“Please tell me we know more than that.”
Grimsdottir tapped some more keys. Another satellite image appeared. “Welcome to the harbor at Freeport City, Bahamas. Check the center-right of screen. Behold our mystery ship: the oceangoing yacht Duroc. She’s been anchored there since yesterday. I’m working on the registration.”
Fisher stared at the yacht for a few seconds, then turned to Lambert. “When do I leave?”
THIRDEchelon maintained a private airstrip outside Hanover, eight miles northeast of NSA headquarters. It was just past one in the morning when Fisher pulled his car onto to the tarmac beside a Boeing V-22 Osprey.
The Osprey was Third Echelon’s workhorse, used for insertion and extraction missions. Billed as a half-helicopter, half-turboprop aircraft, the Osprey had twin engines, each one mounted on a rotatable nacelle, combining the maneuverability and vertical takeoff capability of a helicopter and the high speed and altitude limits of a standard airplane.
The Osprey’s rotors were already spinning at idle. Through the lighted cockpit window Fisher could see the pilot, Bird, and his copilot, Sandy, going through the preflight. Bird was a typical Southern boy, with an awshucks drawl and a carefree personality to match. Sandy, on the other hand, was all business, one of the first women to break into the typically male-dominated special operations community.
Fisher gathered his duffel bag from the trunk and walked to the rear ramp. He was surprised to see Redding standing at the bottom.
“Didn’t know I was going to have company,” Fisher said.
“I wasn’t getting anywhere with our prisoner, so I thought I’d come keep you out of trouble.”
“Will, getting into trouble is what I do for a living.”
“How nice for you. I’ve got some new gear for you. Come on, we’ve got some air to cover.”
ONCEthey were airborne and heading south, Redding pulled a black duffel bag from the overhead bin and dropped it on the floor between their seats. Fisher’s standard equipment load-out was maintained in several places, the Osprey one of them. Fisher assumed that whatever was in this duffel was brand-new.
Redding unzipped it and pulled out a familiar item: Fisher’s tactical suit, a one-piece black coverall fitted with the various pouches, pockets, and harness attachments needed to carry all his equipment. Fisher could see immediately this tac-suit was different.
“First and most important,” Redding said, “you’re familiar with Dragon Skin?”
Fisher was. Originally developed by Pinnacle Armor, Dragon Skin was the world’s first “move when you move” body armor. Lightweight and flexible, Dragon Skin could stop bullets as heavy as an AK-47’s 7.62mm. For years DARPA had been working with Dragon Skin-like composites for special operators, but hadn’t been able to decrease the weight enough to make it feasible.
“DARPA’s figured it out,” Fisher said.
Redding nodded. “Meet the Mark V Tactical Operations Suit, code-named RhinoPlate. Weight, four pounds unloaded; thickness, eight millimeters—about a quarter inch. Outer shell is Kevlar; core material RhinoPlate; inner layer is seventh-generation Gore-tex.”
“Stats?”
“Good against shrapnel at twelve feet; rifle rounds at fifteen; pistol and shotgun at eight feet. The Gore-Tex is tested to maintain core body temperatures down to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit with the hood up, and as high as one hundred ten. You could go from Alaska to the Sahara and stay relatively comfortable.”
“The color’s different.”
“Good eye. New camouflage. The outer layer of the Kevlar is treated with a polymer fiber similar to the coating on stealth aircraft: matte-black, slightly rough to the touch for maximum light absorption. I won’t bore you with the physics, but the micro-roughened exterior partially defuses light. Basically, about thirty percent of whatever photons strike the surface gets trapped—if for only a split second—but enough to diffuse them. Bottom line: You stand still in a shadow, you’re virtually part of the shadow.”
“And the pouches and harness points? Everything’s moved. It looks . . . lumpy.”
“Disruptive patterning. We’ve resized and rearranged them to break up your form.”
Mother Nature abhors straight lines. In low-light conditions the human eye tends to seek out movement, color difference, and geometric form. Of the three, movement was the easiest to address: stand still. Color difference was also easy: Black gives the eye little to draw from the background. Form, however, was problematic. The human body is a unique collection of angles and lines easily discernible to the human eye. By rearranging the pouches to various spots on the suit, the familiar outline of the body becomes fuzzy.
Fisher took the suit from Redding and examined it. He nodded. “I like it. One question.”
“What?”
“Where do I put my car keys?”
“ OKAY,one more item,” Redding said. “An add-on to the SC-20. Again, I’ll spare you the technical stuff. We’ve nicknamed it Cottonball.” He handed Fisher two items: what looked like a standard shotgun shell, and a spiked soft rubber ball roughly the size of marble. “The basic firing mechanism is the same as the sticky shocker and ring airfoil, but with a big difference. Once it’s out of the barrel, the sabot breakes away, leaving only the Cottonball. When it strikes a hard object, an inner pod of aerosol tranquilizer is released. The cloud radius is three feet. Anyone inside that will be unconscious in three or four seconds.”
“Impressive. Duration?”
“For a hundred-eighty-pound man, a waist-up strike will give you about twenty minutes.”
“Accuracy?”
“Plus or minus six inches over fifty feet.”
Bird’s voice came over the intercom: “Hey, boys, incoming transmission for you.”
Fisher tapped his subdermal. “Go ahead,” Fisher said.
Lambert’s voice: “Your target’s gone mobile, Fisher. The Durocjust lifted anchor; she’s steaming northeast out of Freeport City harbor.”
“Destination?”
“Working on it, but we’ve confirmed she took on provisions the day before, including fuel.”
“Probably not a day trip, then. So we either wait for her to put in somewhere, or intercept her under way.”
On headphones, Redding said, “Uh, Colonel, we’ve got a full load-out onboard. I was thinking . . .”
“Skipjack?”
“Skipjack.”
Fisher groaned. “Ah, man, I hate the Skipjack.”
11
“ SEVENminutes to target,” Fisher heard Bird say in his subdermal. “Descending to five thousand.”
“Roger. Give me the ramp, Bird.”
“Ramp descending.”
With a mechanical groan, a gap appeared along the curved upper lip of the ramp, revealing a slice of dark night sky. Fisher felt a slight vacuum sensation as the pressure equalized. After a few seconds, the ramp was down level with the deck. Through the opening Fisher could see nothing but a carpet of black water and the distant twinkling lights of the Bahamian mainland.
“Ramp down and locked,” Bird called.
At the bulkhead control panel, Redding checked the gauges and nodded confirmation.
“Surface conditions?” Fisher asked.
“Sea state one, low chop. Winds five to seven knots from the northeast.”
“Give me a two-minute warning.”
“Will do.”
Redding’s voice came over his earpiece: “So, tell me again, Sam: Why do you hate this thing?”
The “thing” in question was a covert insertion vehicle known as a Skipjack. Essentially a one-man IKS ( Inflatable Kayak, Small) equipped with a silent electric motor, the Skipjack was enclosed in a bullet-shaped shell of reinforced fiberglass designed to make the IKS aerodynamic, allowing it to be launched from aircraft and skip along the surface at sixty knots before the shell peeled away from the IKS and sank to the bottom.