The Demon Plagues (30 page)

Eventually, the President stirred. “I think
you need to leave now, Chairman. I can’t help you.” He gulped down
his beer, turning away.

The two secret service agents moved forward,
politely but firmly indicating Markis should go. He stared at
McKenna for a long moment, then stood up. “All right. I guess I’ll
be off. I have an alien to talk to.” As he walked out he kept
hoping the man would call him back, like a car salesman caving to a
negotiation ploy, but he didn’t.

Back at the bus Markis came as close to a
full-out bout of cursing as he had in a long, long time. He clamped
down on his tongue and stared out the window, ignoring his team’s
questioning looks. Finally he spoke so quietly that only his team
could hear. “He didn’t go for it. Not only that, he didn’t even
acknowledge TF’s existence. He threw me out, and he seemed
terrified. What terrifies the President of the United States?”

Cassandra and Karl exchanged glances. She
whispered back. “Someone else who’s really in charge, that’s who. I
told you this was a bad idea. You’re too damn trusting. It almost
got you killed in Geneva and it might get us killed here.”

“Not trusting, Cassie. I’m just willing to
take a risk, a leap of faith. I’m sorry I got you into this but
then again, you could have said no.”

She laughed bitterly. “Not likely. But maybe
I should have. So what next, maestro?”

Markis kept his voice low. “You know what.
Plan B. Right Karl? Always have a plan B.”

“Semper Fi, sir. The Corps will pull your
nuts out of the fire again. Let’s get back to the plane. Driver!”
He raised his voice. “Back to the airport, right away.”

The driver obediently stomped on the gas,
hurrying out of the Presidential compound, off the campus, and
through the streets of Pueblo. He turned on his emergency lights
and ignored signals and traffic, pulling right up to their
airplane.

“Thanks, son,” Karl said, clapping the young
man on the shoulder. He hustled the rest off the bus and onto the
aircraft.

Jill Repeth fidgeted inside the plane,
looking a question at Karl once they had closed the doors.

He nodded at her. “Suit up, Gunny. Plan B is
go.”

Markis put his head back in his seat and
closed his eyes, taking himself out of the equation. He wasn’t
operational military anymore; better to let her fellow Marine
handle it.

Jill and Karl immediately headed to the back
of the plane, ignoring the motion of taxiing. By the time she had
the parachute on the jet was rolling down the runway.

“Do you think they’ll interfere with us
leaving?” she asked as she rigged her combat equipment pack to her
front rings.

“I hope not; the boss didn’t say it was a
disaster, just that the President wouldn’t listen. Whatever is
going on behind the scenes, let’s hope it takes a while to work
out, and no one is stupid enough to think killing the Chairman is a
good idea. Either way, you’re going to be gone before it happens.”
He ran his hands under her vertical risers and leg straps, checking
everything in a jumpmaster pre-inspection.

“Thanks for letting me do this, Guns.”

“Don’t thank me. You’re the only one that
makes sense. You know the contact personally, you have the skills –
you’re the perfect choice.” He slapped her shoulder. “Now get that
helmet on.” He pulled on a set of headphones attached to the
aircraft intercom.

She pulled on the headgear and got ready. It
was only a few miles to the drop site, just minutes in the climbing
jet.

Karl pulled up the manual release on the
hatch in the tail floor, a modification specifically for covert
drops. It popped upward, locked into a bracket. He used a long
lever to shove it downward into the airstream. This created a blast
barrier that allowed a jumper to clear the underside of the plane
without difficulty.

Sound and rushing air filled the interior
space. Jill’s heart hammered with adrenaline. She stood up, getting
ready to step into the hole in the floor and drop straight
through.

Karl clapped a hand to one side of the
headphones, a look of concentration on his face. He held up a fist,
then extended one finger, emphatic. “One minute!” he yelled.

She breathed deeply, checking her altimeter
on her left wrist, pulling her goggles into place. They were coming
up on five thousand feet, a very low sport jump but high enough for
a combat drop. At about two hundred feet per second, she had
twenty-five seconds before she augered in. The lower she opened,
the less time she would have under canopy, so she planned to pull
at twenty-four hundred. That gave her twelve seconds if she had a
main chute malfunction, just enough time to deploy her reserve.

“Ten seconds!” Karl held up all ten digits
and then yelled, “Get ready!”

She stepped forward to the edge of the hatch,
her toes on the edge.

As soon as he heard the signal in his headset
he slapped her thigh. “Go!”

One short step and she dropped through. The
air rushing past at two hundred miles an hour snatched her like an
enormous hand, seeming to fling her backward relative to the plane.
She always loved this moment of a drop, the feeling of being out of
the aircraft, bird-free in the open sky.

Arching hard, she forced her body into a
configuration that caused her to fall face-downward and stable. She
quickly oriented herself, using the airflow to turn like a top
toward her landing zone. Checking her altimeter, she got ready,
then threw out her pilot chute as she crossed 2400 feet.

Counting out loud to herself, “One thousand,
two thousand, th – ” the chute opened perfectly with a sound like
flapping canvas. A moment later she had the toggles out of their
holders and pulled both down sharply, releasing the control lines
from their stowage. The rear of the high-performance canopy swept
back like flaps on an airplane, and now the ram-air parachute acted
more like a wing than a drogue.

She flew.

At maximum speed this rig developed over
fifty miles per hour of forward thrust; it was a very dangerous
canopy for anyone but an expert, because that same speed advantage
in the air had to be carefully controlled as she approached the
ground.

Her landing zone was a treeless wash, sandy
and she hoped free of big rocks, in the hills overlooking Teller
Reservoir on Fort Carson. Their intelligence had concluded that the
relatively new complex there, isolated from the main base, was the
Tiny Fortress lab. Despite stringent security measures, nothing
employing thousands of people could be hidden for long. Even the
so-called Area 51, a hundred miles from anywhere, eventually became
well known. This place was only twenty miles from downtown
Pueblo.

She adjusted her equipment fastened tightly
to the front of her torso. In a round-chute drop it would have been
lowered on a line to hit the ground first, relieving her of its
weight as she performed her parachute landing fall. With ram-air
canopies, however, especially these fast ones, that arrangement
simply would not work. Nothing could interfere with her
airplane-like landing stall if she wanted to come through it
unhurt.

Lower and lower she flew. She wasn’t at all
sure of the winds, and she looked around desperately for some
indication. On a prepared drop zone there would be smoke or a flag
or wind sock; here there was nothing.

Her backup method was to quarter-box the
compass, turning ninety degrees each time. At every heading, she
held out her hand in front of her and found the spot where the
ground did not seem to be moving up or down. This was, by
definition, the horizontal axis where she would land. Then she
watched for drift left and right. By doing this in all directions
she got a rough idea of the effect the wind was having on her own
movement, and was able to turn into the wind. The lower she got,
the more accurate her estimation became.

She lined up on her gully, the wind about
five knots and slightly left to right. She compensated by aiming a
bit to the left as the ground seem to accelerate. She carefully did
not focus on the rushing rocks and dirt, instead choosing a spot
about a hundred feet ahead of her.

Flaring, her speed bled off rapidly and a
gust picked her up. She eased off on the toggles and plummeted,
jerking downward on the handles to flare again and stall. It wasn’t
a pretty landing and she ended up on her knees, thankful for the
hard pads she wore, but she was down. She popped one shoulder
release, allowing the canopy to collapse, then the other. Rapidly
rolling up the chute, she buried the whole affair in some soft dirt
and hefted several rocks on top of it.

Opening up the combat equipment bag and
pulling out the civilian rucksack inside, she then stripped out of
her jumpsuit and put on hiking gear. In a pinch she could play the
lost backpacker; in either case a woman in shorts and a ball cap
was less conspicuous than a camo-clad Marine. Making sure her PW5
was accessible but out of sight, she started trekking.

The sun beat down but the terrain was not too
rugged, just hills varying in size by a couple of hundred feet. She
followed game trails and dry washes until she found a motorcycle
track heading the direction she wanted. Within a half hour she
overlooked Teller Reservoir and the laboratory complex.

Sitting down in the shade of a scrubby
cypress, she drank water and used her lightweight binoculars to
examine the grounds from the distance of half a mile. It took her
two hours of careful study but eventually she found what she
needed.

As night fell she approached the fence. From
this direction, away from the access roads and the edge of the
base, security was less than stellar. A laboratory complex this
size meant over two miles of fencing, and there were plenty of weak
spots for a trained infiltrator. She found the place she had seen,
where a flash flood had washed out some soft dirt at the bottom of
the mesh and slid under, erasing her tracks with a sage branch as
she went.

Once inside, she accelerated, running flat
out along the top of a concrete drainage canal until she came to an
access road. If there were motion sensors or cameras, she wanted to
give them the least possible time to see her. If she was gone when
they came to investigate, she hoped they would think it was a
coyote that tripped the sensor. Stars blazed overhead as the last
of the glow left the sky.

At the access road she slowed, jogging right
up the middle of the asphalt toward the residential area. Typical
Army housing had been easy to spot, especially when combined with
the visible amenities – a gym with athletic fields, a gas
station-convenience store combo, and an entertainment complex with
an all-ranks club.

Slowing to a fast walk she headed for the
club. It was the best place to pick up information, especially as
everyone there would assume she was part of the community. Human
beings simply couldn’t maintain tight security for long, especially
among themselves. People talked, and she hoped to listen. And if
she really got lucky, she would get a line on her contact.

Inside was surreal, music mingling with the
sound of billiard balls cracking, the smell of bar food mixed with
aromas of beer and bathroom disinfectant. She drifted through the
rooms, glancing at the clientele, looking closely at any woman she
saw. None matched her mental image from long ago.

She tossed her pack into a corner and took a
table there, waving to a waitress. “A Bud and a hot dog, please.
Yes, chips, plain. Thanks.”

She sat back, studying the crowd.
Pretty
good for a Thursday night, but unless you wanted to drive into
Pueblo, there wasn’t much else to do.
It was probably the only
restaurant open in the evening; she saw a few families but mostly
singles and clumps of friends. A group of extremely fit men with
haircuts and demeanors that screamed ‘special ops’ played Crud at
the pool table.

She wolfed down her hot dog and picked up the
half-full beer bottle and bag of chips, drifting over to the group.
She saw a few glances of speculative interest; she knew she was no
looker but she was tall and athletic and could be pretty when she
smiled.

So she smiled.

“So...how do you play this game?” she asked
the nearest, a heavily-muscled man with a strong brow and an open,
Irish face. He took the bait instantly. Half an hour later she was
shrieking and having fun, only half of it faked. Crud was fun, a
fast-moving game using just the cue ball, the eight ball, and
hands. Each player took a turn for their team in rotation, trying
to knock the black ball into a pocket, striking it with the white
before it rolled to a stop.

Later as she sat at their table – clearly
their
table, so different were they from the scientists and
bureaucrats sharing the big room – she bantered and dodged
questions about herself, instead turning the queries back on the
men. She didn’t push; they would have had plenty of operational
security training and reminders. She just asked them about
themselves and let them brag.

The Irishman, McCarthy, had obviously claimed
her for himself, but she didn’t let him close the deal, maintaining
her social space and elbowing him when he got too handsy. She
wasn’t above sleeping with someone for the good of the mission but
she thought she could string him along without going that far.

The one they called Huff was her worry. He
laughed loudly but his eyes missed nothing and he played his
comrades like a master fiddler, keeping peace, making jokes,
telling and suggesting stories, never quite the center of attention
but always the one the group keyed off of – natural leader and
class clown combined.

She waited a long time for some
conversational connection to her potential contact, something where
she could credibly ask the questions she needed to ask, when
serendipity bypassed Murphy and dropped a little luck in her
lap.