With a human payload.
Inside the pod, Beck was cushioned in impact foam and a harness that barely allowed her to breathe. The pod performed one duty only. It protected the HALO jumper from the extremes of atmospheric heat. When she hit an altitude of 15,000 feet, the pod would deploy its own parachute, which would jolt her speed down to a reasonable pace. She had had to sit in a special oxygen chamber with Black Six for hours before the drop, on board the SR-71, while they traveled over the Atlantic. Six was now in his own pod, dropping a hundred feet away from Beck. But she couldn’t see him. She couldn’t see anything. The HALOPOD had no windows. Even if it did, it was the middle of the night in the high altitude Arctic sky. It was just as dark outside the pod as it was inside. She had only one thing to look at.
She eyed the digital altimeter on the inside of her black helmet’s faceplate, inches from her eye. The red LED numbers whirred in a countdown. 30,000 feet. Her speed was 753 mph. A new world record, she thought. Although she realized that was only compared to known and recorded feats. That the US Air Force still had commissioned and fully functional SR-71s was news to her, and she had never heard of the HALOPOD either. She wondered how many records had been covertly broken and never reported.
She didn’t mind the drop. It was strange to fall for so long, but she was packed in so tightly that she was comfortable. All she had to do was wait. 20,000 feet.
At 15,000 feet, the HALOPOD deployed its parachute and the unpowered vehicle jolted to what felt like a stop in mid air. Beck felt her stomach attempt to crawl out of her throat, but then her mind was on other things. The pod hissed around her. Then small charges set in a seam around the egg vertically, detonated, shooting the two elongated halves of the pod safely away from Beck’s body, and leaving her free falling again.
Now free to move her limbs, Beck pulled her arms from her sides and spread her legs, tearing open the Velcro that had kept her limbs glued to her sides. Between her armpits and her legs, the parachute fabric of the wingsuit’s wings deployed, giving her the ability to glide in her second descent. The wings scooped the air, and Beck pulled her left arm in a few degrees, adjusting her trajectory. She could see Black Six ahead of her in the distance, spinning in his yaw axis, because of the lack of any vertical stabilizer on his wingsuit.
Amateur, she thought. So much for the sexy secret agent.
As she watched, Black Six, simply pulled his legs and arms together to get out of the spin, and after a second or so, his body repositioned in a straight vertical plunge. He moved his arms and legs out again to scoop the air with his wingsuit, and this time, his movements were perfect.
Huh, Beck thought. Nice recovery.
Beck dipped and dove down a little lower and closer to Black Six, then leveled out again. It wasn’t as dark as she had expected it would be at this time of night. She couldn’t see any auroras, but the sky was a deep blue in places and black in others. The net effect was that visibility was far better than she could have hoped.
The counter in her faceplate kept speeding down and as it reached 5000 feet, she readied herself for the end of her flight. At 4000 feet, she moved her hand toward the pull ring for her parachute. She was supposed to pull at 3000 feet, but when she reached it, she saw that Black Six hadn’t pulled his chute yet. She wanted to fall longer than him. She didn’t know why she felt competitive toward the man she had only met earlier that day, but she did.
2000 feet and he still hadn’t pulled his chute.
At 1000 feet she almost chickened out, but she saw his parachute start to deploy. She gave herself ‘one Mississippi’ and then pulled her cord. Her parachute yanked her descent into a slow fall. The sky was clear, the stars shone brightly and from the harness of her parachute, Anna Beck began examining the snow-covered ground of her landing site. But then she thought she saw something and she blinked to clear her eyes. She stared at the snow below her, squinting to see if she could spot it again. Movement. Lots of movement.
As she came down to within 100 feet of the snow-covered hillside, she heard Black Six’s terrified whisper in her earpiece, breaking the radio silence they were supposed to observe.
“Mother of God, there must be a hundred of them.”
He was right. Tearing through the snow 70 feet below her, in the direct path of her landing, there was a small crowd of about ten dire wolves, swarming in one location, jostling and fighting for a spot at the center and being repeatedly shoved back. The other ninety or so streaked through the snowdrifts and tried to get to the crowd from several directions. When Beck got to 50 feet, she thought the dire wolves were fighting, like in a schoolyard brawl.
At thirty feet, she recognized the combatant at the core of the brawl, punching, kicking, flinging and cussing out one dire wolf after another.
“Damn,” she said. “That’s Queen.”
FIFTY-SIX
Over the Arctic Ocean
4 November, 0100 Hrs (Norway Local Time)
The Persephone raced through the night sky, ripping a sonic boom over the northern coast of Greenland. Deep Blue sat back in his chair at a computer desk and rubbed his eyes. While he had given up being President of the United States, he found it difficult to give up some of the perks. As President he had been spoiled by the office furniture aboard Air Force One. When he had stepped down, he made sure to kit out the Crescent with a luxurious office, complete with all the computing power he would ever need as Deep Blue.
But the Air Force’s Persephone, the similarly designed ship he rode in now, was more utilitarian. It had bunks for sleeping and cargo-net type chairs for sitting in. The desk he sat at now was a small modular one that Aleman had gotten the White security team to carry aboard. His chair was a cheap office chair from Staples with no armrests. Plus, the ship had a smell to it. A smell he would always associate with the military after his days as a Ranger. Sweat, dirt, rubbing alcohol…and something else he couldn’t place. That odd something else was always around in every military space he had ever been in, whether buildings, ground vehicles, ships or planes. Over time, he had come to think it was the smell of impending death.
He leaned back in the feeble chair a little further, and twisted his back to get comfortable. Lewis Aleman sat across the room from him at a similar desk with two laptops and a tablet computer arrayed on the small particleboard desk. Deep Blue had tried to get the man to take some sleep, but he had claimed insomnia. Looking at Aleman now, he could believe it. The man had changed into white BDUs like everyone else, and he had showered and shaved, which Deep Blue hadn’t bothered to do, but he looked exhausted. Aleman looked more alert than anyone else at this point. Only a few of the others aboard were even awake. Matt Carrack remained awake, while his men slept in the bunks. Even King was asleep.
He looked back at Aleman and sighed. “Anything new?”
“Packers are doing okay.”
Deep Blue chuckled. “You’re a Green Bay fan?”
“No, I could care less about football.” Now it was Aleman’s turn to smile. But the smile spoke volumes on how grim the situation was. “But you wanted to know what was new. Most of what I’ve been seeing here indicates that the basic problem I told you about-the world ending soon from being turned into Swiss cheese by the portals-hasn’t changed.”