Dakota stepped to the side and saw the woman from the Washington Post lying on the floor, in a compliant stance. Her head was down, her arms were out, and her legs were crossed behind her. Someone had given her a lesson in how to not get shot by a tactical team.
While the first assaulter kept his gun trained on her, a massive explosion to Dakota’s left knocked him off balance, all the way down to his kneepads.
The room filled with smoke, and when he spun around and looked in the direction of the noise he couldn’t see a thing, even through his panoramic night vision goggles.
All the men in the stack were in the attic now, covering the main part of the room with their rifles, desperate to find a target through the thick smoke.
Another noise came from the smoke. It wasn’t an explosion; more like the sound of an electric engine.
Dakota didn’t want his men running into a trap. “Hold positions! Hold till you can see your way forward!”
The smoke cleared a little, but the NODs weren’t cutting through it. Dakota called, “White light!” into his mic, then he flipped up his goggles and actuated the flashlight on the bottom of his rifle. Quickly the other operators followed suit.
The smoke was still thick, but they could see him now. Twenty-five feet away their target stood still in the middle of the room, his arms wrapped tightly around his body, his legs together.
His eyes on the six men in front of him.
Above him Dakota could see stars — there was a jagged eight-foot-long hole in the roof above Violator’s head.
Dakota shouted, “Contact front!” and he pressed his trigger.
And then, just like that, their target was gone. He fired straight up, into the air and through the hole in the roof.
The six JSOC operators stood there, guns trained on empty space. Dakota had gotten one round off, but he didn’t think he’d hit anything.
The team leader was the first to run forward. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling now, and he saw nothing but the nighttime sky.
Harley stepped up next to him. “There is no way that just happened.”
77
Court soared through the broken roof, his eyes closed and his appendages tight against his body lest he rake them across the jagged edges marking the border of the breach created by the charge he’d affixed to the ceiling soon after his arrival here at Alexandria Eight. Once he felt the cool of the night air on his skin he opened his eyes, and he watched the large CIA safe house fall away below him as he rose, shooting upwards as fast as he would if he were flying in a plane.
He still wasn’t feeling great about his chances — his heart pounded and his stomach cinched tight with terror — but he’d made it out of the range of the JSOC boys, so he knew there was nothing else he could do to affect his chances now.
Court told himself he should just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Instead, however, he fought a wave of nausea as the motion and the nerves played havoc on his insides.
At the Special Activities Division cache in Harvey Point, North Carolina, Court had run across a new piece of equipment that immediately reminded him of something very old.
The Fulton recovery system, more commonly known as the Skyhook, was something of a legendary device in special operations. Invented in the 1950s, the Skyhook was a personnel ground-to-air retrieval system consisting of a large balloon attached to a rope, which connected to a body harness. When the device worked as advertised, the balloon rose to several hundred feet, and an aircraft equipped with a capture device grabbed the rope under the balloon and then heaved the person in the harness up into the sky. Once alongside the aircraft an operator in the cabin could then use a device to reel in and recover the “victim.”
It sounded great in theory, a little too Buck Rogers, perhaps, but for a spy behind the lines with no other options, it was much better than nothing.
But Court had heard of no more than five or six times where a Skyhook recovery had been successfully executed in the field.
The item Court noticed in the experimental locker at the Point was a modernized and miniaturized version of the Skyhook. Named the Buzzhook, instead of a huge balloon and helium tanks, this ground-to-air retrieval device employed a 16-by-16-inch quadcopter that could climb vertically at fifty miles an hour carrying a payload of fifteen pounds.
Behind the quadcopter, three hundred yards of four-millimeter bonded Kevlar rope spun out quickly from a large, spring-loaded spool in Court’s backpack. The rope was black in color and it had been invisible in the dark attic, so thin that even with rail lights from the JSOC assaulters’ firearms they could not see it, especially with the smoke from the breaching charge in the air.
As soon as he’d blown the roof, Court pressed a preset button on the drone and it fired straight up through the hole created by the breaching charge. The Buzzhook pulled its cordage to a height of nine hundred feet in just seconds. Here it stopped suddenly and began hovering, staying perfectly in place with its onboard GPS receiver and its gyroscope.
An infrared light blinked on the drone, and a second infrared light, attached to the cord a hundred feet below the Buzzhook, blinked as well.
Within moments of the drone launching out of the roof of Alexandria Eight, a de Havilland Twin Otter with a painted-over tail number flew to the exact same GPS coordinates, but at an altitude of only 400 feet. The hundreds of people on the ground — the media, first responders, local cops, FBI, and interested CIA officials — all stood and stared. Police helicopters had seen the craft coming in from miles away, but it had claimed to be on its base leg for nearby Washington National Airport, and it only deviated from its flight path forty seconds earlier, so there was no time to begin tracking it before it arrived.
Timing had been everything, of course, and here Court had had to make a few educated guesses. He’d told Zack to plan on arriving directly above Alexandria Eight at twelve thirty a.m., but to plan to have an excuse ready for air traffic control that could speed them up by five minutes, or slow them down by the same amount.
That gave Court a ten-minute window.
The Twin Otter captured the Kevlar cord and pulled Gentry into the sky at twelve thirty-three, yanking him almost straight up by entering a steep climb.
Court looked down at an altimeter on his watch and saw he had ascended four hundred feet. He looked up and behind him, and finally he saw the aircraft, flying black now, all its lights extinguished. He kept his body tucked as tightly as possible, felt the incredible wind and cold and even the thick mist as he was pulled along through a small cloud, and he told himself that this was not nearly as bad as he thought it was going to be. As long as the tiny cord that served as his lifeline held, then he would be fine.
But as he was looking at the dark aircraft above him, he saw something that made his heart stop. The Twin Otter suddenly banked to the left… hard to the left.
Court knew physics well enough to understand what would come next, so he closed his eyes and held on to the harness inside his clothes by wrapping his arms even tighter across his chest.
Two seconds later he felt his harness wrenched hard in the direction of the plane above, then he whipped around at over one hundred miles an hour. He screamed a volley of curse words and he kept his eyes closed, but when he felt the pull direction change again, and he sensed he was now flying forward and not backwards, he gave in and opened them.
The Fox 5 helicopter he had flown in forty-five minutes earlier was now right in front of him, no more than one hundred yards away, its rotor blades churning the air.