Countdown to Midnight

Twenty-Nine

Laura Van Horn tweaked her BushCat’s centerline control stick gently to the left, banking into a slow, wide orbit a couple of thousand feet over the low, wooded hills of Central Texas. A stretch of mostly open, mostly level ground appeared through the windshield — grazing land for one of the local cattle ranches. She glanced at Fox. “The training area’s just down there.”

The head of the Quartet Directorate’s American station nodded and raised his binoculars to scan the small valley. Bright white chalk lines, like those used on baseball fields, had been laid down across the close-cropped grass. They created a highly visible, mostly rectangular shape with one rounded side that was roughly eight hundred feet long and a little more than a hundred feet across. More chalk lines had been drawn inside this larger outline, suggesting a maze of piping, catwalks, gangways, bollards, and other structures. He lowered his binoculars and turned to Van Horn. “Is that supposed to be a mockup of the Gulf Venture, as seen from the air?”

“Yep.” She shrugged. “It was the best we could do in the time available.” She grinned at him. “We thought about trying to lease a tanker of our own for practice. But that turned out to be way outside our budget. Plus, sailing around in the Gulf of Mexico with a rented ship that size would be a bit too likely to draw attention from the media and the government that we could do without.”

“Yes, I’d imagine so,” Fox said with a thin smile of his own. He craned his head again to take another look at the chalk-drawn deck plan. He frowned. “So our Mr. Flynn has decided to take his team in by helicopter after all? Despite the tanker’s air defenses?”

Van Horn shook her head. “Nope. Nick’s got something a little different in mind.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Different in what way?”

“You’ll see,” she said cryptically. She spoke into her radio mike. “Dragon, this is Tiger Cat. We’re in position. Standing by.”

Through their headsets, they heard Flynn’s laconic reply. “Understood, Tiger Cat. Dragon Team dropping now.”

Van Horn banked again, bringing the little plane around so that they could see another aircraft — this one a larger, twin-engine turboprop — flying several miles away and several thousand feet higher. Its wings winked in the spring sunlight.

Fox raised his binoculars, seeing tiny black specks spilling out of the distant plane. He waited for parachutes to blossom against the clear blue sky. None did. His frown deepened. Something strange was happening out there. Instead of plunging almost vertically toward the ground, the men who’d just hurled themselves out of the aircraft were slanting downward at an angle — gliding straight toward the tanker mockup at high speed. Perplexed, he focused carefully and managed to catch a brief, close-up glimpse of one of the jumpers. The helmeted man was diving headfirst. His arms and legs were spread apart, with layers of nylon fabric connecting them to create an airfoil.

“They’re wearing wingsuits,” Fox murmured, suddenly realizing what it was that he was seeing.

“Pretty nifty idea, right?” Van Horn said archly.

Starting a couple of decades before, experienced skydiving enthusiasts had begun taking to the air wearing those individual flying suits. Worn in combination with parachutes for the final landing, wingsuits added significant amounts of lift and enabled their users to greatly extend the range and duration of every jump — whether out of airplanes, or off tall buildings, mountains, and cliffs.

One by one, as they arrowed closer to their chalk-outlined target, the jumpers pulled their chutes. Steerable rectangular canopies snapped open, slowing their descents, and they drifted down the last couple of hundred feet. They were clearly aiming for the clear patches of grass and dirt inside the outline — while trying to avoid the white lines that represented pipelines, catwalks, fake shipping containers, and the other obstructions which littered the real oil tanker’s deck. In a real combat jump, anyone who slammed into one of those obstacles would almost certainly be seriously injured or killed. Small clouds of dust and chalk puffed up as each man flared his parachute and came down to a soft landing.

Once all eight jumpers were down, Van Horn brought her BushCat around, descended, and landed in the pasture close beside the tanker mockup. By the time Fox climbed out of the light aircraft, Flynn was already on his way over with his wingsuit and parachute bundled under one arm.

“Welcome to the Dragon Exercise Area,” Flynn greeted him, coming up with a big grin on his lean, dirt-streaked face. “Otherwise known as the Big Dusty to some of my guys.”

Fox stared at the chalk-outlined target area and then shook his head dubiously. The list of things he could imagine going wrong was already depressingly long. He turned back to Flynn. “There’s a pretty big difference between hitting your marks on a stationary, one-dimensional target on dry land, and landing safely on a ship steaming at high speed at sea, isn’t there?”

Flynn nodded calmly. “Yes, sir, there sure is. And between landing in broad daylight and coming in at night, for that matter.” He shrugged. “Which is why we’re going to be running this drill over and over, steadily upping the tempo and difficulty level each time. Once we’ve mastered the basics of flying these wingsuits and steering our landing chutes, I’ll have a contactor come out to the ranch and put up some scaffolding so our mockup’s more 3D.”

“How long do you plan to train?” Fox asked.

“If possible, practically right up to the moment when you give us the actual target,” Flynn told him frankly. “When we do this for real, it’s going to be a HALO drop from high altitude. The farther we are from the Gulf Venture when we jump, the less likely we are to spook the bad guys until we’re right on top of them. It’s our best chance to avoid being blown out of the sky by their antiaircraft guns.”

Fox narrowed his eyes in thought. The younger man was right. Given the defenses their enemies had fitted to that oil tanker, achieving almost total surprise was their only hope of putting an intact assault team aboard. “How far away do you plan to be when you make your drop?”

“The world wingsuit distance record right now is around twenty miles,” Flynn said quietly. “I hope to beat that.” He smiled tightly. “We’ll manage it for sure — and by a considerable margin — if the experimental high-tech wingsuit gear I’ve ordered from Germany gets here in time for us to train on it.” Then he shrugged. “But since I can’t count on that happening, we’re training to go using the equipment we have on hand now.”

Fox nodded slowly, taking in what he’d been told. The opening phases of this plan might not be quite as crazy as he’d first feared. The tanker’s Iranian captain and crew shouldn’t automatically assume that an aircraft crossing their course twenty miles or more ahead was launching an attack on them. And that ought to make them hesitate to unmask their concealed weapons — since doing so risked blowing the Gulf Venture’s cover as a genuine merchant ship. That was especially true since the Dragon team’s transport plane would be flying well outside the effective range of their 35mm guns and surface-to-air missiles. So at least the aircraft’s crew would be safe no matter what happened. Of course, the same thing couldn’t be said for Flynn and his men. If the tanker’s weapons were manned and ready when they jumped, the gun crews would need less than thirty seconds to drop their camouflage and open fire.

Knowing that revealing his misgivings wouldn’t help anyone, Fox did his best to hide his fears. Throughout its long history, the Quartet Directorate’s audacious covert operations had helped guard the United States and its allies against their most dangerous enemies. But there was always a terrible price to be paid — a price in brave men’s and women’s lives. The secret war waged on behalf of the peoples of the free world without their knowledge or gratitude had been costly from its very outset. Sadly, it showed no signs of becoming any less deadly with the passage of time.

Instead, he waved a hand at the tanker mockup and at the group of tough-looking men who were now busy loading their gear aboard the vehicles that would take them back to the local airport for another practice jump. “Has there been any reaction from the locals to all this unusual activity of yours?”

Flynn’s grin grew bigger still. “Some, but not a lot. There aren’t a lot of people in this part of the state in the first place. And the folks who do live here are mostly the get-along, go-along kind. If it’s not obviously illegal, they pretty much reckon it’s none of their business.” He fished a business card out of his breast pocket. “For when we run into any real nosy parkers, I had these printed up. It usually satisfies them.”

Fox took it. Almost unwillingly, his own mouth twitched in a slight smile. The fake business card read: flynn’s flying circus—team aerobatics and stunts. air shows and movie spectaculars our specialty. Then he sighed. If this fun-loving Texas daredevil got himself killed, the world would be a much darker place. Unfortunately, he suspected that was by far the most likely outcome of this hazardous operation.

Later that evening, after the Dragon team had finished the last of its three scheduled practice jumps for that day, Fox briefed Flynn, Van Horn, and the others on the search program the Quartet Directorate had instituted to try to find the converted Iranian oil tanker. They all listened intently. Unless Four could somehow detect and then track the Gulf Venture at sea, all of their training and hard work would be in vain.

“Analysis by our top planners confirmed that relying on aircraft for the initial search would be a complete waste of time and resources,” he told them bluntly. “So instead, we’re using satellites.”

“We’ve got our own fucking satellites?” Hynes blurted out in astonishment. “Seriously?”

Fox stifled a frown. He still wasn’t sure that it had been wise to bring the members of Flynn’s old unit into the Quartet Directorate secret. They were considerably rougher around the edges than Four’s usual recruits. Still, as Gwen Park had pointed out to him — at great length — what other choice did they really have? Killing innocents went against every principle Four held dear. And besides, Hynes and Vucovich, unpolished though they might be, had demonstrated both considerable loyalty to their old commander and a remarkable talent for unconventional operations by tracking him down in the first place. If they lived long enough — doubtful though that seemed at the moment — more training should make them extremely useful agents, especially for missions requiring direct action.

“The satellites aren’t ours,” he explained patiently. “At least not directly.”

Through one of the Quartet Directorate’s front groups — ostensibly a science nonprofit focused on climatological research — they were buying time on the European Pléiades constellation. Its twin high-resolution imaging satellites circled the globe in polar orbits, passing over every point on the Earth’s surface once every twenty-four hours. These satellites were dual purpose, filling both defense and civilian needs, but most of their users were more interested in pictures taken over the world’s land masses. That left an opening for Fox, and he’d seized it with both hands.

Under the contract he’d written, the Pléiades satellites were scanning large swathes of the world’s oceans, beginning with zones near the Persian Gulf — and then steadily moving to the east and west and north and south with each new orbit. Depending on weather constraints and their space vehicles’ other commitments, the constellation’s commercial managers in Toulouse, France, had estimated they should be able to obtain good quality pictures of around 230,000 square miles of ocean per day.

Hynes whistled.

Fox nodded. “Those numbers do sound impressive,” he agreed coolly. “Unfortunately, they still represent only a fraction of the sea area we need surveyed.” He shrugged. “But without access to our own government’s far more capable spy satellites, this is our best option.”

The former Army enlisted man frowned. “So you’re saying this is still just a crapshoot.”

“Not entirely,” Fox corrected. “Our search patterns are carefully calculated to maximize the odds of our spotting the Gulf Venture. For example, we’re focusing most heavily on stretches of the ocean outside the ordinary sea lanes, since we suspect the Iranians and their Russian allies want to avoid even accidental contact with other passing vessels that could report their presence.”

Sitting between Hynes and Van Horn, Flynn nodded his understanding. He leaned forward. “One thing, Br’er Fox?”

“Yes?”

“I get why we’re renting the Pléiades constellation. But aren’t there other imaging civilian satellites that can cover wider areas?

Fox nodded. “There certainly are, Nick. However, the tradeoff there is that they all produce much lower-resolution imagery. We need high-resolution pictures to have any real hope of positively identifying the Gulf Venture from orbit. At lower resolutions and from hundreds of miles up in space, one AFRAMAX-sized oil tanker looks pretty much like another.”

“So what’s our outside time frame for finding this ship?” Flynn asked quietly.

Fox sighed. “Your guess on that is as good as mine, Nick.” He shrugged. “But one thing is all too clear: if we don’t spot the Gulf Venture before it comes within missile range of whatever target Moscow and Tehran have chosen, it will be far too late.”