Costello and his crew came out in dark blue flight suits and gave him one. "Just put this on. I'm not going to tell you where we are, so don't ask. While we're outside, don't talk to anybody, and don't touch anything. We're changing planes."
They deplaned into a hangar and got on a C-130 parked directly opposite. The crew ran through the pre-flight check while Costello warmed up the cockpit. Storch lugged his gear into the cavernous cabin and was startled to find it already full of cargo. He laid his pack gingerly down next to the mound of boxes under a heavy nylon net and sat on it. He did not move when they took off. He sat still through the flight, riding out the rolling turbulence that meant they were over the Pacific. He remained so as Costello turned over the controls five hours out and came back to commence a good-natured but relentless effort to chat him up. "So I understand you're going to jump out of my airplane. When were you last jump-certified?"
Storch shrugged.
"When, Sergeant? Five years ago? Ten?"
Storch nodded.
"Well, which is it? I'm a civilian, now, so don't pull that dumb grunt shit with me."
"Ten years." He looked up at Costello for the first time, bound and determined to make him regret it. "I can fucking jump. Go fly the fucking plane."
"Nice attitude." Costello rolled up his sleeve and presented his thick, vein-strangled forearm. An anchor tattoo, blue and blurry under curly bronze hair. Below it, an island maiden winked at him. "I did three tours on subs in Vietnam and after, son, while you were swimming around in your daddy's balls. If I learned anything, it was how to get along with all kinds of assholes. You have to, when you're in a can with everyone's farts and bad breath and shit in your face all day and night. When I discharged, I started flying so I could get away from assholes and their stink, and you're stinking up my fucking plane."
Storch bowed his head and took a deep breath. Of all the imbalanced and damaged people Storch had met in the Mission, Costello alone actually seemed to kind of like him. He wasn't afraid of him, he didn't hate him, and he didn't want anything from him. "What do you need to know?"
"I have the coordinates and the flight plan and everything, but nobody's said anything about extraction. How are we getting you out?"
"I'll get myself out."
"Have you looked at the map, Sergeant? It's a long fucking swim. Now, I've got a modified STABO rig like the choppers in 'Nam used to use, but it's got a balloon that hoists the snare to altitude. I can drop it on the atoll and pick you up when you call me."
"I'm not taking a radio."
Costello's hand reached out to grab his shoulder, but Storch stared it down. Costello pulled it back like he'd been burned. "I can't let you do that. I don't know what you're planning to do down there, and I don't much give two shits, but I need to know I can get you out."
"Why? The Mission doesn't want me back. I'll get out on my own, don't worry about me."
Costello shook his head slowly. "No, son, you won't."
Storch's ears popped. "Why are we descending?" he demanded. He got off his pack and flipped open the holster at his hip. His other hand went for Costello's throat. Though the pilot jumped back, only Storch's will stopped it from snapping his neck.
"We've got to take on fuel in Honolulu," Costello said, eyes riveted to the hand.
"We don't need to stop."
"We do if we want to come back. We're cleared there, we'll be in the air again in two hours."
"What do they think we are?"
"Naval research mission, dropping marker buoys in the basin to measure tidal radiation from Bikini and Eniwetok, and all the other underrated vacation destinations. Very classified."
Storch waved at the cargo. "And these are the marker buoys?"
"Hey, you don't tell me what you're doing, don't ask me—"
"It's lysing agent. Your orders are to drop me at the target, then circle back and bomb the atoll with nasty green shit."
Costello looked back at the cockpit for a long moment, nodded.
"Don't worry about me. Follow your orders. How long will I have?"
"Three hours, that's the most we can burn fuel. I can land on Howland Island to the south and lay over for twelve hours, if you think it'll make a difference. But if I'm out there any longer, the real Navy will start to notice."
"That'll be enough time. Do it."
Costello shouted in his face. "I am not going to drop gas on you, son. I will follow my orders but you're not jumping out unless I can get you back."
"Why do you give a shit? Because I look human?" He let his anger change him just a little. Costello recoiled. "Your commanders can't believe how good they got it, burning me and Keogh in the same place. Don't fuck it up for them."
"I'll wait twenty-four hours, and I'll drop the recovery rig before I light it up. But if I don't see you—"
"You won't see me," Storch said. "Now go fly the fucking plane."
Costello turned and started to go back to the cockpit, but stopped and called back over the din of the engines, "You were at Heilige Berg, right?"
Storch, trying to push himself back into focus, nodded impatiently and moved closer.
"So you saw my raid?"
"What?
Your
raid?"
"Not the ground assault, that was Aranda's, but the air attack was mine. I flew all the planes. Built them, too."
"You flew all of the planes…"
"Oh, most of them were on programs generated off the terrain, but I ran a lot of them myself."
"Yeah, I saw it," Storch said, uncertain where this was going.
"What did you think?"
"What did I think?"
"Yeah, you saw it. I was a hundred miles away the whole time, I only got to watch the screens. What was it like?"
Storch winced. He remembered his bitter exultation at the sight of the machine-on-machine holocaust. It had showed him a little bit more of why he no longer wanted to be human. "It was pretty cool, I guess."
"Pretty cool? I had sixty drones in the air, radar-doubled to look like two hundred. I took out two computer-controlled Helicon and Bofors artillery batteries and a Cobra gunship with less than twenty percent casualties, then dumped the rest on the goddamned target like coins down a fucking wishing well."
"The target was a sham," Storch said in as reasonable a tone as he could manage. "They were long gone."
"Aranda said we got them all."
"Aranda lies. I don't know why, but he's full of shit."
Costello puzzled something out, then his grin widened. "So it really was empty?"
"Practically. There was a company of mercs guarding it, but I think the ground assault and Keogh's army killed them all."
Costello turned and skipped back to the cockpit. "Guess we'll have to do it again, then."
Storch didn't move while they refueled in Honolulu. He drank some water in-flight and ate some pineapple that Costello brought. He rotated plans in his head as they took off again and turned south. He played scenarios for hours. He replayed his memories of the shadow that ruled his body for nearly six months. He fought nausea as the memories churned his nervous system and clenched his bowels. He had to keep his breakfast down, or he might as well go home. He kept his breathing even and his temperature low, but he couldn't keep his mind in check.
His body changed to keep him alive at all costs, but his mind ran ever on, tangling him up in decidedly human recriminations and guilt. How long would he have to waste energy like this, before his body decided thought was a maladaptive trait, and took it away?
He had saved Stella Orozco. He was clear. He owed nobody anything. She was free and safe from harm. More, she was strong. She could withstand anything, now.
Just like you. Just like Dyson.
You're going out of your mind because of your body, and your body is coming along for the ride. What will you be tomorrow, or next year? Will you still be able to remember your name? That's what you gave to her, to keep her safe.
He had delivered her from slavery to madness, and left her like a ticking bomb in the heart of the Mission. Was she some sort of revenge on them? Or just another coil in his cycle of failure, of falling short when it really mattered? She thought he was going away because he was ashamed and afraid of what they did, and what they became when they did it. But he was going there before he rescued her. The FBI agent only showed him the way. He was a missile on terminal approach. It was her own bad fortune to have gotten mixed up with him in the first place.
Still, her words dug at him.
He wants you to go.
They were all wrong. Beneath all the technology and the mystical brainwashing, he was only a man. He could be killed. Storch had yet to discover what, if any, meaning his life had, but it was not all an accident. He had never given any serious contemplation to the truth or falsity of the existence of God, but he knew in his heart that the Creator was not a thing from outer space. They were not the children of a mistake. He would hear that abomination give him the truth, the final truth, before Storch executed him.
They want you to go.
The Mission was terminally fucked. They were the human dinosaurs' last impotent gesture of defiance at their successor. That successor would never be Keogh.
Nobody wants you to come back.
She was better off without him. They would only tear each other apart, and he was never any good at teaching anyone else how to be human, anyway.
He checked his chute and his altimeter. He shrugged into his heavy pack and turned on the jump light. The cockpit opened and Costello came out. Storch threw the lever that opened the rear of the plane. The deck split at the aft end of the cabin, and lowered to form a gaping maw, a ramp to the roaring sky.
Costello clung to the netting on the bulkhead. Storch checked his GPS unit again. They were within a mile of the target. Costello shouted something at him, but the wind tore it away.
So fucking go.
Storch gave him a thumbs up, turned and ran off the end of the ramp.
The human body does strange things when it thinks it's going to plummet to its death. In even seasoned paratroopers, the adrenal glands go berserk, and the bowels go cold as blood flow is diverted to muscles to fight gravity to the death. Storch's body was no different. He started to change almost before he jumped.
The wind lifted him up off the end of the ramp and he actually rose up for a moment, buffeted by the wake of the plane, before gravity took over. A membrane formed over his eyes so he could stare, unblinking, at the tiny circular reef, twenty thousand feet below.
He'd logged two hundred training jumps and three combat jumps in Panama and Iraq, and knew what to expect. He packed his own chute. Still, his body didn't trust him. His back arched and his arms and legs splayed out to maximize his surface area, but his body hurtled on at terminal velocity. Trapped between featureless planes of brilliant blue, the illusion that he was floating on the buffeting column of air was overwhelming. Only the retreating, rising speck of the plane, and the oncoming, expanding bone-white scab of the atoll told him he was falling.
His chest expanded and his lats inflated like airbags under his arms. The harness holding the pack to his chest, an intricate system of canvas cords and duck tape, tore apart under the strain. He flailed out at it, but the roaring wind stripped the pack off him. It floated just out of reach for a moment, then the wind set it twirling at his head, and out of sight. His arms refused to reach for it.
At ten thousand feet, he figured out that his body was trying to grow wings. His arms cramped up and his skin burned like needles were growing out of it. He tried to keep his mind from screaming into blind animal panic, tried to play along with his insane body and find an answer to what was happening. His body did not trust the parachute, and was finding its own way to the ground.
Have you eaten anything lately that had wings?
Sure
, he thought. Turkey, chicken…
but nothing that could fly—
He tried to focus on the island. He saw no antiaircraft missiles or artillery. Three concrete bunkers stood on the high ground of the island at the top of the atoll. The lagoon looked very different from the satellite picture. It was thoroughly overgrown with coral formations and tangles of kelp around the shallow edges, but the bottom dropped out into blank cerulean blue at the center. The shores of the atoll were likewise fringed with a thick growth of seaweed and coral, but the tide lashing against it seemed to thin it out. He tried to shape his body into a bullet aimed at the bunkers and opened his chute.
The chute ripped out of the pack and exploded into a canopy in the same instant that Storch's overtaxed shoulder straps tore free. He was whipped upside down by the harness around his groin. The brutal pull of deceleration turned his head inside out, but he forced his arms to grab the tattered chute harness and climb back into it.
He looked down and saw his pack splash in the lagoon. The water churned, and it disappeared. He grabbed the steering toggles and yanked on them until the parachute began to fitfully spiral down to the north end of the atoll.
As he got closer, its features came into sharper relief. The kelp strands stretched out for hundreds of yards into the open ocean, cables as thick as telephone poles waving in the tide—and bleeding. Clouds of deep red fanned out in all directions on the sweeping tides that converged on the lone atoll.
He knew that the island nations of Micronesia and the Marshalls, to the west, were among the most shark-infested in the world, and that sharks would follow a blood-scent across hundreds of miles. The island's plant life lured them here to feed, and they came. He saw gray shadows circling the atoll in concentric rings that suggested this was an ancient feeding frenzy. Strangely, they did not attack each other, but single-mindedly waged war on the bleeding seaweed.