It was so much like Vietnam, Clark thought, riding in a helicopter over solid treetops of green. But he was not in a Huey this time, and it was nearly thirty years since his first exposure to combat operations. He couldn’t remember being very afraid-tense, yes, but not really afraid-and that struck him as remarkable, looking back now. He was holding one of the suppressed MP-10s, and now, riding in this chopper to battle, it was as though his youth had returned-until he turned to see the other troops aboard and remarked on how young they all looked, then reminded himself that they were, in the main, over thirty years of age, and that for them to look young meant that he had to be old. He put that unhappy thought aside and looked out the door past Sergeant Nance and his machine gun. The sky was lightening up now, too much light for them to use their night-vision goggles, but not enough to see very well. He wondered what the weather would be like here. They were right on the equator, and that was jungle down there, and it would be hot and damp, and down there under the trees would be snakes, insects, and the other creatures for whom this most inhospitable of places was indeed home-and they were welcome to it, John told them without words, out the door of the Night Hawk.
“How we doing, Malloy?” John asked over the intercom.
“Should have it in sight any second-there, see the lights dead ahead!”
“Got it.” Clark waved for the troops in the back to get ready. “Proceed as planned, Colonel Malloy.”
“Roger that, Six.” He held course and speed, on a heading of two-nine-six, seven hundred feet AGL-above ground level-and a speed of a hundred twenty knots. The lights in the distance seemed hugely out of place, but lights they were, just where the navigation system and the satellite photos said they would be. Soon the point source broke up into separate distinct sources.
“Okay, Gearing,” Clark was saying in the back. “We’re letting you go back to talk to your boss.”
“Oh?” the prisoner asked through the black cloth bag over his head.”Yes,” John confirmed. “You’re delivering a message. If he surrenders to us, nobody gets hurt. If he doesn’t, things’ll get nasty. His only option is unconditional surrender. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah.” The head nodded inside the black bag.
The Night Hawk’s nose came up just as it approached the west end of the runway that some construction crew had carved into the jungle. Malloy made a fast landing, without allowing his wheels to touch the ground-standard procedure, lest there be mines there. Gearing was pushed out the door, and immediately the helicopter lifted back off, reversing course to the runway’s east end.
Gearing pulled the bag from his head and oriented himself, spotted the lights for Project Alternate, a facility he knew about but had never visited, and headed there without looking back.
At the east end, the Night Hawk again came in to hover a foot or so off the ground. The Rainbow troops leaped out, and the helicopter immediately climbed up for the return trip to Manaus, which would be made into the rising sun. Malloy and Harrison put on their sunglasses and held course, keeping a close watch on their fuel state. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment maintained its helos pretty well, the Marine thought, flexing his gloved hands on the controls. Just like the Air Force pukes in England.
Noonan was the first to get set up. All the troops ran immediately into the thick cover a scant hundred yards from the thick concrete pavement of the runway and headed west, wondering if Gearing had noted their separate arrival here. It took fully half an hour for them to make their way over a distance that, had they run it, would have taken scarcely ten minutes. For all that, Clark thought it was good time-and now he remembered the creepy feeling that came from being in the jungle, where the very air seemed alive with things hoping to suck one’s blood and give you whatever diseases would take your life as slowly and painfully as possible. How the hell had he endured the nineteen months he’d spent in Vietnam? Ten minutes here and he was ready to leave. Around him, massive hardwood trees reached two or three hundred feet to the sky to form the top canopy of this fetid place, with secondary trees reaching about a third that height, and yet another that stopped at fifty or so, with bushes and other plants at his feet. He could hear the sound of’ movement–whether his own people or animals he couldn’t be sure, though he knew that this environment supported all manner of life, most of it unfriendly to humans. His people spread out to the north, most of them plucking branches to tuck under the elastic bands that ran around their Kevlar helmets, the better to break up the outline of their unnatural shapes and improve their concealment.
The front door of the building was unlocked, Gearing found, amazed that this should be so. He walked into what appeared to be a residential building, entered an elevator, punched the topmost button and arrived on the fourth floor. Once there, it was just a matter of opening one of the double doors on the corridor and flipping on a light in what had to be the master suite. The bedroom doors were open, and he walked that way.
John Brightling’s eyes reported the sudden blaze of light from the sitting room. He opened them and saw-
“What the hell are you doing here, Wil?”
“They brought me down, John.”
“Who brought you down?”
“The people who captured me in Sydney,” Gearing explained.
“What?” It was a little much for so early in the morning. Brightling stood and put on the robe next to the bed.
“John, what is it?” Carol asked from her side of the bed.
“Nothing, honey, just relax.” John went to the sitting room, pulling the doors closed as he did so.
“What the fuck is going on, Wil?”
“They’re here, John.”
“Who’s here?”
“The counterterror people, the ones who went to Australia, the ones who arrested me. They’re here, John!” Gearing told him, looking around the room, thoroughly disoriented by all the traveling he’d done and not sure of much of anything at the moment.
“Here? Where? In the building?”
“No.” Gearing shook his head. “They dropped me off by helicopter. Their boss is a guy named Clark. He said to tell you that you have to surrender-unconditional surrender, John.”
“Or else what?” Brightling demanded.
“Or else they’re going to come in and get us!”
“Really?” This was no way to be awakened. Brightling had spent two hundred million dollars to build this place – labor costs were low in Brazil – and he considered Project Alternate a fortress, and more than that, a fortress that would have taken months to locate. Armed men – here, right now – demanding his surrender? What was this?
Okay, he thought. First he called Bill Henriksen’s room and told him to come upstairs. Next he lit up his computer. There was no e-mail telling him that anyone had spoken with his flight crews. So, nobody had told anyone where they were. So, how the hell had anyone found out? And who the hell was here? And what the hell did they want? Sending someone he knew in to demand their surrender seemed like something from a movie.
“What is it, John?” Henriksen asked. Then he looked at the other man in the room: “Wil, how did you get here?”
Brightling held up his hand for silence, trying to think while Gearing and Henriksen exchanged information. He switched off the room lights, looked out the large windows for signs of activity, and saw nothing at all.
“How many?” Bill was asking.
“Ten or fifteen soldiers,” Gearing replied. “Are you going to do what they-are you going to surrender to them?” the former colonel asked.
“Hell, no!” John Brightling snarled. “Bill, what they’re doing, is it legal?”
“No, not really. I don’t think it is, anyway.”
“Okay, let’s get our people up and armed.”
“Right,” the security chief said dubiously. He left the room for the main lobby, whose desk controlled the public address system in the complex.
“Oh, baby, talk to me,” Noonan said. The newest version of the DKL people-finding system was up and running now. He’d spotted two of the receiver units about three hundred yards apart. Each had a transmitter that reported to a receiving unit that was in turn wired to his laptop computer.
The DKL system tracked the electromagnetic field generated by the beating of the human heart. This was, it had been discovered, a unique signal. The initial items sold by the company had merely indicated the direction of the signals they received, but the new ones had been improved with parabolic antennas to increase their effective range now to fifteen hundred meters, and, by triangulation. to give fairly exact positions-accurate to from two to four meters. Clark was looking down at the computer screen. It showed blips indicating people evenly spaced in their rooms in the headquarters/residential building.