“Where’s our goddamned parachute?” he shouts again, and yanks hard at her wrist, pulling her down onto himself. As she finally tries to break away, Annie catches another glimpse of his clutching fingers… and sees for the first time that they are horribly burned, the fingernails gone, the outer layer of skin sloughing off the knuckles, baring raw, strawberry-red flesh underneath.
She wants to scream, tells herself she must scream, thinking… still without knowing why… that it might somehow bring her ordeal to an end. But it refuses to come, it is trapped in her throat, and all she can do is produce a small cry of anguish that is torn to shreds by her vocal cords even as she wrings it out of them—
Annie awakened with a jolt, her heart knocking in her chest, the trailing edge of a moan on her mouth. She had broken out in a cold sweat, her T-shirt plastered to her body.
She looked around, taking a series of deep breaths, shaking her head as if to cast off the lacy remnants of her dream.
She was home. In Houston, in her living room, on her sofa. From the TV in the kids’ room she could hear the Teletubbies carrying on with manic effervescence. On the carpet at her feet, her newspaper was still folded to the article she’d been reading when she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep. Its headline read: “AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY.” Above the columns of text was a photo of Orion in its catastrophic final moments.
Annie bent her head and covered her stinging eyes with her palm.
She’d flown back from the Center after having been there since very early that morning and attended meeting after meeting in which the participants — NASA executives, government officials, and representatives of the various shuttle and ISS contractors — had ostensibly been trying to sift through what they knew about the accident and lay out a preliminary framework for an investigation into its causes. Instead, they had spent the majority of the time staring at one another in dazed silence.
Perhaps, Annie thought, it had been a mistake to expect anything more constructive so soon after the explosion. At any rate, she had felt nothing but a sense of leaden futility by the end of the final session, and been grateful for the chance to go home.
Home sweet home, where she could take her mind off what had happened, enjoy some light reading and a refreshing nap before getting started on dinner.
Her hand still clapped over her eyes, she felt a small, bleak smile touch her lips.
An instant later the tears began streaming between her fingers.
The Barrett rifle against his shoulder, his cheek to its stock, Antonio aligned his target in the crosshairs of its high-magnification sight.
Moments after leaving Kuhl’s vehicle, he had scurried up a tree that afforded a direct line of fire with the guard station, and was now half-sitting, half-squatting in the fork of its trunk, his feet braced on two strong branches. The thirty-pound weapon ordinarily required a bipod for support, but here on his treetop perch he’d been able to rest its barrel over his upraised knees.
He inhaled, exhaled, gathering his concentration. A series of dry trigger pulls had helped him find a comfortable body position and make minor adjustments to his aim. He would be shooting across a distance of over nine hundred yards, and could not afford to be even slightly off balance.
There were two guards inside the booth. One stood at a coffeemaker, pouring from its glass pot into a cup. The other sat over some papers at a small metal desk. He would be the second kill. The man on his feet would have greater mobility, and a mobile target always had the best chance of escape, requiring that it be the first to be taken out.
Antonio took another inhalation, held it. The guard at the coffee machine had filled his cup and was putting the pot back on its warming pad. He raised the coffee to his lips, but would never get a chance to drink it. In a practical sense he was already dead. The booth’s bullet-resistant window would be easily penetrated by the tungston-carbide SLAP rounds chambered in Antonio’s weapon, doing the men behind it no good at all.
“Mi mano, su vida,” he whispered, releasing his breath. As always before a kill, he felt very close to God.
He pulled smoothly on the trigger of his weapon, his eye and forefinger welded in seamless action.
His gun bucked. A bullet split the air. The window shattered. The guard spun where he stood and went down, the coffee cup flying from his hand.
Antonio breathed again, took aim again.
Still behind his desk, the second guard barely had the time to turn toward his crumpled partner before another bullet whistled in from the night and caught him in the left temple, tearing through his skull and snapping him up and out of his seat.
The sniper remained in position a short while longer, wanting to be thorough, watchful of any hint of movement in the sentry booth. Nothing stirred in the pale yellow light spilling from its blown-out window. Satisfied he’d gotten two clean kills, he shouldered the rifle, and was about to slip from the tree when a fluttering sound overhead gave him momentary pause.
A glance up through the foliage revealed that he’d been none too hasty in executing his task.
The jump team had arrived and was descending from the darkness.
FOUR
Clearing the perimeter fence by a hundred meters, Manuel dropped his gear bag on a tether and continued his descent into the compound. He was aware of his teammates floating in behind him, aware of the ground rushing up.
Now he pulled his left toggle to turn into the slight westerly wind, trimmed more altitude, waited until he felt the bag land below him with a thump, and hit the quick-release snap to disengage it. An instant later, he drew both toggles evenly down to his waist to flare the chute. It collapsed in on itself, spilling air.
He landed softly on the balls of his feet.
His chin low to his chest, Manuel let himself move forward in a kind of loose-legged trot, remaining upright, checking his momentum as he separated himself from the canopy. The others, meanwhile, had come rustling to the ground on either side of him. Most of them were also on their feet, but one or two had dropped a little harder, tumbling onto their backs and sides in fluid parachute landing falls.
And then they were up and slipping free of their harnesses. They hurried to recover their bags and collect the equipment inside them — grenades, plastic explosive charges, and upgraded FAMAS rifles like those that would be used by the extraction team. Exchanging their jump helmets and goggles for combat helmets with optical display units, they donned dark special-purpose visors, coupled the electronic gunsights on their rifles to the helmet-mounted displays, lowered their monocular eyepieces, and then stealthily moved out at their leader’s command, splitting into three groups of four.
If the information they had obtained was correct, it would only be seconds, at most minutes, before their presence was detected.
Along with other things of vital interest to their employer, that information would be well tested as the night ran its course.