Redemption (16 page)

“How did Marshall take the news?”

“Sir, Howard never informed anyone that they had been selected as my guardian.”

“I don’t know what to say, Hal.  This is a lot to take in.  Why haven’t you ever told me this?”

“Sir, Howard never directly instructed me to keep the information confidential, but since he never told anyone I felt it was best to honor the spirit of his decision.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Sir, I felt you needed a boost in confidence.  If Howard were here now, he’d be asking you what to do.”

Richard thought of his dearly departed friend and wiped a tear from his eye.  “The most brilliant mind of our time thought I was a genius, that’s high praise coming from him.  I just have this gnawing feeling that I’m about to let him down.”

“Sir, you know I will do everything in my power to make Howard proud of us.”

Richard sat up, a gleam in his eye.  He was on his feet, pacing back and forth down the length of the room.  “That’s it, Hal!  I think you may have just solved our problem.”

“Sir, I am afraid you will need to elaborate.”

“Hal, tell me about the power cells in your robots.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

General Richard Dupree was crammed inside a small cabin with another paratrooper and a boxy looking contraption that was a modified Hal robot. He couldn’t move his torso or legs more than a half an inch and the fact that his arms were folded across his chest made him feel like he was trapped inside a coffin.

“Hal, open the comm channel.”

“Yes, sir, you are broadcasting.”

“If I may have your attention, this is General Dupree.  Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank each and every one of you for embarking on the most daring mission every conceived.  I wish we had more time to prepare for this mission, but we all know what’s at stake.  Millions of lives hang in the balance.  I know you have all been briefed on what’s about to happen, but I think it is wise to go over the details one last time.  It’s important that you commit these details to memory because once we’re airborne; the Chinese will sever all communications to avoid early detection.  That also means that we won’t have computer support, we gotta do this the old fashioned way - by looking at the simple gauges in front of us.  It will take us over two hours to reach the correct altitude and another two hours to reach our respective drop zones.  That means you need to keep an eye on the gauges and use your propellers to stay on course.  You won’t do us any good if you end up fifty miles from the target.  When you jump, a short ripcord will drop the Hal robots out of the bottom of the cabin.  The first thirty seconds will be crucial; chances are high that you’ll be spinning wildly out of control.  If you are unable to correct your descent, you will lose consciousness and that will be the end of you.  Once you’re in a stable descent, you’ll be heading straight down for four minutes.  When you’re a thousand feet above the DZ, your chute will open and it will be a very rough landing.  You’ll have a few seconds at best to brace yourself.  If you end up with a broken leg or even a sprained ankle, you’ll serve little purpose to the mission, so make sure you nail the landing.  You all know your primary, secondary, and tertiary targets.  Whoever takes out the communication tower, switch on your Hal robot so he can power up his friends.  If all hell breaks loose before the comm tower goes down, switch on the Hal robots and our friend will lay waste to the airfield and hopefully give our invasion force a better chance.  Godspeed to us all.”

“Sir, the channel is closed.  All of my robots except for this one have been deactivated.”

“Thank you, Hal.”

“Sir, before I power down this robot and sever communication, may I ask a question?”

“Of course, what is it?”

“Sir, I am concerned that you have not shared the full details of Operation Nantucket in it’s entirety.”

“You really think everyone involved in this operation needs to know every last detail?”

“No sir, I do not.”

“Then what’s the problem, Hal?”

“Sir, you misunderstand me, I am concerned that you have not shared all of the details of Operation Nantucket with the president or vice-president.”

“I understand your concerns, Hal.  I’m not changing my mind on this and you are to keep the information to yourself like we discussed.  Is that going to be a problem?”

“No sir, it will not.  You are the sole administrator of my program, I am unable to disobey your commands.”

“Good.  Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Power down my friend.  I’ll see you on the ground.”

***

Richard had performed many HALO jumps during his military career as a Navy SEAL.  He had never been afraid of heights and jumping from above the clouds didn’t bother him at all.  This jump was so far above his level of experience that it might as well have been his first.  He was currently in the neighborhood of twenty miles straight up, over four times the height of a standard HALO jump.  Since the Chinese had the airspace above the Mississippi River locked down tight this radical move was necessary to strike without being seen.  The previous four hours of the trip had been filled with fear and doubt and Richard hated every minute of it.  The more he thought about it, he was certain the last minute insurance policy he had in place would need to be used.

Richard reversed the propellers attached to the cabin to stop the balloon’s forward movement.  He looked at the gauges in front of him and tried his best to trust them.  These gauges were commonplace during World War II almost a century ago, but to Richard they felt far too simple to be effective.  The fact that he had to plot the course and make corrections with pencil and paper made him very nervous.

“General Dupree, sir!  Look!”

Richard could barely hear the man sitting directly behind him.  Lieutenant Banaski was shouting through his helmet.  Richard moved his feet apart to get a better view of the plexiglass trap door beneath him.  The seat he was strapped into was angled slightly forward so he could see down.  “I see it, Lieutenant!  That’s a good sign!  Just what we wanted to see!  It’s beautiful!”  Richard looked down in the darkness and could see the mighty Mississippi River shimmering in all her glory.  It was a sight to behold in the darkness; he could only imagine what she looked like in the daylight.

Richard looked to his left and right and counted four other cabins relatively level to his own.  He flipped a switch in front of him.  “Hit your light, Lieutenant!”

“Copy that, sir!  Done!”

On the port and starboard sides of the cabin, a strobe light began emitting three pulses in rapid succession.  Richard’s field of vision was limited, but he could see lights on dozens of cabins spread out of what he hoped was about a square mile.

“Lieutenant!  You ready for his?”

“Not a chance in hell, sir!”

“Me neither, here we go!”  Richard reached up with both hands and pulled down the lever above his head that opened the trap door beneath him.  He heard his safety harness snap open and his seat slowly pitched forward.  He carefully planted his feet on the rail and grabbed the bar above him and raised himself up.  He paused for only a brief second to ensure his footing, leaned forward, and stepped off the rail.

Richard was shocked at how quickly he accelerated.  He knew the air was much thinner and provided practically no resistance against his two hundred pound body.  He wasn’t sure but he was almost certain that for a brief second he could see the curvature of the earth on both the east and west sides.  The sheer magnitude of what he had just seen both amazed and horrified him.  The first ten seconds of the jump were going smoothly until he made the crucial error of turning his head to the right to find nothing but the blackness of space.  He tried to look at the ground and battled the sensation that he was veering off into the cold vacuum of nothingness.  Richard’s fears were intensified as his body tumbled violently.  His vision was a rapid blur of confusing shapes and varying degrees of light and dark.  Richard instinctively reached up for his ripcord to end this madness only to be reminded that it would be worthless until he was two thousand feet above ground level, a measure he implemented to insure the skies wouldn't be filled with clearly visible parachutes.

What have I done?  No one can survive this.  Every single jumper is falling to their death.

Richard no longer had any sense of orientation.  He rolled over on his back and remained there for five seconds staring at blackness.  Richard had never felt such terror in his life.  He glanced at his biometric readout and saw his blood pressure was 180/120 and his pulse was 190.  He knew he had to calm down or he would have a stroke.  

I’m getting light-headed.  I’m going to pass out and this will all be over.

Richard raised his arms and tried to change his orientation so he could see the ground and thankfully it worked, or at least he thought it worked but didn’t really care one way or the other.  He’d rather be looking at the spinning ground than the terror of staring into the abyss.  With his view much improved, he could tell that the spin had slowed but not enough to make a difference.  He quickly glanced at the biometric readout to find his vitals still dangerously high.

Richard closed his fingers and cautiously cupped his hands.  His spin slowed considerably but he was still nowhere near being in control.  He guessed that he had been in a spin for about thirty seconds and knew he would not survive much longer.

I’m about to die.

In his last seconds of consciousness, Richard decided that he wasn’t just going to give up and die without a fight.  He looked to the ground and focused on a string of lights that he assumed was the landing field at the St. Louis base.  The string of lights came into and out of his field of vision twice.  On the third time around, he tucked his arms to his side and lurched his body at a downward angle like a missile.  At seven hundred miles an hour, the maneuver would either correct his spin or tumble him head over feet and snap his spine like a twig.  Seconds away from losing consciousness, he didn’t have much of a choice but to try.

Holy shit, that worked.  Breathe, breathe!

Richard was finally in a stable descent and the g-forces slamming his body finally became manageable.  The light-headedness faded and he was pleased to see his vitals were in the safe zone.  He checked the altimeter and was shocked to see he was already halfway to the ground.  Richard welcomed the comforting embrace of much thicker air and could feel himself slowing down.  With nothing but ground in his field of vision he enabled the infrared feature on his visor.  It took a few seconds for Richard to comprehend what he was seeing.  The easiest feature to place was the landing strip on the airfield.  Once he had done that, the rest of the installation was easy enough to plot out in his mind.  Richard looked at the altimeter to find he was four thousand feet above ground level.  In the span of a few seconds, Richard determined, much to his surprise, that he was going to land inside of his designated drop zone, roughly a quarter of a mile from the airfield.

When the altimeter registered a thousand feet above ground level, the parachute deployed and Richard quickly went from terminal velocity to ten miles an hour in a matter of seconds.  A few seconds after that, he was on solid ground.

Richard was disoriented for a few seconds and then remembered he had to collect his Hal robot.  He looked straight up and with the aide of his visor’s infrared capabilities; he spotted the faint reflective patches fixed in various places to the shell of the robot.  The reflective patches didn’t register with the naked eye, but in infrared, they lit up quite well.  Richard detached his parachute as he walked and once free, jogged the short distance to where the disabled robot had landed.  When he arrived, he noticed Lieutenant Banaski was already there.

“Sir, that was one hell of jump, wasn’t it?  I was spinning hard for a few seconds there, scared the shit out of me.  You?”

Richard stared at the young lieutenant for a second in disbelief. 
A few seconds?  Are you kidding me?  
“Focus, Lieutenant, we’ve got a job to do.”

“Yes, sir.  Sorry, sir.”

Richard looked down at his lifeless friend.  “Wheel on your side good?”  Richard knelt down and checked the small wheel on his side of the disabled robot.

“Mine’s good.”

“Let’s get moving,” said Richard.

The two men hoisted the rectangular contraption at a forty-five degree angle and wheeled him along the ground like they were casually strolling through an airport terminal with a three hundred pound suitcase.

The two men were startled by a loud thud ten yards away that kicked up a cloud of dirt.  They dropped the robot and hit the ground, certain the Chinese were lobbing mortar rounds on top of them.  Richard slowly raised his head from the dirt and saw a bloody finger a few inches from his face.  “Get up, Lieutenant, we’re fine.”

“What the hell was that, sir?”

“One of our brothers didn’t make it.”  Richard stood up and walked the short distance to the mangled corpse.  The body was horribly contorted, all four limbs had been broken in several places and his head had nearly decapitated from its torso.  Richard closed his eyes for a few seconds, swallowing the guilt that would otherwise consume him.  “Let’s go.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we—”

“Nothing we can do, Lieutenant, we have a job to do.”  Richard knelt down and grabbed his side of the robot.  “Now, Lieutenant.”

“Yes sir.”  Lieutenant Banaski took his place opposite of Richard the two men continued to the airfield.  Along the way, they came upon three more corpses like the one that crash-landed next to them.  Richard hoped the four dead paratroopers had been the only casualties from the jump but knew better; this idiotic plan was headed towards failure.  The two officers traversed the quarter mile to the outskirts of the airfield.  The floodlights illuminating the perimeter extended about a hundred yards into the darkness and Richard stopped fifty yards shy of the floodlights’ reach.