Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,23
a simple change in color, but carried dire implications.
“It’ll be okay,” he said, placing his hand gently on her shoulder.
Her stomach knotted at his touch. She wondered if this is how it felt; going into battle with strangers. They knew nothing about each other, but every gesture, touch, and word snuck past her personal defenses. In that moment she noticed King’s presence in full. The thin scar on his neck. The confidence of his stance. Even his smell—metallic. And for a moment, until he spoke again, she felt safe.
“Time to go.” He nodded to the door and followed her out.
In the hurried fifteen minutes to follow there was little time to think. They quickly donned their jumpsuits, harnesses, bailout bottles, gear, and weapons, all of which had been triple checked during the flight over the Pacific. Then they sat, placed oxygen masks over their faces, and breathed 100 percent O2 for the next hour, which flushed nitrogen from their bloodstreams. The air pressure outside the Crescent was one-third that of sea level’s. Jumping at thirty thousand feet with too much nitrogen in your body would give you the bends, akin to what SCUBA divers experience if they surface too fast. Nausea, headaches, and, in worst-case scenarios, death could occur. Not a good way to start an operation.
For the next thirty minutes, while prebreathing, Sara read and reread their mission profile. They were meeting up with a CIA operative out of Laos who’d spent a lot of time in the Annamite range. She knew nothing about this person other than they held the code name Pawn Two. How original. Then they would head for Anh Dung, a village smack dab in the middle of a mountainous nowhere.
The side benefit was that the mountain range had become a modern Noah’s Ark. Before the war, only local villagers ventured into the massif. It was the same for generation upon generation, going back thousands of years. And now even the villagers were afraid to tread on the explosive soil. Only a few biologists and cryptozoologists had braved the region. It was a gold mine of unclassified mammals the likes of which the world had not yet seen. Sometimes the scientists went in and never came back out, but the draw continued to that day.
A red flashing light took attention away from the dossier in her gloved hands. She put it aside and heard King’s voice loud and clear in her earpiece. “Two minutes, people. Pawn, get over here.”
As the seconds ticked by, King fastened himself to her back. While Sara had been skydiving several times before, she’d never done a HALO jump and even if she had, she had a feeling King would still insist they jumped tandem.
Thirty seconds until jump time, she felt the Crescent slow significantly. Then the hydraulic bay door hissed open, exposing them to the freezing thirty-thousand-foot night air. She felt the temperature change even through her protective jumpsuit.
“Switch to your bailout bottles,” King said. “On my mark . . . jump!”
One by one, the Delta team jumped from the back, commencing a free fall that would take them rocketing toward the earth’s surface only to be yanked up by their chutes at an extremely low altitude. King and Sara jumped last.
Cast out of the nearly invisible Crescent, the team, all wearing black, disappeared into the night. If not for small glow-in-the-dark diamonds on the back of their helmets, the team would find staying together impossible. King found the four diamonds below and tilted himself and Sara forward. They glided through the air and joined the rest of the team, who’d already taken up formation.
As the thirty-below wind whipped past, Sara was amazed at how different this was from low-altitude skydiving. A typical drop might last only seconds before chutes deployed, but they’d already free fallen ten thousand feet and had another nineteen to go before they’d open their chutes. The downside, of course, was that at one thousand feet, descending at terminal velocity, there was no time to open a reserve if the main failed. For that reason, none of them even had reserves.
But Sara’s mind wasn’t on becoming a stain on the ground. She was enjoying the freedom of the moment. Not only was she free of earth, but her senses were free as well. The wind generated pressure on her body like a heavy blanket. The white noise of rushing air blocked out everything else. And the darkness above and below let her eyes relax. It was