Caruso smiled. “They were Rangers, I’ll grant you that. But Rudy called me first thing this morning from the office. He’s thinking about buying my truck, and he asked me to leave the keys under the seat so he could go by my place and take it for a spin on his lunch break. He said Mike would come along with him.”
Jack tried to think of others involved in their organization who might have driven the two and a half hours from the office in Alexandria, Virginia, to play the role of bad guys this morning. “Donna Lee was FBI. She knows her way around a submachine gun.”
Dom said, “Adara told me Donna tweaked her knee at CrossFit on Wednesday. She’s on crutches for the next couple weeks.”
Jack smiled now. “You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”
“You and I run into enough assholes who want to shoot us out there in the real world. I’m not looking to take a Sim burst to the junk today. I’ve got plans this weekend. I’ll game the system if I have to.”
Jack laughed now, glad for the diversion that kept him from thinking about his parachute-packing skills and the jump to come. “What do you have planned for the weekend?”
Dom looked like he was considering whether or not to answer the question, but just then Ding pulled off his headset and Dominic leaned back away from Ryan.
“What are you two knuckleheads conspiring about over here?”
Both men smiled but made no reply.
Chavez raised an eyebrow. “Two minutes out, Jack. You’ll be dropped three hundred yards or so from the boat, at the stern, to avoid detection. Obviously it’s daytime, and any sentry in the real world looking aft would see you, but this is training. The OPFOR on deck knows to keep their eyes in the boat. You get a free pass to swim up, as long as you don’t make it too obvious.”
Dominic said, “Yeah, don’t dog-paddle up in a big yellow rubber ducky.”
Jack gave Chavez a thumbs-up.
“Once you’re out the hatch, Helen will take us up to six thousand and we’ll jump from there, sail right onto the deck. We’ll spot targets on the way down and try to take them out on landing. By the time we hit the deck and strip away our harnesses, I want you climbing up the sea stairs ready to stack up with us.”
“You got it,” Jack said. This was going to be an arduous swim. The waters of the bay looked choppy from the window behind him.
Just then, Chester “Country” Hicks climbed out of the copilot’s seat and moved back to the cabin door. He flipped the lever and slid the big hatch open, filling the already noisy cabin with the locomotive-like drone that came along with the air rushing by the aircraft moving at ninety knots.
Hicks held up a single finger, indicating one minute till jump, and Jack pulled himself to his feet, along with Chavez. Jack and Dom pounded fists again, and then Jack walked closer to the open hatch.
Chavez leaned close into Jack’s ear as he moved up the cabin with him. “Remember… Don’t forget.”
Now Jack cocked his head, leaned into Chavez’s ear. “Don’t forget what?”
“Don’t forget anything.” Chavez smiled, slapped the younger man on the back, and pointed toward the open door. “You’re up, Jack. Time to fly like a piano!”
Jack fought a bout of queasiness, waited for the signal from Country, and then leapt out.
3
Seven minutes later Jack bobbed in the water at the sea stairs at the stern of the Hail Caesar, a seventy-five-foot Nordhavn yacht owned by a friend of Gerry Hendley’s, director of The Campus. The yacht was anchored off Carpenter Point, at the northern aspects of the Chesapeake Bay, a few miles east of the mouth of the Susquehanna River.
Jack was tired from the swim, and he blamed the Susquehanna, as well as the North East River, which flowed south into the deeper water here, for messing with his stroke. He hadn’t been wearing diving gear, just the fins and a snorkel/dive mask rig, so he’d done the majority of his swim on the surface. The waves forced him to work for every yard, and they also caused him to drink a substantial amount of seawater down his snorkel, and now while he stowed his excess gear on the sea stairs and readied his silenced submachine gun, he gagged a little.
He checked his watch and saw he’d made it just in time. And then, as if on cue, his waterproof headset came alive with Ding Chavez’s whispering voice. “One is in position.”
Caruso then came over the net. “Two. On time. On target.”
Jack’s transmission wasn’t as macho as his cousin’s. “Three. I’m here. Headin’ up.”
“Roger that,” Chavez said. “We’re right above you.”
Jack climbed the sea stairs and saw Ding and Dom in their black gear. Their chutes had been rolled and stowed under a thick spool of line on the main aft deck, and just a few feet in front of them, Dale Henson, one of their security men and a member of the OPFOR, sat with his back against the starboard-side gunwale. A pair of red splotches adorned the breast of his khaki jumpsuit, and a submachine gun lay on the teak deck next to him.
Henson had taken a candy bar out of his pocket and was now eating it, looking up at the three assaulters with no pretense of playing dead for the duration of the exercise.
He winked at Jack, then rolled his eyes back, jokingly feigning taking two gunshots to the chest.
“Cute,” whispered Chavez. Then he said, “Fleming is on the flybridge. Dom stitched him in the back before he knew we were overhead.”
Jack nodded. Two OPFOR were down with minimal noise, and neither had had time to broadcast a warning on their radios.
Silently the three Campus operatives formed in a tactical train and moved up the starboard-side deck toward the door to the main saloon.
Ding was in front, Dominic right behind him, and while Jack brought up the rear, he saw Dom hold up his right hand and extend three fingers. It was Dom’s covert way of letting his cousin know there were only three more to deal with in the opposition, based on the theory he put forth in the Cessna.
At the hatch to the main saloon Ding stopped and waved Jack forward. He ducked below the little portal, pulled an HHIT2—a handheld inspection tool. It was a mini — video camera with thermal capability and a long, flexible neck that ran between the lens and the device itself. Jack bent the neck, then slowly raised the eye up to the portal while looking at the cell-phone-sized monitor. The half-inch-wide camera showed Jack the scene just inside. There, the other two training cadre, Pablo Gomez and Jason Gibson, sat on chairs, watching TV. Both men had eye protection on, pistols on their hips, and sub guns positioned within reach.
Jack held two fingers up for Chavez and Caruso.
While he watched, Gomez reached for the radio on the table next to him, spoke into it, and then adopted a look of concern. Jack assumed he hadn’t received a reply from Henson or Fleming on deck.
Gomez dropped the walkie-talkie, launched from his chair, and went for his SMG, and Gibson took the hint, doing the same just an instant behind.
Jack took his eye out of the device, stowed it in a drop bag hooked to his belt in the small of his back, and hefted his MPX. As he did this he turned to Chavez, and in an urgent whisper he said, “Compromised!”
Ding reached for the latch, Jack readied his SIG, flipping the selector lever to fully automatic fire, and then Ding turned the latch and pushed the door open with his foot.
Jack fired quick, controlled bursts at the two men, dropping Gibson first with three rounds to his well-padded chest rig, then taking Gomez in the same area just as his MP5 began to rise at the threat. Both men fell back into their chairs, put their guns in their laps, and raised their hands.