Direct Action - 03 (14 page)

Deckard opened the screen door and stepped outside.

Mauritius was a relatively tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Isolated, it was tucked away from all the distractions and complications found elsewhere. The waves broke on the shore, pulling the beach out with it as the tides changed. It felt like he was standing on the edge of the world.

Walking down the beach, he crossed Bill's workout area on the deck and stepped inside. Zach and Paul were shooting the shit about some French tourists they had banged the night before.

“This island is a pussy buffet, bro,” Paul laughed.

“Fucking Euro girls don't lube up right when they're drunk though. Gotta help 'em out a little,” Zach complained.

“Give them a break,” Rick cut in. “I'm sure she did fine with what little she had to work with.”

The Liquid Sky men roared with laughter as Rick high-fived Paul. Everyone went quiet as Nadeesha entered and sat down in a chair in the corner. Bill was sitting on his couch with his laptop open.

“Now that everyone is here,” Bill said as he eyeballed Nadeesha, “we can get started.”

Deckard noticed that Ramon was missing.

“I know everyone has been nervous about the client. Recent events back in the States scared him off and his company decided to abandon a number of classified projects including some indig proxy force they were training out in Nevada. After we got hung out to dry, I had to find us employment elsewhere. Pakistan was for a Prince in Bahrain. Afghanistan was a one-off paid for by some ex-Agency guy working a private network in Pakistan. Then, Dubai was for the Yids.

“We had a couple interested parties who were going to pick us up on a permanent basis like G3 Communications did, but some of those fell through. A lot of the players had experience with BW, and the executives over there left a lot of scorched ground between the decision makers and the contractors. I almost set us up working directly for a group of princes in the Gulf States, but now I think I got something better.

“A retired American General is going to pick up Liquid Sky and his 'leadership academy' or what-the-fuck-ever will sponsor us covertly. This way, his group acts as the middle man between the princes who have plenty of work for us to do. This Arab Spring thing is really fucking up their jive. That's where we come in. Between them and these Wahhabi sand niggers they got their hands full and a bunch of inept A-rab soldiers in their military who sleep most of the day and spend the rest fucking their boyfriends. So we won't be hurting for work.”

“So what are we looking at?” Rick asked.

“They've got something for us to start on now. Ramon finished his pre-mission prep and has already moved into the target country to begin operational preparation of the battlespace. Tomorrow, the rest of us move out to the staging area. The targeted individual has already had five assassination attempts on him in the last two years, so he is paranoid as fuck and is prepared. He knows someone will try again and will be waiting for us. This is going to take some brass balls to pull off, but what the fuck else is new.

“Don't worry about that shit now. Party it up tonight. Tomorrow we fly out to begin training and it is back to business.”

A couple whoops went up and the boys began dragging out a keg that they had on ice. The next time Deckard turned around, Nadeesha had already disappeared. Bill tapped the keg and started passing out beers. Paul got a few dozen shot glasses and lined them up on the kitchen table. The other guys were making phone calls to some of the expat girls they knew on the island.

Zach shotgunned four shots back-to-back and the party was started. Deckard was pretty drunk by the time a half dozen women showed up. Four were from France, one from Switzerland, and another from Germany. They brought drugs with them, too.

Bill did a couple lines of a blow off one of his billiard tables. Deckard was starting to get nervous. Former operators filled with booze and coke and haunted by the wars they fought in was not exactly a great combination.

Sitting down with a fresh beer, one of the French girls came over and sat down on his lap. Deckard had no idea what the blond was saying to him and he cared even less. Across the room, one of her girlfriends was grabbing Zach's crotch as they took turns downing shots. She frowned at her and then went back to Deckard, kissing him on the lips. They seemed to be in competition with each other.

Rick fired up a couple lines of coke between vodka shots.

Now the French chick had pulled out Rick's cock. It was Deckard's turn to frown. The Prince Albert piercing had to hurt. Getting down on her knees, the blonde girl's friend went to work, deep throating Rick right there in the middle of the party. The European girls cheered, a few offering advice on how to improve her technique.

The blonde was clearly pissed over something and jumped off Deckard's lap to go use the bathroom. When she came back, her pupils were huge, dilated from whatever pills she had swallowed.

By then, Bill had bent the big-titted German girl over a billiard table, dropped trou and was drilling her, the moans drowned out by the loud deathmetal music blasting over the stereo.

Jesus Christ
, Deckard thought. When he was a young soldier they used to have Squad parties. He recalled his Squad Leader doing keg stands all night, throwing the keg off his back deck, and then doing donuts around his house in a beat-up Toyota pickup truck. All of that seemed pretty mild compared to this cocaine-fueled orgy.

Once Bill finished with the German, the blond pillhead let her jean shorts fall around her ankles and bent over the pool table to wait her turn. Soon, her finger nails were tearing up the billiard table's upholstery.

Deckard could take a hint, if he stuck around much longer there was a good chance that one of these nymphos was going to handcuff him to a radiator and shock his balls with a couple wires attached to a car battery. He made a hasty exit as Paul and Zach swapped girls and were going for their second round.

Later on, he couldn't remember stumbling back to his beach house. He woke up in the early morning hours, still wearing his clothes while laying in the bathtub with the shower on, soaking wet.

“What. The. Fuck.”

10

Deckard launched himself off the ramp of the airplane and into the darkness. He still had trouble stabilizing as he exited the aircraft and rocked from side to side for a few moments as he rode the hill of air down through the sky, his body riding along with the forward throw of the plane on exit. Seconds seemed to stretch on forever, but he finally got stable in the air and assumed a position called a high lift track position in normal parachuting, that is, with his arms extended but swept back and his legs extended all the way out.

Unlike a HALO jump in the military, he was wearing a wing suit which would provide additional lift and therefore, more forward-glide during freefall. The sheets of material stretched between his legs and out from his arms. An ancient dream was now achievable: human flight.

Turning his head slightly, he could make out the sleek forms of four other Liquid Sky members flying behind him in the moonlit night.

Pivoting his hips and shifting his legs, Deckard was able to steer by using the wing suit like a giant rudder. Splotches of gold floated beneath him as he soared over the city. Manila.

He got on azimuth, heading west, over the city and pointed towards the ocean beyond. He was dumping altitude, dropping a meter for every couple of meters that he traveled forward. The wind howled in his ears as the cityscape below him shot by.

Angling himself downward, he picked up speed as he flew towards his target. Through the wind goggles he wore, Deckard could now make out the outline of the Aquino Building. He was moving at nearly a hundred and twenty miles an hour, and the rooftop was the smallest dropzone he had ever had to hit in his career.

It was coming up fast.

The other Liquid Sky members floated alongside him, each maneuvering slightly away from each other to clear their airspace. In the night they looked like giant flying squirrels in their wing suits. One operator dropped his hips to try to adjust his trajectory. At this point they were all trying to make small adjustments to get on the right track before deploying their parachutes.

To his right, one of the wingsuit parachutists peeled away from the formation. He was too far off the required fight path and was having trouble getting stable. He would have to deploy his parachute and land safely at a secondary landing zone on the ground. Deckard didn't notice, he was completely fixated on his target.

The leading edge of the target building was coming up. Deckard reached back and deployed his pilot chute. The drogue caught in the air and yanked out his main parachute. Everything was a blur of motion as Deckard's world swayed, his parachute opening above him. He was looking down into the lights inside the rooftop swimming pool.

He was too low.

Deckard reached up to grab his toggles to try to steer while he still had some space to maneuver. Below him, he saw another jumper slam right into the side of the building and through the plate glass windows. His parachute never had a chance to deploy at all.

Deckard reached out but the edge of the roof was still a good ten feet away. He sunk beneath the lip of the roof and was staring at his reflection in the windows. His heart was in his throat as he made impact.

The scene froze in front of his eyes.

Feeling his boots make contact with the floor, he stood up. The harness had lowered on its pulley system at the end of the scenario. The blinking word RESET flashed in his goggles. He flipped the visor up on his forehead and looked across the dark room. Everyone was quiet. It was their tenth time through the same scenario and none of them were getting any better.

He squinted as the lights came back on.

“Not a single person made it on to the rooftop,” Bill scolded them. “Take it from the top.”

Deckard stretched his neck, his arms, and legs as he was still secured in his parachute harness and couldn't start walking around while tethered into the metal frame.

Each of them wore a parachute and black S-Bird wing suits made by TonySuit. Following the Special Operations adage, train as you fight, they used the same gear in the simulator that they would use on target. The S-Bird wing suit would allow them the forward glide they needed to jump from an airplane, fly into the restricted airspace over the city of Manila, and then land on their objective. This model wing suit also came equipped with escape sleeves. Normally the wings of the suit had to be unzipped manually after the jumper deployed his parachute so that he could reach up and grab the parachute's toggles in order to steer it. There would be no time for that on this gig, they would be right on top of the objective by the time they got silk over their heads.

Later, they would add their combat equipment to their rigs. At the moment the kit loadout was still being finalized as Ramon collected intelligence on the target in the Philippines. As it stood, it didn't really matter what kit they carried on objective if none of them could even get there in the first place.

A gray-haired technician sat in the corner of the warehouse. He was behind a computer, clicking away with his mouse as he began to reset the training scenario.

The simulator and the software were created by a company called ParaSim. The scaffolding structures were lined up next to each other, five in a row for the Liquid Sky operators. Nadeesha was working intel and logistics for them at their staging area and would not be going on target.

At the top of the scaffolding was a series of electronic pulleys and servos that moved the suspension lines that each parachutist hung from during the simulation. The suspension lines would reel themselves in and out and reposition the jumper's body based on what was going on in the simulator. It would even release and drop the jumper down to the floor when he landed on the ground in the simulation.

Sensors were hooked up to the parachute ripcord and toggles so that the jumpers actually used their gear in physical reality, and got real time feed back inside the virtual reality simulator. A modified flip-down night vision goggle headset was worn on the helmet of each jumper but the normal night vision goggles were replaced with a virtual reality screen. The simulator could replicate all sorts of different scenarios based on the inputs added by the technician behind the computer.