a raft he’d built from palm trunks and coconut fibers, but some fish came inshore to breed and could more easily be caught in the small lagoons and tide pools near his hut.
He finished his circuit at his vegetable garden. The garden grew two hundred yards from his house on a sixty- by eighty-foot patch of land that faced the rising sun. Not all of the land was in use at all times since not all crops were in season at the same time, but it was still enough to keep him busy for at least an hour a day.
He attached a rubber hose with a shower head at one end to the spigot of his fresh water barrel, hefted the barrel and attached the Velcro straps he had bartered for over his shoulders. The barrel was heavy, over one hundred pounds full of water, but Masveriyaa felt no strain in his back as he opened the spigot and watered his garden.
He smiled at that. In addition to keeping him busy, this life kept him in shape. He was strong, stronger than he was when he left his life behind to become the Fisherman.
This was a good life, this new, simple existence. It was lonely, but it was good. Masveriyaa was proud of it. If that radio remained silent, he would live the rest of his days here watching the sunrise, catching fish, tending to his garden, and cozying up to the fire when it rained.
And if that radio didn’t stay silent… well, he would cross that bridge if he came to it.
He finished watering his sweet potatoes and chilis and set the barrel down with a sigh of relief. He took a brief rest before heading to his raft to check the nets he’d left beyond the surf. He sat on the stump of a screw pine, gazed across the ocean and let his thoughts wander. His eyes took on a faraway look, hardening slightly and looking beyond the horizon to the memory of what once was.
Masveriyaa sat for ten minutes, then got to his feet and headed to his raft. The Fisherman had fish to catch.
CHAPTER FIVE
“We’ve got to be the only people on Earth stupid enough to jump out of the world’s most luxurious business jet.”
Maya cinched the strap of her parachute tightly and, without looking at Trent, she replied, “I’d rather jump than try to crawl out of the wreckage after the pilot lands this thing in the middle of a rainforest.”
“Yeah, good point,” Trent replied. “What’s our extraction plan again?”
“We get to Kilimanjaro, and a helicopter picks us up from there.”
Trent frowned. “Isn’t Mount Kilimanjaro one of the most heavily trafficked tourist attractions in Africa?”
“It is,” she agreed, “but we’re not going to take any of the official climbing routes. We’re going to climb the north side away from the hiking trail to just above the tree line, get in a helicopter, fly to an airfield in Kenya, then take the same jet back home.”
“Seems complicated,” Trent said.
“We grab the data core, climb a few thousand feet, get into a helicopter, then get into an airplane. That’s four steps. How much simpler do you want it to be?”
Trent shrugged. “I just feel like we’re risking being seen this way.”
“It won’t matter as much once we have the core,” Maya replied. “So some tourists see a helicopter. There are a dozen good reasons why a helicopter could be flying over the forest. As long as no one figures out that we’re there to retrieve nuclear launch codes that fell from space, let the conspiracy theorists have fun with it.”
Trent chuckled. “You’re just as cavalier as your father.”
A bolt of anger flashed through Maya. “You didn’t know my father. You have no idea what he was like.”
Trent’s smile faded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“We’ve reached the jump window, agents,” the captain said over the PA system. “You may jump anytime in the next five minutes.”
Maya moved to the door of the aircraft and performed a final equipment check. Aside from her parachute pack, she wore CIA-issue cargo pants, combat boots, and a vest with body armor and pockets all around containing her standard array of equipment: enhanced vision eyeglasses, flares, a flashlight, grenades, both conventional and sonic, a satellite phone, a backup radio, a necklace with an emergency beacon, and a few other odds and ends.
And, of course, weapons. She had a Ka-Bar Fighter with an eight-inch blade that sported a partially serrated edge and a full tang carbon steel blade. The modern world had a plethora of fighting and utility knives with impressive features, but in Maya's experience, the classic Ka-Bar was still the best at its job.
In addition to her knife, she had a Heckler & Koch HK45CT handgun with three magazines containing eight rounds each of .45ACP ammunition. She preferred the .45 for its stopping power and didn’t mind the slightly extra recoil compared to the 9mm handguns preferred by many female agents.
Her primary weapon was also Heckler & Koch, an HK416A5 carbine with an eleven-inch barrel and three thirty-round magazines of 5.56mm NATO ammunition. Plenty of people questioned the stopping power of the diminutive round, but unlike the 9mm, Maya had seen good results from the tried-and-true NATO round. In situations where that round wasn’t good enough, having a heavier rifle round wouldn’t have been enough to tip the scales in her favor.
Besides, while she could deal with the recoil of a .45ACP pistol, the recoil of a 7.62mm rifle round or even a 6.5mm round affected her accuracy at distance, and the much heavier build of rifles chambered for those rounds made them prohibitive for any long-term combat mission. If there was fighting to be had below—and Maya hoped very much that there wasn’t—then the short-barreled HK416 would be just fine.
She finished her checks and gave Trent a thumbs up. He returned one of his own, and she pulled the third exit lever on the door. Rather than opening down into its typical airstair door like the ordinary exit lever or causing the entire door to disconnect from the fuselage like the emergency lever, this third handle was a CIA modification that pulled the door inward and slid it to the side using a small hydraulically operated track.
The wind that buffeted her immediately upon opening the door was bracing. The jet had slowed to one hundred thirty knots, but even at that minimum possible speed, the force of the air was alarming.
Trent has a point, she thought drily. This fucking sucks.
Too late to back out now, though. She’d left once before and come back. Now she had to deal with what this job entailed.
“Fool me twice, shame on me,” she muttered.
“What?” Trent called over the howling wind.
“Nothing.”
She grabbed the jump handles, leaned back, and propelled herself through the door. She counted to five to give herself time to clear the aircraft’s wind shear, then pulled her cord. The ground rushed up at her, and when nothing happened after three seconds, she pulled the smaller red emergency cord.
Thankfully, that worked. The drag chute popped out and pulled the much larger main chute from the pack. It filled with air, slowing her with a jarring jolt that clapped her teeth together.
They had jumped at three thousand feet, the lowest possible altitude that gave them any sort of safety margin. Maya had used all of that safety margin, and while the parachute rapidly slowed her descent, the ground was still rushing to meet her with a far greater urgency than she liked.
She braced herself for a hard landing and aimed for the softest-looking tree. The seconds ticked by, and just before she reached her tree, she saw a sharp branch pointing straight at her chest.
She cursed and jerked her body to the side. The branch sliced through the air in between her left arm and her chest. She breathed a sigh of relief that was cut short when the smaller branches of the canopy sliced at her face as she impacted the tree.
She endured the assault until she stopped moving, then sit leaves out of her mouth and tapped her left ear to her shoulder to activate her earpiece. “Talon, are you there?”
When in the field, she preferred to use Trent’s codename and insisted that he use hers. It wasn’t especially likely that any active terrorists would associate her first name with Agent Zero, but it wasn’t impossible, and there was no need to take unnecessary chances.
She heard a crashing noise in the trees a dozen yards ahead of her. A groan came through her earpiece, followed by. “Yeah, Specter. I’m here.”
Maya took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Okay. Let’s cut ourselves down.”
“Uh, you might want to take a look down before you do that.”
Maya frowned and looked down. In the darkness, she could only see… well, darkness.
She pulled her enhanced vision glasses from her pocket and clicked the mode button until it reached night vision. Then she cursed. “Aw, shit.”
“Yep.”
It turned out that the softest-looking trees were also the tallest trees. She was suspended in the air about sixty feet from the forest floor. To make matters worse, she didn't seem to be anywhere close to a thick enough branch to support her weight.
Damn it, the trees weren’t even that soft.
She sighed. “Well, we wanted to be CIA agents. What’s your situation look like?”
“A long drop straight down.”
“No big branches you can use to hold your weight?”
“Nope. My chute somehow got caught in a bunch of twigs between two different trees and left me hanging in no man’s land.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She thought for a minute. “Okay, keep a hold of one of your parachute cords. Cut the others until you start dropping. That might slow your descent enough to keep you from breaking every bone in your body when you land.”
“Oh joy,” Trent replied sarcastically. “And should I expect that you are doing the same thing?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, Trent, I’m going to wait for the eagles to show up and carry me to the ground.”
“What?”
“It’s a Tolkien reference. Read a book sometime.”
She wrapped one of her parachute cords around her left hand and drew her Ka-Bar with her right hand. She cut the parachute cords one at a time, bracing herself with each one.
“For your information, I have read the Chronicles of Narnia before.”
“Wrong novel series,” Maya said, slicing through another parachute cord. “But you’re very cute.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Maya sliced the third to last rope. As soon as the cord separated, she moved toward the ground with alarming speed. She braced herself for impact, but thankfully, the parachute caught again. The cord stretched, and she slowed as it reached the limits of its tension.
She put her Ka-Bar to the cord, and as soon as the carbon steel blade reached the taut nylon of the cord, the fibers separated. She fell again, traveling about five feet before landing heavily on her backside.
She winced and rolled over, rubbing her sore buttocks. And with that dignified entry, she thought, getting to her feet.
She lifted both legs one at a time and twisted her back. Once she confirmed she wasn’t injured, she tapped her earpiece again. “Talon? How’s it—”
A snap followed by loud rustling answered her question. Trent descended at a somewhat less frightening clip than Maya, but he didn’t stop before reaching the ground. He landed with a whoomph and lay still. Maya rushed to his side and knelt next to him. “Talon? Are you all right?”
He groaned but lifted a thumb into the air. Maya sighed with relief and helped him to his feet. She grinned. “How did you like your first parachute jump?”
Trent returned her smile. “It was wonderful. Let’s never do it again.”
She giggled and kissed his cheek. She pulled her compass and satellite phone from her pockets and brought up Penny’s map on the phone. “All right. It looks like we landed right in the middle of Penny’s drop zone. That’s good. I say we start north until we reach the edge of the zone, then walk in a zigzag pattern traveling—”
“It’s a few hundred yards north.”
“What?”
“The satellite. It’s a few hundred yards north of us. I saw it when I jumped.”
Maya blinked, and Trent grinned again. “But that was a really good idea about the zigzag march. A-plus, Agent.” Maya rolled her eyes and slapped his chest lightly. “Lead the way, tiger.”
Trent obliged, staring forward through the dense jungle vegetation. Maya didn’t mind the bugs that she was certain crawled all over her now, but if she saw a snake, they were going to have some problems.
Are there black mambas in the rainforest? I forget.
Fortunately, any snakes that might have been interested in the hairless gorillas that fell from the sky didn’t show themselves to either agent as they made their way toward the crash site of one of the Department of Defense’s most valuable satellites.
“You know what gets me?” Trent said out of nowhere. “What happens if the OWLS satellite falls? Like, what happens if all of those nukes just crash into a random place? Does the military even think about crap like this before they do things?”
“First of all, no, they don’t. Second of all, let’s not just talk out loud about national security secrets.”
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, here we are.”
Maya walked to his side and gasped. The satellite’s fall had pushed a deep crater into the Earth’s surface. The sides of the crater were smooth, almost uniform, and appeared to be composed primarily of ash left behind when the crash and ensuing fire incinerated the trees and other plants that had fallen into the crater.
More importantly, the satellite below looked like it had been gutted. Twisted metal panels sat scattered across the ground, but from where she stood, she could see nothing that looked like a data core.
“We need a closer look,” she told Trent. “I think someone else might have—”
Something hit her on the shoulder and knocked her sprawling. She rolled over just in time to see a shadow swing something big at Trent’s face, sending him tumbling into the crater.
Her eyes widened as over a dozen individuals burst from the trees, all of them carrying guns.
She realized grimly that she was right about the satellite. Someone else had gotten to it before them. They were still here.
And they weren’t interested in sharing.
CHAPTER SIX
Maya drew her handgun with lightning speed and squeezed off two shots. The nearest attacker crumpled, and while the others dove for cover, she holstered her handgun and unshouldered her rifle.
How did they sneak up on us?
She fired a burst, dropping the first attacker to fire at her. His shots went wide, slamming into a tree a few yards to her right.
But the other attackers had recovered from the initial shock and were now aiming their rifles at her. Maya quickly thumbed the fire selector to full auto and emptied her magazine in a panoramic arc as she retreated into the trees behind her.
She switched her magazine using a technique her father had taught her: pulling the replacement mag from her belt, dropping the empty mag, slamming the new mag into the receiver and, catching the empty mag at belt level, then clipping it in the empty slot. The entire operation took a half second, and she was able to fell another attacker with a well-placed burst.
Even that brief tap of the trigger at full auto used a half-dozen rounds, so she switched the selector back to a three-round burst as she sprinted away from the crater.
She tapped her earpiece. "Talon, do you copy? Talon, come in!"
No response. A lance of fear shot up her spine. She hadn’t seen exactly what hit Trent, but his arms had gone limp as he fell over the edge into the crater. He could be unconscious. Or worse.
She spun around and fired at her pursuers. Two more fell before the others dove for cover. As soon as they did, she sprinted sideways for forty yards, then veered back to the crater. She needed to get to Trent. She needed to see if he was hurt, and if so, how badly.
She heard a loud voice call as she ran. “Hoja, punda! Anarudi kwenye shimo!”
She didn’t recognize the words, but considering where they were, she guessed it was Kiswahili or some other Bantu language. That meant locals, and unless something massive had escaped the CIA’s notice, that meant that these were likely run-of-the-mill scavengers rather than an organized fighting force sent specifically to recover the DEDALUS data.
