Robert Doherty - Section 8

"That was fucked," Tai said.

Vaughn turned his head and looked at her in the moonlight. She was lying next to him, still breathing hard from the long swim to shore. In her hand she had the GPS, which she'd just pulled out of a waterproof bag in her rucksack.

"We're alive," Vaughn noted.

Tai looked up from the GPS screen at the sky.

"It will be dawn soon. We're over ten kilometers from where we're supposed to be."

She pointed.

"Hono Mountain is there."

Vaughn could see a large dark mass in the moonlight towering up into the sky.

"We're way behind schedule," Tai added.

"Is that what bothers you?" Vaughn asked.

"Hell, no," she said angrily.

"Three malfunctions in a row. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit."

They'd hit the water hard, then had to scramble out from underneath the reserve canopy that draped over them. Unspoken between them was the fact that they hadn't worn life vests. They'd been so confident they could make the flight to the island, it was never brought up. For Vaughn, that mistake brought echoes of the designator battery. What saved them was that they followed standing operating procedure and waterproofed the contents of their rucksacks before the jump, which served as flotation devices in the pinch. They'd cut away from the reserve, Vaughn got rid of the harness, and then they tied themselves together using a short length of rope, put their elbows on their floating rucks, and started swimming toward the silhouette of Jolo island. It took them almost an hour to make it.

Tai had explained all the failures to him. Vaughn had to agree with her succinct assessment of what happened to her, but he wanted to wait and let her lay out the obvious.

"Someone was trying to kill me," she finally said.

"You think?"

That earned him a slight smile that momentarily wiped away the tension and anger on Tai's face. Vaughn checked his watch.

"We're overdue on the initial entry report."

He sat up, grabbed his rucksack, and began to open it to get to the satellite radio inside.

Tai put out a hand and stopped him.

"What?" Vaughn asked.

"Someone was trying to kill me," she repeated.

"I know, and – " Vaughn stopped and slowly nodded.

"I see."

He let go of the ruck.

"Why? And who?"

"I don't know."

"The Abu Sayef?"

"I think getting to my chute and disabling it would have been a little hard for them to do."

"Someone tried to kill you," Vaughn said.

"I already said that twice," Tai responded.

"Yes. So, you're dead."

Tai stared at him. Their eyes locked in the moonlight, and she slowly nodded and smiled.

"Very good."

Her smile was not of the pleasant variety.

General Slocum was none too pleased, and he was letting his staff know it. The initial entry report from the recon team was overdue. This raised a lot of questions, none of which anyone knew the answer to. Had the team been compromised, which meant that the entire mission was compromised? Was it equipment failure? Had both jumpers died on infiltration? Or were they too severely injured to make commo?

From behind the one-way glass in the observation room, Royce watched the general lash questions at his staff, none of which could be answered by any of them. It was a fruitless exercise, but one Royce had seen far too many times in his dealings with the military. Von Clausewitz, the great Prussian general, who many military men liked to quote, had once said, "In war, everything is simple, but even the simple is difficult." Royce always remembered that saying when he dealt with the military.

There was another element that began to enter into the discourse in the operations room: someone dared ask the question whether this was simply a twist thrown into the simulation to see how they reacted. That earned the speaker an even fiercer tongue-lashing by Slocum, who got them back on track by pretending this was a real exercise.

For Royce, there was another issue bothering him. One that had nothing to do with the recon team or even the mission. He'd used one of his connections to the National Security Agency to check on the progress of the jet David was on. The NSA was wired into Space Command out in Cheyenne Mountain, which controlled a ring of satellites that tracked every single object that flew.

The reports had been fine up until a little while ago. Then the jet disappeared.

At first Royce had assumed that it landed on some island. But when he checked the last confirmed satellite spotting, projected out speed and time, and drew a circle, all he was left with was ocean. There was no place it could have landed.

It had vanished.

Royce did not believe in the Bermuda Triangle, or the Devil's Sea, the Pacific's version of that famed locale. Planes didn't vanish. They crashed, they blew up, or they landed somewhere. Instinctively, he knew that David – and everyone else on board that plane – was dead. The Organization had retired them. Permanently.

He shook his head. It wasn't his instincts, it was reality. He'd sensed David's fatalism the last time they met. And he had to assume that David had not made the decision to retire, despite what he'd told him. He'd been forced out.

Royce held his emotions at bay and considered that. True, David was old. But he was still an effective agent. A man with loads of experience. So why "retire" him?

There was only one reason Royce could come up with: David had fucked up.

And David had been working this op.

Royce's jaw clenched. Tai. The bitch. She – His thought abruptly ended as a red light flickered in the operations center. An incoming message. It began to scroll across the screen in front of the room. The overdue initial entry report:

ON JOLO. WATER LANDING. TAI DEAD. MALFUNCTION. BODY GONE. WILL CONTINUE WITH MISSION. VAUGHN

The muscle on the side of Royce's face relaxed. Payback was a motherfucker.

"One down, five to go," the team leader announced.

"But that only leaves five to do the job," the black man noted.

"They are supposed to do the job, aren't they?"

"Oh fuck off."

It was a worthless piece of ground if taken by itself. But as realtors always say: location, location, and location. In this case the key to the location was isolation. Many believed Johnston Atoll was the most isolated reef in the world. It is eight hundred kilometers southwest of Hawaii – the nearest island – and fifteen hundred kilometers north and east of North Line Island and Phoenix Island, respectively.

The United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii annexed Johnston Atoll in 1858. The United States mined the guano deposits until the late 1880s. When they ran out, it was designated a wildlife refuge, in 1926. Then the Navy saw the strategic position of the place and took over in 1934.

The atoll consists of four coral islands: Johnston Island, Sand Island, North Island, and East Island. The largest of the four, at 625 acres, is Johnston Island, and the only one that could support an air strip. It was the place where the Navy settled in, and the island has continued to be the center of what little human community there is. At present, there were 960 civilian and 250 military personnel stationed on the island. They were not there on vacation.

The United States government designated the atoll a national wildlife refuge jointly administered by the

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Defense: two distinct, incompatible organizations. As with any jointly administered operation in the U.S. government, when DOD was on one end, things tended to slide down the table to it.

The major facility on the atoll was operated and maintained by the Field Command, Defense Special Weapons Agency, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Its mission made perfect sense for the remote location, and as usual for the military, was given an acronym: JACADS: Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System.