Diego glanced at his brother. As always, he wasn’t comfortable with having Rubin accompany them on such a dangerous mission. Just the jump alone could be disastrous. A high-altitude jump in the dark into a dense rainforest was extremely dicey.
He knew Rubin was uncomfortable with the others protecting him. Before, Diego hadn’t cared that his brother didn’t like it. He had encouraged those on the team to protect Rubin. Now, he had a taste of his own medicine. He was the man who set up to guard the backs of his team. He should have jumped first and set the specialty night strobe for the others. The moment he indicated he would make the HAHO jump first, Joe, Ezekiel and Rubin simultaneously and adamantly said no.
Joe gave him his cold, piercing stare when he would have protested the decision. There had been instant silence among the team members seated around the oval table where they were planning the mission. He had been with those men for several years, Mordichai and Malichai even longer. Now they were looking at him with a mixture of alarm and speculation. Diego hadn’t liked it at all. He’d always managed to fade into the background while remaining in plain sight. He knew that was going to be impossible.Joe, Rubin and Ezekiel hadn’t told the others he was capable of performing psychic surgery, but they weren’t going to allow him to put himself in harm’s way when someone else could assume that role.
He’d ventured a quiet argument that Bridget was going to be his sister-in-law and that none of them would be there if it weren’t for his decisions, but Joe kept his stone face and Ezekiel leveled his icy gaze at him. That only brought more undue attention. He was grateful his brother didn’t rub it in his face that he was now in the same boat with him. Most of his team members had no idea why Joe had nixed the obvious choice to protect them, but they didn’t weigh in on the decision.
“One minute…thirty seconds. First jumper in the door,” Joe said.
Mordichai stood at the door with Diego directly behind him. That strange alarm he had was building and building.
“Go!”
Mordichai dove before Diego had a chance to assess the blaring alarm. It was overwhelming.
Something’s wrong, Joe. I have to follow him right now. I need clearance for the jump.
Diego didn’t look at Joe; instead, he stepped up to the door and stared out into the night. It was dark, just a sliver of a moon, so small there might as well not have been a moon. The wind whipped at him, clawing at him in an attempt to drag him from the plane. The engines roared. Adrenaline rushed through his veins. Usually, on a jump like this one, fear was familiar, but now that fear was for Mordichai, not himself.
You certain?
Absolutely, no time to waste.The feeling was growing in strength, and it was all he could do not to hurl himself out into the night after the man he considered a brother.
The temperature at this elevation was around minus fifteen. The vicious cold snapped and bit, and the wind stung every exposed part of his skin. He could smell the jet fuel as the plane traveled close to a hundred and fifty knots.
Joe double-checked his gear. Diego took a deep breath, grateful his friend knew him so well and didn’t question that feeling that had saved them so many times.
“Go.”
At the command, Diego dove without hesitation. The wind hit hard, jerking and tugging, pulling at him. He fought to control two hundred pounds of gear. The rucksack hung between his legs was a hindrance to his movement. Then the roar of the engines ceased and he was free-falling. In that moment, as he soared alone through the dark sky, the feeling was euphoric. Exhilarating. He loved the jump. The sky was a place of absolute peace.
Diego pulled his chute abruptly, putting on the brakes. His speed went from one hundred and twenty miles an hour to about twenty. The force jerked his body hard. The wind rushed by. His helmet muffled all sound, leaving him soaring in a peaceful, dreamlike world. In those moments, there was freedom. Euphoria. Contentment. He dropped through a dark world in silence, basking in the cocoon of peace.
Still, in the back of his mind, he was aware he was suspended by a sheet of silk in a commercial air traffic space. There was always the possibility of splattering like a squashed bug on a passing jet. That knowledge didn’t deter his happiness when flying in and out of the clouds as the dark enfolded him.
Fog surrounded him just as he caught sight of the ground rushing at him with alarming speed. The jungle spread out in front of him, a macabre grayish-green sea. There was no strobe to guide him down, and jumping without a clear destination was always dangerous. He’d followed Mordichai quickly, and perhaps his fellowGhostWalker hadn’t had time to set up the strobe, but the urgency in his gut told Diego something else had stopped him.
The trees and grass were various shades of green, even with the gray veil of fog, allowing him to judge where he needed to set down. He flared his chute thirty feet out, slowing down. When he landed, there was the familiar light jolt, and without hesitation he reeled his chute in fast. The others would be on their way down. His first course of action was to find Mordichai and determine what the problem was—because there was one. The sense of urgency was overwhelming.
Diego blocked out everything but the night itself, allowing the animal in him to move to the forefront. He found it somewhat ironic that he’d spent years learning to suppress what was now his natural nature, but in times of an emergency, when he was needed to find his brethren, he used every bit of his energy to bring forth every animal trait that could benefit him.
At once, he could see clearly into the foggy interior of the rainforest. The wind brought him scents and sounds of small rodents and reptiles scurrying in the debris on the forest floor. Immediately, he pinpointed Mordichai’s location. Near him were two other individuals murmuring to each other as they warmed themselves on a small heat device. Mordichai was located in the tree above them and he wasn’t moving.
Coming to you.He sent the telepathic call to his brother. Ezekiel had taken Rubin and Diego in and raised them along with his younger brothers, Malichai and Mordichai. Long ago, they’d established telepathic communication.
There was no answer. Nothing at all. The silence ratcheted up Diego’s sense of alarm and urgency tenfold. He knew Mordichai was alive, but there was no response, not even a stirring in his mind.
He moved through the trees in silence, utilizing the cat in him, moving with fluid stealth, the hairs on his body acting like radar,allowing him to recognize what was around him and how close it was. He smelled the enemy before he came up on them. He had to remove them before the rest of his team came looking for Mordichai.
By now all the men in his unit would have made the jump, even without the night strobe to guide them that only the GhostWalkers would have been able to see. If these men were roving guards for Whitney’s compound, they couldn’t be allowed to radio to warn those inside they were coming.
He caught Mordichai’s scent. The cat in him snarled, lifting lips, exposing teeth. The image was strong in his mind as he took to the arboreal highway, leaping into the trees and landing softly on a branch. He began to run. It was suddenly more imperative to get to Mordichai than to take out the two guards.
Beneath him, as he flashed by, he noted the men warming drinks over the small device they were using for heat. They were both big men with a lot of bulky muscles, particularly around their necks and shoulders, making their necks appear wide but very short. That raised an immediate alarm. He identified them as supersoldiers, men who had failed the psych evaluations but whom Whitney had accepted into his program.
Those men wanted to be souped up and gladly “died” on some mission in order to become what they considered superior to every other soldier. Sadly, they didn’t realize their lives would be very short. Whitney treated the men as disposable because they didn’t meet his strict regulations. He needed a private army, and creating them allowed him to continue with his experiments.
Nearly all of Whitney’s supersoldiers had far too much bulk, their bodies distorted. As they continued mutating, in quite a few cases, so did their bodies. Whatever Whitney was trying for lately, most of the time it didn’t work for long. That hadn’t deterred him from continuing with his experiments.
