“I’m going in,” she said, launching the script. “We may get shut down at any moment.”
“Got it. Just cracked the flash, and I’m in download mode.”
“What’s going on now?” asked Dago, sipping his beer.
“We’ve got a small window of opportunity,” Angela explained, watching the script go through its sequence. “I think I found Hastings’s access to DARPA, but the moment we log in we run the risk of getting caught if we navigate the site in a way that’s different than how Hastings typically does it.”
“Or if he attempts to log in while we’re in,” added Art-Z.
“Then what?” Dago asked.
“Then all hell breaks loose,” replied Angela as the screen turned dark, followed by the words,
PROJECT SKYLEAP
ENTER PERSONAL ACCESS CODE NOW.
SkyLeap?
A timer came up at the bottom of the screen.
Ten seconds.
Angela keyed in the last password, a long string of letter and numbers.
A wheel spun in the middle of the display before changing to a menu of options superimposed on a star-filled background.
TRAINING
SUITS
TECHNOLOGY
PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
She almost clicked on the Technology tab but kept her index finger hovering an inch over the touchpad.
What would Hastings do?
Slowly, she shifted the pointer to Program Management and clicked it once.
And she stopped breathing.
* * *
Jack inhaled deeply while Angela dialed her cell phone and put it on speaker mode, holding it at shoulder level between them as they sat on the sofa. Dawn was still a few hours away, and he couldn’t help but wonder what new set of strange findings the day would likely bring.
But one thing remained constant. Angela was certainly Angela. Her hair might be longer and blond, her clothes might be different, and she wore a bit more makeup, but those hazel eyes regarding him with the same warmth from their early years hadn’t changed one bit.
The phone rang twice before a sleepy voice came on the line.
Pete.
“Angela?” he said, before coughing and adding, “What … what time is it?”
“Almost three,” she said.
“Is … everything all right?” he asked, coughing again.
“Ah, no. That’s why I’m calling at this hour. Something’s come up and I need to see you right away.”
There was a rustle in the background, like papers being shuffled, before he cleared his throat and asked, “Okay, sure, sure … what’s it about?”
She looked at him and lightly bit her lip before saying, “It’s … about Jack.”
There was a pause, before Pete asked, “What about Jack?”
“Well, there’s no easy way to say this,” she said, raising her brows. “Jack’s right here with me.”
Another pause, this one much longer.
“Pete, are you still there?” she asked.
“Angela, yes,” he said, slight condescension replacing grogginess. “You know I’m always here for you. Did you have another nightmare?”
“No dreams, Pete. He’s sitting next to me in my living room, flesh and bones, and we need to see you right away.”
A heavy sigh came clearly through the speaker, followed by “Angela, look—”
“Hey, Pete,” Jack said. “It’s me.”
“It’s … wait a minute … who’s this?” Any trace of sleepiness vanished.
Jack grinned at Angela and said, “Your best buddy.”
“That’s … impossible. I watched you … Angela, what the hell’s going on?”
She was about to reply, but Jack put up a hand. “I carried your sorry ass for two miles to a park ranger station in Colorado while you screamed like a girl after one of your stupid aluminum alloy carabiners failed, and that’s after I told you, dumbass, to stick to steel. Remember?”
He looked at Angela and then at the small phone in her hands, noticing that this version of his wife also had long fingernails painted red.
“Jack?” Pete finally said. “How … how did you … survive? Your position got overrun … we saw you taking fire … no one could have—”
“It’s a long story,” Jack interrupted, “and better told in person.”
“Jack,” Pete insisted. “What happened? How did you not die from that … fusillade? Those bastards were right on top of you unloading their AKs.”
He sat back a moment and looked at Angela, who nodded.
“All right, man,” Jack replied. “As weird as it sounds, I’m from another version of Earth.”
Silence, then, “Come again?”
“Yeah, I know how it sounds. I still have a hard time believing this, and so does Angie. In my version of Earth, she finished the suborbital suit, and I executed a jump from sixty miles high, but I somehow went through some sort of passage during reentry that brought me down to your Earth.”
“My Earth? Jack … there’s only one Earth.”
“The events I’ve experienced in the past several hours certainly challenge that view.”
“Okay. Hold on, Jack. Start from the beginning.”
Jack did, taking just a couple of minutes to give him an abridged version of what happened.
When he finished, the phone was silent for a moment, though Jack could hear Pete’s heavy breathing at the other end.
“So … let me get this straight,” Pete finally said, “you just woke up in the middle of a field near Orlando?”
“Yep. And I hitched a ride to my … to this house.”
She leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Jack, this is your house. You even know where the damn coffee is.”
He put a hand on her face, the tip of his index circling her freckle. She smiled and kissed his finger.
“Okay,” Pete said. “Who else have you spoken to?”
“Just Angie and now you.”
“Jack, listen very carefully. Don’t move. Don’t call anyone else. I’ll be right over. We’ll sort this out.”
Angela put her phone away and said, “I’m sure there’s a way to explain all of this. We just need to get the right data in front of the right people.”
He sighed and nodded, looking at their matching tattoos. “So we still have the bikes?”
“Yep. Just changed the cylinders on yours. Runs like new.”
“And the boat?”
“Dark and Stormy. Still in the boathouse out back. I work on it now instead of the marina guys. Gives me something to do on the weekends, plus I continue to scuba dive.”
He grinned. They had named it after Jack’s favorite drink during his SEAL days, made with Gosling’s Black Seal rum.
“Do you enjoy teaching?”
“It’s different, and I don’t have to think too hard. After you died, I had difficulty concentrating for very long.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re here now,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”
Jack cleared his throat, realizing he was quite dehydrated. “Do we still keep vitamin water in the fridge? I’m thirsty as hell.”
She laughed and took him by the hand to the kitchen, where she snagged a couple of bottles from the refrigerator.
Her back against the sink, she twisted the cap off and brought her bottle up to his, tapping it and saying, “Here’s to ‘Relax, honey. I’ll be right back.’”
Jack gave her a half laugh and took a long swig before asking, “Was the body ever recovered and brought home?”
She shook her head. “Why do you ask?”
He shrugged. “Ah … it’s nothing.”
“No,” she said. “What is it?”
“Forget about it.”
“Jack, dammit. We have a deal … or at least we did in this world. We always spoke our minds, so get it out.”
Raising an eyebrow, he said, “All right … it’s just … just what Pete said on the phone
about no one surviving that fusillade. What I’ve gathered so far is that they saw the Taliban firing in my … in Jack’s direction.” He paused, frowning at how weird that sounded, before adding, “But did they actually see him die?”
“No, but the reports said that—”
“Hold on,” he interrupted. “Was the body shown off by the Afghan rebels? Maybe on some Web site?”
Angela put her bottle down, crossed her arms, and slowly shook her head. “Where are you going with this?”
Standing in front of her, Jack also put his bottle down and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Look. I just know how those Taliban motherfuckers think,” he said. “I fought them long enough. To them it’s all about promoting their cause, and one of the ways they do it is by parading any semblance of a trophy they can get their dirty hands on. Bragging rights is a huge part of their mission. If they shoot down a Predator, next thing you’ll see is a video of them chanting to Allah around the smoking wreckage. Every time they kill one of ours and manage to take the body, you’ll see it displayed on some Web site. Bastards even like to execute our people on video. So, if they really did kill Jack Taylor wearing a version of this futuristic suit, I would bet my government pension they would have paraded my carcass all over the Middle East.”
“But they didn’t,” she said. “There was nothing but that damn letter on the mantel … plus what Pete told me.”
“Well, I can promise you one thing, Angie. We always take our wounded and our dead,” he said. “It’s our code. We do it not only out of respect for a fallen warrior and his family, but also to take away the enemy’s bragging rights. And when we can’t take our dead with us, we make damn sure there’s nothing left behind … like I did in Colombia.”
Angela made a face. “Colombia? You … Jack never went there.”
“I did … after Afghanistan, for about a year. This particular mission turned out to be my last one with the SEALs.”
“What happened?”
Jack looked away. Those memories still stung.
She put a hand to his cheek and gently turned his face toward her. “It’s all right. You can tell me anything, remember?”
He certainly remembered a time when he could.
Taking a deep breath, he said, “It was supposed to be a routine recon to track down the location of this big-shot drug lord. But the damn surveillance gear malfunctioned, and we lost our cover. It turned very quickly into a turkey shoot. Everyone on my team was dead within a couple of minutes. The only reason I survived is that I sat them all up holding weapons so the incoming militia would think we were still alive, and then I booby-trapped them with everything we had, from Claymores to C4. I heard later that the heat from the blast was picked up by satellite. Not only did I vaporize my team—plus a few dozen bad guys—but such an unexpected and over-the-top bloody counterstrike has a way of stripping the enthusiasm right out of the most determined enemy. It bought me time to escape while the fuckers were trying to figure out which head went with which asshole.”
He paused, then added, “My point, Angie, is that even in that extreme case, there was nothing left behind to be paraded around.”
She just stared at him. “So you think that he may have survived the…” Her voice trailed off as she bit her lower lip and her eyes filled rapidly, a tear running down her cheek, wetting the freckle.
He instantly regretted bringing that up, chastising himself for being so insensitive. It was probably hard enough for Angela to wrap her head around him literally dropping out of the sky five years after his reported death. The last thing she needed was to fuel that confusion with false hope dispensed by the same man who had shocked her an hour earlier.
“Look,” he continued, searching for the right words. “I seriously don’t believe that anyone could have survived the fusillade that you’ve described. But my point was that Pete has a hell of a lot of explaining to do because in both worlds, Jack hauled his delirious ass and his mangled leg for two miles, while he was incoherent, talking shit. Pete owed Jack a trip home to his wife, even if it was in a body bag.”
“But like you said, there was no body displayed by the Taliban, and you’re right. It would have made for an excellent trophy,” she said.
It was obvious now that he had opened Pandora’s Box. Angela wasn’t going to let this one go so easily, so he tried a different tactic.
“Maybe they realized the value of the armored battle dress technology, which was top secret at the time—and still is—and decided to put a lid on the whole thing and not advertise the killing so they could sell the suit to the Chinese or the Russians. I’m sure that money would have easily trumped the short-term press they would have gotten by parading another dead American. Look, I’m sorry I even brought it up. I don’t think he’s coming home, especially after five years.”
Still holding his hands, Angela pulled him toward her. “But … that’s the thing … he did … you did. You made it home, Jack. You still made it home to me. You found a way, and that’s all that matters.”
“Angie, I—”
She hugged him, and Jack didn’t resist. He simply returned the embrace, his body responding when feeling her chest pressed against his.
“When you lose someone you love,” she finally said, still clinging to him, “it doesn’t really hit you until later, after the initial shock passes. The military funeral, the shiny uniforms, the volleys of shots fired, the jets flying overhead, and even the damn folded flag and those shell casings … all of that came and went in a flash. But it was later, Jack, when I had to go to bed alone, when I woke up alone, when I ate alone—hell, even when I walked into the garage and saw your bike and had to go riding alone. That’s when it hit me, and it kept hitting me as I saw you in everything I did. Even in that orbital suit that I couldn’t stomach to look at anymore. And that’s why I couldn’t stick around NASA. I couldn’t breathe in there. It was truly suffocating. I had to get the hell out.”
“Well, that suit’s the reason I’m here,” he said.
“No,” she said, walking back to the living room and sitting on the sofa, where she inspected the strange glass token. “Not just the suit.”
Jack took his seat next to her. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know … but I do know someone who…”
Jack saw the glow from incoming headlights forking through a gap in the drawn living room curtains, and he raised a hand. “Don’t make a sound.”
She stared at him as he narrowed his gaze, shifting it to the foyer, listening to a sound that didn’t belong. The sound of …
“Something isn’t right,” he whispered.
But before she could reply, Jack was already on his feet, killing the lights in the foyer, in the living room, racing toward the curtains, peering through their narrow gap into the darkness beyond, staring at three Humvees driving slowly down the street.
Car doors swung open followed by seven soldiers scrambling over the pavement, taking positions across the street at either side of the house. Pete finally emerged from the center armored vehicle holding a radio to his lips.
What are you up to, buddy?
“What is it?” she hissed from the living room.
“Your boyfriend,” he replied, waving her over. “He’s decided to play soldier.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s brought armed men with him. I don’t get the feeling he’s here to help us sort things out. I think he’s here for that.” He pointed at the OSS by the sofa. “And after he gets it…” He ran the tip of his thumb across his neck.
“No way. Something’s gotta be wrong, Jack. I know him,” she said, grabbing her mobile phone and speed-dialing him.
A moment later they watched Pete reach for his phone with his free hand and read the screen, obviously realizing it was Angela.
“Hey, I’m on my way,” he answered.
“What’s taking so long?” she asked.
“Traffic. I’ll be there in a couple
of minutes. Hold tight.”
She hung up and said, “Jack … I don’t understand what’s going on. Why is he lying? What are those soldiers doing across the street?”
“I don’t intend to stick around long enough to find out,” Jack said, considering his options, and finally asking, “Angie … my arsenal … did you hang on to any of it?”
She looked at him, understanding flashing in her eyes as she said, “Yes, all of it.”
* * *
“They’re all going to have to be modified,” Angela commented, popping the lid of a Red Bull and taking a swig before adding, “Idiots.”
“Here’s to trusting The Man,” Art-Z said, also holding a can and tipping it in her direction.
Angela ignored him while she browsed through screen after screen of complex production timelines reminiscent of the space shuttle era, when suppliers from all over the globe provided the primary contractor, Rockwell, with every component required to assemble a shuttle, from the thermal protection system to zero-G toilets.
“Looks like there’s quite the operation already underway,” Art-Z added while she read through Project SkyLeap’s production schedule for orbital space suits. The Pentagon procurement division had been busy conducting top secret biddings from every possible supplier—many of them companies that she had collaborated with over the years to develop the various prototypes—and had created an assembly line at an undisclosed location.
Angela frowned, realizing that she shouldn’t be that surprised. After all, the objective from the very beginning had been to create a weapon, and that meant that at some point in time the military would have to take the OSS from NASA’s R&D labs into a production facility just like every other military weapon in operation today.
She’d simply expected to have been part of that process, and not just because of professional pride, but because of precisely what had transpired. The screen glowing with data in front of her indicated that the Pentagon was already producing something that wasn’t ready for prime time yet. She had warned Pete on multiple occasions about tempering Washington’s enthusiasm for productizing a program of this complexity too soon. Something with this many moving pieces—and most of them state-of-the-art—required careful testing at the component level, followed by the module level, and then through various integration steps.
The Fall Page 13
