CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
David’s heart thudded so loudly he half expected the guards at the CIA facility to hear it and discover him and Jayce before their infiltration could begin.
He couldn’t recall ever being so nervous, not even when Lillian Martin was in his house pointing a gun at him and Faith.
When a loud whirring noise cut through the air, he flinched and nearly cried out.
The thick leather padding of the motorcycle jacket he wore held in heat and he could feel sweat running down the middle of his back.
“It’s the drone,” Jayce said. “It’s okay.”
“That’s the drone?” David whispered. He looked at the drone, an alien-looking contraption with five rotors and a pill shaped body with odd bulges from the makeshift EMP device Jayce had constructed out of six-volt batteries and copper wire. “I thought it was supposed to be quiet.”
“Yeah, well, it’ll have to do. I’ll just fly it in a wide loop around the facility so they only hear it when it’s coming from the front.”
The plan was simple. Normally, simple was good. It meant fewer things to go wrong. In this case, however, David feared that the plan’s simplicity left a huge margin for error that could be easily exploited. And they had no other way in. If this didn’t work, they were screwed.
The plan was for Jayce to fly the drone with its makeshift electrical bomb into the fence near the front gate.
The resulting impact would short out the electric fence and deactivate the gate.
It would open, and the guards would immediately rush to the area, believing the place to be under attack.
Ideally, when they discovered it was a drone, they would believe that their attackers were somewhere in the woods beyond and focus on the exterior defense of the facility.
Meanwhile, Jayce and David would sneak inside on the opposite end of the property.
It wasn’t so much a good plan as the only one available to them.
They had weapons, but if they had to use those weapons, it meant a lot of things had gone wrong, and they were probably about to die.
Besides, neither of them wanted to kill people, even if those people were evil like the testers of the 93rd Testing Brigade.
David thought of the soldier Michael had killed protecting him, and his stomach lurched. For the thousandth time, he wished he could have left this alone and not obsessed over things he couldn’t change.
What if it was Turk?
True, but that did little to soften his nausea. If they died in this attempt, then he would have accomplished nothing, and he would never see Faith or Turk again.
But he had to try. As afraid as he was, he would see this through.
“Okay,” Jayce said. “Wait for my signal. We’re going to give it a few seconds after the pop before we make for the fence. If we jump too early, they’ll catch us.”
David nodded.
The whine of the drone’s motors intensified, and the small craft rose into the air and accelerated north.
David focused on his breathing: four seconds in, four seconds hold, eight seconds out.
Wind rustled through the leaves, caressing his face with a gentle but unpleasant chill.
He suppressed a shiver, irrationally certain that the movement would immediately draw attention to them.
The whine of the drone softened, then disappeared.
Jayce manipulated the controls, turning it west, parallel to the gate.
David glanced at the small screen on the drone’s controller.
It returned a night-vision image of the ground, gray prairie grasses shimmering in the starlight.
Once, a small creature peered up through those grasses, its eyes two pinpricks of white.
As the drone approached, it turned and fled with a flicker of a short, fluffy tail. Probably a rabbit.
Jayce manipulated the joystick again, and the facility loomed ahead, the same negative-image gray as the rest of the screen but immense and imposing, like an ancient walled city.
David stiffened when the outlines of the four guards at the gate came into view.
One of them pointed up at the drone, and another lifted his rifle.
“Shit,” Jayce called, dropping the drone to just above ground level.
Streaks of fire shot over it, and Jayce weaved through the grass, trying to evade the guards.
Finally, the checkerboard pattern of the electrified chainlink fence appeared.
Jayce pressed a button, and a signal triggered a small spark.
That spark jumped in between the terminals of the three six-volt batteries, and a much larger spark arced to the fence.
The screen erupted in white just as a flash of lightning accompanied by a sharp, low-toned buzz cut across the air.
Jayce pumped his fist softly and tossed the useless joystick to the ground. He grinned at David. “Showtime.”
A final brilliant flash of fear coursed through David’s body. Then it vanished. There was no getting out of it now. He had made his choice.
“Night vision,” Jayce reminded him.
He dropped his goggles and looked ahead to see guards rushing toward the gate. A few were shouting and looking around uncertainly. The rest were looking intently at the night, certain that something was coming from the same direction the drone had come from.
“Now,” Jayce said.
The two of them rushed toward the facility at a dead run.
Jayce moved carefully, his feet somehow managing to find landing spots that made no noise.
David stumbled forward like a blundering bison, snapping branches, crunching tumbleweeds, and kicking up more dust than a pissed-off elephant.
He sincerely hoped the guards were deaf, because he couldn’t imagine how on Earth they didn’t hear this racket.
Closer to the facility, the soil grew sparser, and the noise dissipated. He breathed a sigh of relief, then another when pissed-off rifle-wielding men and women didn’t descend on them in force.
Jayce jumped onto the fence and climbed quickly. David followed, watching nervously as Jayce carefully maneuvered around the razor wire. For an analyst, the man was impossibly athletic. Maybe all CIA agents received training.
David wasn’t nearly so graceful. The fence shook and rattled as he climbed, and once again, he was certain he was announcing their presence to the whole facility.
He gritted his teeth and forced himself to focus on the climb.
Getting past the razor wire was going to be a challenge.
Up close, the gleaming shards of metal were longer and sharper than they seemed from a distance.
He wasn’t sure his motorcycle jacket would stop the prongs.
No choice. He was here. Too late to turn back.
He reached the top and paused. Okay, he was here. Too late to turn back. How the hell did he move forward, though?
“Vault it,” Jayce hissed. “Vault it, come on!”
Voices carried to David. He glanced over his right shoulder and saw a pair of guards sharing a look as they talked about the attack on the gate.
He couldn’t tell their facial expressions from this distance with night vision, but if they looked a little bit more this way, they’d see David balancing on the fence trying to figure out how to “vault” it.
“Dude, we’ve gotta go,” Jayce said. “Just jump it.”
Do I vault it or do I jump it? David thought drily. Make up your mind.
He took a deep breath, then pulled himself up, trying to hold the fence with his hands while bringing his feet to the top.
He nearly made it, but his balance tipped backwards near the top.
He overcompensated, throwing himself forward.
He fell over the razor wire, and a dozen of the prongs caught in his thick leather jacket and padded pants.
Ripping sounds stung his ears while one of the prongs found skin underneath his left leg and stung his flesh.
He hung upside down for a moment before the prongs tore away, and he fell heavily to the ground.
Pain exploded in his back, and he gasped, fearing for a moment that he’d broken something.
Jayce helped him to his feet and pulled him along, and he realized with relief that he’d only bruised himself from the fall.
That would feel like crap in the morning, and the wetness he felt in his left leg told him the razor wire had sliced him pretty good, but he could still move.
“Have you never climbed a fence before?” Jayce whispered as they sprinted for the building.
David just glared at Jayce until he shrugged and looked away.
They reached a back door, and Jayce crouched next to it and reached into his pocket for a lockpicking kit.
David crouched behind him, and the next instant, the door flew open, and someone stomped out.
David’s breath caught in his throat as he recognized Colonel Randall Chastain, the leader of the 93rd.
He and Jayce jerked back into the shadows as the colonel stormed toward the gate, brow furrowed.
“What the hell is going on?” Chastain called to the guards. “What happened?”
Had Chastain not been so focused on the gate, he would have seen them, shadows or no shadows. They had just gotten very, very lucky. David couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if they were unlucky.
The door started to swing closed. Jayce reached out and caught it before it closed all the way. He peered into the doorway, then waved for David to follow.
David did, and a searing white light burned his eyes. He gasped and tore the night vision goggles off, pressing his palms to his eyelids and baring his teeth in a silent snarl of pain.
“Yeah, you’re supposed to turn night vision off when you enter a lit building. You didn’t… Sorry.”
David took deep breaths and blinked until his vision stopped flashing red and white. “It’s safe to assume I don’t know anything about what we’re doing,” he whispered to Jayce.