The skids touched down, then sank into the sand as the pilot dropped the rpms of the rotors, the silence overpowering after the flight. The Ghost exited the helicopter and felt the slap of the wind, the cold biting through his clothes. He instructed the hostages to do the same, telling Omar to bring the pilot.
Omar led them to the northern end of the small island, then said, “We have to cross the river branch here.”
The Ghost looked at the tree line thirty feet away and said, “How deep is it?”
“Shouldn’t be over your thighs right here.”
“You go first, get on the far side with the pistol, and I’ll send them one by one.”
He’d watched them cross, and then went himself, the water leaving his teeth chattering in the cold. After they’d reconstituted on the far side, the Ghost said, “Where is this place? We’re going to get hypothermia out here.”
Omar said, “Follow me.”
He led them through the trees until he crossed a small dirt path, then followed it to a glade, the trees falling away to reveal an old logging cabin, the roof missing shingles and the windows broken out.
The Ghost hurried them inside, seeing two footlockers next to a fireplace. He lined up the hostages against a wall, now at three with only thepilot dressed for the weather, and said, “Tell me you stashed cold weather gear.”
“Yes.”
The Ghost removed his explosive device and set it next to the footlockers, saying, “Distribute some coats or blankets. I’m going to make a fire.”
Omar said, “We have no need for that. I’ll give you a coat, but they don’t need one. It’s time.”
The Ghost looked at him, knowing why he was so adamant that the hostages die, but he hadn’t explored the information Mr. Pink had given him. He said, “Give them something to keep warm. There is no need to add to the suffering before they die.”
After taming the cold with a change of clothes and a roaring blaze in the stone fireplace, the Ghost said, “Okay, now tell me about this final attack.”
Chapter 78
Aaron watched Veep and Jennifer pulling out parachutes from a secret panel behind the kitchen galley and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a bit extreme?”
I looked up from the video feed coming from the FLIR cameras embedded in the nose cone of the Rock Star Bird and said, “You got any better ideas? We’re most certainly not going to find a runway nearby.”
He looked out the window of the airframe, the snowcapped mountains dimly illuminated by the moon, saying, “I don’t see a drop zone either.”
I said, “That helicopter can’t land on the side of a mountain. Wherever it went, it might be big enough for us to jump into.”
He said, “How are you going to jump out of a Gulfstream? You can’t open the door.”
I flicked my head to Shoshana and said, “You want to tell him?”
She said, “Aaron, this is the same type of bird I jumped out of in Brazil, when we loaded a nuclear weapon on it, remember?”
I saw the memory clear in his brain, and he said, “Because I could jump, but couldn’t fly the plane.”
She said, “Yeah, I could fly the plane, but I didn’t know how to jump.” She turned to me and said, “I still haven’t learned to jump. That one time was lucky, over the ocean, and you went out with me.”
I said, “That’s okay, because someone’s got to stay in here and work the hatch.”
She said, “I’m not staying in the plane.”
Aaron said, “Yes, you are. You will jeopardize the mission by exiting. If you get injured, or God forbid, killed, it will cause mission failure.”
She said, “You can exit with me, like Pike did last time.”
I said, “Shoshana, we’re going to be jumping really low, like four thousand feet. You won’t have time to figure out how to get stable, and he’s not going to be able to get to you like I did at twelve-thousand feet.”
Aaron said, “No. You stay on the aircraft.”
