Ghost Ship

FORTY-EIGHT

Had they overheard Lt. Brooks’s candid assessment of their mental health, Kurt and Joe might have agreed with him. Considering the odds alone, they were at least “half crazy.”

Fortunately, the military had brought along a few items that would even the odds a bit.

Kurt and Joe were changing into combat gear that was far more exotic than anything Kurt had ever heard of. The clothing looked more like a two-piece wet suit than standard fatigues. It fit snugly and had some compression to it, bulging only where armored Kevlar pads covered the chest, thighs, and forearms.

“Feel like I’m suiting up for some futuristic sport,” Joe said as he pulled the garment tight.

Kurt laughed as he pulled his own suit on and ran his hands over the outer layer. “Odd texture,” he said. “It feels like sandpaper.”

An Air Force staff sergeant named Connors explained the clothing. “These are what we call infiltration suits,” he said. “The guys call them Chameleon Camo, because of the way they work. There are twenty-nine thousand microsensors sewn into the exterior. They detect ambient light in all directions and change the color of the suit to match what is behind and around you. Try them out.”

Kurt found a small switch and clicked it to the on position. Then went over and stood by the wall of the aircraft. The suit changed almost instantly from a dark navy blue to battleship gray. Where his right leg crossed in front of a black seat, the suit turned black. And where a yellow cable crossed behind him, a matching yellow strip crossed from his shoulder.

He wasn’t exactly invisible, but it looked like he’d been painted over to match the wall. Only his face and hands were obvious and they would be covered by gloves and a hood once he was on-site.

“That’s incredible,” Joe muttered.

“If you think they work well inside a brightly lit aircraft,” the sergeant said, “wait till you get on the ground. If you two aren’t careful, you’ll lose track of each other from ten feet away.”

“What about infrared?” Kurt said.

“The suit has a cooling unit,” Connors said. “It will counteract your body heat for about thirty minutes once you switch it on. After that, the exterior of the suit will start to warm up and you’ll lose both your thermal protection and your chameleonlike powers. From that point on you’re just wearing expensive body armor. And I mean real expensive. Each of these suits costs more than you guys make in a year.”

Kurt switched his suit off and watched it return to a dark blue color in the time it takes a lightbulb to dim. From there the sergeant led them over to an equipment table that had been folded down from the wall of the cavernous aircraft.

“You’ll breathe through these,” he said, picking up two devices that looked much like divers’ regulators.

“What’s wrong with the air on the ground?” Joe asked.

“We can’t have your breath giving you away.”

Kurt chuckled. “I told you go easy on the onions.”

“What can I say?” Joe replied. “I like a little flavor.”

“It’s not the odor,” Connors explained, “it’s the heat. Breathing out vents a lot of hot air into the world, easy to spot on a thermal scope. No sense covering the rest of you in a cool suit if you’re going to walk around with a plume of ninety-eightpoint-six-degree vapor coming from your nose or mouth.”

He pointed to a lever on the front of the regulators. “Twist this when you’re ready to go dark. From then on the regulator will mix cold air with every outgoing breath, effectively cooling it to the ambient air temperature and neutralizing the danger.”

“How long will it last?”

“As long as your compressed air holds out. Depends on your level of exertion. The tank is small so you’re looking at fifteen, maybe twenty minutes tops. Make sure you’re through the outer layer of security by then.”

Both Kurt and Joe nodded.

Next came the weapons and guidance equipment. First off, the sergeant strapped a gauntlet to Kurt’s arm. It had a curved, low-light screen on it. “Standard GPS, moving map display,” he said. “It will illuminate with less than one candlepower. You’ll be able to read it with your night vision goggles on, but no one else will. Remember, this is military GPS, so it’s good to within three feet.”

From there they moved to a rifle rack.

Connors handed them matching weapons. Once again they were like nothing Kurt had ever fired. Considering how much he knew about guns, that was surprising.

“Are these phasers?” Joe asked. “I’ve always wanted one.”

Connors chuckled. “Electromagnetic railguns,” he said. “Completely silent. Accurate up to a thousand yards. They fire ferrous projectiles — in other words, the bullets are made of iron, not lead, so they’re more lethal in terms of penetrating anything they encounter. Also, since they don’t require gunpowder, your standard-sized magazine carries fifty projectiles. You have a second magazine in your packs.”

Kurt held the weapon up, testing the weight and feel. It had a long barrel and was definitely nose-heavy.

“How does it work?” Joe asked.

“Superconducting magnets along the barrel and a high- potency battery pack. Pull the trigger and they accelerate the projectiles to a thousand feet per second in the blink of an eye.”

Joe nodded approvingly.

“Why are there two triggers?” Kurt asked.

“Since they are already equipped with a substantial power source, someone got the great idea to add a long-range Taser to the bottom rail. The lower trigger fires it. You can hit someone accurately up to fifty feet or simply hold the tip of the barrel against them and give a half pull to zap them manually.”

“So we don’t have to kill everything we see,” Joe mentioned.

The sergeant nodded.

A red light went on at the far end of the aircraft and they could feel the plane begin a rather steep descent.

“We’re approaching the drop zone,” the sergeant said. “Any questions?”

Joe raised a hand. “You said ‘drop zone,’ but we don’t seem to have parachutes.”

“You won’t need them,” Connors said. “You’ll be going out in the Hummer.”

“Does it fly?”

“Nope. But it can be put on a pallet and tossed out the back from an altitude of no more than twenty feet.”

Joe turned to Kurt. “You said we’d be using parachutes.”

“LAPES,” Kurt said. “Low altitude parachute extraction system. It’s all right there in the acronym.”

Joe shrugged, secured his weapon, and made his way toward the Humvee. “Why not? I’m open to new things, different experiences, novel ways of risking my neck in the name of science, why not try driving an SUV off an airplane moving at a hundred fifty knots? Somebody’s got to do it.”

Both Kurt and the sergeant laughed.

“Good luck,” Connors said.

Kurt nodded. “You want us to bring you anything back? T-shirt? Postcard? Puka shell necklace?”

The sergeant grinned. “I prefer a shot glass that says ‘We came, we saw, we conquered.’ ”

Kurt returned the smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Thirty minutes later, Kurt and Joe sat belted into a Humvee that was secured to a sturdy wooden pallet and a harness that would deploy two large drogue chutes. Joe was harnessed in at the wheel, though he wouldn’t actually do any driving during the insertion, as the danger of the wheels turning sideways and getting ripped off was far too great. Instead, the Humvee would use the pallet beneath it as a sled while the parachutes trailing out behind them would both slow the vehicle down and keep them from nosing over.

Kurt made one last check of his equipment. Out of an abundance of caution and a certain sense of nostalgia, he had added an additional weapon to his arsenal. Hidden in his pack was the Colt revolver that Mohammed El Din had given him. He doubted he’d need it. But if the recent past had taught them anything, it was that modern technology was vulnerable to tampering or failing at precisely the wrong moment. That being the case, having a backup weapon from a bygone era didn’t sound all that bad. He kept it zipped up in a front pocket that ran diagonally across the vest.

For less logical reasons he’d brought the pictures of Calista’s family and the lifeboat they attempted to escape in. After searching for the truth so painfully himself, some part of him thought she deserved to know hers.

The light on the wall turned yellow and Sergeant Connors pressed a switch that opened the ramp at the tail end of the C-17.

They were descending through two thousand feet into utter darkness. The sea was below them for a moment and then sand as they flew over the beach.

As they flew lower and slower, the howl of the airstream whipping past the open door took on a different tone. With full flaps and its gear down, the C-17 could move incredibly slowly for such a huge machine. But the wake turbulence caused by flying at a high angle of attack in such a “dirty” condition created a buffeting and whining sound that seemed to trail behind the plane as if banshees were chasing it.

On the map, the drop zone was labeled Antsalova Airport. Joe seemed concerned about that. “You think the people at this airport are going to be surprised when we drop out of the sky and drive off without stopping at customs?”

“It’s not much of an airport,” Kurt said, “more of a dirt strip with a grass hut at the far end. We’re only coming here because we need a flat surface to slide on. But there are no planes. No rental-car desks. No white courtesy telephone.”

“No Admirals Club?” Joe said, looking perturbed. Kurt shook his head. “Sorry, buddy.”

Joe sighed. “I really have to talk to my travel agent. This trip is getting worse all the time.”

As Kurt and Joe waited for the light to go green, the pilots up front were easing the huge aircraft down over the trees. A crosswind coming down off the slope of the island was making it difficult and they were actually flying sideways, a tactic pilots call crabbing. The problem was that they couldn’t drop the Humvee in that alignment or it would land sideways and flip, killing the occupants instantly.

The copilot was on the instruments while the pilot flew with night vision goggles on.

“Ninety feet AGL,” the copilot said.

“Can’t get any lower until the trees clear,” the pilot replied.

“We should be over the site in ten… nine… eight…”

The trees finally dropped away from under them and the pilot saw the dirt strip stretching out before him in a long thin line. He corrected to the left and brought the C-17 almost to the surface, stomping on the rudder to straighten the huge bird out.

The C-17 was now thirty feet off the dirt strip, screaming at full power and headed for the trees five thousand feet ahead.

In a chair behind them the loadmaster hit a switch, changing the jump light in the rear of the aircraft from yellow to green. “Release the payload,” he said into the intercom.

For what seemed like an interminable length of time but was, in fact, only a few seconds, nothing happened except the trees ahead looming larger. Then the pilot felt the plane rise as the five-thousand-pound payload was pulled out the back.

At almost the same instant, Sgt. Connors’s voice came over the intercom. “They’re away. Payload clear. I repeat, payload clear.”

In a synchronized move, the pilot jammed the throttles to full as the copilot retracted the gear to reduce the plane’s drag coefficient.

“Positive rate,” the copilot called out, seeing the altimeter begin to move.

The pilot heard but did not reply. The dirt strip was only a mile long. The trees at the far end were no more than a few hundred yards away. It was a very tight window.

“Climb, baby, climb,” he whispered to the plane.

With its engines screaming and its nose pointed skyward, the gargantuan aircraft clawed for altitude. It crossed the end of the dirt strip and pulled just clear of the trees, close enough that the mechanics who inspected her later would find streaks of green chlorophyll all across the underside of the fuselage.

Clear of the danger, the pilot leveled off, picked up airspeed, and then turned to the southwest. In short order, they were out over the Mozambique Channel. Only now did the pilot consider the fate of the men they’d just dropped, wondering if they would live out the night.

For their part, Kurt and Joe had wondered if they would survive the drop itself. It felt as if the plane was maneuvering desperately the last thirty seconds or so. As the light went green, Connors had pressed a red deploy button and shouted “Go,” or something along those lines.

Neither Kurt nor Joe truly heard him as the sound of the drogue chutes deploying and the sudden whiplash of being pulled backward out of the aircraft snapped their heads forward and commanded all their attention.

The Humvee was yanked out of the aircraft and in free fall for all of two seconds. Kurt distinctly remembered the sight of the aircraft pulling up and banking to the right as the vehicle skidded across the dirt on the pallet like a toboggan out of control on an icy slope. The first sensation was like skipping like a stone on a lake. And then they decelerated as the pallet maintained contact with the packed dirt of the runway. The last forty or fifty feet seemed smoother. And then suddenly they lurched to a stop.

Up ahead the C-17 just barely cleared the trees, and Kurt was certain he saw brief fires in the treetops where the heat of the engines singed them.

At that moment just being alive was a thrill. Kurt looked over at Joe and saw him grinning from ear to ear. “Okay, I’d do that again,” he said giddily. “I’d even pay for another ride.”

Kurt had to agree, but duty called. He opened the door and released the lock that connected them to the parachute and another lock that held them to the pallet. Joe performed the same task on the driver’s side and then climbed back inside, turned the key, and brought the Humvee’s 6.2-liter fuel-injected diesel to life.

In a moment they were speeding across the last hundred yards of the runway and onto a dirt road that led them south.

“Hope you’ve got the map ready,” Joe said, “ ’cause I’m not from around here.”

“Just stay on this road,” Kurt said. “We’ve got seven miles to go.”