The Seal of Solomon (10 page)

“Upwards of fifty, perhaps more, stationed as recons along approachable routes. Including, presumably, our route.”

Op Nine opened one of the overhead compartments and pulled out something that looked like a cross between an elephant gun and a rocket launcher. It had a black strap for hanging it over your shoulder and a telescopic sight.

“Now,” he said. “In the case of a full-blown intrusion event, this is the CW3XD.” He held it high over his head so everybody could get a good look. “Obviously, it has never been field-tested.”

“No time like the present,” the tanned agent muttered.

Op Nine ignored him. “The magazine holds fifty rounds of ordnance.” He pulled an oversized clip of bullets from the same overhead compartment. He ejected one of the bullets and held it up. It looked like an ordinary rifle round, except the tip was larger, about the size of an olive. “Be extraordinarily cautious with these. Loss of one into unfriendly hands could result in complete MISSFAIL.”

“Mission failure,” Ashley translated for me, but I had already figured that one out.

“The CW3XD is designed solely for containment of intrusion agents,” Op Nine said, his tone becoming stern. “Under no circumstances is it to be discharged at the Hyena and his forces.”

“Why?” another agent demanded. He was the biggest one of the lot; his thighs bulged in the shiny OIPEP jumpsuit and his biceps were about the size of my head, which, like too many people have pointed out, was large. “One round from this bad boy and they'll never find all the pieces.”

“The ordnance is limited,” Op Nine said.

“Extremely limited,” Abigail Smith added, and for some reason she looked across the aisle at me.

“And it is specifically designed for operation against an intrusion agent,” Op Nine said.

“So it'll kill 'em?” the big agent asked.

Op Nine gave him a cold stare. “What has never lived cannot be killed. Theoretically, the CW3XD will inhibit the IAs, giving us time to retrieve the Seals from the target.”

Op Nine nodded to Abigail, who took a deep breath and rose from her seat with an air of weariness, like she could actually feel the fate of the world resting on her shoulders.

“Let's gear up,” she said, and I thought her voice shook a little, and that wasn't encouraging, a senior OIPEP agent, afraid.

16

The agents stood up and popped open the overhead compartments, pulling out these yellow and orange bundles with white harnesses and clinking silver buckles. It took me a second to get it. This plane wasn't landing. Instead, we were jumping. My stomach did a slow roll.

Ashley touched me on the elbow. “You need some help with yours?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Turn around.”

I turned my back to her and she slipped the harness over my shoulders. I turned again and she proceeded to snap the silver buckles closed. The top of her head was below my chin as she worked on the buckle at my waist, and her blond hair shimmered in the cabin lighting. I smelled lilacs. She gave each buckle a sharp tug before stepping back.

“The chute should automatically deploy after seven seconds,” she told me. She touched a cord hanging over my left shoulder. “Pull the backup if it doesn't.”

“What if the backup doesn't work?”

“It'll work.”

“But what if it doesn't?”

“Then you hit the ground at five hundred miles per hour.”

She turned away and rummaged in the overhead. Four agents fussed with the big crates in the middle of the hold, unhooking the heavy chains and checking the mattress-sized parachutes tied to them.

“When you say seven seconds, is that seconds like ‘one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi' or ‘one thousand one, one thousand two'?” I asked.

She turned, holding a gun and holster. She wrapped it around her slim waist and pulled it tight.

“It'll be all right, Alfred,” she said. “Just don't stiffen up on the landing. Remember to bend your knees on touchdown; you'll be okay.”

A bell rang inside the hold and a yellow light began to pulse over the cabin door. All the agents except two lined up for the jump. These two took positions in the rear on either side of the massive bay door; I guessed they were in charge of deploying the crates. I wondered who was in charge of deploying Alfred Kropp.

The agents lined up by the pulsing yellow light were hooking these long metal cords dangling from their chutes to a thin pole that ran the length of the cabin. I was wondering why, when the door swung open and a tornado roared into the plane. The wind kicked my feet out from under me and I would have smacked butt-first onto the hard metal floor, but a pair of huge hands caught me before I hit.

Op Nine shouted into my ear: “Be careful, Alfred Kropp! There may not always be someone near to catch you when you fall!”

He hooked me to the pole. I shivered in the howling wind. The temperature must have dropped about ten degrees when the door swung open.

One by one the OIPEP agents vanished through the opening. One second they were standing there, the next they were gone, like they were being sucked into the maw of an angry, screaming beast. Op Nine put one hand on my shoulder as we edged closer. My knees felt very weak and my throat very dry, but I didn't have a choice now—I couldn't turn back or change my mind, and sometimes that's better.

When my turn came, I put a hand on either side of the opening and stared into the dark Arabian night, unable to look up or down or unclench my cramping fingers from the cold metal. Op Nine bellowed in my ear, “Now! Let go, Alfred!”

That was it, the whole deal. I really had a problem with this letting-go thing. My mom. The truth about my dad. The loss of everybody who was close to me. I suddenly realized that sometimes the toughest thing is getting out of your own way.

I let go.

17

I spun and twisted and flipped as I fell, yowling my lungs out. The big plane appeared to shoot straight up toward the stars, and the world fragmented and refused to arrange itself into any kind of order: stars, earth, earth, stars, stars, earth, earth . . . and my mind fell apart with it. I forgot to count and by the time I remembered, I had no idea where to start—how many seconds had passed? Should I pull my cord just to be safe? Or would pulling my cord mess up the timing mechanism and tangle my chute? And, if my chute got tangled, would the desert sand break my fall? But if desert sand could break someone's fall, why use a parachute in the first place?

I hadn't been counting, but I figured I was way past the seven-second window, so I pulled the cord. Nothing happened. Stars, earth, earth, stars—and nothing happened. I yanked the cord again. I should know better than to jump from airplanes. In fact, with my track record, I shouldn't even indulge in something as commonplace as jaywalking. I pulled the cord a third time.

Nothing happened. Well, one thing happened: the rip cord broke off in my hand.

A few seconds later I was yanked about fifty feet straight up as my chute deployed and my descent slowed—but didn't seem slow enough. At least I was falling feetfirst. I could see one or two other OIPEP troopers silhouetted against the sky, dangling from their chutes like the toys I used to buy—the green army men with the plastic parachutes that you threw underhanded into the air. Half the time the kite string didn't unravel correctly and the army man crashed to earth or got hung up in a tree branch.

I looked down between my feet and saw the desert rushing up.
Bend your knees, Kropp, keep 'em loose,
I told myself, but I smacked into the ground with my legs as stiff as one of those army men's. My right ankle twisted in the sand. I pitched forward and the chute settled gently over my writhing body, the silky material wrapping tighter and tighter around me as I rolled in the sand.

Somebody pulled the chute off me and rolled me over. I looked up into Ashley's face—her red lipstick looked purple in the starlight—and said, “I think I broke my right ankle.”

“Let's see,” she said softly. She ran her fingers along the bones and then took my foot in both hands and gently turned it.

“Ouch!”

“I think it's a sprain. Let's see if you can put any weight on it.”

She unhooked me from the harness and pulled me to my feet.

“Put your foot on the ground, Alfred,” she said.

“Ouch!”

About a hundred feet away the agents were busy with the crates—or what was left of them. They had broken apart on impact; slats lay scattered in every direction.

Op Nine came up, frowning.

“Kropp is hurt?” he asked.

“Not badly,” Ashley said. “A sprain, I think.”

Op Nine said to Ashley, “Kropp rides with you.”

He trudged toward the other agents gathered around the remnants of the crates. We trailed behind, my arm draped over Ashley's neck, my foot dragging in the sand. In every direction dunes marched like oceanic waves, disappearing into the horizon. I had thought the stars very bright on the shores of the Red Sea, but here in the desert they seared the blackness around them.

“Where exactly are we, anyway?” I asked Ashley.

“The Sahara.”

The agents had pulled twelve snowmobiles from the shattered crates and were going down some kind of checklist, getting them ready, I guess, only there wasn't much chance of a snowstorm in the desert. One agent was handing out the CW3XDs and clip belts that they threw over their shoulders, reminding me of Mexican bandits. Abby Smith stood by herself a few feet away, holding some electronic gadget with a bluish LCD glimmering on her frowning face.

“What's the deal with the snowmobiles?” I asked.

“They aren't snowmobiles,” Ashley replied. “Well, they used to be. They've been modified. We call them sand-foils.”

Instead of the ski pads, these had thin metal blades, the sharp edge facing down. Someone handed Ashley a helmet and she passed it to me.

“Put this on, Alfred. A sand-foil's top speed is a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Do you know what a single grain of sand can do if it hits you at that speed?”

“No, but I got hit with a baseball once that must have been going forty miles per hour; it hurt like heck.”

I shoved the helmet down over my head. I could have guessed it would be too small, and it was. One of my ears was folded down.

Abby snapped her device closed and trudged over to us.

“We're approximately a hundred clicks due east of the target,” she said crisply. Her voice sounded very far away inside my helmet. “Remember, no wake-riding and no unauthorized firing of the 3XDs. Op Nine and I are on the point. Any questions?”

Nobody had any questions or, if they did, they weren't going to waste time asking them. All the agents except Ashley flipped the big CW3XDs onto their backs. Ashley had to ride with hers awkwardly resting across her chest, since she had my big self awkwardly clinging to her back. Static popped in my ear and suddenly her purry voice seemed to enter my head and lodge in the middle of my brain. The helmets were outfitted with a wireless setup.

“You okay?”

“I guess.”

She pressed a button on the console in front of her and indicator lights blinked on. I didn't hear the engine roar to life like I expected; the thing simply started to vibrate beneath me.

“Hang on!” she said. I wrapped my arms around her waist as the sand-foil leaped forward and accelerated, the blades rising out of the sand as it gained speed. These sand-foils were clearly not made for two riders. My butt hung about halfway off the back of the leather seat and I worried about a stray grain of sand embedding itself into the softest part of my body.

Looking over her shoulder, I could see the speedometer. The needle hovered just below the one hundred mark.

Abigail Smith had said we were due east of the target, which meant we must have been heading west, but the dunes ran roughly north-south, so our race across the Sahara was run half of the time in the air, as we crested one wave, became airborne, and then smacked back down in a trough before starting up the next dune.

The ride across the desert was like being on a roller coaster. Those rides always seemed to last longer than they really were. I raised my head and looked over Ashley's shoulder.

The other agents had already stopped. Straight ahead the horizon glowed a brilliant amber with little sparks flying around in the orange like sunlight reflecting off the tips of waves.

We slowed to a stop and I slipped off, fumbling with the chin straps of my helmet. I yanked it off, wincing as it scraped over my ears. I could see Op Nine standing a few yards in front of the rest of the group, studying the glowing horizon like he'd never seen a sunrise before.

“What's up?” I asked Ashley, but she just shook her head. I trudged through the sand toward Op Nine, dragging my bum foot. The glow on the horizon had deepened to an orangish red. But something about this desert sunrise wasn't right, and it took me the rest of the hike to figure it out: we were facing west, not east.