Tom Clancy - Locked On

Clark smiled. “Long underwear, then.”

Sherman smiled back. “Most definitely. Can I bring you a cup of coffee?”

“That would be great.”

She turned for the galley, and Clark recognized for the first time how worried she was about what they were about to do.

Fifteen minutes later, Captain Helen Reid came over the cabin intercom. “We are at nine thousand feet. Beginning depressurization now.”

Almost immediately Clark could feel pain in his ears and sinus cavity as the cabin depressurized. Clark had already dressed, but Adara Sherman put on her heavy double-breasted wool coat while sitting on the sofa next to him. She was careful to button all the buttons and to cinch the waist belt, and then secure it with a double knot. It was a fashionable coat by DKNY, but it looked a bit odd lashed down on her body like this.

While she slipped her hands into her gloves she asked, “How long since you’ve jumped out of a plane, Mr. Clark?”

“I’ve been jumping out of planes since before you were born.”

“How long have you been avoiding answering difficult questions?”

Clark laughed. “About as long as I’ve been jumping. I’ll admit it. I haven’t done this in some time. I suppose it’s like falling off a log.”

Worry lines rimmed Sherman’s eyes behind her glasses. “It’s like falling off a log that is traveling at one hundred twenty miles an hour, seven thousand feet above the ground.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Would you like to go over the procedure again?”

“No. I’ve got it. I appreciate your attention to detail.”

“How is the arm?”

“It’s not on my top-ten list of problems, so I guess it’s fine.”

“Good luck, sir. I speak for the crew when I say we hope you will call us anytime you need us.”

“Thank you, Miss Sherman, but I can’t expose anyone else to what I have to do. I hope to see you again when this is over, but I won’t be using the plane during my operation.”

“I understand.”

Captain Reid came over the PA. “Five minutes, Mr. Clark.”

John stood with difficulty. Strapped to his chest was a small canvas bag. It carried a wallet with cash, a money belt, two false sets of documents, a phone with a charger, a suppressed.45-caliber SIG pistol, four magazines of hollow-point ammunition, and a utility knife.

And strapped to his back was an MC-4 Ram Air parachute system.

First Officer Chester “Country” Hicks stepped out of the cockpit, shook John’s hand, and together Hicks, Clark, and Adara moved to the rear of the cabin. There, Sherman raised the small internal baggage door, creating cabin access to the baggage compartment. Sherman and Hicks buckled themselves into wide canvas straps attached to the cabin chairs and then they crawled, one at a time, into the tiny baggage hold. They had moved all the luggage into the cabin and lashed it to chairs earlier in the flight, so they had enough room to maneuroom to ver while on their knees.

Adara moved to the right side of the external baggage door, Hicks took the left side. Clark remained in the cabin of the aircraft, as the space was tight enough with two bodies in the cargo hold. He just dropped to his knees and waited.

A minute later, First Officer Hicks glanced at his watch. He nodded to Sherman, and then the two of them pulled on the external baggage door from the inside. The hatch itself was only thirty-six by thirty-eight inches, but it was very difficult to open. The external door was flush with the fuselage, just below the left engine, and the airflow over the skin of the aircraft created a vacuum suction that the two crew members in the cargo compartment had to defeat with brute force. Finally they got the door pulled in, a squeal as cold night wind rushed into the compartment. Once the door was inside, they slid it up like a tiny garage door, and this opened the thirty-six-by-thirty-eight-inch port to the outside.

The port-side jet engine was just feet away, and this created a raging noise that they had to scream over to be heard.

Captain Reid had dropped them below the cloud cover as they approached their destination airport, Tegel in Berlin. The earth below was black, with only a sprinkling of lights here and there. The hamlet of Kremmen, northwest of Berlin, would be the closest concentration of development, but Clark and Reid had chosen a drop zone west of there, because it contained a large number of flat open fields rimmed by a forest that would be virtually empty on an early Thursday morning.

Clark kept his eyes on Hicks in the luggage compartment in front of him. When the first officer looked up from his watch and pointed to Clark, John began counting backward from twenty. “Twenty, one thousand. Nineteen, one thousand. Eighteen, one thousand…”

He turned around, got on his hands and knees, and backed into the baggage hold. At “Ten, one thousand,” he could feel Adara and Chester’s hands holding the straps of his parachute rig, and he could tell the toes of his boots were just outside the aircraft. Captain Reid would have slowed to one hundred twenty knots or so, but still the jet noise and the pressure of the wind on his legs were intense.

At “Five, one thousand”—Clark had to shout it so the others could hear — Hicks let go of Clark’s harness, and Sherman did the same, but she followed it with a quick squeeze on his shoulder.

At “Three, one thousand” he backed farther out into the dark, cold wind. It was tough doing this backward, but headfirst would have been dangerous, and feet-first, scooting out on his butt or back, would have increased the chances that his chute rig would catch on something inside the aircraft.

“One, one thousand. Go!” Clark pushed his body out of the aircraft; immediately he felt his right side slam against the threshold of the external baggage door, bruising his ribs. But he fell away and free of the Gulfstream as it raced off in the night toward the lights of Berlin in the distance, leaving behind John Clark as he turned end over end, spinning downward toward fields of winter wheat some seven thousand feet below.

The oval table in the conference room on the ninth floor of Hendley Associates was ringed with stern-faced men that Thursday morning. Sam Driscoll’s and John Clark’s seats were empty, but Domingo, Dominic, and Jack faced Gerry Hendley and Sam Granger. Rick Bell, Campus chief of analysis, begged off the meeting because he weas focusing his energies on analyzing CIA and FBI traffic regarding the Clark investigation.

Gerry assented to Bell’s request, as it was in everyone’s best interest that they got some sort of heads-up in the event black trucks full of FBI tactical officers were on their way to the front door of their building.

For the past two days, Hendley Associates had been open for business, but the operators and much of the intelligence-analysis staff had been instructed to stay home. Instead the company functioned as a perfectly aboveboard trading and arbitrage shop, in case any of the intelligence the government was using in its sealed indictment on Clark also included information tipping off investigators about the real reasons behind Hendley Associates.

When no one came knocking on Tuesday or on Wednesday, Hendley, Bell, and Granger made the decision to bring their men in to work on Thursday. They had a very active and important investigation under way, with Sam Driscoll already out in the field, and plans to send the other operatives to Dubai to set up covert surveillance on Rehan’s property there.

The first question of the morning was whether or not they could continue on with their investigation, or if they wanted to just pull up stakes, lie low for a while, and somehow try to support Clark.