"There may be more than the three we killed. It's hard to tell," she said. "They usually work in three-man teams, but two together, so there would be six together."
"Spetsnaz?" said Stoner.
"I don't know the name, just that they're Russian."
"OK."
"If there is another team tracking us, they will be vicious. Where's your car?"
"On the other side of the border."
"That far? You walked?"
"I didn't want to get stopped." "You couldn't bribe the guards?"
"It didn't seem like a good idea at the time. Especially if I was coming back with you." She frowned at him.
"You wanted to talk. It's not safe to do it here." "You think I'm going to let you turn me into the military?"
"I'm not going to turn you into the military." She was holding her rifle on him.
Stoner kept talking. "If I was going to do something stupid like that, I wouldn't have come back to the house for you," he said. "Your message said that you had mutually beneficial information, and that we could work out a deal. That's why I came."
"With two soldiers."
"I needed guides over the border. I don't speak the language. I left them here — if I was going to ambush you, I would have."
"I don't know."
"Your people killed two Americans," added Stoner. "Maybe you killed them yourself."
"We haven't killed any Americans. Not even spies. It is the Russians. They have taken over the movement."
Stoner stared at the barrel of the AK-47. The moonlight turned the rifle's black metal silver, as if it were a ghost's gun, as if he were imagining everything happening.
"You didn't patch me up to shoot me now," he said.
"How do you know?"
"You've already made your decision to help," Stoner told her. "They're after you. It's all you can do." "I can do many things." "You have to trust me." "I trust no one."
Stoner nodded. "But you take chances." "Like you?" "Like me."
She lowered her weapon. "I will go," she told him. "But I will talk only to you, not the army, or to the government. They are all corrupt."
Stoner rose slowly. "What about them?"
She shook her head.
"You want to just leave them on the ground?" "Of course." "Even your man?"
"Very possibly he was the one who betrayed me."
All that remained was to test the MESSKIT the way it was meant to be used — from an airplane.
A C-130 configured for airborne training and recertifica-tion was used as the test plane. Danny joked that they ought to requisition an office chair with casters and use it to launch Zen into the air: They'd push him off the plane's ramp and see what happened.
Zen didn't think the joke was particularly funny, but the actual jump was nearly that informaclass="underline" He put one arm around Danny and the other around Boston, and the next thing he knew, he was flying through the air, propelled with the others as they leaped off the ramp.
Within seconds he was free. It didn't feel as if he was fall ing, exactly, nor with the MESSKIT not yet deployed could he say that he was flying. He was skydiving, something he'd never really done, even before he lost the use of his legs. His head seemed to be moving through a wind tunnel, with his arms and the rest of his body playing catch-up.
His heart was bringing up the rear, pumping furiously to keep pace.
A small light blinked at the left-hand side of his helmet's visor. Activated by the abrupt change in altitude, the MESSKIT's system monitor was sensing the external conditions. Zen had ten seconds to take control either by voice or manually, or the system would assume that its pilot had been knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection and would then automatically fly him to the ground.
"Zen zero one, MESSKIT override to manual," he said.
The light stopped blinking. In its place, a ghosted grid appeared in front of his eyes. Numbers floated at the left, a compass and GPS coordinate points appeared on the right.
He was at 21,135 feet, and falling.
"Deploy wing kit at two-zero angels," Zen said.
The computer had to calculate whether this was practical before answering. It was another safety measure to prevent the MESSKIT from opening in unsafe conditions. Zen was also wearing a reserve parachute with an automated activation device set to open if his rate of fall exceeded eighty-three feet per second. deployment in 17.39 seconds flashed on the screen.
Zen pushed forward, doing his best to get into the traditional frog posture used by a skydiver. He spread his arms, as if trying to fly.
Unlike a parachute, the MESSKIT's wing deployment did not jerk him up by the shoulders or torso. Instead of a tug, he felt as if the wind had suddenly filled in below him, holding him up. He reached his hands up, the handlelike holders springing open below his wrists.
And now he was a bird — a very, very high flying one, but a bird nonetheless. He could steer by shifting his weight, or by pushing hard against the tabs at the ends of each handle.
At first, he didn't think either method did very much. Then he realized that the compass in his visor was moving madly. He eased up, leveling into straight flight.
The view was spectacular, many times more impressive than anything he'd seen from the cockpit of an F-15, let alone the video the Flighthawks fed him. All of Dreamland spread before him; beyond it, all of Nevada, all the way to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Las Vegas was to his left; to his right… well, from this vantage point, it looked like Canada. The sun hung low over the desert, casting a pinkish light against the mountains, a beautiful shade that any painter would trade his soul to recreate.
The normal rate of fall in a modern parachute was in the vicinity of eighteen feet per second. But because it was more glider than parachute, the MESSKIT could descend very slowly — he was currently gliding downward at a rate of just over nine feet per second. Of course, that meant trading descent for linear progress, as Annie had put it — or flying. He soon found that by shifting his weight forward slightly, the pressure from his arms directed the MESSKIT's airfoil to slow his descent even further.
"Hey, Zen, you're headed toward the end of the range," said Danny over the radio. Both he and Boston were using traditional parachute rigs. They'd waited to deploy them until after Zen's wings had expanded and it was clear he was under control. Now they were falling off to his right, well below him.
"I forgot you guys were here," said Zen.
"Don't forget to come down," said Danny. "And somewhere in Nevada, all right? I have some things to do tonight, and I don't want to fish you out of the Pacific."
"Oh, I'll come down," said Zen, starting a turn to stay inside the test area. "I know one thing."
"What's that?"
"I'm going again. And again after that. I can't wait to see a full sunset from up here."
Among the items Stoner had stockpiled in the trunk of his rented Nexia was a medical kit. He pulled out a bottle of hydrocodone and chased five pills with his bottled water. Then, to counteract the effects of the synthetic codeine — the dose was two and half times a full-strength prescription — he took two capsules of Adderall, an amphetamine.
He pulled on a spare shirt and jacket, holding his breath against the pain. It was going to take a while for the codeine to kick in. Even then, all it would do was take the edge off.
"Can you drive?" he asked Sorina Viorica. "I can if I have to, but probably we'd be better if you did."
"I can drive," she said.
"We have to go south. To Bucharest."
She frowned. "I'm not going to your embassy."
"I wasn't going to take you there. I have an apartment. You'll be safe. The GPS unit—"