A man came to the window and conversed with her in French. Eddie heard the flip-flip of paper currency changing hands. Moments later, the ramp motored up and the thunderous growl of the propellers receded, leaving the two of them in relative silence.
The blindfold came off.
From behind his chair, Darcy placed Eddie’s glasses on his nose at an awkward angle, and he immediately looked around. Through the tinted rear windows he could see a broken tarmac with crops of weeds growing in the cracks. Out the front windscreen, he saw nothing but deep blue water.
Darcy settled her chin on his shoulder. “You know. I kind of like you this way, Red Leader, all chained up so I can do whatever I want.” She rose up again and flicked his ear.
“Don’t do that. It’s cruel.”
“Perhaps.” Darcy made a popping sound with her lips and flicked his other ear. “But I think you like it, no?”
He did. A little. That was so wrong. Pouting, Eddie tried to cross his arms, but the shackles caught him. He sighed. “I hate you.”
“No you don’t.” Darcy opened the door, dragged out a pair of bulky duffel bags, and slid it closed again.
He glanced over his shoulder. She was gone.
“You might think about rolling down a window!”
Eddie took a deep breath to put her out of his mind and surveyed the workstation. Cursors blinked on every monitor. All the CPUs were humming, and the shackles gave him enough freedom of movement to work the keyboard. Darcy had left him there with several teraflops of computing power and a SATCOM antenna linked to the CIA mainframe. She might as well have left him with a machine gun in one hand and a nuclear missile in the other.
“This might be fun.” Eddie rolled his wrists in the shackles, cracked his knuckles, and let his fingers hover over the keyboard. “Okay. Here we go.”
“Oops!” Darcy flung open the van door, flooding his monitors with daylight. “I almost forgot.” She reached in and flicked a lighted switch on the floor, about six inches beyond Eddie’s reach. The monitors blinked off. The CPUs spun down. She gave him a wink. “I will be back, yes? Do not run away.” The door slammed closed again.
“Aaaaggh!” Eddie cried again. “I hate you!”
She pounded on the door and he heard her muted, melodic voice from outside. “No you don’t!”
Eddie let his chin drop to his chest. “No. No I don’t.”
FINN LOOKED UP from his work in the back of the box truck to see Darcy lugging a pair of duffels across the desolate Black Sea airbase. Crumbling buildings, crumbling bunkers, all on a peninsula of sun-bleached concrete jutting out into the Black Sea. And then there were the rows and rows of rusted, forgotten aircraft. He found the sight of them depressing. Lukon had sent them to a kind of post-apocalyptic purgatory—once a Soviet naval airbase, later a military storage facility called a boneyard, and now abandoned to decay.
“You have the capsule ready?” Darcy let the bags drop to the concrete.
Those bags were filled with explosives. “Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
He traded a screwdriver for a wrench, adjusting one of the four small reaction control jets used for positioning the balloon in flight. “Nothing.”
A few minutes later, the two carried the capsule to a helicopter pad at the water’s edge. After using a pneumatic gun to anchor the launch clamps to the concrete, Finn hooked up the balloon to a hose running from more than a dozen hydrogen tanks and began the long process of inflation.
He lifted his hand off the valve. “Watch this while I change into my pressure suit. Do not let it fill too fast. This hydrogen gas is mixing with the oxygen inside the balloon. One little rip, a spark of static, and boom.” He spread his hands to form a mushroom cloud. “Comprendez-vous?”
Darcy made an incredulous pbbt sound. “Your French is atrocious. I am a chemist. You think I do not know how to safely handle hydrogen?”
“Yeah. Well”—Finn glanced at the bags of rockets and explosives she had dropped onto the concrete—“safety really isn’t your thing.”
A few minutes later, Finn emerged from the truck wearing a formfitting pressure suit and an aerodynamic back shell filled with his chute and equipment. With the high-pressure hydrogen pouring in, the polyethylene balloon had already stretched to the height of a small skyscraper.
He strolled over and checked the gauge, casting a glance at Darcy.
Darcy unzipped one of her duffels. “I told you. I know what I’m doing. Now come here, yes? It is time to strap on your wings.”
She called them wings, but in reality, they were packs of three rockets each, fueled with Darcy’s own special blend of insanity. She strapped the first set to his right ankle, then moved on to his left. “You must use rockets because a wingsuit will not work in the mesosphere.”
“And neither will a parachute.” Finn raised his arms so she could secure a control box to his waist. “I remember the briefing. The chute in my shell pack is a streamer. It won’t inflate. The air is too thin up there.”
“Correct. The streamer stabilizes your flight, nothing more.” She handed him a trigger wired to the control box. “Acceleration, deceleration—you do it all with rockets. Comprenez-vous?”
“So that’s how you say it.”
“Shut up and get in the capsule.”
Capsule was a strong word. Finn climbed aboard XPC’s conical jumping platform. It might have been stitched together from soda cans. The thing had barely enough structural integrity to survive the ascent, let alone any positioning maneuvers with its RCS thrusters. And it had no door, leaving him exposed to rapid drops in temperature and pressure.
Heating elements laced into the metallic mesh of his pressure suit would counteract the cold, but the batteries had limited life. Finn would have to wait until the brink of hypothermia before activating the system. He turned around and knelt inside the glorified aluminum can. “I can’t believe Lukon talked me into this.”
“You did not need to be talked into anything.” Darcy turned the valve to shut down the hydrogen and began disconnecting the hose. “All you needed was the opportunity.”
She had a point. Finn’s entire life had been a search for the status of legendary. Jumping from target to target within the mesosphere would earn him that title for sure.
“The last mountain was empty,” she said, bringing him his helmet. “Now you climb a new mountain to seek a new god, yes?”
“No.” Finn jerked the helmet from her hands. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He put it on and pressurized the seal. When he tried to speak again, his voice bounced back at him, muted by the polycarbonate face mask. “Head over to the van. Let’s do a SATCOM check before I launch.”
Darcy held a hand to her ear and scrunched up her nose. “Launch? Okay, if you think you are ready.” She laid a hand on the actuator that would unlock the anchor clamps.
Finn waved his hands. “No, no, no! That’s not what I said!”
“Au revoir.” She pulled the lever.
Chapter
sixty
LINATE AIRFIELD
MILAN, ITALY
AS TALIA RAN OUT from the dressing area at the back of the tent, she saw Avantec workers ripping away the entire face of the expo tent. Bazin the bear danced back and forth on the platform out front, arms spread wide, herding the ispettore and his men down the ramp.
She saw Ivanov as well, through the angular canopy of the Mark Seven’s flight deck, taking his place at the controls. He revved the engines and rotated the aircraft to face the crowd. She took a last look around and ran up the moving hatch steps to join him.
Ivanov occupied the left seat in the cockpit. Talia took the right. She set her helmet on her knee. The spare suit, with its highly stretchable mesh, had a one-size-fits-all feel. “Ready for takeoff?”
“Yes.” He flicked a toggle, and the hatch motored up behind them. “So, Miss Talia, where to?”
“Gryphon,” she said, pulling her restraints down over her shoulder
s. “Lukon and his band of thieves are already on their way.”
“Then we must head them off at the pass, as you Americans say. Hold on to something. This first stage is a little rough.”
The Mark Seven rose into a hover, ghosting out toward the safe zone of the water runway. As soon as the whole craft had cleared the cheering crowd, Ivanov canted her forward and jammed the throttles to the stop. The aircraft leaped into the sky.
Talia fought against the G-forces to look down at the expo. Every head had ducked against the spray of water kicked up by the jets. Now the onlookers all peeked out from under their arms to watch the Mark Seven rocket away. “Oh, I think they’ll remember this.”
The climb was fast and violent, nothing like the gradual ascent of a conventional airplane. In short order, the altitude reading projected on the canopy in front of her rolled through twenty-five thousand feet.
“We did not get a proper clearance.” Ivanov fixed his gaze on the sky above them. “Watch out for commercial airliners. We would not want to split one in half.”
She laughed.
He didn’t.
“Oh. Right.” Talia looked up through the glass.
By sixty thousand feet, where the daytime sky grew dark, their climb rate had slowed to a shallow angle. Ivanov made a check of his systems and set the autopilot. “Helmets on.”
Talia watched him lock his helmet into the rigid collar of the suit and tried unsuccessfully to mimic the procedure.
Ivanov smiled at her efforts. He flicked a switch on his collar, activating a microphone, and leaned over to help. “Like this.” She heard a hiss and a sharp thock as he locked her helmet in place.
She didn’t feel any different, other than a sudden urge to scratch her nose. She activated her microphone. “Shouldn’t I feel something?”
“Not unless the Mark Seven loses cabin pressure. Gryphon is pressurized as well. The suits are a mere precaution. Should we lose pressure on the airship, we run the risk of exposure to a near-vacuum.”
“You mean the kind where blood literally boils?”
“No, no.” The microphone added a layer of static to Ivanov’s laugh. “The air in the lower mesosphere is still a thousand times thicker than the thermosphere, the true edge of space. Although, without the suits, the more readily available moisture in our bodies would, indeed, flash boil. The water on our eyeballs, for instance.”
Talia grimaced at the image of moisture boiling away from her eyeballs.
“The rest comes with time. After thirty seconds we would experience”—he paused as if searching for the right word—“bloating. Yes, bloating in the soft tissues like you have never imagined. Only then, after our subsequent deaths, might our blood begin to boil.”
If Ivanov was trying to offer her comfort, he had failed. “Thanks. That description was very reassuring.”
Ivanov glanced at her, confused by her tone, then returned his attention to his readouts. “We have some time. The Mark Seven travels at Mach 2, but Gryphon is still an hour away.”
Talia looked out through the windscreen, searching the sky as if she might see Finn’s weather balloon way out in front. She knew she wouldn’t. And yet she could feel it climbing toward the goal. “Mach 2 may not be enough. This race will be close.”
Chapter
sixty-
one
ABANDONED SOVIET BONEYARD
BLACK SEA COAST, UKRAINE
EDDIE HAD A PLAN.
It lasted all of ten seconds.
Darcy reappeared and flicked the main switch, activating GROND’s computers, and the moment Eddie had a cursor, he started typing. His fingers flew over the keyboard, trying to get a message to Langley.
She slapped his hands away. “Stop that. You think I do not know what you are trying to do?”
He locked eyes with her, knuckles smarting. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“Eddie . . .”
He tried again.
She slapped his hands.
Back and forth they went, typing and slapping, typing and slapping, with little more than gobbledygook showing up on the monitors.
Finn’s voice came over the SATCOM. “Oi! What’re you two doing down there?”
They both stopped. Eddie checked the radio. In the struggle, Darcy had hit the hot-mic switch. He shut it off and pressed the transmit key. “Nothing. We’re . . . just . . .” He glanced at Darcy.
She shrugged.
“. . . checking our systems.” Eddie didn’t know why he felt guilty. These two were the enemy. He was supposed to be mad at them. He was mad at them. At least, that’s what he told himself.
“Focus,” Finn said. “I’m riding up into the atmosphere’s most electrically active zone under a big bag of explosive gas. I need to feel like I’m going to survive.”
“Yeah. Okay. Stand by.” Eddie switched to an internet screen and brought up a weather readout for the Black Sea region. He saw a chance for a little psychological revenge. He sweetened his tone. “Don’t worry. Those mesospheric explosions only occur above bad weather. And I see only one patch of storms on the scope.”
“Yeah. I see it too—a sea squall building to the east.” Finn went quiet for a moment, and Eddie could hear the wheels turning. “So, which direction will I be jumping?”
“East.” Eddie grinned at the mic, letting that sink in, then added, “I hope you get fried by a red elf and swallowed by a big blue sprite.”
“Why, you little—”
Darcy switched off the SATCOM. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry.” Eddie raised his hands as far as he could, rattling his chains. “Were you expecting me to cheer him on?”
She pursed her lips. “I get it. You are upset at how we treated you, yes? But that is no reason to curse the man to death. Jumpers are very superstitious, and Finn is in a delicate place right now. You must show sensitivity.”
“I don’t care. Why should I help you people?”
Her answer surprised him. “For your friend. Talia. Her life depends on Finn’s success.”
That was news to Eddie. “You’re lying. Talia is safe, we left her back at the chateau.”
“Not true. She is on her way to Gryphon as we speak, and Finn must get there first, or she will die.”
Eddie looked from one of Darcy’s deep brown eyes to the other.
She nodded, and all her insanity seemed to fall away for just a moment. “Fais-moi confiance.”
He didn’t know what fais-moi confiance meant, other than that Darcy was telling the truth. “Okay. You win.”
“Good.” Darcy switched on the radio. “Now tell Finn he will be all right.”
“What? No.”
“Do it.”
Eddie sighed and pressed transmit. “Finn?”
“Yes?”
“You’re going to be okay.”
A long pause. “Thank you.”
While they waited for the balloon to climb, Darcy had Eddie hack into Gryphon’s encrypted GPS beacon. Finn needed pinpoint accuracy for the type of target-to-target jump he had planned. Eddie finished the hack, passed the coordinates to Darcy to calculate his trajectory, and gave Finn an altitude check. “I have you passing one hundred forty thousand now.”
“My gauge reads the same. We’re in sync.”
“How does it look up there?”
“Like the edge of space, Red Leader. Thanks for the support. True blue. I know this isn’t easy for you.”
Finn had never called him Red Leader before, and Eddie could swear he heard a quiver in the Aussie’s voice. He squinted at Darcy. “Is he getting emotional?”
“No. He is getting cold.” Darcy leaned over him and keyed the mic. “Finn, the cold is penetrating your suit, yes? Switch on your heaters.”
“No worries. I can wait a little longer.”
They heard his teeth chattering. “Hypothermia,” Darcy said. “He has waited too long. The cold is affecting his thinking.” She tried again. “Finn, listen to me. Turn your heaters on.�
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There were several seconds of static. “I’m telling you. I’m fine.”
Eddie gave it a try. “Finn . . . this is Ed—er . . . Red Leader. I’m looking at your battery readout.” Eddie had no such thing. “You’ve got plenty of juice. Go ahead and turn those heaters on for me.”
“Yeah, all right, Red Leader. If you insist.”
Darcy patted Eddie’s shoulder. “See? He needs you. With your help, he will make it.”
Eddie stared at his screen for a long moment. “No. He won’t.”
He brought Darcy’s targeting plot over to the main monitor. A split display showed the lateral and vertical paths from the balloon to the airship, with real-time updates accounting for the balloon’s wind readouts. The updating vertical path gradually dipped below the airship. “The winds are stronger than forecast up there. He’s going to fall short.”
“That cannot be right.” Darcy pulled his keyboard over and began typing.
“Can’t he get closer? I thought the balloon had an RCS.”
She kept working, occasionally drawing in the air with her finger, doing math in her head. “He has had the RCS on since launch, pushing him east over the water, but it is not very strong. It was designed for station-keeping only.”
“What about going higher?”
“We are already pushing the balloon to its limit. At higher altitude, it may burst.” Darcy entered several more calculations before finally sitting back in triumph. On the display, she had aligned the vertical path with the airship again. “There. A little extra speed—a longer burn from my rockets—and voilà, he will make it.”
“You forgot the need for deceleration.”
Darcy scowled at him. “I did not. I can do the math. Finn has time to slow down for the landing.”
“I can do the math too.” Eddie pointed to a line of data below the display, jerking his wrist against his shackle. “He has the time, but not the fuel. His rockets will burn out before he slows down enough, and he’ll skip right off the top of Gryphon. Darcy, if Finn attempts this jump, he’s going to die.”
Her eyes widened. Darcy smashed her hand down on the transmitter. “Finn! Do not jump!”
The Gryphon Heist Page 26
