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.”
Aaron usually hung in the background whenever Shoshana was around, deferring to her, and it was the first time I’d seen him
forcefully tell her no. I thought she would explode, like she usually did with me, but she simply nodded. He was clearly in
charge of their team.
She looked at me and said, “Show me what to do.”
I thought, What? How come he didn’t get yelled at? Where did that put me in the pecking order? Instead, I threw her a bone, saying, “Hey, you’ll also be our only conduit to the shit show we just left behind.”
It had taken thirty minutes to convince the battalion of trigger-happy army guys and police that we weren’t the hostage takers,
first by communicating with them from the cockpit, then by opening the door and letting a bunch of armed police come storming
in, with all of us sitting in the seats with our hands in the air.
They’d stomped around a little bit, acting like they were seeing if we’d crammed the hostages in the toilet or suit jacket
closet, but mostly trying to figure out how they were going to explain the embarrassment of what had just happened. It turned
out that they had shut down the airport, and the A4 escort had landed, saying that the next plane in—which was a private charter
not unlike the Rock Star Bird—would be the hostages.
Easy mistake, if you forget that we had a different callsign and were a completely different type of aircraft. Even so, I’d
told them I had no idea what the hell they were talking about, that I was Grolier Recovery Services, and we’d never seen such
shoddy treatment. About that time they’d gotten word about the second hijacking of the day, with the theft of a helicopter
just across the channel.
They’d left the aircraft and I’d demanded to be allowed to take off and fly back to Buenos Aires. They were more than happy to let us go, figuring we’d be in front of television cameras immediately if we stayed in Ushuaia. Of course, I had no intention of returning to Buenos Aires.
As soon as we were airborne, I’d had Aaron and Shoshana start looking at a digital map for suitable spots to land that little
helicopter while Jennifer and Veep started prepping the jump gear. All we knew was that they’d taken off and flown east, towards
the Tierra del Fuego national forest, and from a quick look at the map, I figured they were headed to Chile, as that would
be a clean break from everything going on in Argentina, both because it was an extremely rugged, depopulated area and because
it was a national border.
We were already in Chilean airspace—that’s how close the border was—and we’d flown over two potential areas, but the FLIR
had shown no activity. The camera wasn’t nearly as good as something you’d get from a Reaper or Gray Eagle drone, but it wasn’t
something to sneeze at either. It was capable of finding heat sources and providing images good enough for mensurating the
terrain, which was all we needed.
Shoshana pointed at another spot, deeper into Chile, and I relayed it to the pilot. We were over the top of it in seconds,
but it was also empty. I was growing frustrated, because the border with Chile was a giant mountain range with very limited
places to set the helo down successfully—especially at night—and we were running up on the range of its capabilities. It wasn’t
like it was an MH-60 Pave Hawk with drop tanks.
Shoshana said, “Do you have the cell phone collection on?”
“No. No reason. There’s no cell service out here.”
“All the more reason. If the Ghost still has his cell phone, maybe he’s just left it on in his pocket. It’ll be looking for
a tower, and we’re the only game in town.”
I jumped up, saying, “Good point.” I went to the pilots and had them initiate, then separated another tablet from a holster
in the cockpit. I called Veep over, telling him what we were doing. He started working the tablet, then said, “It’s completely
blank. There’s not a cell phone anywhere around here.”
Shit. I said, “Keep working it. I’ll help out Jennifer.”
I went to her, seeing her checking out the Javelin parachutes we had, making sure the Cyprus AODs were functioning, and the
containers were serviceable.
She looked up and I could see a little anxiety slip out. She really hated jumping, especially at night.
She said, “No luck yet?”
Aaron called out, “Alpha four dry hole. Moving to Alpha five, but we’re almost at the nautical limit of the helicopter.”
I smiled at her, because her expression was saying, Glad to hear that. I said, “Don’t worry, I don’t think this fishing expedition is going to work out.”