Emerald Sky (15 page)

Chapter 24

The plan was to use stealth rather than
force. A team consisting of just four members was assembled for the mission.
Emmy was supposedly in charge, but she did not really believe this. Whilst she
had the unique knowledge to interpret whatever technological defences they may
come up against and hopefully to be able to predict the enemy’s manoeuvres, she
certainly did not have the trust of the colonel. This was most definitely a
military operation at its core and as such, she knew it was the military that
would be calling the shots.

Along with Esteban, a second soldier had
been assigned to watch over Emmy. His name was Sgt. Jack Berry. He was a few
years younger than his colleague and as such, possessed the enthusiasm and
unflinching dedication to duty of one who still has it all to prove. Emmy was
naturally wary around any new faces, but Esteban appeared to trust this man so
she was willing to give him a chance.

The final member of the crew was Jimmy.
The young psychic was to be their secret weapon. He may have proven redundant
on the earlier astral assault against the Chinese, but in the physical realm
his powers would give them the edge they surely needed. He was unique. No
matter how much more advanced the enemy may have become, they would have
nothing quite like Jimmy. Between the four of them, this small band had the
skills and knowledge equal to an entire battalion of regular service personnel.

It was deemed too risky for them to enter
Chinese airspace, so they decided to do the drop over Nepal. Once on the ground
they would then cross the border on foot. This was where Jimmy’s gifts were to
be called upon. He was to help them find the safest passage through the
mountains. When you have a psychic on the team, you do not need a map or even a
compass.

As soon as they were in the air, Emmy
felt more relaxed than she had done in a long time. With the exception of her
intermittent astral journeys, she had begun to fear she would never leave the
claustrophobic confines of the secret base. Now she was thousands of miles
away, about to enter a country the Americans had zero jurisdiction over. She
even allowed herself a smile.

‘Do you care to share the joke?’ asked
Esteban.

‘Huh?’

‘It’s the first time I’ve seen you smile.
I figure there’s gotta be a reason.’

‘Oh, I didn’t realise. Sorry.’

Esteban unclasped his belt and moved to
the seat next to the scientist. Though small, the plane’s hold had been
designed to accommodate many more bodies than its current occupants and as such
they had the space to move freely.

‘We’re not in the base now,’ he told her.
‘The colonel has no authority over us out here.’

‘Soldiers are built to follow orders,’
she replied.

Esteban shook his head whilst laughing to
himself.

‘Not this soldier. I’ve spent a lot of
time in the field. You soon learn that orders are...flexible.’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘Is the colonel aware of this philosophy
you have?’

‘I don’t know. Are you going to ask him?’

Emmy turned away from him.

‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ she
said. ‘Your problem is that you see goodness where there’s none.’

‘And yours is that you do not see it when
it is staring you in the face. I’ve seen inside of your soul just as you have
mine. You and I both know we can trust one another, yet you still hold back.’

She hesitated. What happened during their
shared astral trip had previously gone unsaid. She now wondered how much of her
thoughts he had seen. Could she really trust him or was it a trick? There was
only one way for her to know for sure.

‘Okay, if you must know, I was thinking
of Lucy. When we were in hiding we agreed to avoid flying. She made such a big
deal about it. If she could see me now...’

Esteban searched her eyes for any signs
of grief or regret, but could see none.

‘This Lucy – you still love her?’

‘Of course, can you ever stop; loving
somebody, I mean? How about you – what happened to the girl I saw in your
memories?’

Esteban shifted uneasily. Whilst he had a
talent for reading others, he was not so good at expressing his own emotions.

‘You’ll have to be more specific,’ he
told her. ‘There’ve been many.’

‘I think you know the one I mean.
Redhead. She was the reason you tried to turn your back on this life.’

‘That’s complicated. And it’s very
different to your situation. She and I were never really together. Her heart
belonged to a friend and I helped them when they needed it. My job was merely
to keep her out of harm and that was what I did.’

‘Did you ever see her again?’

‘Yes, our paths did cross once more.
That’s actually the reason I ended up returning to service.’

‘Do you care to elaborate?’

‘Not at this time - no. We’ll be in
position shortly. We should begin our preparations.’

Rather than risking a landing, the team
would be parachuting in from 16,000ft. With neither Emmy nor Jimmy having any
experience in this regard, they were required to jump tandem with the soldiers.

‘Time to get ready,’ said Esteban.

He arose along with Sergeant Berry. Just
as the two men got to their feet the plane hit an air pocket. The resulting
turbulence was like a car hitting a speed bump in fifth gear. Sgt Berry fell to
the floor, but Esteban was able to grab hold of an overhead railing and
remained on his feet. At once, all eyes switched to Jimmy.

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ he assured
them.

‘Who’s worried?’ asked Sgt. Berry.

Emmy offered her hand to help him back
onto his feet.

‘You needn’t be concerned,’ she told him.
‘I won’t tell anybody you got scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ he protested.

‘You will be when your parachute doesn’t
open,’ said Jimmy.

‘What?’

Jack was still shaken from losing his
footing, and with no prior experience of the young psychic, he was unsure how
to take the comment.

‘He’s joking,’ said Emmy, hoping to
reassure him. Then turning to Jimmy, she added; ‘you are joking, right?’

‘We’ll finish this conversation on the
ground,’ interrupted Esteban. ‘If we don’t go now, we’ll miss our window.’

Emmy and Jack shared a brief look of
concern.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Emmy. ‘They’re just
messing with us.’

The two pairs connected their safety
harnesses ready for the jump. Esteban and Jimmy went first. With some
trepidation, Jack and Emmy followed immediately after.

The rush was much more visceral than what
Emmy had experienced on her astral journeys.

It was Physical.

It was real.

Her heart felt like it was in her stomach
and her cheeks vibrated as if her face was trying to turn itself inside out.
For a moment, she feared she may even black out, but once her senses began to
orientate themselves the view presented to her was enough to keep her focussed.
She had been from one end of the solar system to the other but still the sight
surrounding her ranked among the greatest she had witnessed.

The landscape was not just beneath her,
it was all around. Mountain peaks rose from the ground like granite
skyscrapers, reaching altitudes far greater than that at which she had left the
aircraft. Sheer rock faces whizzed by as she descended, providing her with an
effective measure of her speed, but unlike with her usual mode of travel, she
had no way to control it. That job now fell to Sgt. Berry.

She timed their descent by counting each
passing second.

45, 46, 47, 48...when was he going to
pull the cord?
she wondered, as what
moments earlier were small specks of dark among the snow were now revealing
themselves to be very large buttresses of exposed rock.

61, 62, 63...how much longer?

She had been told the freefall would only
be 45 seconds to a minute. Was Jimmy telling the truth when he had warned of
the parachute’s failure to open?

Then, like waking prematurely from a
dream, she was abruptly tugged back into focussing on her immediate surrounds.
The ground was no longer rushing towards her, but appeared to be suspended as
if floating on an invisible ocean. She felt herself turning, and as the
parachute rotated through 180 degrees she could see the other open chute of
Esteban and Jimmy just ahead of her.

‘Some rush, eh?’ Jack asked.

‘It’s incredible, and the view is
amazing,’ she replied. ‘I can hardly comprehend the scale of it all. How we’ll
find a passage through these mountains, I don’t know.’

‘I think that’s up to your psychic
friend.’

The two pairs landed on an open plain at
the entrance to a valley nestled amongst the spot where two mountains converged.
Once they had unclasped their tandem passengers the two soldiers withdrew their
firearms and adopted a defensive posture. They then performed a quick recon of
the immediate surrounds before concluding that there was no imminent threat.

It was the first time Emmy had
experienced sub zero temperatures, but the initial shock of the cold did not
last long. Her clothing was well insulated and she had so much to distract her.
Back home, much of the land was flat and featureless, especially around
Jackson’s Hill. Here it was of a scale she could barely comprehend. The
mountains shrunk her down to the size of a termite. Not since she had projected
her consciousness into far flung corners of outer space had she felt so lost
and isolated.

‘So where are we?’ she asked.

She was sitting on the frozen ground with
her head craned upwards, still trying to fathom the massiveness of the mountain
range.

‘Co-ordinates are irrelevant,’ Esteban
replied. ‘We don’t need a map. That’s our compass right there.’

He pointed toward Jimmy who seemed a lot
less awestruck than Emmy. Unbeknownst to the others, he had kept his eyes closed
during the whole jump.

Just in case.

Since sharing his fears with Emmy he had
continued to ponder his own mortality and had concluded that when the time did
come, he would rather not see it beforehand.

‘So where to, Jimmy?’ asked Emmy.
‘Esteban tells me you’re in charge.’

The young psychic glanced around as if he
was searching for something specific. After two visual passes he walked up the
valley towards the base of the mountains. The other three followed, each
keeping their distance. They did not want to get too close whilst he was using
his unique gift.

***

The colonel was relieved when he received
news of the team’s safe landing. Success depended almost entirely on having the
element of surprise. If the Chinese knew what was coming then his men would not
stand a chance. So far as he was aware, the plane had made it in and out
without detection.

He was taking a major risk with this
mission. Arguably the biggest of his career. The target base being situated in
Tibet rather than the Chinese Motherland did little to ease his concern. The
slightest mistake could be misconstrued as an act of war.

‘What have you got to report?’ he asked
Dr Stark, who was seated opposite at his desk.

‘No further breaches,’ the scientist
replied. ‘We’re monitoring every square inch of this facility around the clock.
Nothing can get past that level of surveillance.’

‘What about a ghost?’

She did not flinch upon hearing the term.

‘Not even that. We are talking about
state of the art technology. Things even Dr Rayne doesn’t know about. Oh, and
for the record, Colonel, they’re not ghosts. We prefer to use the term
traveller.’

‘Some rich kid puts off going to Harvard
in order to waste Mom and Dad’s cash on finding themselves in Cambodia is a
traveller. What we got here may not be some undead phantom, but they’re just as
dangerous. We cannot afford to wait for them to come to us. It’s time we took
control of the game. Should Dr Rayne fail, we need to find a way to take these
spooks out ourselves.’

‘What do you propose?’

‘Simple – a trap. The last breach
happened in the medical bay when that Johnson kid turned off his mother’s life
support. They may have been trying to hijack her body. Been done before, it’s
all in the report on Jackson Fox. If we want to smoke these bastards out, we
have to offer them some form of bait. You are to turn off life support to one
of the coma patients.’

The scientist swallowed hard. She knew
that if she wanted to remain on the project she would have to bypass more than
a few ethical principles, but she had never committed murder, which essentially
the colonel was now asking her to do. She had to make a choice. It did not take
her long to reach a conclusion.