Black Sunrise

by Brett Godfrey

  This ritual complete, he turned and slid the door upward on its Teflon tracks. A fierce, cold wind swirled through the cabin. He would exit from the “front float” position, so he’d be the first to climb out into the slipstream.

  A light beside the door changed from red to yellow.

  Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

  The light turned green. He leaned out to check the aircraft’s position, feeling the wind pressing against his helmet. The runway was directly below, nearly three miles down. They were in perfect position for a windless day.

  Time to go.

  He reached up with his right hand, grabbing a steel bar above the door outside the fuselage. Pivoting his left shoulder into the slipstream, he climbed out, fighting the wind, perched by the toe of one running shoe on the bottom edge of the floor. He side-hopped to his left, toward the front of the plane, to make room in the door for two more jumpers to climb out. The last member of the four-way team squatted just inside the door, gripping Roady’s arm and the chest strap of the man beside him, who made eye contact all around—a signal that all were ready to launch.

  The center jumper raised his chin, dipped it, and the four men dropped away from the plane as one, in perfect unison. Kenehan turned in the air so that his feet pointed skyward, facing “down the hill,” locking eyes with the man opposite him.

  The four skydivers released and repeatedly gripped each other, turned and released their grips, turned and re-gripped, forming pattern after pattern, like flying square dancers. In the skydiving world, this was called “turning points.” Each separate formation was a point. Kenehan counted nineteen before his helmet-mounted computer chimed the twenty-second mark. He was amazed at the speed and grace of the other three men who, unlike him, were all present or former world-champion skydivers.

  Point after point, they moved in unison for nearly a full minute, seemingly floating, belly to earth, backs arched, heads up and arms cupped beneath their chins in a position known as “the mantis,” which only the finest skydivers can maintain and fly. All too soon, altitude-sensing units in their helmets beeped the four-thousand-foot warning. It was time for them to break apart their formation, track away from each other like a human starburst and then deploy their parachutes.

  Flaring out of his track, Kenehan cupped his arms and torso for a second or two to slow down. Then he reached behind him, gripped a leather ball at the bottom of his parachute container, jerked it loose and released it into the wind.

  It is amazing that four seconds can become an eternity of helplessness, but that’s what happens after deploying a parachute—every time.

  Kenehan waited—four long seconds.

  When a parachute opens, the jolt is reassuringly severe, but this time Kenehan felt only a slight tug before the earth began to spin madly beneath him.

  Centrifugal force pulled his chin to his chest, and he fought to lift his head, struggling to see his canopy. What he saw made him swear in his full-face helmet: a tangled bundle of nylon cupped at one end like a funnel.

  Line twist—tangled slider.

  No fixing this one.

  His life expectancy was now down to about ten seconds unless he did the next bit perfectly.

  The horizon was spinning faster. With his left hand, he gripped a small nylon pillow protruding from his harness on his left side, peeled it quickly from its Velcro housing and yanked it to jettison the malfunctioning main canopy.

  He was tossed like a Frisbee, spinning with his back to the ground, away from the misshapen bundle of useless nylon. It took another two seconds for him to roll, like a cat, belly to earth in a stable arch. He pulled his reserve chute with his right hand.

  His reserve exploded open, slamming him into his harness. Relief flooded through him, making him feel giddy.

  Spank me, baby!

  Without losing his reserve handle or cutaway pillow, he looped his index fingers through the steering loops for his small reserve canopy and flew toward the landing zone, a square of grass the size of a soccer field next to an old row of hangars. The air grew warmer as he approached the desert floor. Thirty seconds later, he was on the ground. Condensed water droplets appeared for a few seconds on the still-cold nylon of his jump suit. His yellow reserve canopy dangled from his hand by loops of thin nylon cord.

  He shuffled into the hangar, dropped his canopy, reserve handles and helmet on a clean patch of carpet, and shimmied out of his harness and jump suit. Then he wandered out into the desert to find his main canopy.

  Shit. Now he was done for the day—and the trip. There wasn’t time for a repack. The vacation was over. The company had ordered him to report for a training exercise in Florida.

  Kenehan worked for the Brecht Group, a private company that supplied its worldwide clientele with corporate intelligence, private security, global threat assessment, hostage negotiation and rescue, and other services less well known in the private sector, but contracted frequently by certain governments. The Brecht Group had offices in Charleston, London, Rome, Paris and Munich, and a new office had just opened in Moscow, to the great amusement of the company’s aging founder, Albert Brecht. The company’s Central Operations Headquarters, or COHQ, was in Baltimore, where the agency, then called Information Security Services, or ISS, had first formed in 1959. Older veterans still called it ISS, though the name had changed more than twenty years ago. Out of the roughly ten companies capable of competing with it in the global arena, the Brecht Group was among the oldest and largest, probably the most secretive and certainly the most expensive provider of its specialized services.

  Kenehan’s immediate senior was Dave Thomas, a former Secret Service agent with advanced degrees in international studies and international law. Thomas had ordered Kenehan to report to the company’s enormous training facility in Florida in two days. Kenehan was sorry to end this long-overdue and all-too-brief period of downtime.

  He’d recently finished a long, arduous and very dangerous assignment that had ended successfully, but violently, in the Mediterranean. For the past three months, he’d been working undercover aboard the Italian freighter MV Cogliano under the guise of a deckhand, infiltrating a criminal cartel known as Hydrus.

  The seaborne mafia of the Mediterranean, Hydrus specialized in extortion, theft, piracy, sabotage and insurance fraud.

  A coalition of insurance and shipping companies had pooled their resources to contract with the Brecht Group to achieve what international law enforcement agencies had failed to do—delivering a knockout blow to Hydrus and stem the escalating financial bleeding the syndicate’s criminal operations had caused.

  The MV Cogliano had been the floating headquarters of one of Hydrus’s top leaders, Don Pietro Savagnelli. Masquerading as an ordinary maritime shipping vessel carrying loads of perfectly legitimate cargo, the vessel had afforded senior Hydrus henchmen the essential cover, mobility and access to the inner workings of the modern maritime world that fostered their criminal enterprises.

  Kenehan’s undercover work had culminated in the vessel’s seizure during a massive gun battle between the ship’s crew and Gruppo Operativo Incursori. These Italian naval special forces were part of a branch of COMSUBIN, or Comando Subacquei ed Incursori—the Raiders and Divers Group of the Italian Navy. GOI commandos had stormed the Cogliano off the coast of Sardinia, saving Kenehan’s life after he had burst-transmitted hours of covertly recorded video and audio. He’d delivered sufficient evidence to convict most of Hydrus’s leaders and hopefully break the organization’s back.

  Kenehan had lived for months in horrible conditions below deck while working eighteen-hour daily shifts. The assignment had been all but complete when his cover had been blown. Before the GOI insertion team had scaled the side of the ship, a steward had found Kenehan rifling through documents in the captain’s cabin. The steward had held him at gunpoint, calling for help on his belt-mounted radio. The ship’s first officer—also a senior member of the criminal cabal—had arrived within seconds.

 
Bleating in Italian, Kenehan had protested his innocence.

  The first officer would have none of it and had marched Kenehan at gunpoint out onto the deck, shoving him against the rail with the muzzle of a cheap Beretta jammed into the base of his skull. Facing out to sea with the man at his back, Kenehan had expected immediate execution. He’d seen it before: one round to the base of the skull and they’d shove his body over the rail and into the sea.

  Switching to French, Kenehan had shouted that he was with Interpol and that several other law enforcement agents were aboard the vessel. Demanding details, the first officer had jammed the Beretta harder into the back of Kenehan’s head, as if to scoop the information out of his brain by force. Then in English—which he knew the first officer did not understand—Kenehan recited part of an old American poem. While drawling the words, he’d slipped a Microtech Ultratech, a slender front-opening stiletto—and a Delta favorite—from his waistband.

  “Strange things are done in the midnight sun,” he’d intoned, snapping the scalpel-sharp blade into position, his hand and the knife hidden behind the rail. “By the men who moil for gold. You understand? They moil for gold. In the midnight sun. Capiche?”

  Straining to understand this jibberish, made harder by a stiff ocean breeze, the first officer had pulled Kenehan’s shoulder, turning him to stare down the barrel of the pistol. Kenehan had rammed the blade deep into the man’s abdomen just above his belt, stripping the gun away from the dying man with his other hand, twisting and pulling the blade upward with all his strength. The tanto blade had glided through skin, muscle and viscera, opening a long, deep furrow in the man’s belly. A fountain of bright red blood had gushed forth, soaking the officer’s white uniform.

  Then all hell had broken loose. Kenehan had found himself running, shooting and cursing, blood-soaked and outnumbered, with nowhere to hide. The Beretta had held fifteen rounds in a staggered clip; Kenehan had eventually brought down six more men before holing up, out of ammunition, in a winch house on the afterdeck. Oh, Mama, I’m in fear for my life... The jig is up, the news is out, they’ve finally found me.

  Just then, the GOI boys had come aboard.

  Now, hiking through the Arizona desert, Kenehan shook the image of the bloody carnage from his mind as he came upon his tangled main canopy. Fifty feet farther on, he found his freebag and kicker plate, tethered to its spring-loaded pilot chute. Wadding them under his sweaty arm, he headed back through the scrub to the drop zone.

  By the time he reached the hangar, his jump-mates had already finished repacking their chutes and were in the process of planning another dive. They knew he was out of the game for a while, as his reserve would have to be professionally re-packed by a licensed rigger. He took his gear to the rigger’s loft and left it with the man who had saved his life by packing his reserve the last time. Next, he grabbed a sandwich and a cold soda before climbing into his rented Nissan.

  The inside of the car was as hot as a kiln.

  He started the car, lowered the windows and waited for the air conditioning to get going as he drove slowly along the dirt road to the highway, leaving a massive plume of dust in his wake. He glanced at his watch—a Panerai the GOI boys gave him last month—the fabled timepiece of the Italian frogman. It would take him an hour to reach Phoenix. He’d grab a shower and then catch the evening flight to Orlando. Arriving a full day early would give him a chance to get a last bit of rest before the exercise commenced.

  He paired his phone to the car’s audio system and scrolled through his playlists, settling on “Let’s Ride” by Kid Rock.

  Cold air was finally blowing from the vents. He raised the windows and settled in, sipping his Diet Pepsi, enjoying the song, a SpecWar anthem from when he was Army Combat Applications Group, or CAG—formerly known as Delta. He’d served in it before transferring to the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA’s elite Special Operations Group. The boys had sometimes listened to the song before missions so they could get into the right mind-set, instead of thinking about the letters their wives would get—which his current boss called “Letters to Mama.” By force of habit, he kept an eye on his rearview mirror and his speed close to the limit, but he let his mind wander as he cruised through the Arizona desert.

  Chapter 6

  The stench rose up and hit Antonio like a punch. The rancid odor made him gag as he lifted the trunk lid and peered into the dark space.

  Beeman stood a few feet away under the yellow glare of a single bulb.

  The girls were no longer dazzling.

  They looked like cadavers spooned together.

  Antonio couldn’t tell if they were breathing. They’d been in the trunk for so long, it wouldn’t surprise him if they were dead. Am I already a murderer? He wasn’t ready for that—at least not yet. He’d shielded his mind from what he knew must come eventually.

  In horrid fascination, he bent down for a closer look, holding his nose and breathing shallowly through his mouth.

  Both of the young women had emptied their bladders—more than once, perhaps—and brown ooze was leaking through the brunette’s white cotton shorts. That was bad enough, but she’d also puked. Had she drowned in her own vomit? The tape had somehow peeled away from her mouth, so he didn’t think so. Her cheek lay in a puddle of slime that had soaked into the coarse carpet lining of the trunk. Spotting a piece of undigested food in the goo, Antonio had an overpowering urge to turn and run, and empty his own stomach somewhere in the darkness beyond Beeman’s driveway.

  Relief flooded through him when first one and then another pair of dull, listless eyes opened, turning eventually upward to see him. The girls gradually started to squirm against their bonds. Yet he could not bring himself to move or speak.

  A peculiar tingle crept upward along his arms and shoulders as he gazed into the blonde’s widening eyes. The gleam of raw terror now replaced her vacant stare. Antonio felt drawn to the blue orbs glaring silently back at his own. He felt a connection, a brief but intimate contact, a psychic electricity passing between them with a shared jolt of realization.

  This was happening.

  Antonio, like her, was living through something totally beyond any past experience, beyond imagination. As he stared into her eyes, they shared the unreal nightmare. Her eyes remained locked in the primal connection that binds predator to prey.

  Antonio looked away. He had crossed a line. His life would never be the same.

  He filled his lungs, and the vile odor that radiated from the open trunk assaulted him again. He stepped back into the darkened driveway and took several more deep breaths, the cool mountain air clearing his head a little.

  “Are you alright?” Beeman asked softly.

  The engine ticked as it cooled. A cricket chirped nearby. The sounds grew louder, or so it seemed, as Antonio realized that Beeman was staring at him intently. Shadows from the bare bulb overhead sharpened his normally soft face.

  Antonio looked back at Beeman and said nothing.

  A faint, cold smile formed on Beeman’s small mouth. He turned and pressed the button on the wall to bring down the garage door. The harsh, intrusive squeal of metal rollers broke the stillness. Antonio stepped back into the garage, ducking under the door. Silence returned as the door closed and the motor came to a stop.

  Beeman held the can of aerosolized tranquilizer against his leg as he stepped around to look into the trunk himself. Leaning in, he loomed over the tear-streaked faces that peered up at him from the darkness.

  Venom poured from his mouth as he spoke.

  “Dirty girls,” he hissed, his voice laced with menace. “Is this how your parents raised you? To soil yourselves on the first date?”

  Holding the can where they could see it, he continued. “We use this to control animals in our lab—dogs, monkeys and other beasts—when we take them from their cages … for experiments. Some of them struggle, try to bite. So we use this to control them.”

  He handed the can to Antonio and pulled a hunting knife fro
m a sheath hidden beneath his waistband. The beautiful, hollow-ground blade was polished to a mirror finish. He waved it back and forth hypnotically a few inches from the girls’ faces before touching the needle-sharp tip with his thumb, piercing his skin. A drop of bright red blood formed quickly. He smeared it on the lips of the blonde as she clamped her eyes and mouth in terror.

  The blood looked like black lipstick in the dim light.

  “My word, this shade suits you,” Beeman said softly. “It compliments your bloodshot eyes. I wonder how it goes with your own blood?” He pressed the flat part of his blade to her cheek.

  Muffled squeals and whimpers rose from the darkness as both girls began to struggle in panic against their bonds.

  “What’s that?” Beeman said as though he could understand them. “You want to know more about the experiments?” Wide, wet eyes followed the polished steel of the blade as Beeman carefully repositioned the blade’s sharp edge against the side of the blonde’s slender neck. Her face went red, and a squeal of terror and despair trumpeted through her nose. She clamped her eyes shut again, her body shaking violently.

  The brunette screamed loudly, realizing her mouth was no longer taped shut.

  Beeman sheathed his knife and took the can from Antonio. Aiming carefully, he pressed the button twice, sending jets of mist into each of the terrified faces. The girls went still.

  Silence returned to the garage, broken only by the ticking of the engine as it cooled and Beeman’s soft chuckle.

  “A frightened animal with elevated respiration ingests more of the drug.”

  In the confined space of the garage, the odor of the spray made Antonio’s head swim. He brought his arm to his face and breathed through the crook of his bent elbow, using the fabric of his shirt as a makeshift filter.