The OPSAT screen flashed with an encrypted message from Grim, and Fisher slowed to read it:
No RF jamming of those enemy birds yet. As soon as we begin jamming, they’ll be onto us. I’ve plotted your course to Briggs. Keep heading straight. I’ve told him to shut down his beacon, so if you lose it, just stay on the coordinates of his last signal. Then you shut down yours. Total blackout now.
Fisher raced around a pair of trees, spun, then checked his OPSAT while trying to catch his breath in the much thinner air of the mountains. The beacon was gone, meaning Briggs had to be conscious. However, Fisher was on top of his last signal. He moved around the largest of two pines, then spotted the man’s helmet off to his right. He winced and looked up. “Aw, shit.”
Briggs was dangling nearly ten meters above the forest floor between a pair of thick, snow-covered limbs, his lines caught in the web of smaller branches. He was trying to swing himself back toward the nearest tree, but he was too far out.
Fisher sent Grim a three-word status report: Briggs in tree. Then he holstered his pistol, took a deep breath, and began hauling himself up and across the sticky bark, wrapping his legs around the tree trunk until he reached the nearest branch. After that, he ascended much more quickly, reaching Briggs within a handful of seconds.
He immediately got to work, digging into a pouch on his belt near his spare magazines to produce a twenty-yard length of 550 paracord. He unraveled the cord, broke off a small branch, then tied the rope around the branch so it would serve as a weight or small anchor. He reared back and tossed the branch to Briggs, who caught it on the first try and reeled in some line.
Fisher ascended even higher into the tree, drawing the rope with him. Once he neared the branch on which Briggs’s chute had become tangled, he began drawing in the rope, then wrapped it over another, thicker branch to serve as a winch. Bracing himself, he began hauling Briggs back up toward the limb above.
With both of them gasping and grunting, Briggs finally got his hand wrapped around the branch, and then, with his free hand, he triggered his quick release, breaking free from the chute.
Coaxed by Fisher, he swung his legs up and did an inverted log crawl toward the trunk. Fisher hauled him to safety on the supporting limb, and Briggs took a deep breath. “Thank you, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Fisher nodded. “We need to move.” He glanced at his OPSAT. Grim reported the launch of two Mil Mi-8 transport choppers/gunships from the new Russian military base in Tskhinvali, Georgia, 120 kilometers southwest of the crash site. Their ETA was approximately eight minutes.
They descended the tree, and once on solid ground, Fisher helped Briggs remove and hide his jump gear.
As the sun disappeared behind the ice-slick canopy and their breaths turned heavy on the air, they tugged down their trifocal goggles with high-frequency sonar detection and sprinted for the crash site.
7
AS part of the team’s investigation into Kasperov’s disappearance, Fisher had reviewed a lengthy catalog of the software giant’s personal assets—jets, yachts, vacation properties, and even an automobile collection that rivaled talk show host Jay Leno’s. In regard to planes, Kasperov had a fleet of seven private aircraft that ran the gamut from smaller luxury jets to a giant Airbus A380 fit for an Arab sheik. Two years prior, Brazilian aerospace conglomerate Embraer S.A. had constructed for Kasperov a Legacy 650 they described as an airborne palace and state-of-the-art mobile business suite. The plane had a crew of two with optional flight attendant and total capacity of thirteen passengers plus one in the cockpit jump seat. The 650 was eighty-six feet long, with a wingspan of sixty-eight feet, and was powered by two Rolls-Royce AE 3007/A1P turbofans. Her max speed was 518 mph, with a service ceiling of 41,000 feet.
The price tag? A whopping thirty-one million dollars.
Kasperov probably had great insurance, too, and he’d need it, because as Fisher and Briggs ran parallel to the burning trees cordoning off the wreckage like giant torches, they thought the plane had entirely disintegrated, leaving only a blackened slash mark across the valley. Finally, in the middle of a clearing below more pines littered with debris that resembled metallic confetti, they observed a large portion of the tail section and fuselage, both miraculously intact.
Briggs shot HD video of everything, while Fisher slid his goggles up onto his forehead. The burning trees were doing an exceptional job of lighting the scene, with waves of heat billowing into his face.
He picked his way around the shattered fuselage, navigating between the twisted and charred seats, then he directed a powerful LED penlight into the cabin, whose bulkheads had been blackened. He was searching for charred skeletons, imagining one appearing in his light, but found only mangled metal and melted plastic.
With the stench of all that kerosene-based Jet A fuel and a dozen other chemicals wafting in the air and beginning to get to him, he hustled back outside and jogged forward, following the ragged edge of a huge furrow until he found a small portion of the cockpit lying inverted and jammed between two trees.
The seats were still attached. Seat belts thrown off. No pilots. Had they bailed out? Fisher examined the seat belts again: no signs of tearing, stretching, or strain.
“Hey, Sam? Over here!” cried Briggs.
Fisher raced away from the cockpit, back along the furrow toward Briggs, who was holding a backpack with a large logo embroidered on the outside pocket: four red squares forming a diamond pattern with gray shadow boxes behind them. Beneath the image were the letters “CSCS.” Briggs proffered the bag, and Fisher zipped it open and rifled through textbooks and notebooks.
“The daughter went to school in Zurich,” whispered Fisher. “We got her bag, but where’d she go?”
“Yeah, and if they wanted to fake their deaths, then where are the bodies?” asked Briggs.
Grim, who’d been analyzing the video Briggs had sent, chimed in over the radio. “Break radio silence now, guys. I’ve been monitoring the Russian army’s transmissions, and they’re onto us. Picked you up with infrared before Charlie could start the jam and GPS spoofing. Those Mi-8s are three minutes out now.”
“Sam, it’s Charlie. Like I mentioned, if you can deploy the drone, I’ll remote operate it from here. I’ll be another set of eyes and ears.”
“He’s got soldier envy,” said Briggs.
“What he’s got is our backs,” Fisher corrected. “Charlie, roger that. Deploying the drone.”
From a custom-designed holster sitting low on his right hip, Fisher slipped free another of Charlie’s prototypes: a micro tri-rotor drone even smaller than the first one they’d fielded during the Blacklist mission. Fisher simply tossed the UAV into the air like a softball. The drone’s rotors automatically unfolded and purred to life. After gaining some altitude, the tiny bird boomeranged back toward Fisher, now controlling it from his OPSAT. He plucked two CS smoke grenades from his utility belt pouches and attached them to the drone’s undercarriage via custom release clips that served to pull their pins so the canisters could be deployed down on the enemy. The drone was also equipped with a self-destruct system and served as a remote sonar beacon to watch enemy movements. The larger model could be fitted with a micro 9mm semiautomatic gun on a pivoting mount, but Fisher had chosen the smaller model since the plan here was to go in “ghost,” evade detection, and not engage the enemy. The CS gas would both screen them and give the Russians a tearful moment of pause as it wreaked havoc with their respiratory systems.
“Okay, Charlie, the drone’s all yours.”
“Sweet. I bet that S&R team will fast rope into the crash site. The best time for you guys to extract would be while they’re infiltrating.”