"More like an hour," Kat told him. "You"re enjoying it then?"
Ethan pulled off his oxygen mask. His face was wet, and the air hitting it froze the moisture instantly. "Too right," he said, despite the sudden cold. "It"s brilliant! I mean, what"s not to love about this?"
"Couldn"t agree more," said Kat, and Ethan felt a sudden kick of g-force as the stack started to pull a turn to the left.
Kat spoke again. "I could stay up here for ever. Nothing matters when you"re riding the wind; everything"s so peaceful, everything makes sense."
"Most people wouldn"t agree though," said Ethan. "Doing this would seem completely nuts to them."
"The main problem with skydiving is that you have to be s.e.xy to do it," Johnny chimed in. "That"s why I"m so good. And why so few people skydive."
"You must tell me how you manage to be so modest," said Ethan.
"It can"t be taught," said Johnny. "You either have it or you don"t. It"s a natural talent."
"Skydiving"s an exclusive club," said Luke, coming in on the chat-net. "And no one can argue that being part of something exclusive isn"t appealing."
"And that is why it is so great," agreed Natalya.
"Exactly," said Kat. "It"s one of those things you just know hardly anyone else is ever going to do. Like this I mean, who gets to do a stack formation at nearly thirty thousand feet?"
"So, Kat, how did you get into all this?" asked Ethan. "Why skydiving? What do your parents think about it?"
"They encouraged me," said Kat. "They were tired of me getting into trouble, doing stupid things. This way they knew I was getting a thrill and that it was legal. And besides, it got me out of their hair. All they had to lose was a few quid."
"She sounds so daring, so dangerous," said Johnny. "So like me."
"No one"s like you, Johnny. You"re definitely a one-off."
"Sounds like your parents are pretty cool," said Ethan: his own parents could never afford to pay for him to skydive his dad would just think it was beer money wasted.
"Honestly, I hardly see them," said Kat. "I spent most of my time with the housekeeper."
Ethan laughed. "Housekeeper? We don"t even have a house!"
At this, the chat-net crackled with laughter from everyone in the stack.
"We"re at five thousand now," said Kat. "Ethan, that"s the island over there to the left."
Ethan looked down to where she was pointing. He could just make out some faint lights far below them in the gloom. He knew they were now gliding over the sea. If he was honest, he didn"t want it to end, but then his thoughts turned to their mission and he felt a jolt of adrenaline hit his system. He could taste the metallic flavour of it on the edge of his tongue part fear, part exhilaration.
He loved it.
Kat"s voice brought him back to the present. "We land in five. Remember: legs up and land on your a.r.s.e!"
CHAPTER 27
Out of the darkness, Ethan saw the ground rushing up to meet them. The stack had broken up a few minutes before to allow everyone to glide in safely. Now they were seconds away from landing.
As they came in, the gra.s.s looked like a smoky blur.
"Legs up, Eth!" said Kat.
The ground came up fast, but Ethan felt Kat pull the canopy into a perfect touchdown. He landed on his backside, but it felt more like he"d simply sat down on the gra.s.s than completed a two-hour drop from a jet thousands of feet above. Around him he saw Johnny, Luke and Natalya touching down, each of them swooping in neatly like an owl on a kill.
Within seconds, Kat had him unclipped and, like the rest of the team, was quickly bundling up the canopy.
"Ethan, catch!" said Luke, throwing something to him. "And again."
Ethan caught both items. The first was a small black pouch with a zip around three sides. The second was a tin, much like a shoe polish tin.
"That"s a silk stuff sack," said Kat. "Unzip it and stuff in the canopy, rigs and thermal suits which we can take off now, by the way."
Ethan did as he was told. The bag unfolded easily to something ten times its original size and, after stuffing the canopy and everything else into it, he used the compression straps to squeeze it into a small, tight ball. "And this?" he asked, holding up the tin.
"Black face cream," said Kat. "No point being in all this black kit if our hands and faces glow in the dark. Don"t cover yourself in it. Just use enough to break up your skin-tone, OK?"
Ethan opened the tin, stuck his finger in and then started to smear the stuff on his face as best he could. "OK?" he asked, looking at Kat.
"Yeah," she said. "Just remember to do your ears and neck too, and also above the wrist."
Ethan looked at the rest of the team busying themselves with their kit: Natalya, Luke and Johnny stowing their own canopies into the stuff sacks, then pulling the four bergens from the holdalls. It was organized, slick, done with purpose. Ethan had never felt so switched on in his life. With the rush from the flight to the island still buzzing through him, he felt more than ready to get on with the mission.
"Now we hide that lot in the trees," said Luke, indicating the stuff sack Ethan was holding. "By the time anyone finds the gear, we"ll be long gone." He handed Ethan a large bergen. "Yours," he said. "It looks heavier than it is."
Natalya and Johnny came over, holding a stuff sack and a bergen each. Luke pulled out a map and spread it on the ground. Then he took something out of his pocket, flicked it open, and a deep green glow spilled over the map.
"What"s that?" asked Ethan. "Doesn"t look like your average torch."
"It"s not," said Luke. "It"s a Betalight. Military issue. It"s a harmless radioactive chemical that glows for about thirty years. Doesn"t have an on/off switch, just this rubber cap to cover it up."
"Right," said Ethan, "of course," and decided he should stop asking questions.
"It"s perfect for this type of work," Luke continued. "Gives us just enough light to read a map without the risk of getting spotted." He placed a finger on the map. "We"re here," he said. "The drop was perfect. Which means we all owe Gabe a drink."
Everyone looked down at the map. Ethan glanced around at his teammates and felt relieved to be on their side, rather than on the receiving end of whatever it was they were about to unleash. They no longer looked like adrenaline freaks, desperate for another rush. They seemed focused, organized, and more than a little dangerous. He already knew they were great skydivers he"d seen that for himself but this mission wasn"t just about jumping out of a plane. It was about explosives, and rescuing Sam, and possible contact with people who would shoot first and probably not even ask any questions later. Given Sam"s background, and Gabe"s involvement, the team would obviously have been given training and skills that Ethan had yet to see. He wondered when he"d be getting some of that training himself.
"We"re to tab that"s run run," Luke explained, glancing at Ethan, "from here, through the woods and then up to the castle."
"How far is it?" asked Natalya.
"Only about half a click," Luke replied. "If we get a move on, we should be there in ten."
One thing was bothering Ethan: what if they ran into anyone? They had no weapons, no way of protecting themselves. It was the only thing that made him really nervous. He felt reasonably confident that he and his teammates could handle themselves in a fight, but what if they got shot at? "What if we"re spotted?" he asked.
"It"s like Gabe said," Johnny explained. "We"re to be as close to invisible as we can be. We go in, do our thing, get out. It"s a grown-up version of hide-and-seek."
"But there"s still a chance, isn"t there?" said Ethan. "And they"re armed. It doesn"t seem exactly fair. I"m not ma.s.sively keen on getting my face shot off."
"The priority is the diversion," Luke said. "We"re not here for a sc.r.a.p. If you"re pinged sorry, Eth, spotted just get out as fast as possible."
"But if you do run into someone," added Johnny, "you just hit them b.l.o.o.d.y hard and run away. Got it?"
"Yeah," said Ethan.
Luke folded up the map and got to his feet. "Johnny, you take point."
Johnny grabbed his bergen and jogged off into the dark. Ethan swung his own bergen onto his back and joined the rest of the team as they followed in quick pursuit.
Having made their way through the trees, hiding their rigs on the way, Ethan and the team now stood staring across the open ground to the castle on the clifftop. To Ethan, the ruins looked like a set of huge broken teeth scattered across the horizon. Kat pulled out some binos and handed them to him. They were the same as the ones The Dude had given him at the antenna.
"Check out the castle, Eth. Tell us what"s up there."
Ethan trained the binos on the ruins. "There"s one tower still standing," he said after a moment, keen to make his description as clear as possible. "The wall is nothing more than a pile of stones, but there"s a large section completely missing, creating a huge hole. Through the hole, inside the ruins, I can see a large tent and some lights."
"I"m guessing the tent is where the meeting is taking place and probably where the disk is being looked at," said Kat.
"Security?" asked Luke.
"Nothing obvious," Ethan replied.
"This is probably a makeshift rendezvous," said Luke. "They won"t have done much prep of the site because they won"t be expecting anyone to know they"re here."
"Gate-crashing," said Johnny. "One of my favourite pastimes."
Ethan was about to lower the binos when he saw movement. "Hold on," he said. "I can see two guards. They"re standing at the large hole in the wall."
"Let me have a look," said Kat, and he handed over the binos.
"The x-rays look more like doormen than anything to worry about," she said. "They"re carrying, though. Both have M4 carbines."
"Hardly surprising," said Johnny. "Even though they aren"t expecting visitors, that doesn"t mean they"re going to come out here with nothing but a toothbrush."
"The M4 is a variant of the better-known M16," Luke told Ethan. "It"s been used in Afghanistan and Iraq." He looked at the rest of the team. "If those two are anything to go by, we can expect anyone else we spot to be carrying as well. The one advantage we have is that, as Johnny said, they"re probably not expecting visitors. This place is miles from the mainland. If anyone was coming, they"d count on hearing them."
"Unless they happened to drop from the sky," said Johnny happily.
"All the same, we"ll need to get rid of those two guards before we do anything else," said Luke. "If they spot us, the mission is screwed, and so are we. Kat, Natalya you OK for that?"
Ethan saw the girls nod. Kat was still staring through the binos.
"See anything else?" asked Johnny.
"No," said Kat. "Nothing. Hang on..."
Everyone heard the hesitation in her voice.
"What is it, Kat?" asked Luke. "What you got?"
"Birds," she replied. "Helicopters. Over to the right, just in front of some more woodland."
Luke took the binos from Kat, had a look, then pa.s.sed them on.
Ethan could just make out some oddly shaped silhouettes far off to the right and away from the castle. If Kat hadn"t said anything, he"d never have known they were helicopters; in the dark, they simply looked like strange bits of the shadowy landscape.
"Three of them," said Kat, taking the binos back. "Gabe told us Sam said there were more people here than they"d originally thought. That"s why he called for backup. That"s why we"re here. Seems they turned up in style."
"What"s the problem?" asked Ethan. "Why would a few more people make any difference to Sam?"
"Stealing a disk from under the noses of three or four people is one thing," said Luke. "Doing it in a crowd is something else entirely. Chances of getting pinged are pretty high."
"But there was no mention of the birds," said Natalya. "Gabe would have told us."
"I know," said Luke, "and that"s what"s worrying me."
"You think this is more serious than we thought?" asked Ethan.
"Exactly," said Luke. "I"m guessing there"s more people at this party than either Gabe or Sam realized. And that"s going to make our job even harder. We"re going to have to be d.a.m.ned careful just to avoid being slotted."
Slotted, Ethan knew, meant shot shot. For a few seconds everyone was quiet.
Johnny broke the silence. "There"s no point dwelling on it," he said. "We need to get on with the job in hand, finish it and extract ourselves and Sam. Right?"
Everyone nodded.
"Good," he went on. "So let"s focus on what"s really important, shall we?"
"What"s that then?" asked Ethan.
Johnny smiled. "How soon we get to blow s.h.i.t up..."
CHAPTER 28