Sudden Threat (3 page)

“Drop me off at the next pier up near the airport, and we’re even,” Matt said.

The man yanked the remaining two hundred dollars from his hand and nodded.

Much later, true to his word and the seven-hundred-dollar payment, the captain of the ship pulled into the pier normally used for fruit transshipment. Night had fallen, and Matt effortlessly leapt from the bow of the Bangka ferryboat onto the concrete pier.

He reassured himself by patting his Glock, which had stayed firmly in his hand through the fall, and which he had quickly placed in its holster while still on the floor of the boat. He walked a kilometer to the apartment he had rented, grabbed his gear, then discreetly moved another kilometer and a half toward the airport and checked in at the nondescript Uncle Doug’s Motel.

Matt presumed that “Uncle Doug” was Douglas MacArthur, patron saint of all things Philippine.

He tossed his duffel on the floor, locked the door, and pulled out his satellite Blackberry.

Check out
Shimpu
. Contact KIA. New location. Standing by.

Matt sent the dispassionate note as if having contacts killed and being shot at were akin to signing an office memo or sitting in a meeting to discuss the next meeting. He removed the Baby Glock from its holster, ran his finger along the extractor, and felt the reassuring bump indicating he still had a round chambered.

Almost immediately he received a text message from his handler.

Airport. Midnight. More to follow. Feet and knees together.

Matt looked at his watch. It was 0200.
Like I’m on a wild-goose chase
, he thought, and shook his head.

Matt forwarded the text to his personal secure e-mail account; his way of keeping a journal.

“Feet and knees together” was paratrooper code for the way to survive a parachute landing. Matt understood that if you kept your feet and knees pressed firmly together, you stood a chance of not breaking an ankle or leg. If you reached for the ground with one foot, then all of your weight would come barreling onto one spot of one bone at the speed of gravity, usually resulting in a fracture.

He simply typed back: Roger.

Sitting on his twin bed with no box springs, he stared at his pistol, cycling the events of the last few hours through his mind. He snapped his head upward and whispered, “Shimpu.” Remembering the meaning of the obscure Japanese word sent a chill up his spine.

“Divine wind,” he said to himself.

It’s what the kamikaze pilots called themselves.

Chapter 2

Mindanao Island, Philippines

Garrett had spent the day resting, doing a few push-ups, and chowing on combat rations. One thing about a parachute jump that Matt knew for certain was that you rarely landed in your intended location. Therefore, he needed to be rested and well fed in preparation for the abundance of energy required once on the ground.

He cinched the parachute straps, tightening them against his legs and across his back. He patted the Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife he had taped beneath his cargo utility pants, then tapped his Baby Glock and visually inspected his SIG 552 Commando rifle. He felt the reassuring weight of his 9mm and 5.56mm ammunition in his outer tactical vest. All seemed to be in good order.

What was not in good order, in Matt’s mind, was the text he had just received. A group of Filipino Rangers had just been shot down somewhere over the island of Mindanao. Matt’s handler had sent a text indicating that one C-130 was a catastrophic loss, meaning everyone was killed, while the lead airplane had some jumpers get away.

The question he was to answer was, Were there any survivors?

I come here looking for Predator connections, and now I’m looking for dead Filipino Rangers
, Matt thought, shaking his head. It was not that the task was a nuisance; just the opposite. He knew damn well that the soldiers who had just died were fighting in the name of freedom.

More sacrifice
.

The Casa 212 airplane bounced along the runway and lifted easily into the sky. Matt was jumping a square parachute so that he could steer it to a precision landing. He had asked the pilots to put him over the wreckage site, and he would work from there. The reported crash site was thirty kilometers east of Compostela.

Through a map recon, Matt had selected a drop zone about a kilometer away. It was the best he could do, and even at a kilometer, he believed that the blank level-looking spot on the map was probably a banana plantation or, worse, a recently harvested sugarcane field. Either way, he stood a good chance of being impaled on a freshly cut banana tree or sugarcane stalk. Neither was a particularly good option in Matt’s view.

Once he had silk over his head, he would flip down his night-vision goggles and steer to the best possible landing point.

The flight from the Davao City airfield to his drop zone took about ninety minutes, even though the release point was only eighty kilometers north of Davao. Matt had asked the pilot to fly south over the water, then to circle around the island and approach the drop zone from the north, which doubled the flight route. He would be jumping from 3600 meters above ground level, which would put the airplane at about 5400 meters above sea level. The plains of Mindanao were surrounded by jagged volcanic mountains that ran parallel along the west and east coasts. The heat and rainfall had, over the course of time, spawned lush tropical rain forests on both the windward and leeward sides of the island. Matt would be jumping in the bowling alley between the two ranges, which topped out at about 4300 meters, but he would be cheating toward the eastern range, where the airplanes had last been sighted.

As they flew, Matt used his goggles to survey the landscape. Once the pilot made the turn to fly from north to south, Matt saw the city lights out of the front right of the airplane. He was standing between the pilot and copilot seats, observing through the windscreen, and assumed the city was Compostela.

“There,” Matt said, pointing to his left front. He saw the faintest evidence of fire. Stepping away from the cockpit, he walked over to the port personnel door, which was open, and held on to the rails of either side, leaning out of the aircraft but staying out of the slipstream.

With his goggles, the fire was more evident. He could see the smoldering remnants of something burning. As they approached, he saw he was looking at two spots of burning wreckage.

Seems right
, he thought.

He walked back to the cockpit, lifted his goggles, and said, “Just get me over those two hot spots. I’ll open at about a thousand AGL and find a good location. That’s where I need to be.”

Paramount in his mind was the fact that there might be some survivors. He was jumping in with a small rucksack, which included a first-aid kit. He would be able to treat a few patients, but that was all. Unfortunately, Matt knew, a few might be all that were left from a plane crash.

“Okay, sir, we’re over top. Anytime now,” the copilot said, leaning back and looking at Matt.

“Roger. Thanks, guys.”

Matt checked his gear once more, then walked off the back of the open ramp, fell forward into a swan dive as if he were going to do a belly flop, and flared his arms to stabilize his free fall.

Initially he was unable to detect the two fires he had seen from the airplane, and as he checked his altimeter, he saw he was approaching 1100 meters above ground level. He spun once, then again. On his second spin, he saw them and adjusted his airflow to direct his fall toward the wreckage.

At just above 350 meters, he pulled the rip cord on his parachute. It opened cleanly and he had good silk above him. The cool air offset the typically warm Philippine nights and felt good on his face.

He retracted his goggles from their pouch, steered them to his face, and placed the harness on his head, securing it with a chin strap. The “dummy cord” flapped against his windbreaker but would prevent him from losing the goggles should they come loose.

Through the green-shaded world of the goggles, he studied the wreckage. He saw an unpleasant sight at the southernmost airplane.

There were hundreds of people milling around the burnt remnants, but he could determine the oblong shape of the airplane and concluded that aircraft must have been the second in the order of movement. Making a snap decision at about 200 meters before landing, Matt pulled hard and steered about a kilometer away from the southern airplane and toward the northern wreckage.

The only obvious problem was that he couldn’t see anywhere to land.

“Oh shit,” he whispered. He realized that talking to himself while under canopy never did much good, but thankfully he caught an updraft and rode it over a small ridge. His quick-firing mind realized that the reason there seemed to be no people near the northern fire was because the terrain was too severe. They might arrive soon enough.

At 40 meters above ground level, he could see the fire burning, and its ambient light gave him enough visability to conclude that the only place he could land, if at all, would be in the middle of the plow field of the wreckage.

So, his two options were to land in burning, twisted metal or a stand of twenty-meter oaks, chestnuts, and mahogany trees.

His goggles refracted the glint of something elongated running perpendicular to his axis of descent and he realized, perhaps a bit too late, that it was the moon reflecting off water, which in those mountains could even be a waterfall.

Just as his feet were skimming the tops of the trees, he miraculously found a clearing of sorts and toggled hard into a spiral that took him into the hole. Beneath the jungle canopy, his goggles were less useful but still better than the naked eye.

His parachute caught on something, and he swung forward. He was suspended in air, oscillating back and forth as if on a playground swing set. He had his rucksack on a seven-meter lowering line, so he pulled the quick release and heard it thud into the ground shortly after.

Matt flipped his goggles back onto his head, removed a flashlight from his vest pocket, and shined it beneath his feet. He was a mere two meters off the ground.

He removed his Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife from its ankle sheath, cut one riser, then grabbed above his intended cut on the remaining riser, cut it and held on with one arm. He flipped his knife into the ground, heard it stick, then let go.

He kept his feet and knees together as he landed.

Collecting his rucksack and knife, Matt pulled a compass from his vest, set an azimuth north, and began walking quickly to the wreckage.

Chapter 3

Just to move maybe a kilometer had taken him nearly an hour. Where the terrain was moderately level, it was choked with dense undergrowth. Where there was less vegetation, there seemed to be impossibly jagged and steep volcanic rocks and cliffs.

Matt took a knee on the rock ledge that he had just ascended. His beacon had been the bright spot in the offing, like town lights reflecting off the clouds, though his goggles, when he could wear them, had differentiated the subtle nuances of the burning crash up on the face of the mountain through the triple-canopy forest.

Finally, he put his goggles up to his eyes and saw the smoldering ruins of half a fuselage. Looking to his left, he could see the direction from which the aircraft had flown, or tumbled, and cut a wide swath of destruction. To his right it looked like the debris field continued on another fifty meters or so until a flat wall of rock had blocked any forward progress.

Matt stood and walked carefully, scanning with his goggles in both directions as he stepped lightly over hot chunks of metal scattered about. He had seen airplane crashes before, and they were never remotely comprehensible. Could anyone ever imagine the terror or horror of plummeting in a plane into the ground? In a way, he hoped that someone could tonight; it would mean they were still alive. On the thought, he touched his rucksack, which he knew contained his first-aid kit.

He stepped over a full propeller, knelt next to it, and touched the blade. It was warm, but not hot. The friction of the crash and the jet-fuel spillage had created fire and heat, but not everything burned.

All I’m asking for is one person to be alive,
Matt thought to himself.
Just one.

He moved toward the blackened hull of the aircraft, which was surprisingly intact, but split wide open, like a lobster tail. He entered the fuselage from the rear and immediately saw a body. The heat and smell pushed him back outside. For the first time he noticed the crackle of the fire still burning rubberized pieces of material.

Matt saw the man’s hands first. It was an odd visual display as the body was actually outside the aircraft, tethered by a deployed parachute.

The flashlight that Matt shined on the scene revealed a charred static line tracing from the door of the aircraft onto the rock ledge. From there Matt saw the metal ring at the apex of the parachute and some charred silk. His eyes followed the suspension lines to the risers, which were surprisingly intact.

The hand was splayed upward toward the riser as if reaching to pull a slip. Matt moved the flashlight beam farther down the body and could see a U.S. Army combat uniform.

Shit.
He sighed.

He moved quickly next to the man and saw the name tag: Peterson. Matt checked for pulse and airway, but got negative reports on both accounts. He visually inspected Peterson and saw that he had been rigged to jump and that the airplane must have crashed as he was trying to exit.

Matt saw the arrowhead patch of the U.S. Army Special Forces on the man’s shoulder sleeve with airborne and Special Forces tabs above.
No one told me Americans were in this thing,
he said to himself
. What the hell is going on?