Читать книгу The Big Burn - Terry Watkins - Страница 13

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.”

She knew about the incredible fires that were almost yearly events in that part of the world. Thousands of hectares of jungle in the heart of the Malay peninsula, peat-soil fires similar to the fires in Indonesia. The pollutant haze and smoke spread across the entire region all the way to Hong Kong. Most of them were started in land-clearing operations by farmers. They got out of control in the heat of a dry season and just kept burning. Jungle fires have been known to burn for months and months.

She knew that right now over a thousand fires were burning in East Kalimantan province of Indonesia alone. It seemed they would never get a handle on the fires if they couldn’t stop farmers from clearing bush for crops and companies from burning forests and jungles after logging to make way for new palm oil plantations. Between the two, the fires came every year. And now, more than a year after the horrible tsunami, and the endless battles with radical guerrilla groups, the fires were burning again.

“You’re going to be jumping at night. The fire there is really bad because of all the debris left from last year’s tsunami.”

“You said I was going to be trained. Trained for what? Jumping I already know.”

“Small-arms combat.”

He said it as if he was certain she would accept the pronouncement without hesitation. As if packing a gun and having to shoot somebody was just the course of nature…his nature, perhaps, but certainly not hers.

“I’d rather not.”

“You can’t go into a bad place without some preparation.”

“You think you’re going to make a soldier out of me overnight?”

“You’d be surprised what I can do with you in a short period of time.”

He said it with a blank face, but she peered into those pale green eyes of his and wondered if he was fooling around with a double entendre. She decided he wasn’t the type. But then, given her condition, she doubted he was seeing anything to invite double entendres.

“If you can stay awake, I’d like you to practice with a video game.” He pulled a laptop from a black case on the floor, opened it and started some sort of combat game. “It’s designed to teach the use of small arms in combat situations. You need this training and we don’t have a lot of time. You’ll need to play various levels of this video game until we get to Guam. Then I’ll put you through an intense course until we embark on the mission. It’s just a precaution. If things go right, we’ll never run into an unfriendly.”

“You’re jumping in with me?”

“Yes. You can’t go in alone. It’s too dangerous.”

“You’re one of those guys.”

“What guys?”

“What are they called? Commandos? Special Ops? What are they…oh, right, Delta Force.”

Brock concentrated on the video game, not looking at her. Immediately, she knew she’d struck a nerve. Delta Force flew under the radar screen and liked to keep it that way.

“I’m just a soldier on a mission.”

Bullshit, she thought. This guy runs around with no uniform, no name tag. Marines are flying him in choppers, then he commands a huge cargo plane with all those other commando-looking guys. Yeah, right, he’s just your average soldier. “And I’m a ground-pounding firefighter.”

Brock ignored her comment and concentrated on setting up the game.

She asked, “Is this a commercial game?”

“Not quite. This is mine.”

“You wrote it?”

“Yes. Military is doing a lot of their own now. It started with the release of America’s Army in 2002. That was mostly an interactive army-recruitment ad downloaded by millions of gamers. Since then, they’ve gotten even more sophisticated.”

For once he showed some emotion, some enthusiasm. The guy was human after all.

“This makes better soldiers?”

“Absolutely. Proficiency with the games increases reflex speed to situations, and eliminates thought pauses. Reaction time is everything. The percentage of targets hit has been increasing dramatically per round fired.”

“How did you get involved in this? Were you a big game player growing up?”

“Isn’t every kid? I was involved for a while in the Army Government Applications office in Cary, North Carolina, with a team of video-game creators and simulation specialists. I worked with guys from Red Storm Entertainment, Interactive Magic, and Timeline. Then I joined another group. This video game isn’t for public preview.”

“And that’s what this is?”

Brock looked as if he was going to smile, like this whole thing turned him on, and he couldn’t talk about it enough. She liked him much better like this, but it still didn’t mean she trusted the guy.

“Yes. What you’ll be dealing with you won’t find in your local toy store or video store. This is a big inside industry now. We have a lot of support in the field from several D.C. agencies, West Point and the Special Ops center in Florida where most of the simulation and training technologies are located. They’re all heavily involved in the military-video business.”

“They produced this game?”

“It was created by six people. I led the project. You’re going to learn everything you need to know about operating and firing certain weapons under stress. Plus escape and evasion tactics in jungle conditions. We have games to fit just about every condition, but you’ll only need this one. What’s good about this system is I’ll coach and instruct and rerun scenarios until you get them right. It can condition your reflexes in a few hours of this kind of prep. Then some fieldwork and in about the tenth of the time that it used to take, we can have you online and operational.”

He was so convincing that Anna decided to give the training tool a try, not that she was ready to jump into a Malaysian warzone, but the game looked interesting enough.

Anna played war with Brock for six straight hours. She killed hundreds of people. Some of them over and over and over until she got it right. He was a very soft-spoken instructor, nothing like she expected from his demeanor.

The only weapons Anna had ever fired before were a shotgun and a hunting rifle. Her mother, an outfitter in Colorado, was a skeet shooter and a meat hunter. Neither of those weapons was involved.

At one point when Anna was growing tired of all the action, she asked, “Do rookie soldiers really learn how to kill another person by playing these video games?”

“This just helps train reflexes. Gets the brain pathways set. The training’s progressive. You’ll go out and fire live ammo at shifting targets next. Each step will be faster and closer to the real thing.”

She looked at him, trying to get a sense of reality out of him. “You really think you can teach me how to kill someone in a day? Seriously?”

“I can get you close enough that, in a bad situation, you might just react to survive. But it’s not a given. Movies and TV shows aside, it’s very difficult to turn a civilian into someone who can kill at close range.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Actually, it’s true. In fact, studies have shown that soldiers have done all kinds of things to avoid just that. Most ground-combat units in World War I rarely fired their weapons. When they did, they rarely fired to kill. They fired high. Some of them died because they couldn’t make themselves kill. Most killing was done from long range. Mortars, bombs, cannon and machine guns. But we’ve discovered advancements that overcome most of the natural resistance.”

“You consider this an advancement?”

“In combat, yes. Not in civilization. I’m not in the business of advancing civilization. I’m in the business of trying to protect it.”

“By uncivilized means.”

“By any means necessary.”

His apparent honesty was about the only thing she liked about him at the moment. “I’m exhausted,” she told him after a long yawn. “I’ve suddenly developed a loathing for this video game and I really don’t think you’re going to make much of a killer out of me in a hundred days, let alone one. I’d just like to take a nap. There’s no shower on this plane, is there?”

“No. You can shower when we get to Guam.”

“I can’t wait.”

He smiled, finally, a warm, charming smile, and she began to warm up to this strait-laced soldier until he said, “Neither can we.”