by Richard Fox
For as long as he’d been with Caliban and for all the laws he’d broken for the sake of its mission, why did Shannon think this “Caius” had to be hidden from him?
Mike jogged around the corner, a roll of toilet paper in hand.
Ritter handed the phone over to Mike.
“For you,” he said.
“Yankees! Where are you?” Moshe yelled.
They found Moshe in the hangar, rummaging through a wall locker. Israelis climbed into Botha’s Cessna Caravan armed with wrenches and crowbars.
“Your people came through with another location for the package. I don’t know why my government wants to take you on another wild-goose chase, as you say, but I don’t give the orders.” Moshe pulled a dark-tan backpack from the locker, covered in straps and pillow-like pouches.
“Good thing my team has a mandate to be prepared. You’re both airborne qualified, correct?” He patted a hand on top of the parachute.
Mike nodded.
“Sure,” Ritter said. He’d gone to Airborne School back in 2000 for his ROTC summer training. He’d earned his jump wings after a handful of jumps from a static line unto the unforgiving soil of Fort Benning and remained a “five-jump chump” ever since.
“Getting in will be easy. Getting out is a bit more complicated,” Moshe said.
A seat flew from the open door of the Caravan and tumbled in the dirt. Another followed a few seconds later.
A screen door clattered shut, and Botha ran into the hangar. His hands grabbed his head through his unkempt hair.
“What the hell are you doing? I just had those refurbished!” Botha yelled as his arms whirled from Moshe to the plane.
“Making room. You’re going to fly back to Saudi Arabia and drop us off along the way,” Moshe said.
“What? Where? I can’t stop in Yemen. There was a disagreement about some paperwork a while back, and the official in charge was very hardheaded about it,” Botha said.
“You mean the shipment of pre-Islamic artifacts you had on your plane that ended up for auction in England?” Moshe asked.
Botha shrugged and turned his palms up. “I offered him a very legitimate bribe.”
Moshe took a pen from his uniform top and pointed to a kidney-shaped island off the “horn” of Somalia.
“Socotra. You’ll fly us over. No need to stop.”
“This plane can’t make it to Socotra,” Botha said.
“We’ll stop and refuel at the airport in Bosaso. You don’t have any warrants there, do you?” Moshe asked.
Botha had to think for a second before shaking his head.
Another seat flew from the plane and ripped open the leather upholstery of the seat it landed on.
“Aww, come on!” Botha continued his protests with the men who were clearing out the interior of his plane.
“You said getting out was a problem,” Ritter said to Moshe.
Moshe turned a laptop around and zoomed in on the island to a cluster of homes in a desert mountain valley. He moved the image so the homes and the coastline were on the screen.
“The structures are the target, and there’s a fishing village on the coast twelve kilometers away. This package of yours—it’s heavy, right?”
“Four man carry.” Ritter said.
“Long way to go on foot. Maybe we can procure some transport. Maybe we can’t. We get to the fishing village, and one of our sayanim, our helpers, will meet us there. He’s paid up with the pirates and can get his boat there from Bosaso quickly enough.”
“Once we’re on the boat, you’ll give us the drop location, correct?”
“That’s the plan,” Ritter said.
Moshe tossed his pen onto the desk and zoomed in on the cluster of buildings.
“Get packed. We’re wheels up as soon as there’s room for us in that rust bucket. If all goes well, we’ll be there before dawn.” Moshe said.
Turbulence in the Cessna was a special kind of horrible. The only illumination was from red lens flashlights and the lambent glow from Botha’s control panel. An Israeli leaned into the cockpit, absorbing the Afrikaner’s never-ending diatribe about how inconvenienced he was by the “air piracy” and the cost of the seats left behind in the Kenyan dust.
Ritter, Mike, and the Israelis sat against the fuselage, their parachutes between their legs. Botha reached over and tapped a screen. Moshe leaned between the pilot and empty copilot seats and nodded. Israelis stirred to life and got to their feet.
Mike pulled Ritter up and ran his flashlight over Ritter’s parachute straps, checking for any rips or tears and tightness.
“Remember, pull the cord,” Mike said. He tapped his flashlight against the ring on Ritter’s chest. Most army airborne operations used a static line to deploy a jumper’s parachute as he stepped out of the aircraft. Like many things in the army, the equipment worked best when the Soldier didn’t have to think about it.
Ritter felt the plane descend. The plan was to fly low and slow; the less time the jumpers spent in the air, the less they’d scatter. The trade-off was that if anything went wrong with their parachutes, they had less time to react. The view from the windows was nothing but darkness.
Alarms blared as an Israeli pried open the side cargo door. It shot back on the runners and slammed open. Wind howled through the plane as the first Israeli braced himself in the doorway. He pushed himself back and launched into the night. The Israelis filed to the open maw and followed suit, their leaps paced by a jumpmaster at the door.
Wind tugged at Ritter’s sleeves as he grabbed the cold steel of the doorframe, an abyss before him. Ice crept through his veins and froze his arms in place. Fear. He knew the emotion, could rationalize it as his body’s way of getting ready. Yet, his mind couldn’t override the notion that hurling himself into the night and trusting his life to a wad of silk and cloth was a bad idea.
A hand slapped his shoulder, and he charged forward. A cold wave of air hit him, and he spread his arms and legs to stabilize his fall. Gravity’s sure hand had him, and he had the rest of his life to deploy his parachute.
Ritter grabbed at his chest, grasped a ring, and pulled.
Nothing.
He pawed at the parachute rig, fumbling for the rip cord to the backup parachute. Years old training fought for relevance in his mind as he tumbled end over end through the darkness. Seconds ticked by, seconds he didn’t have to lose. Fingers, nearly frozen in panic, found a pull ring.
He stuck a finger into the ring and pulled again, and it extended a few inches before halting. He grabbed the ring with both hands and heaved.
The string snapped loose, and Ritter stared at the release in his hand and kept falling.
His world quaked, and for an instant Ritter wasn’t sure whether he’d hit the ground or if his parachute had deployed.
Not dead. Still thinking. What am I supposed to do next? he thought
He looked up, past the extended riser that ran from his harness to into the billowed canopy. He didn’t see any rips, tears, or tangled lines.
What’s next? he thought. He’d done one nighttime jump in training. Something about the horizon? No, the gear.
Ritter loosed his pack of gear and let it vanguard his fall. He put his feet and knees together and waited for the line between him and the pack to go taut. He heard a thump, but the line stayed slack.
Did the line break? Shouldn’t it have—
He plowed into the ground. A collision that should have gone feet-knees-thigh-torso went feet-ass-head. His helmet smacked against a rock, and the impact sent stars dancing across his vision.
Ritter felt rocks and dirt scraping against his body as his parachute dragged him across Socotra’s terra firma. He shook his head clear and pulled a pin at his shoulder to detach the parachute from his harness. One of the risers snapped off, the other held fast and he kept sliding. His right calf erupted in pain as something sliced across his leg. The remaining riser slid loose from his shoulder and out of his reach.
The
canopy slithered across the landscape. The moonlit terrain cut off a few dozen yards ahead of him.
A cliff.
Ritter unsnapped his Applegate-Fairbairn and sawed at the fabric riser. The blade bit in but made slow progress.
“Not. Like. This!” he screamed as he worked the blade.
A sliver of fabric remained as his parachute broke over the cliff edge and took Ritter over it a moment later. The parachute snapped free and took to the wind like a wraith. Ritter reached for the cliff face and found no purchase.
His mind went to Natalie as he fell. She’d never know the truth of how he died, never knew how he felt about her.
Something jerked at his waist, and he smashed into the cliff. He looked up. The line from his gear was an umbilical cord from his harness over the lip of the rock wall.
He twisted in the air and grabbed a handhold on the cliff face. He tossed his blade over the edge and hauled himself up the cliff with more skill and speed than he’d ever considered himself capable of. His fingers dug into the loose dirt of the blessedly parallel ground, and he clawed forward until his knees were on solid ground.
With his face in the dirt, his heaving breaths blew dirt into the air. He didn’t care that he sucked in the same dirt and gave the earth a gentle pat.
He felt footfalls vibrating through the ground and pushed himself onto his knees. Two figures were running toward him in the darkness. The line from his riggings ran between a pair of boulders. The equipment pouch must have gotten caught between the rocks as gravity and wind conspired to kill him.
“Eric?” Shlomo said in a loud whisper.
Ritter got to his feet and picked his blade up from the dust. He wiped it clean and gave it a quick kiss before sheathing it.
“I saw you go over and thought you were dead. You look good,” Shlomo said.
“I’ve got better things to do tonight than to die,” Ritter said. False bravado might convince Shlomo, but his quivering knees knew the truth.
He took a step toward his gear and yelped in pain. His lower leg went alight with pain.
Ritter felt his calf, the uniform leg shredded and wet with blood. Blood seeped from the gashed and raw flesh but wasn’t dripping. Ritter pulled a piece of sharp flint from his leg and looked at it in the dim light.
“Can you walk?” Shlomo asked.
Ritter took a few tentative steps, thankful that the pain was manageable. He wouldn’t be a hindrance to the rest of the mission.
“Yeah, just need to bandage it up,” Ritter said.
A red light winked at them in the distance. Wraiths coalesced around the light as the Israelis rallied together.
Ritter recovered his gear and kicked sand over the parachute rigging. What they wouldn’t carry, they would hide. If a local came snooping around and found a punch of parachutes in the middle of the desert, he or she wouldn’t need much of an education to realize something was amiss in his little part of the undeveloped world.
He limped toward the rally point, and the Mossad medic sat him against a boulder and went to work on his leg.
Ritter kept his eyes on the knot of men. The light from a GPS screen illuminated a map in between them.
His calf flared in pain as the medic sprayed it with antiseptic.
“Ow,” Ritter said, a statement instead of an exclamation.
“Stom ta’pe, koos,” the medic said. He wrapped gauze around Ritter lower leg and taped what was left of his pants leg over the gauze.
Mike—Ritter identified him in the darkness by the way he flowed as much as moved through the night—approached and looked from Ritter’s damaged leg to Ritter’s face.
“Just a flesh wound,” Ritter said. Mike motioned to the red light with a nod.
Moshe had a map on his thigh, a pencil tapping against it. He whispered to the rest of the Israelis in Hebrew.
“We’re off,” Moshe said to Ritter and Mike.
“How far?” Ritter asked.
“Almost…four kilometers,” Moshe said, “and there’s a canyon between us and the target location.”
“I got a quick look at it,” Ritter said. Five canyons running from north to south split the southeast quarter of the island. Their target was a group of buildings built on a bone-dry wash in the middle of the canyon.
“Which means there’s a detour, which means about eight kilometers, five miles, to move.” Moshe looked to the east, where the first hints of the sun’s arrival were manifest. “If we run, we might get there before sunrise.”
Moshe rose to his feet and started running. For a man wearing a bulletproof vest with Kevlar plates and another thirty pounds’ worth of gear, he could move fast.
Ritter’s lungs burned, and his blood pumped fire as they ran toward a ridgeline. The sun had nearly cleared the horizon, and the team was open and exposed against the bare desert. His injured leg throbbed against the bandages. His boot squished from the blood that had run down his leg and pooled within.
They cleared the ridgeline and stopped in a sparse grove of dragon blood trees. The trees looked like gigantic mushrooms; thin branches spread like veins beneath a canopy of tiny needles. Deep-red sap glistened in the morning light. Ritter took a drag of water from the hose on his CamelBak, less than his parched throat demanded. Who knew when they’d come across clean water again?
“Eric, take this.” Shlomo passed Ritter a dark plastic device, which was the size of his hand. A concave disk was embedded within it. “You run down to the road and set it up once we find a nest. Set the thermal trigger, and nothing will get past. You know how to use it, right?”
The M4 SLAM antitank mine weighed a little more than two pounds and, when detonated, used the power of the explosives within to turn the concave copper plate inside out and fire it off as a gigantic bullet, an explosively formed penetrator. Firing it at the nuclear weapon wouldn’t end well. The Israelis had brought some specialist equipment with them. Goldstein carried an AT4 rocket launcher for use against vehicles and buildings. Another Israeli had an antipersonnel claymore in his gear.
“Let’s hold on to that idea,” Ritter said as he handed the mine back to Shlomo.
“No, you keep it.”
“You’re just sick of carrying it, aren’t you?” Ritter said. Shlomo grinned at him.
The bleat of sheep came from deeper in the dragon blood forest. Ritter aimed his Tavor rifle at the sound as a flock emerged from between the tree trunks. That many sheep meant a shepherd would be with them, someone who could spoil their mission with one shout.
The sheep meandered between the trees, their bleating loud and frequent. There was no shepherd walking among them.
Mike stepped past Ritter, his weapon at the ready. Ritter stood up and followed him. What was Mike planning to do when he found the shepherd? Shoot him?
They stepped around the arched roots of the dragon blood trees and into the flock. Sheep skittered away from them.
Mike clicked his tongue twice. His rifle pointed to a skinny man dressed in rags and a turban lying face down in the dirt. A dark patch of dirt was beneath his head. Ritter approached the man slowly, then nudged him with his foot. No response.
Ritter dug his toe under the man’s ribs and kicked him over. He flipped over, his limbs loose. This was a man—no, just a teenager—with the hints of a beard. A red canal across his throat bespoke a professional touch. Someone had sliced into his throat with a garrote and left him in the dirt. Ritter reached down and touched the dead man’s side. Still warm. With no rigor mortis, he hadn’t been dead long.
Ritter keyed his mike. “Moshe, got a body over here. I think—”
The distant echo of machine gun fire boiled over from their target. Ritter knew the sound of AK-47s when he heard them; the acoustics of the canyon multiplied the sound of shots.
“We aren’t the only ones here,” Ritter finished.
“You and Shlomo cover the road going north,” Moshe said over the radio. “No one gets out. The rest of us attack.”
Mike ran
back to Moshe, crossing paths with Shlomo, before following the Israelis down a wash leading to where the nuke was being stored.
Ritter and the black Israeli ran parallel to the ridgeline by a few yards and found an outcropping. Shlomo slid into the crevice and popped open the sight for his sniper rifle. The plain around the ridgeline was bare desert for hundreds of yards. No one would sneak up on them.
“Movement,” Shlomo said.
Ritter lifted his head over the ridgeline. A beat-up Kia Bongo pickup truck, the same kind he’d seen in Iraq, drove away from the target houses at high speed. The truck rode low, a heavy load causing it to slide across the packed dirt as if it were on an icy road.
“Moshe, you get eyes on that truck?” Ritter said into the radio.
No reply.
A different crack of gunfire erupted in the canyon. Moshe and the team were otherwise occupied.
Ritter looked north; the wash led to an improved road and the rest of the island. If the nuke was in that truck…
“Shlomo, can you disable the truck without hitting the cargo bed?” Ritter asked.
“What happens if I hit the cargo?”
“Let’s not find out.”
Shlomo let out a slow breath and squeezed the trigger.
The truck was three hundred yards away, moving over uneven terrain. Shlomo’s rifle fired, and the bullet shattered the Bongo’s front windshield. It kept going.
Shlomo worked the bolt action, and a smoking cartridge ejected into the morning light.
The second shot didn’t have an immediate effect, but a second after the report faded, the truck rumbled into a shallow ravine. There was no movement from the driver.
Gunfire continued from deeper in the ravine, with the sound of a nightlong thunderstorm compacted into minutes. If the nuke wasn’t in that truck, then it was in the crossfire.
