Oscar’s stomach lurched into his throat as the helicopter stalled. The screams of horror and panic around him battled with the din of the engine failure alarms — his worst living nightmare playing out in real time. The drop began gradually for a quarter second and then accelerated like a runaway elevator, freefalling into the embrace of gravity. All Oscar had time to think was “Oh, God — no, no, no…”
The explosion from the chopper plowing into the earth was audible fifteen miles away in Spanish Lookout, and the plume of smoke from the wreckage was visible all the way to the Mexican border. By the time rescue craft mobilized and made it from Belize City, the flames had exhausted themselves, and all that was left was the charred skeleton of the frame.
Chapter 5
Four Years Ago, Chechnya, Russian Federation
Jet steered the maroon Lada Kalina to the roadside and stopped to check her GPS coordinates. She was outside of Grozny, on a minor artery that ran south to Alkahn-Yurt, a quarter mile from the target, and there was no traffic at a little past midnight on a Tuesday. Even so, she didn’t dally, and inched the small vehicle back onto the pavement before pulling onto a side road a hundred yards farther up — a farm access-way, according to her study of the satellite images.
Once out of the city, the surroundings quickly became rural, with large crop fields separating the farmhouses that punctuated the landscape. It was a quiet region where neighbors kept to themselves and didn’t poke their noses into the business of others. Everyone would be asleep by now in the nearby homes, few as they were, as tomorrow would bring another twelve-hour stint in the fields, commencing at daybreak.
She killed the headlights and engine, and exited the hatchback, moving to the rear compartment to secure her backpack and weapons. As was her custom, she had loosened the interior bulb and the brake lights so they wouldn’t alert anyone to her presence — particularly valuable if she had to run dark once the operation was over and she was making her getaway.
The PP-19 Bizon submachine gun she pulled from the duffle in the back was a Russian weapon, as was the compact PSS pistol, capable of delivering six shots in nearly complete silence; one of the true feats of Soviet ingenuity — the Mossad had gotten their hands on three almost a decade before to reverse engineer for their own purposes. One of the pilfered weapons had been sacrificed to Jet for this mission. The PSS used a special cartridge with an internal piston that blocked the escape of the explosive gasses that made noise; it was as close to a silent killing firearm ever developed.
A complement of throwing knives, as well as her main blade, were of Russian paratrooper stock. All of her clothes, weapons and ammunition had been sourced in Moscow, so in the event she was captured or killed, the trail would end in Russia — standard procedure for this kind of assignment. The night vision goggles she slid on were the only non-Russian device — a consumer type readily available anywhere online, so foreign manufacture signified nothing.
Jet slid her arms through the backpack straps and then hoisted the Bizon before taking off at a trot into the brush. She knew all about the motion detectors on the outside of the compound and was carrying countermeasures that would neutralize them. Beyond that, this was a straightforward sanction — the target was verified at the location as of this evening, the security detail had been watched for weeks and its schedule was well understood, and nobody at the site was expecting anything. She had performed dozens like it — rescue operations, assassinations, diversionary missions. The essentials were always the same. Get in and out with a minimum of fuss, achieve the objective, and live to fight another day.
Unlike many of her peers, she didn’t work with a team unless it was absolutely necessary. In this case, she had argued convincingly that she could easily handle the operation on her own. Her control officer had disliked the idea, but ultimately acquiesced. Given her track record, what Jet wanted, she generally got.
She had been operational now for four and a half years, which was forever in her specialized niche of intelligence work.
Intelligence work. That was a nice way of saying government-sponsored murder and mayhem. Be that as it may, she was the very best at her job and had become a whispered legend in the Mossad. Even during her training, after being recruited from the army following her mandatory stint, she had been a standout. One of the instructors had confided in her at the end that she had easily been the most adept student he’d ever trained — a natural, with uncanny talents.
That hadn’t surprised her. She’d discovered while in the military that extensive discipline and a rigorous regimen of physical demand was the perfect antidote for the seething fury that had boiled inside of her since childhood. She’d been an angry and confused six-year-old following the death of her parents in that tragic car accident, but then when her foster father had betrayed her and begun to…
She had tried to channel her rage and hurt by studying martial arts and spending most of her free time at a dojo run by one of her counselors in Tel Aviv, but that hadn’t filled the hole in her soul. Neither had the almost obsessive study of languages, mastering a new one every year. No, the pain and outrage had no outlet until she’d joined the military, and it had translated into a fearlessness and ability to execute that knew no equal. Mossad recruiters had been alerted, and after poring over every aspect of her background, decided she was perfect for the experimental new team they were assembling.
Everyone selected had several things in common. No family. No real friends. No husbands or wives; nobody close. Emotional detachment and fluid sense of morality. And nearly superhuman reflexes and skills with weapons.
Jet never knew how many were approached, or how many went into the program only to falter during the brutal and uncompromising training. She had been trained alone. Though she’d seen a few others coming and going, Jet had been kept in a separate area, segregated except for her three instructors. At one point, one of them had explained that the isolation was for her safety; nobody knew who was on the team except for those who’d made the grade and had to work together, and the man assigned to act as its control — a man known only to the team by the code name Ariel. Jet didn’t even get to meet him until she had been approved in the final weeks before her specialized training ended. She’d been surprised to find that he was relatively young — no more than his mid-thirties — and extremely intense. Brooding would have been one description that would have fitted perfectly.
She snapped back to the present. There was nothing to be gained doing a trip down memory lane. She needed to focus.
Her footfalls crunched on the dry twigs, and she slowed as her GPS indicated she was getting close to the compound. With any luck, the mission would be over within fifteen minutes from the time she deactivated the first motion detector. Maybe less. There were twelve sentries guarding the target, but they worked split shifts, so she only needed to contend with six. The others would be neutralized in their sleeping quarters, using gas. The two small aluminum canisters were wrapped in neoprene sheaths to protect them on approach.
The compound’s lights were visible from several hundred yards, even through the dense vegetation. She’d been following a trail the advance surveillance group had told her ran near the property. She paused in the underbrush to flip her night vision goggles out of her field of vision, and brushed a bead of moisture off her forehead. There were a few other minor loose ends to attend to, but it was almost showtime, and her first piece of business was to render the motion detectors useless.