by Bob Mayer
“Wait one!” Moms called out, an unusual display of surprise for her. “Correction. Correction on the Package. Support got the damn Package invoice number wrong but the right pickup location. The Package is not a virus.”
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Until her next words. “It’s the hard drive from the laptop from our Fun Outside Tucson.”
“Fuck me to tears,” Nada muttered.
Roland stood on the open ramp, fifteen thousand feet above Utah, as calm as if he were waiting in line at Starbucks. Of course, Roland had never waited at a Starbucks, but one gets the idea. They were at fifteen thousand AGL because any higher and everyone inside would have to be on oxygen. As it was, the breathing was hard. Roland was looking down. It was easy to see I-15 running north to south. The glow of Salt Lake City was north of their current location. Eagle had offset a horizontal mile from the Flying H Truckstop where Ms. Jones told them the van was located. At least where the van’s GPS tracker was, Nada reminded everyone. The two might no longer be connected.
“Go,” Eagle announced.
Roland stepped off into darkness. He spread his arms and legs, got stable, then pulled the ripcord. The opening shock jerked him upright, and he looked up to make sure he had good canopy while he grabbed the control toggles for the chute.
Above him, Moms waited until the ramp was shut before issuing her next order. “Eagle, get us to five hundred AGL, into hover mode, and be ready to move in fast if Roland has any problems.”
Five hundred was the altitude at which the Snake could hover and not be heard at all by anyone on the ground.
“Don’t hit Roland on the way down,” Mac added, because Mac always had to add something.
It didn’t even occur to Roland that he might get hit by the Snake dropping altitude. He was focused on the truck stop and the area around it. So far, everything looked normal as he watched an eighteen-wheeler pulling out of the stop and turn onto the ramp for the interstate.
As he passed through eight thousand feet he spotted the van. Parked in the shadows, away from the bright lights of the truck stop and filling station. At least the Courier had done that according to Protocol.
“Eagle, thermals around the van,” Roland asked as he adjusted his descent.
“Very slight heat sigs coming from the driver’s compartment of the van,” Eagle said. “Doc, take a look. The sig isn’t right. I’m going lower.”
Roland was using a clockwise spiral to descend, checking all directions.
Doc’s voice came over the net. “You’ve got two warm spots in the front of the van.”
Two? That wasn’t good, Roland thought.
Doc continued. “But, ah, I’d say we have two corpses losing body heat. Not hot enough, even through the roof of the van.”
“Any other heat sigs?”
“Closest human is refueling over by the pumps,” Eagle said. “Couple of deer in the field to the west about five hundred meters out.”
Roland was about to pass through four thousand feet. He took a moment to ready his MP-5 on top of his reserve. The M-240 machine gun was on his side, rigged tight against his body. He reversed his spiral, because Protocol said he was to reverse directions after passing through four thousand feet. Why? He’d never thought to ask.
“Wind?” Roland asked.
“From the north-northwest at twelve knots, gusting to eighteen,” Eagle reported. “You’re still clear. We’re holding at five hundred, to the west, offset three hundred meters. I’m deploying the gun if you need backup.”
Roland didn’t bother to look in that direction. If Eagle said that’s where the Snake was, that’s where the Snake was.
When Roland hit two thousand AGL, he started dumping air, accelerating his descent because he was in range of someone firing from the ground and there was no point in taking his time. He made one last curve, had his approach set, and then aimed straight for the van, still dumping air. Roland had perfected the craft of driving a parachute into an art over the course of 1,342 free-fall jumps.
Thirty feet above the van, he flared the chute, breaking his rapid descent so that when he landed on the roof, the only sound was the thud of his boots like a heavy gong, and not the crack of bones breaking. There is a fine line between the two.
From the wind report, Roland knew he had to cut loose the chute or get blown off the top of the van by a gust. He popped the quick releases on his shoulders, then grabbed the MP-5 and did a quick three-sixty.
Nothing close.
Roland aimed the gun down. He knew the specs. The roof was armored. If anyone was alive inside they knew something had come down on top of them. Roland swapped out the MP-5 for the M-240, preferring the heavier firepower.
Roland jumped off the roof, turning in the air, peering in the windshield as he came down, machine gun at the ready.
He landed on the parking lot. “We’ve got what looks like two KIA in the front of the van. The Courier and some girl who got double-tapped.”
“Roger,” Moms said. “Inbound.”
Roland put his back against the front fender of the van, half-crouched out of sight of the interior just in case one of the apparently dead people wasn’t dead—or was perhaps a zombie—and somehow blew out the bulletproof glass and came after him. But he figured the priority was whoever had done the killing, and they were outside somewhere.
He heard the whine of the Snake, muffled by the trucks passing on the interstate. The fast ropes came down and then the rest of the team. The Snake went back out to hover over the wilderness to the west and provide cover.
Moms was on point, appearing out of the surrounding darkness. Nada and Kirk went past and spread out, putting themselves as security between the van and the truck stop, going to a knee, their weapons at the ready. Mac joined Roland along with Nada and Moms.
“Why’d you land on the roof?” Mac asked. “If it’s rigged with a motion detonator, you’d have set it off.”
Roland shrugged. “I like having the high ground. Guess it isn’t rigged with a motion detonator. One less thing for you to check.”
Mac didn’t need to be told what to do. There was a Protocol for a Courier van. He nodded and the rest of them moved away.
Mac moved quickly but efficiently. Running his hands gently everywhere his eyes went, as coordinated as Nada had been with the JMPI. Mac was also sniffing as he searched, and listening, head slightly cocked. Mac had once defused fourteen IEDs along a single stretch of road in Afghanistan in less than six hours. Like Roland and free-fall parachuting, Mac had taken his craft to an art form. He finished the exterior. Then he put on a headlamp and turned it on. He slid underneath, covering the entire bottom, slithering along the ground. Finally he came out from under the van and turned the lamp off.
“No break-in,” he reported. “No triggers. The outside is clean.”
Moms signaled and they moved back to the van. Moms gestured and Roland held out his cupped hands as he squatted. Moms stepped into his massive hands and he easily lifted her up so she could look down in the front.
“Two KIA,” Moms confirmed. “Open her up, Mac.”
“Clear,” Mac said.
Roland put Moms back down and they moved back once more, leaving Mac alone. He took out the remotes he’d programmed on the flight in, using the data from the Depot for this van. One by one he turned off the alarms and locks.
He walked over and put his hand on the driver’s handle. Mac cracked the door, checking for tripwires. Satisfied, he jerked the door open.
The Courier tumbled out and Mac stepped out of the way, letting the body slam onto the pavement as he went up on the step, weapon at the ready. “She’s been double-tapped,” he reported.
He stepped back down and checked the Courier. “Knife up through the jaw. He went quick.”
Mac went around to the back and opened the two heavy doors. “Bad news. Safe is open. The Package is gone.”
Moms and the rest of the team other than the two men on security came up. They all
went to the rear first, looking in.
“The van was locked and secure, right?” Moms asked.
“Correct,” Mac answered.
“Fuck,” Nada said. “Inside job.”
“Rig it for sling load and let’s get it out of here,” Moms said, but she was looking about, into the darkness. Because someone out there had done the impossible.
Five kilometers away, in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, Burns was watching through a night-vision scope as the team rigged the van to be hauled away. It had gone down exactly as Burns had experienced numerous times in the past as a member of the Nightstalkers.
According to Protocol.
Nada and his Protocols.
Burns nodded.
THE NEXT DAY
In the middle of the southern part of the Bonneville Salt Flats, out of sight of I-80, a convoy of semis and Humvees had circled up. Much like the Donner Party that had crossed this same desert so many years ago. Except the Donners had gotten lost and had to detour to Pilot Peak way off to the north, losing valuable days, resulting in—months later—getting snowed in high in the Sierras. And eating one another.
Nada was in that kind of mood as the Snake came to a hover over the empty space in the center of the circle. Eagle gingerly descended, depositing the sling-loaded van onto the desert floor. Then he sidled the Snake over and set down, opening the back ramp.
They had a few hours before dawn and Ms. Jones wanted this wrapped and brought back to Area 51 before the sun came over the Rockies to the east. Moms had been on the Satcom with Ms. Jones the entire flight and the team had been unusually quiet, the bodies of the Courier and the girl on the deck in the center of the cargo bay. Her ID meant little: a runaway who’d gotten caught up in some bad shit. There was no doubt she’d been the bait, given the way the Courier’s pants had been opened. No one had even made a joke about shrinkage, which indicated the seriousness with which they were viewing this breach of security.
“Best they never know,” Mac said suddenly as Eagle cut the engines and they all got to their feet.
Everyone turned to him in surprise, even Moms. Mac pointed at the girl, her face mangled beyond recognition by the two bullets. “Better the family thinks she’s still out there somewhere. Alive. Hope is better than knowing for sure what the parents don’t want to know for sure. Trust me on that.”
Moms nodded. “Ms. Jones says she’ll be taken care of.”
Mac’s face tightened. “I didn’t mean taken care of. I meant no cop with a badge shows up at her parents’ door, some complete stranger, and tells them their daughter’s head has been blown off ’cause some dickhead couldn’t keep his pants on and some other dickhead wanted a hard drive. Best they not know. Sometimes hope is all you got.”
Mac stomped down the ramp into the desert and out beyond the perimeter into the darkness.
Kirk was surprised, because Moms had kept her mike hot during the last part of what Mac said, and everyone heard Ms. Jones reply on the team net. “I understand, Mister Mac. They will never know.” Then Kirk heard the click as the link went back to just Moms and Ms. Jones.
Nada looked down at the bodies as a Support team with two body bags appeared at the bottom of the ramp.
Nada pointed at the Courier: “He forgot why he was here.”
Doctor “never call me Professor, I earned my degree” Winslow left his lab on the campus of the University of North Carolina into the darkening evening with the hunched shoulders of a man whose day had been less than fulfilling. He occasionally, but not often, wondered if everyone who worked for him in the lab, from the techs to the various levels of graduate students and postdocs aspiring to his own position, ever noticed his bored resignation.
Physics was a young man’s game, and now that he was in his forties, it wasn’t as though his synapses were going to fire more rapidly and come up with a brilliant new theory. He’d seen it in those older than him. It had been a gentle, almost unnoticed slide from original brilliance to his single decent, well-paying idea—now gently fading into the past—to his eventual harrumphing for or against whatever the topic was depending on who was paying him and how much he stood to lose intellectually. Physics was like acting or novel writing or any other venture where one stepped into it with youthful verve and high expectations, but only a handful became Tom Hanks or Hemingway or Einstein.
Winslow found it amusing that so few understood that blinding ambition was the necessary ingredient of any intelligence or talent. He had the ambition, and as he pushed open the building door into the stifling heat of summer and the almost empty parking lot, he thought it was ironic that Ivar, his most talented student, had no ambition at all. It was the reason so many successful scientists stole the work of their lessers. Someone had to do something with it. A mind was a terrible thing to waste.
He walked to his car, the sweat already ruining another good shirt, and thought of Darwin, who’d read Wallace’s letters about evolution; while they shared many theories, Darwin was the one who ran with the big one. How many people knew who Wallace was? Darwin had had the ambition while Wallace had been content to merely be mentioned by the greater man.
Winslow’s wife, Lilith, had a Serbian grandmother who’d filled her head with tales of Tesla and how Edison had screwed him over, and how even Einstein’s wife, well-educated in her own right and ahead of her time, had lost out on her contributions to her husband. Winslow wasn’t sure he bought into the latter part, but the fact that Lilith was raised with the concept that stealing was an integral part of science made them a good pair in the ambition area. She just didn’t realize he wasn’t Tesla. Poor Tesla, whose better concept for alternating current had been relegated to the electric chair instead of home lighting, due to the manipulations of Edison, who had some of his assistants “accidently” kill animals with AC current to show its “danger” and secretly lobbied to get AC in the electric chair. It wasn’t surprising that no one wanted to turn on a light that shared the same current that Sing Sing used to turn off someone’s lights.
Winslow smiled. He had to remember that for the dinner party. He pulled his cell phone out and hit the record button so he wouldn’t forget: “No one wants to turn on a light that shares the same current that Sing Sing uses to turn out someone’s lights.”
Talking into the phone was why he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him. It was only as he clicked the record app off that he heard the voice right behind him and almost jumped out of his shoes.
“I’ve been everywhere but the electric chair and seen everything but the wind.”
Winslow spun about, the phone held out as if there were some app that could protect you from a stranger sneaking up on you in the dark.
“Who are you? What are you talking about?”
The man wore a hat, his face in darkness. There was an implied threat in the way he stood, in just the way he breathed. “Something from my old life. It’s a Nada Yada.”
“A what?”
The man gestured with his hand and there was clearly something metallic in it. “Just unlock all the doors and get in the car, Doctor Winslow.”
Winslow hesitated, considering his options. Swing his briefcase? Run? Scream?
He pressed the unlock button on his car key as he looked anxiously about at the tall smokestacks poking up above all the lab buildings so they could vent the by-products of various procedures. A distant blue light indicated where you could press an alert for campus police. Very distant. Too distant. Maybe this stranger only wanted the car?
“Get in the driver’s seat.”
Winslow slid into the leather seat as the man got in the back, behind him.
“Hot out, isn’t it?” the man said, as if this were the most normal of occurrences for him. “You’d think there’d be Fireflies out, it’s so hot.” He laughed to himself, a private joke apparently. There was a slightly manic edge to his laughter.
“What did you say?” Winslow felt his fear lessen slightly at the odd comment.
; “Fireflies,” the man repeated. “You have to wonder where they are. And relax your grip on your briefcase, Doctor, because if you swing that at me, it will only result in severe damage to that arm.”
Winslow tensed once more. “That’s an odd thing to say during a robbery—fireflies.”
“Who says I’m robbing you, Doctor Winslow? Maybe I want to sell you something?”
Winslow swallowed, feeling a wave of excitement greater than his fear sweep through his body. “So you have the fireflies?” he whispered, playing along on the sneaky spy stuff, figuring it was some code word.
“You don’t even know what a Firefly is, do you? But you do know what a Rift is, correct? You did get that e-mail from your former student. He didn’t know what Fireflies were either. None of you really know what you’re doing. What would you be willing to pay me if I said I have what you need? Does the name Craegan ring a bell?”
Winslow had to bite back the instant answer that formed on his tongue: Anything. He thought for a moment. “Fifty thousand.”
“Move the decimal place.”
Winslow wanted to turn and shout that was robbery, but he knew it actually wasn’t. Winslow glanced up at the rearview mirror. The man was sitting back, hat still keeping his face in the dark. Winslow reached for the light switch.
“Don’t.” The man laughed, the manic edge sharper. “The Fireflies got to me.”
“What are you talking—”
The man tossed something over into the passenger seat.
Winslow saw the hard drive with the ASU control number on the side. “I’ll need time to get the money,” Winslow said. “A week?”
“What are you going to do?” the man asked. “Take out a fourth mortgage on your house?”
Winslow started in surprise.
