EIGHT

Thirty Thousand Feet above the South China Sea

WHILE IN DEVELOPMENT, the sleek plane carrying the Chess Team to their destination halfway around the world was code named Senior Citizen. Now in active service, yet still classified top secret, the stealth transport had been dubbed Crescent for its half-moon shape. Its two turbo fan engines pushed the black specter through the night sky at speeds up to Mach 2, but held a casual Mach 1 speed as it approached the target area. The Crescent could haul up to twenty-five thousand pounds, including tanks, but this one had been converted for Special Ops HALO (High Altitude-Low Opening) drops and, as a result, featured several private rooms complete with bunks, closets, and heads. It had a price tag of five hundred million dollars, not including the billions in research and development, but it did its job, which right now was to transport two pilots, two doctors, the five members of the Chess Team, plus their newest addition, Pawn, halfway around the world—undetected.

“You’re serious?” Sara said, arms crossed over her small chest. “Pawn?”

King nodded as the incision over his heart was stitched up. He winced as Dr. Mark Byers gave the wire a few tugs, pulling the cut flesh together. He’d been given local anesthesia, but because they were jumping right into a mission, the dosage had been low and the effects long since diminished. Luckily, Byers announced he was done, with a quick snip. “Thanks, Mark.”

The balding doctor winked and began wiping down the scalpel he’d used to open King’s chest. “Just try to avoid any physical activity for the next few days. Wouldn’t want it to reopen.”

As King laughed, Byers, who’d given King more than a few stitches in the past few years, patted his shoulder and added, “I put in a few extras. It should hold. Just make sure I don’t have to give you more when you return, eh?”

“No kidding. You do a terrible job. I’ve got scars in places no other man has seen.”

Byers guffawed as he placed the scalpel in an alcohol solution. “With that birthmark of yours you’d be lucky to find anyone, man or woman, willing to find all your scars. You’re just lucky I get paid so well.”

King smiled while inspecting his freshly sewn wound. “You get paid well?”

“Better than you.”

King shook his head. “I’m the one taking the bullets.”

“And I’m the one pulling them out of your ugly ass. Which do you think is harder?”

As the banter continued, Sara tuned out the rest. Her impatience mounted. She’d asked him a question and he outright ignored her. She’d been told that the “Chess Team” was supposed to be the best—smarter and tougher—but she was beginning to have doubts. She knew that Delta operators were more casual than their Special Forces counterparts like the Navy SEALs or Army Rangers. She knew they received stipends to purchase their own weapons. They had to blend. They had to look normal, fit in with a crowd. But that didn’t mean they had to be unprofessional.

And King, their leader—she had no idea what his rank actually was, as Delta had done away with ranks—was more casual than the rest. His blue jeans, Elvis T-shirt, and scruffy black hair wasn’t a cover. It was him. Who he was.

But the positively most annoying aspect of the mission thus far was the plane. If it was stealth, why was it so loud? Not to mention the smell of ordnance, oil, and human sweat that assaulted her nose and brought on a headache that had taken four ibuprofen to tame. And the shaking . . . the dipping up and down . . . the consoles with blinking lights . . . the—

Sara focused her mind back on King to avoid descending into sensory overload anxiety. She’d been diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder a few years back, which at the time had been a relief because it removed the guilt she’d carried for being so picky and demanding about her environment, but it didn’t ease the effects of the disorder. Her senses were not only hypersensitive, they would get mixed up. Smells could give her blinding headaches. She could feel sounds. Rain, cursed with manmade chemicals, caused her to break out in hives. The sun, which most people felt as a blunt warmth, felt as a thousand pinpricks on her skin.

She’d managed to find her own coping mechanisms for most of the everyday challenges, and much of her work as a disease detective for the CDC kept her in familiar territory, even while in the field. But this mission, with its vast numbers of unknowns, new people, new experiences, and totally new surroundings was wreaking havoc with her senses faster than her mind could keep up. Her only defense was distraction . . . and that was hard to come by when she was being ignored.

While lost in her frustration, Sara hadn’t noticed her clenching hands, her reddening cheeks, or her pulsating jaw muscles. But King had. He was quite aware that Sara was about to lose her cool, and all it took was a few seconds of ignoring her. She needed some work. A lot of work. He hopped off the operating table, picked up some clothes from a nearby stool, and said, “Did you say something?”

Sara felt close to popping, but swallowed her words upon seeing King’s back. Not only was the musculature perfectly sculpted, but it was covered by a large, purple . . . something. A tattoo?

“It’s called a port-wine stain. It’s a birthmark.”

“A vascular malformation.”

King chuckled.

“They’re genetic. Connected to the RASA-one protein activator. You probably had a grandparent with one. They’re caused by dilated capillaries, usually on the face.”

“Not this one. It runs down my ass and around to my inner thighs.” King turned around with a smile as he donned a black, moisture-wicking long-sleeve shirt. Sara caught a glimpse of his chiseled stomach and blinked as the words that had been on the tip of her tongue dissolved into the recess of her mind. “Wanna see?”

“What? No. Absolutely not.” Sara continued to blink as her mind began to catch up with her distracted senses. Then she remembered: Pawn. “My code name—”

“You’d like something else?”

Sara began to respond, but was quickly cut off.

“Like it or not, you’re part of the Chess Team now, and the other names are already taken. Any time we take someone else on, they become Pawn. That’s just the way it is. If you want to rename yourself RASA-one, go for it, but from now until we debrief in Limbo, you’re Pawn.”

The room fell silent except for the wind rushing by the aircraft and the roar of its engines. Sara sighed with the realization that she was picking the fight to vent the anxiety caused in part because of the impending thirty-thousand-foot jump, but also from her assaulted senses. It was a stupid fight to pick. “Fine.” She turned to walk away and added, “At least I know I’m the expendable piece.”

King snatched her shoulder and spun her around. He glared into her eyes and said, “No one is expendable on this team. Including you. Especially you.”

He held her gaze and in that moment she felt the powerful sincerity of his words. His voice carried the passion of a man in love—though he was not. Still, his words stirred something in her and kept her from replying.

He noticed her forehead and shoulders relax. She’d be okay. “Of course, you’re working for the military now. We’re all expendable.”

Sara’s laugh was cut short as the door to the makeshift operating room swung open. Rook’s head poked in. “Hey, quit dry humpin’ and get your shit together. We’re an hour and fifteen out. Time to get geared up and start prebreathing.”

King smiled at Sara as Rook ducked out. Despite his insistence on designating her Pawn, he couldn’t stop thinking of her as Sara. And he felt it important he didn’t. Just a second’s worth of believing she could take care of herself might be enough for her to wind up dead. They might call her Pawn . . . one of the team . . . but she was really Sara, the sitting duck. “You heard the man, quit dry humpin’ me and get ready to jump.”

Sara began to respond, but a flicker of color on King’s wrist caught her attention. He saw her frown and looked at his arm. The outbreak meter had gone from green to yellow. Lewis’s test signal had transmitted. It was a simple change in color, but carried dire implications.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, placing his hand gently on her shoulder.

Her stomach knotted at his touch. She wondered if this is how it felt; going into battle with strangers. They knew nothing about each other, but every gesture, touch, and word snuck past her personal defenses. In that moment she noticed King’s presence in full. The thin scar on his neck. The confidence of his stance. Even his smell—metallic. And for a moment, until he spoke again, she felt safe.

“Time to go.” He nodded to the door and followed her out.

In the hurried fifteen minutes to follow there was little time to think. They quickly donned their jumpsuits, harnesses, bailout bottles, gear, and weapons, all of which had been triple checked during the flight over the Pacific. Then they sat, placed oxygen masks over their faces, and breathed 100 percent O₂ for the next hour, which flushed nitrogen from their bloodstreams. The air pressure outside the Crescent was one-third that of sea level’s. Jumping at thirty thousand feet with too much nitrogen in your body would give you the bends, akin to what SCUBA divers experience if they surface too fast. Nausea, headaches, and, in worst-case scenarios, death could occur. Not a good way to start an operation.

For the next thirty minutes, while prebreathing, Sara read and reread their mission profile. They were meeting up with a CIA operative out of Laos who’d spent a lot of time in the Annamite range. She knew nothing about this person other than they held the code name Pawn Two. How original. Then they would head for Anh Dung, a village smack dab in the middle of a mountainous nowhere.

The side benefit was that the mountain range had become a modern Noah’s Ark. Before the war, only local villagers ventured into the massif. It was the same for generation upon generation, going back thousands of years. And now even the villagers were afraid to tread on the explosive soil. Only a few biologists and cryptozoologists had braved the region. It was a gold mine of unclassified mammals the likes of which the world had not yet seen. Sometimes the scientists went in and never came back out, but the draw continued to that day.

A red flashing light took attention away from the dossier in her gloved hands. She put it aside and heard King’s voice loud and clear in her earpiece. “Two minutes, people. Pawn, get over here.”

As the seconds ticked by, King fastened himself to her back. While Sara had been skydiving several times before, she’d never done a HALO jump and even if she had, she had a feeling King would still insist they jumped tandem.

Thirty seconds until jump time, she felt the Crescent slow significantly. Then the hydraulic bay door hissed open, exposing them to the freezing thirty-thousand-foot night air. She felt the temperature change even through her protective jumpsuit.

“Switch to your bailout bottles,” King said. “On my mark . . . jump!”

One by one, the Delta team jumped from the back, commencing a free fall that would take them rocketing toward the earth’s surface only to be yanked up by their chutes at an extremely low altitude. King and Sara jumped last.

Cast out of the nearly invisible Crescent, the team, all wearing black, disappeared into the night. If not for small glow-in-the-dark diamonds on the back of their helmets, the team would find staying together impossible. King found the four diamonds below and tilted himself and Sara forward. They glided through the air and joined the rest of the team, who’d already taken up formation.

As the thirty-below wind whipped past, Sara was amazed at how different this was from low-altitude skydiving. A typical drop might last only seconds before chutes deployed, but they’d already free fallen ten thousand feet and had another nineteen to go before they’d open their chutes. The downside, of course, was that at one thousand feet, descending at terminal velocity, there was no time to open a reserve if the main failed. For that reason, none of them even had reserves.

But Sara’s mind wasn’t on becoming a stain on the ground. She was enjoying the freedom of the moment. Not only was she free of earth, but her senses were free as well. The wind generated pressure on her body like a heavy blanket. The white noise of rushing air blocked out everything else. And the darkness above and below let her eyes relax. It was as though she were in a wonderful bed.

King noticed Sara’s body go slightly limp beneath him. If she passed out it would make for a rough landing. Hell, it was going to be rough already. But if she were unconscious, someone would most likely get hurt. He knocked on her helmet with his fist. “You okay?”

“Never better,” came Sara’s reply through his earpiece. “I’m—”

“King, LZ is compromised,” Knight said coolly.

King looked past Sara’s helmet and saw crisscrossing patterns of tracer fire slicing across the field that was supposed to be their deserted landing zone. King had no idea who the combatants were and had no time to ponder about it. Damnit, where are you, Deep Blue, King thought. They could have used him now. But he wasn’t there, and King would have to trust what he could see with his own two eyes.

The field was surrounded by miles of thick jungle and uneven terrain. There was nowhere else to go.

“Land at the edge of the northern jungle and hump it inside as soon as you hit. Protect Pawn. Shoot to kill.”

Sara’s body went rigid and her breathing became frantic. She’d never been in a firefight and they were dropping straight into a war zone! She felt a second knock on her helmet.

“Sorry, Pawn,” King said in her ear. “This is gonna hurt.”