The Socotra Incident (13 page)

Natalie dug the earpiece out and slammed it against the floor, breaking it with a snap of plastic. She pushed herself away from the dead man with her feet until she hit the foot of the bed. Suleiman’s head was turned toward her, half-open eyes staring at her.

His was the first life she’d ever ended, her first kill. She stared at his body in the silent room, just a pile of meat in a puddle of its own filth now. No longer a person.

“Get up. Get up and get out of here,” she said to herself. But she couldn’t move.

What had Shannon said about him before Natalie arrived here? That Suleiman had funded suicide attacks in Israel. He’d supplied weapons to
jihadis
from Morocco to Afghanistan. He’d sent circuit boards to Iraq that were used in IED attacks on Soldiers and Marines. This wasn’t a good man, not one who deserved her sympathy.

Natalie grabbed the edge of the bed and pulled herself up. She gathered up the spent syringes and put her veil over her face. She used the mirror to look herself in the eye and didn’t see a person without pain for ending a life.

She snatched up the roll of bills from the dresser and left a part of her soul in the room.
 

The pebble arced through the air and struck the side of a Styrofoam cup.

“One point,” Shlomo said. The Israeli tossed a stone at the cup a few feet from where he and Ritter stood against the battered hangar. It hit the lip of the cup and bounced in with a
tink
.

“Five points. I’m at thirty-seven to your four,” Shlomo said.

“This game is rigged,” Ritter said.

“You bet a hundred shillings against a sniper, who makes his living putting a tiny bullet onto a target the size of a coin a kilometer away from him, and this is rigged?”

“Yes, you put some sort of…rock magnet…in the cup,” Ritter said as he tossed another pebble, which missed completely.

Shlomo scored another five points with his next toss.

“Forty-two to four. Why don’t you just pay up now?” Shlomo said.

“Maybe I’m just slow playing you. How much is a hundred shillings anyway?”

“About a whole American dollar,” said Misha, another Israeli lounging in the shade of the hangar, a paperback book depicting a brightly colored armored figure battling some sort of tentacled and toothy space beast in his hands. The title was encrypted in Hebrew script.

“Double or nothing next game,” Ritter said.

A series of beeps came from a pack lying against the hangar. Ritter dropped a handful of rocks to the ground and pulled a beeping satellite phone from the pack. The code on the phone promised a message from Shannon. Ritter took the phone around the corner where the Israelis couldn’t watch him.

He entered his password and was rejected. Odd. He looked around for Mike, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Ritter chewed at his bottom lip.
There’s a nuke loose. To hell with protocol,
he thought. He entered Mike’s personal code, which he’d learned by watching Mike’s thumb position as he entered the code over the years.

A text message appeared on the screen:

TGT LOC 39P ZP 0713 7533

DELIVERY LOC MTF

IL CAIUS POST DELIVERY

RITTER NOT/NOT CAIUS

Ritter relocked the message with Mike’s password and tapped the phone against his thigh. They had the location of the nuke but hadn’t been told where to take it. He didn’t know what Caius was, what it had to do with the Israelis, or why he was exempt from it. The Caliban Program used code words and terms when dealing with outsiders or when communications weren’t secure. If Ritter didn’t know the word, then it had to be something he wasn’t trusted to know about.

For as long as he’d been with Caliban and for all the laws he’d broken for the sake of its mission, why did Shannon think this “Caius” had to be hidden from him?

Mike jogged around the corner, a roll of toilet paper in hand.

Ritter handed the phone over to Mike.

“For you,” he said.

“Yankees! Where are you?” Moshe yelled.

They found Moshe in the hangar, rummaging through a wall locker. Israelis climbed into Botha’s Cessna Caravan armed with wrenches and crowbars.

“Your people came through with another location for the package. I don’t know why my government wants to take you on another wild-goose chase, as you say, but I don’t give the orders.” Moshe pulled a dark-tan backpack from the locker, covered in straps and pillow-like pouches.

“Good thing my team has a mandate to be prepared. You’re both airborne qualified, correct?” He patted a hand on top of the parachute.

Mike nodded.

“Sure,” Ritter said. He’d gone to Airborne School back in 2000 for his ROTC summer training. He’d earned his jump wings after a handful of jumps from a static line unto the unforgiving soil of Fort Benning and remained a “five-jump chump” ever since.

“Getting in will be easy. Getting out is a bit more complicated,” Moshe said.

A seat flew from the open door of the Caravan and tumbled in the dirt. Another followed a few seconds later.

A screen door clattered shut, and Botha ran into the hangar. His hands grabbed his head through his unkempt hair.

“What the hell are you doing? I just had those refurbished!” Botha yelled as his arms whirled from Moshe to the plane.

“Making room. You’re going to fly back to Saudi Arabia and drop us off along the way,” Moshe said.

“What? Where? I can’t stop in Yemen. There was a disagreement about some paperwork a while back, and the official in charge was very hardheaded about it,” Botha said.

“You mean the shipment of pre-Islamic artifacts you had on your plane that ended up for auction in England?” Moshe asked.

Botha shrugged and turned his palms up. “I offered him a very legitimate bribe.”

Moshe took a pen from his uniform top and pointed to a kidney-shaped island off the “horn” of Somalia.

“Socotra. You’ll fly us over. No need to stop.”

“This plane can’t make it to Socotra,” Botha said.

“We’ll stop and refuel at the airport in Bosaso. You don’t have any warrants there, do you?” Moshe asked.

Botha had to think for a second before shaking his head.

Another seat flew from the plane and ripped open the leather upholstery of the seat it landed on.

“Aww, come on!” Botha continued his protests with the men who were clearing out the interior of his plane.

“You said getting out was a problem,” Ritter said to Moshe.

Moshe turned a laptop around and zoomed in on the island to a cluster of homes in a desert mountain valley. He moved the image so the homes and the coastline were on the screen.

“The structures are the target, and there’s a fishing village on the coast twelve kilometers away. This package of yours—it’s heavy, right?”

“Four man carry.” Ritter said.

“Long way to go on foot. Maybe we can procure some transport. Maybe we can’t. We get to the fishing village, and one of our
sayanim
, our helpers, will meet us there. He’s paid up with the pirates and can get his boat there from Bosaso quickly enough.”

“Once we’re on the boat, you’ll give us the drop location, correct?”

“That’s the plan,” Ritter said.

Moshe tossed his pen onto the desk and zoomed in on the cluster of buildings.

“Get packed. We’re wheels up as soon as there’s room for us in that rust bucket. If all goes well, we’ll be there before dawn.” Moshe said.

Turbulence in the Cessna was a special kind of horrible. The only illumination was from red lens flashlights and the lambent glow from Botha’s control panel. An Israeli leaned into the cockpit, absorbing the Afrikaner’s never-ending diatribe about how inconvenienced he was by the “air piracy” and the cost of the seats left behind in the Kenyan dust.

Ritter, Mike, and the Israelis sat against the fuselage, their parachutes between their legs. Botha reached over and tapped a screen. Moshe leaned between the pilot and empty copilot seats and nodded. Israelis stirred to life and got to their feet.

Mike pulled Ritter up and ran his flashlight over Ritter’s parachute straps, checking for any rips or tears and tightness.

“Remember, pull the cord,” Mike said. He tapped his flashlight against the ring on Ritter’s chest. Most army airborne operations used a static line to deploy a jumper’s parachute as he stepped out of the aircraft. Like many things in the army, the equipment worked best when the Soldier didn’t have to think about it.

Ritter felt the plane descend. The plan was to fly low and slow; the less time the jumpers spent in the air, the less they’d scatter. The trade-off was that if anything went wrong with their parachutes, they had less time to react. The view from the windows was nothing but darkness.

Alarms blared as an Israeli pried open the side cargo door. It shot back on the runners and slammed open. Wind howled through the plane as the first Israeli braced himself in the doorway. He pushed himself back and launched into the night. The Israelis filed to the open maw and followed suit, their leaps paced by a jumpmaster at the door.

Wind tugged at Ritter’s sleeves as he grabbed the cold steel of the doorframe, an abyss before him. Ice crept through his veins and froze his arms in place. Fear. He knew the emotion, could rationalize it as his body’s way of getting ready. Yet, his mind couldn’t override the notion that hurling himself into the night and trusting his life to a wad of silk and cloth was a bad idea.

A hand slapped his shoulder, and he charged forward. A cold wave of air hit him, and he spread his arms and legs to stabilize his fall. Gravity’s sure hand had him, and he had the rest of his life to deploy his parachute.

Ritter grabbed at his chest, grasped a ring, and pulled.

Nothing.

He pawed at the parachute rig, fumbling for the rip cord to the backup parachute. Years old training fought for relevance in his mind as he tumbled end over end through the darkness. Seconds ticked by, seconds he didn’t have to lose. Fingers, nearly frozen in panic, found a pull ring.

He stuck a finger into the ring and pulled again, and it extended a few inches before halting. He grabbed the ring with both hands and heaved.

The string snapped loose, and Ritter stared at the release in his hand and kept falling.

His world quaked, and for an instant Ritter wasn’t sure whether he’d hit the ground or if his parachute had deployed.

Not dead. Still thinking. What am I supposed to do next?
he thought

He looked up, past the extended riser that ran from his harness to into the billowed canopy. He didn’t see any rips, tears, or tangled lines.

What’s next?
he thought. He’d done one nighttime jump in training.
Something about the horizon? No, the gear.

Ritter loosed his pack of gear and let it vanguard his fall. He put his feet and knees together and waited for the line between him and the pack to go taut. He heard a
thump
, but the line stayed slack.

Did the line break? Shouldn’t it have—

He plowed into the ground. A collision that should have gone feet-knees-thigh-torso went feet-ass-head. His helmet smacked against a rock, and the impact sent stars dancing across his vision.

Ritter felt rocks and dirt scraping against his body as his parachute dragged him across Socotra’s
terra firma.
He shook his head clear and pulled a pin at his shoulder to detach the parachute from his harness. One of the risers snapped off, the other held fast and he kept sliding. His right calf erupted in pain as something sliced across his leg. The remaining riser slid loose from his shoulder and out of his reach.

The canopy slithered across the landscape. The moonlit terrain cut off a few dozen yards ahead of him.

A cliff.

Ritter unsnapped his Applegate-Fairbairn and sawed at the fabric riser. The blade bit in but made slow progress.

“Not. Like. This!” he screamed as he worked the blade.

A sliver of fabric remained as his parachute broke over the cliff edge and took Ritter over it a moment later. The parachute snapped free and took to the wind like a wraith. Ritter reached for the cliff face and found no purchase.

His mind went to Natalie as he fell. She’d never know the truth of how he died, never knew how he felt about her.

Something jerked at his waist, and he smashed into the cliff. He looked up. The line from his gear was an umbilical cord from his harness over the lip of the rock wall.

He twisted in the air and grabbed a handhold on the cliff face. He tossed his blade over the edge and hauled himself up the cliff with more skill and speed than he’d ever considered himself capable of. His fingers dug into the loose dirt of the blessedly parallel ground, and he clawed forward until his knees were on solid ground.

With his face in the dirt, his heaving breaths blew dirt into the air. He didn’t care that he sucked in the same dirt and gave the earth a gentle pat.

He felt footfalls vibrating through the ground and pushed himself onto his knees. Two figures were running toward him in the darkness. The line from his riggings ran between a pair of boulders. The equipment pouch must have gotten caught between the rocks as gravity and wind conspired to kill him.

“Eric?” Shlomo said in a loud whisper.

Ritter got to his feet and picked his blade up from the dust. He wiped it clean and gave it a quick kiss before sheathing it.

“I saw you go over and thought you were dead. You look good,” Shlomo said.

“I’ve got better things to do tonight than to die,” Ritter said. False bravado might convince Shlomo, but his quivering knees knew the truth.

He took a step toward his gear and yelped in pain. His lower leg went alight with pain.

Ritter felt his calf, the uniform leg shredded and wet with blood. Blood seeped from the gashed and raw flesh but wasn’t dripping. Ritter pulled a piece of sharp flint from his leg and looked at it in the dim light.

“Can you walk?” Shlomo asked.

Ritter took a few tentative steps, thankful that the pain was manageable. He wouldn’t be a hindrance to the rest of the mission.