Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

“Why don’t you just sit this one out?” Dirk added.

“You know I would,” Kurt said, “but something is still bothering me. Our target is not acting like a mercenary. More like it’s his party. I’m not sure what it all means, but I swear there’s more to this than we know.”

He glanced over at Joe. “On top of that, Mr. Zavala says there’s a lot about this tanker that doesn’t add up. For one thing, she’s forty feet wider than most tankers her length, which gives her a kind of stubby appearance even though she’s twelve hundred feet long. She also has odd bulges protruding near the bow underneath the forward anchors, and a raised section amidships. We have no idea what any of it is for, but neither one of us likes it. If it’s all the same with you, I’d just as soon get a closer look at her.”

“You’ve earned the right to make this call,” Pitt said. “Just be sure you’re making it for the right reason.”

“I’m not trying to be a hero,” Kurt said. “If there’s nothing interesting down there, I’ll go over the side, pop the cork on my survival raft, and wait for you to send a blonde, brunette, and a redhead to pick me up. But on the odd chance Joe and I are right, better we find out now rather than later.”

Pitt was quiet. “Okay,” he said finally. “Don’t get yourself blown up before I can yell at you for all these bills that are coming in.”

Kurt laughed. “I’ll try not to.”

With that, Pitt signed off. Kurt gazed ahead at the orange ball of the sun just dipping below the horizon. The truth lay eight hundred miles ahead, moving slowly through the dark of night.

50

TWO HOURS LATER, still on the old jet, Kurt and Joe had moved from the cockpit back into main section of the fuselage. They now stood in a cavern of metal, surrounded by equipment, small containers, and tie-down straps.

Despite a pressure suit, gloves, boots, and fighter pilot — style helmets with noise-canceling headphones and forced oxygen, Kurt could feel the bite of the frigid cold at thirty-five thousand feet. He could feel every shudder of the aircraft and hear nothing but the piercing whine of the jet’s narrow seventies-era engines.

Such were the accommodations in the cargo bay of a Russian transport.

Standing beside him, in a parka with fur lining around the face and a headset and oxygen mask of his own, Joe Zavala appeared to be saying something, but Kurt couldn’t make out the words.

“I didn’t copy,” Kurt shouted.

Joe pressed his oxygen mask and its microphone tighter on his face and repeated his thought. “I said, you must be crazy,” he shouted back.

Kurt didn’t respond. He was beginning to think Joe might be right. Holding firmly to a strap that dangled from the side of the airframe like a man on a crowded subway, Kurt turned toward the aircraft’s tail. A crack began appearing near the rear as the ramp in the tail opened.

As the ramp went down, the old jet shook worse than ever, and the wind swirled through the cargo bay, buffeting him and Joe and threatening to knock them over.

The aircraft had been depressurized thirty minutes before, so there was no rush of escaping atmosphere, but the temperature instantly dropped from just above freezing to fifteen below, and the howling of the jet’s engines jumped four notches at the very least.

Kurt stared out the yawing opening into the waiting blackness of the night sky. He was sucking oxygen off a tank and wearing a specially designed parachute. And while he’d made over two hundred jumps in his lifetime, including twenty HALOs (High Altitude — Low Opening), what he was about to try was something he’d never done before, something Joe had been continuously advising him to rethink.

So far, he’d laughed off Joe’s pessimism, calling him a “mother hen,” but now, staring out the back of the jet, Kurt wasn’t so sure.

Letting go of the strap, he stepped cautiously toward an object near the open tail ramp. It looked like a cross between an Olympic bobsled and a “photon torpedo” from the Star Trek series. The designers called it a Single Occupant Tactical Range Insertion Unit. The men who’d tested it out called it the LX, or Lunatic Express.

It worked like a one-man glider. Dropped from seven miles in the sky with a glide ratio of twenty to one, the Lunatic Express could transport its occupant on a one-way trip across a hundred forty miles and do it without a sound or a heat trail or a radar signature, since the whole thing was actually made of specialized plastic and covered with a radar-absorbing layer that looked and felt like soft tire rubber to Kurt.

To fly it, the occupant climbed in, lay down face-first, and grabbed a pair of handles that did not seem too far removed from the grips of an old ten-speed bicycle. He then jammed his feet into what felt like ski bindings.

The most-forward section of the device was a clear Plexiglas windshield with a basic heads-up display projected on it. It gave him speed, altitude, heading, glide ratio, and rate of descent. It also offered a visual glide-slope indicator designed to help the pilot maintain the correct angle and reach whatever destination had been targeted. In this case, that meant the tanker Onyx, seventy-five miles away.

Because of her odd position in the ocean, the Onyx had proved hard to get to. Not only was she far away from the closest shipping lane, there were no air routes anywhere close to her. To fly overhead, even at thirty-five thousand feet, would have been instantly suspicious, but there was a heavily traveled air route seventy-five miles to the south, and on radar the IL-76 would appear as just another passenger jet on the airborne highway. Kurt couldn’t imagine it being worth a second look.

And even if they were watching, no system Kurt knew of would pick up the glider and its single occupant.

It was a simple setup in theory. In the simulator Kurt had felt like he was playing a video game. Somehow the real thing was slightly more intimidating.

“Come on,” he said to Joe. “Get me into this thing before I chicken out.”

Joe moved up to the glider. “Do you have any idea how many things could go wrong with your plan?”

“No,” Kurt said. “And I don’t want you to tell me.”