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“When?”
“We’re here to take you to Miramar Air Base. You’ll be briefed there.”
She didn’t like the sound of this. “I usually get briefed when I’m going on a mission. But not from the military. I’m not in the military.”
“Actually, it’s a CIA mission. And I’m pretty sure you’ll want to go sign on. In fact, I’m positive.”
Anna stared at Brock. Eight years ago, her father had disappeared in Southeast Asia on a secret mission with the CIA. He was one of a long line of smoke jumpers who’d been recruited over the years. They were once called “cargo kickers” and worked for the CIA’s Air America, dropping supplies to pro-American guerrilla forces. Smoke jumpers were used extensively in the secret war in Tibet in the early 60’s and the practice never really stopped. Since her father’s disappearance, Anna had become an outspoken opponent of the relationship between the CIA and civilian smoke jumpers recruited into its ranks for special missions.
For a long time Anna had hated the secrecy that kept the truth from her and her mother. Though her mother and father had been divorced for several years before he vanished, they’d remained friends. Her mother was as upset over the lack of information as Anna. Divorce was hard enough, but his disappearance almost more than Anna could take.
The CIA had continually refused to tell her what exactly had happened to her father. The only official information she’d ever been able to get was that he’d disappeared on a mission.
“I want to know what happened to my father,” she said to Brock.
“I’m going to tell you…on the way.”
“To Miramar?”
“No. Guam.”
Her throat tightened. She drank more water, staring over the bottom of the upturned bottle at Brock. The man never flinched. A real poker face if ever there was one.
She was unbelievably calm. Must be the exhaustion, she thought. Anna finished the bottle. “Why Guam? You said he was in Malaysia?”
“Guam’s the jumping-off point. We’ve got a camp there. What we call an isolation camp, or IC. You’ll be trained there.”
A sardonic smile broke across her face. This whole thing was beginning to reek, and she wasn’t in the mood for it.
“Trained for what?”
“Again, I’ll tell you about it on the way. We don’t have much time.”
Until she knew more, Anna refused to succumb to his time schedule.
“All this robotic dialogue isn’t going to work on me. Just tell me now, or you can get into your unmarked chopper and fly back to wherever you came from.”
“Your father’s situation is grave. We need to get to him. He’s requesting you to help us.”
“Why would he do that when he has the military at his beck and call?”
“We don’t know why, exactly.”
“You mean you won’t tell me why.”
“If I knew the answer, I’d tell you. We don’t know why he’s asking for you. We can only assume it’s because he’s trapped on a burning island and probably thinks you’re the world’s greatest smoke jumper. Personally, I don’t buy it. We have the best jumpers on earth working for us and he knows that.”
Anna hadn’t had decent sleep in weeks. She was tired and dirty. That she was standing in a foot of ash in a burned-out ravine listening to this guy tell her not only that her father was alive, but he was trapped on some burning island and requesting her to jump in and get him out sounded, quite frankly, preposterous.
But if this guy was lying, why make up a lie so outrageous?
Unfortunately, he had the hook in her now and she desperately wanted to know the truth.
“I’ll go to Miramar with you, but that’s as far as I go without a better explanation.”
“All right.”
They both turned to wave at the rescue chopper as it began its assent. Anna watched it slant off into the sky carrying four very grateful people back home and wished she was inside that chopper with them.
Anna followed Brock and the marine lieutenant to the unmarked chopper, its rotors swirling languidly. The pilot turned toward them, the dark sun shield of his face helmet giving him a Star Wars look.
The flight to Miramar was a quick twenty-minute hop and Anna dozed for most of it. They landed and got out next to a C-17 transport plane parked just across from a squadron of jet fighters.
“This way.” Brock motioned toward the C-17 as he walked. She followed close behind.
“Isn’t there an office we can go to?”
“Not enough time. You’ll be briefed on the plane.”
“What if I don’t like the story?”
“You can leave anytime you want.”
She stopped on the tarmac. “Why do I have the feeling if I get on board that plane, I won’t be able to get back off?”
He turned to her and pushed his sunglasses up on his head. “You saved four lives today at the risk of your own. That was no accident. I’ve read your file. When I tell you what’s going on, you won’t even think about getting off that plane.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because there aren’t just four lives at stake here, more like forty thousand lives. Including your father.”
What? She couldn’t think straight. Between the intense fatigue setting in and all the water she’d drunk, her bladder felt as if it was going to explode.
“I just really need a bathroom right now.”
“There’s a state-of-the-art bathroom on the plane.”
She hesitated, looking around for an alternative, but the nearest building must have been a quarter mile away. She made the decision to go for the plane.
There were several men on board the almost barren C-17, hovering around a few laptops. She realized that the seats were all backward. Brock told her that in the event of a crash passenger survivability would be greater.
“Has that been proven or is that some military theory?”
“That’s just what they tell me.”
She ignored him and the men and went straight to where Brock told her the bathroom was located. She found the privacy she was looking for, shut the door and struggled to get her fire suit down.
The state-of-the-art bathroom was a hard, cold stainless-steel ordinary toilet, much worse than she’d find on a commercial airliner. But she didn’t care. When she was finished she leaned against the metal wall, just to rest for a second—and fell instantly asleep.
She was jolted awake by movement.
Anna jumped up, struggled to get her fire suit on, fell back, but caught herself by grabbing hold of the sink.
Then, with her suit still around her ankles, there was a knock on the door. “We’re going to be airborne in a couple minutes. You okay in there?” Brock said.
“Yes, I’m fine. But this wasn’t part of our deal. I don’t want to go—”
“You need to get out here and get a seat belt on.”
Shit!
She pulled her suit up, then caught a look at her face in the tiny aluminum mirror. Somebody’s face anyway. It was more like a clown’s face with all the dirt and ash on it. She quickly washed as the plane rocked her back and forth. She wished she could strip off her grimy clothes and jump into a shower. Then when she was all clean again, she’d towel off and climb between silky cool sheets and sleep for a week. But she knew that vision wouldn’t be happening for a very long time thanks to John Brock.
Her father’s face flashed in her mind. She couldn’t quite believe that he was alive. It made her delirious, angry, excited and confused—all at once.
When she finally emerged, Brock told her to take one of the empty seats.
“I’m not going until you explain everything.”
“You have no choice. Make yourself comfortable.”
“No beds?” she said sarcastically.
“Sorry, no beds.”
He went and sat with the other men in the back of the plane.
Anna was furious. How dare they kidnap her like this? As the plane taxied up the runway, she realized there were no windows. It was a weird sensation sitting facing the tail of the plane as it taxied, and she didn’t like having no way to see out. It gave her a claustrophobic feeling. This was all too much.
But she was just too tired for panic. After two weeks of riding in planes to jump fires, she told herself this was just another ride. And just another opportunity to catch a few minutes of sleep. As soon as they’d landed, she’d make them take her home.
Yawning, she grabbed a small pillow from the seat next to her, stretched out and fell dead asleep even before the plane was airborne.
Chapter 3
Anna woke to the steady hum of the plane’s engines, the occasional murmuring of voices, but didn’t bother to open her eyes. They felt as if they were glued shut and she didn’t have the will or strength to force them open before they were ready.
Instead, she replayed the fire jump: cutting herself free, finding the students, calming their fears, getting them to trust her, the desperate digging, the waiting to see if they would survive as the fire blew over them, sucking out their oxygen and laying down intense heat.
They had been lucky.
“Hey, sleepyhead.”
Now she opened her eyes as Brock dropped into a seat across the aisle from her. He handed her an open box containing a sandwich, a package of Oreos, coffee, creamer and sugar packets.
“It’s not much, but it’s all we have.”
She accepted the offering, and dug right in. The hot black coffee tasted especially good. “Thanks,” she said in between bites of cookie. “But this in no way changes the fact that I’m being hijacked.”
“You boarded voluntarily.”
“I had to go to the bathroom.”
“Blame it all on your father.”
She bit into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was the first time in forever she’d eaten white bread and it tasted great. The whole meal was just what she needed to get her blood sugar going again. Straight to the sugar high, no stops for nutrition, then slow it down with the peanut butter. Get herself back on cruise control.
She was glad he’d left the aisle between them. Maybe he couldn’t smell her sweat-laden body odor the way she could.
“I’m going to tell you far more than I normally would, or should,” he said. “That’s because of the abnormal circumstances involved. Your need to know, because of what you have to do, is high.”
“Are you trying to recruit me, or scare me off?”
“Maybe both. Your father has been working clandestinely with the CIA for the past eight years. He converted to Islam over a decade ago and married a Malaysian woman not long after he divorced your mother.”
She stopped in midbite, eyes wide, giving Brock her full attention.
“His wife worked with an import-export company out of Kuala Lumpur, while he wrote inflammatory articles for local papers under an assumed name. He condemned American policies in the Islamic world. His wife had relatives very deep in the radical al-Qaeda sister organization Jemaah Islamiyah.”
“Terrorists?”
“To the core. Your father, through one of his wife’s cousins, was able to penetrate deeper into this organization than any other agent has in the past. I won’t go into details beyond that. All you need to know is that he has in his possession something we desperately need.”
It was like being broadsided by hard wind. She had to recover. When she found speech, she asked, for want of a better question while she tried to process the rest of it, “What does he have that’s so important?”
“A laptop. It belonged to one of the leaders of Jamaal Islamiyah. We have reason to believe there is information on that laptop of an imminent terrorist mission.”
“And he can’t get it out?”
“No, he’s hurt—”
“How badly?” she asked, interrupting. Panic filled her.
“He was shot in the leg. We don’t know more than that.”
Her father was hurt. He needed her. Decision made. She’d do whatever she had to, to help her dad.
“Tell me the rest, Brock,” she said, leaning back in her seat.
“Most of his network has been killed. He’s in hiding on a small island off the coast of Malaysia. He made an attempt to escape, but couldn’t make it. There are thousands of tiny islands, some so insignificant they don’t even have names. He’s on one of them. There are fires on the island and it’s under a huge plume of smoke. It’s also in the middle of a dangerous area. You’ll get a full briefing from CIA when we get to the IC.”
“You said that would happen at Miramar. Why should I believe you now that we’re on our way to Guam?”
“Sorry about that, but those were my orders. I can tell you this much. An extraction requires a HALO jump into extremely bad conditions on an island controlled at the moment by pirates patrolling the waters and terrorists searching for your father.”
A high-altitude, low-opening jump. “And this is something my father thinks only I can do?”
“Apparently that’s the case. Yes.”
