What they didn’t want was Roland to land on someone’s roof.
As jumpmaster, Mac knelt down and grabbed the hydraulic arm on the right side of the open ramp. He had a main parachute on his back but no reserve. They were jumping so low that if the main didn’t deploy, there wasn’t time for a reserve. He peered forward through his night vision goggles. He spotted the blinking infrared strobe ahead and to the right, around a bend in the river.
They were on target.
Mac stood and secured his night vision goggles in a waterproof case. He stared up into the tail, at the glowing red light. The moment it turned green he shouted, “Follow me” and stepped off the ramp.
The C-130 was slewing, following the curve in the Tennessee River around Keller Bend on the north side of the river. Eagle and Kirk followed Mac as quickly as they could move, falling off the ramp. Their static lines played out, pulling the deployment bags on their chutes out, and then the chutes themselves snapped open, all within five seconds.
Which was fortunate, because they had another eight seconds before hitting the water even with open chutes.
On the C-130, Roland shoved the bundles, sending them tumbling. He staggered and almost fell as the C-130 abruptly angled to the right as the pilots turned to follow the river around Jackson Bend on the south side of the river. One of the bundles, filled with weapons, got caught up under the hydraulic arm, and Roland was damned if he was going without his toys.
“Go! Go!” the crew chief was shouting, unusually excited for some reason.
Roland grabbed the bundle, pulled it loose, and tossed it out.
Then he was tossed out of the airplane himself as the pilots abruptly pulled back on their yokes, angling the nose of the plane almost straight up.
Roland found out the reason five seconds later as his chute finished deploying and he checked canopy, as per Protocol, and then looked down to get oriented and saw the high power lines directly below him. Lines that the aircraft had just barely cleared. He grabbed toggles and tried to turn, but it was too late.
He expertly passed between two high-tension lines and then his chute got caught in them. Roland came to an abrupt halt, dangling eighty feet above the river with high voltage racing across the lines above his head.
The only thing keeping him from being fried was that he hadn’t completed the circuit with either the river or the ground.
That was about the only good news for him.
For the others, they had softer landings than a normal land jump, which was the good part of a water jump.
The bad part of a water jump was the water. Mac, Kirk, and Eagle splashed down, went under, then bobbed to the surface as their chutes came down on top of them, turning the dark night almost completely black.
They had a couple of minutes before the chutes became waterlogged and sank — with them inside. So each one did as they’d been trained. Reached up, found a line, and followed it out to the edge of the chute and clear air. Then they unbuckled and pushed the parachute away, slipped on the fins tied off to their sides, and began, well, finning.
The F-22B Raptor touched down with a scorch of black rubber, expensive rubber, since the government bought “special tires” for the “special” plane, and given the price, they were probably leaving at least a few Gs worth of rubber, Nada estimated, on the Knoxville Airport tarmac. Nada was relieved the pilot actually came to a halt next to the Blackhawk helicopter. He’d been envisioning having to do a tuck and roll, jumping from a moving plane, as fast as they’d been flying across the country.
The blue bulb was still in his breast pocket.
Nada managed to climb out of the cockpit, have the blessed relief of the ground beneath his feet for fifteen seconds, and then he was on board the Blackhawk, opening up a kit bag full of the good stuff and trading in his civvies for battle gear as the helicopter took off.
Nothing but good times ahead.
He realized he was looking forward to seeing Scout as he switched the bulb from his civilian shirt into one of the many pouches on his MOLLE vest. It meant he was carrying two less thirty-round magazines but he was beginning to realize he had to live life on the edge in order to experience it more fully.
As if he hadn’t been doing so for decades.
Just differently.
Burns had been driving along the river on the north side, getting as close to it as the roads allowed.
He was searching.
He was currently pulled over on the side of Tedford Road, underneath a set of high power lines. The road was just short of ending at Tooles Bend Road, which went under I-140, a spur of Interstate 40 that connected it with Maryville to the south. It was all quite confusing, but GPS helped a lot.
He turned off the engine and rolled the windows down. He leaned his head out and peered up at the power lines. They were a long way up.
But doable.
Then he heard an airplane engine, the roar familiar: C-130.
He nodded. Of course they were here. He had expected the Nightstalkers to be coming. Burns cocked his head to the side as he examined that thought as much he seemed capable of examining anything.
Had he?
Or had he been told they’d come?
He wasn’t quite certain of anything, except the mission that had been imprinted on him. That he had to do. There was no choice.
The sound of the 130 faded into the distance and Burns considered the power lines because he needed those to deal with the Nightstalkers.
They’d do, but something was nagging at him, touching on the edge of his consciousness. Something was ahead. Just past the underpass. Something that was drawing him with more subtle urgency than the electricity overhead. More than the mission imprinted on him. He started the car and drove left onto Tooles Bend and through the underpass. The road was narrow and winding and took a sharp left up ahead, but Burns slammed on the brakes as he sensed the strange feeling off to the side.
Not sound. Not sight.
The echoes of the past. Of emotion. Of anguish.
Burns looked to the right. A dirt road ran off into the darkness through the trees. A pair of chain-link gates were padlocked together and a half-dozen NO TRESPASSING signs were hung on the gate and trees.
As if.
Burns turned the wheel and hit the gas. The car burst through the gates, leaving them hanging forlornly on their hinges. He drove along the dirt road.
He didn’t need night vision goggles.
Burns tried to figure out what was drawing him. But as he went down the road, it got more powerful. He came out of the trees. An open field was to the left, sloping down to the Tennessee River. Burns peered in the direction as he stopped the car. The ruins of a large ominous-looking building lurked in the darkness. Smashed windows peered out like empty eye sockets, wide double doors in front yawning open, not inviting but threatening.
Do not enter here, for bad things await.
Burns kept his eyes on the ruins as he reached for Neeley’s phone. He gripped it and accessed the Internet, trying to ascertain what this place had been.
It took a while, as if someone had been trying to hide the history of the locale, but eventually he uncovered it: This had been the fieldwork outbuilding of the Lakeshore Mental Asylum in Knoxville. Patients had been shuttled out here for “therapy” in the fields and on the river.
It was not therapy they’d received, Burns could sense.
The place was long since shuttered and closed. A minor mystery for investigators of the paranormal who claimed it was haunted by ghosts of patients drowned in the river and murdered in other nefarious ways.