JET, no. 3 Read online

  The chopper’s blades sliced through the damp atmosphere, thumping a hypnotic beat as the aircraft hovered fifteen hundred feet above the jungle treetops north of Spanish Lookout. The five passengers gazed through the windows at the topography below – referring to their bound reports, making discreet notes in the borders, exchanging glances before returning to their study of the land.

  The pilot was flying in a methodical grid pattern so that the group could better appreciate the area in which they’d spent the last six months. Professor Calvin Reynolds, a rail-thin man with a largely bald head and round, steel-rimmed spectacles, pointed to a small clearing in the distance.

  “There’s A-7. Looks pretty remote from this far up, doesn’t it?”

  They slowly drifted toward the site, climbing another few hundred feet in an effort to find calmer air – the heat rising from the earth was creating unpredictable updrafts, resulting in an uncomfortable ride, and the pilot was sensitive to providing as pleasant a trip as possible.

  A swarthy, heavyset man wiped his neck with a red bandana and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, obviously ill at ease. The occasional turbulence from thermal drafts wasn’t helping; every time the helicopter jolted, he clutched the sides of his seat with a hawkish grip. Oscar Valenzuela hated flying, but especially hated helicopters. He’d read about their aerodynamics, or rather their lack of them. As far as he was concerned, they were death traps – a conviction that Reynolds ribbed him about mercilessly.

  “It looks that way because it’s in the middle of nowhere. I don’t care if I never see the place again, frankly,” Valenzuela declared in a tone of disgust.

  Valenzuela was a highly competent geologist with over twenty-five years of experience in Central America, but one of his personality quirks was that he complained incessantly about everything. His colleagues had long ago grown used to it, but not so his first and second wives, who eventually couldn’t stomach his worldview and moved on to more palatable possibilities. Oscar threw the pilot an evil glare, as though the turbulence was a personal slight, and swallowed with difficulty, his complexion decidedly pasty.

  Professor Reynolds gifted him a humorless grin. “You know as well as I do that we’ll probably be spending a lot more time here,” he said, with a condescending nod of his sunburned head.

  “Just my luck. Filthy place. Bugs the size of buses. Malaria, dengue, yellow fever, typhoid–”

  “And those are the positives,” Reynolds reflected.

  Another jolt hit the cabin as they encountered more bumpy air, causing Oscar’s sweating to intensify. He was preparing to complain about the heat and the roughness of the ride when a loud beeping sounded from the cockpit. The pilot fought with the controls, and then leaned forward and tapped on one of the gauges. The helicopter shuddered as the motor stuttered, then it resumed purring as it had for the last forty-five minutes, the strident screeching of the failure warning dying abruptly.

  Oscar’s eyes were now saucers of panic.

  “Wha…what the hell was that? What’s wrong?” he demanded in a shrill voice a full octave higher than normal.

  The pilot was turning to address him when the alarm clamored again, but this time the vibration intensified before a grinding sound tore through the cabin. Another louder alarm began howling as the rotor stopped turning.

  Oscar’s stomach lurched into his throat as the helicopter stalled. The screams of horror and panic around him battled with the din of the engine failure alarms – his worst living nightmare playing out in real time. The drop began gradually for a quarter second and then accelerated like a runaway elevator, freefalling into the embrace of gravity. All Oscar had time to think was “Oh, God – no, no, no…”

  The explosion from the chopper plowing into the earth was audible fifteen miles away in Spanish Lookout, and the plume of smoke from the wreckage was visible all the way to the Mexican border. By the time rescue craft mobilized and made it from Belize City, the flames had exhausted themselves, and all that was left was the charred skeleton of the frame.

  Chapter 5

  Four Years Ago, Chechnya, Russian Federation

  Jet steered the maroon Lada Kalina to the roadside and stopped to check her GPS coordinates. She was outside of Grozny, on a minor artery that ran south to Alkahn-Yurt, a quarter mile from the target, and there was no traffic at a little past midnight on a Tuesday. Even so, she didn’t dally, and inched the small vehicle back onto the pavement before pulling onto a side road a hundred yards farther up – a farm access-way, according to her study of the satellite images.

  Once out of the city, the surroundings quickly became rural, with large crop fields separating the farmhouses that punctuated the landscape. It was a quiet region where neighbors kept to themselves and didn’t poke their noses into the business of others. Everyone would be asleep by now in the nearby homes, few as they were, as tomorrow would bring another twelve-hour stint in the fields, commencing at daybreak.

  She killed the headlights and engine, and exited the hatchback, moving to the rear compartment to secure her backpack and weapons. As was her custom, she had loosened the interior bulb and the brake lights so they wouldn’t alert anyone to her presence – particularly valuable if she had to run dark once the operation was over and she was making her getaway.

  The PP-19 Bizon submachine gun she pulled from a duffle in the back was a Russian weapon, as was the compact PSS pistol, capable of delivering six shots in nearly complete silence; one of the true feats of Soviet ingenuity – the Mossad had gotten their hands on three almost a decade before to reverse engineer for their own purposes. One of the pilfered weapons had been sacrificed to Jet for this mission. The PSS used a special subsonic cartridge with an internal piston that blocked the escape of the explosive gasses that made noise; it was as close to a silent killing firearm ever developed.

  A complement of throwing knives, as well as her main blade, were of Russian paratrooper stock. All of her clothes, weapons and ammunition had been sourced in Moscow, so in the event she was captured or killed, the trail would end in Russia – standard procedure for this kind of assignment. The night vision goggles she slid on were the only non-Russian device – a consumer type readily available anywhere online, so foreign manufacture signified nothing.

  Jet slid her arms through the backpack straps and hoisted the Bizon before taking off at a trot into the brush. She knew all about the motion detectors on the outside of the compound and was carrying countermeasures that would neutralize them. Beyond that, this was a straightforward sanction – the target was verified at the location as of this evening, the security detail had been watched for weeks and its schedule was well understood, and nobody at the site was expecting anything. She had performed dozens of missions like it – rescue operations, assassinations, and diversionary drills. The essentials were always the same. Get in and out with a minimum of fuss, achieve the objective, and live to fight another day.

  Unlike many of her peers, she didn’t work with an entourage unless it was absolutely necessary. In this case, she had argued convincingly that she could easily handle the operation on her own. Her control officer had disliked the idea, but ultimately acquiesced. Given her track record, what Jet wanted, she generally got.

  She had been operational now for four and a half years, which was forever in her specialized niche of intelligence work.

  Intelligence work. That was a nice way of saying government-sponsored murder and mayhem. Be that as it may, she was the very best at her job and had become a whispered legend in the Mossad. Even during her training, after being recruited from the army following her mandatory stint, she’d been a standout. One of the instructors had confided in her at the end that she had easily been the most adept student he’d ever trained – a natural, with uncanny talents.

  That hadn’t surprised her. She’d discovered while in the military that extensive discipline and a rigorous regimen of physical demand was the perfect antidote for the seething fury that
had boiled inside of her since childhood. She’d been an angry and confused six-year-old following the death of her parents in that tragic car accident, but then when her foster father had betrayed her and begun to…

  She had tried to channel her rage and hurt by studying martial arts and spending most of her free time at a dojo run by one of her counselors in Tel Aviv, but that hadn’t filled the hole in her soul. Neither had the almost obsessive study of languages, mastering a new one every year. No, the pain and outrage had no outlet until she’d joined the military, and it had translated into a fearlessness and ability to execute that knew no equal. Mossad recruiters had been alerted, and after poring over every aspect of her background, decided she was perfect for the experimental new group they were assembling.

  Everyone selected had several things in common. No family. No real friends. No husbands or wives; nobody close. Emotional detachment and fluid sense of morality. And nearly superhuman reflexes and skills with weapons.

  Jet never knew how many were approached, or how many went into the program only to falter during the brutal and uncompromising training. She had been trained alone. Though she’d seen a few others coming and going, Jet had been kept in a separate area, segregated except for her three instructors. At one point, one of them had explained that the isolation was for her safety; nobody knew who was on the team except for those who’d made the grade and had to work together, and the man assigned to act as its control – a man known only to the team by the code name Ariel. Jet didn’t even get to meet him until she’d been approved in the final weeks before her specialized training ended. She’d been surprised to find that he was relatively young – no more than his mid-thirties – and extremely intense. Brooding would have been a description that would have fitted perfectly.

  She snapped back to the present. There was nothing to be gained doing a trip down memory lane. She needed to focus.

  Her footfalls crunched on the dry twigs, and she slowed as her GPS indicated she was getting close to the compound. With any luck, the mission would be over within fifteen minutes from the time she deactivated the first motion detector. Maybe less. There were twelve sentries guarding the target, but they worked split shifts, so she only needed to contend with six. The others would be neutralized in their sleeping quarters, using gas. The two small aluminum canisters were wrapped in neoprene sheaths to protect them on approach.

  The compound’s lights were visible from several hundred yards, even through the dense vegetation. She’d been following a trail the advance surveillance group had told her ran near the property. She paused in the underbrush to flip her night vision goggles out of her field of vision and brushed a bead of moisture off her forehead. There were a few other minor loose ends to attend to, but it was almost showtime, and her first piece of business was to render the motion detectors useless.

  ~ ~ ~

  The guard never knew what hit him – a throwing knife penetrated his ribcage from behind, piercing his heart, the neurotoxin on the blade instantly paralyzing him even as life ebbed from his body. Jet knew there were four sentries outside and two inside, and her strategy was to take out the exterior guards silently.

  She moved like a wraith, nearly invisible in the shadows. The second guard would be rounding the building within one minute – the Mossad watchers had confirmed the security detail was on a tight timetable with its patrols, a throwback to the highly disciplined training the men had received in the Russian special forces – Spetsnaz GRU, the most elite of the elite.

  The little PSS pistol popped, driving a 7.62mm bullet through the second guard’s throat. He crumpled to the ground, his weapon dropping soundlessly on the grass beneath him.

  Jet crouched by his motionless form, confirming he was dead before dragging him behind a hedge so the other guards wouldn’t be alerted.

  Only two more to go outside.

  The third was in the process of spinning around to identify the odd noise he’d heard when Jet’s second throwing knife punctured his lung. He joined his colleague behind the hedge – then Jet’s blood froze when his radio emitted a burst of static at low volume and a voice demanded a status update in Russian.

  She opted to let the call go unanswered. Her Russian was excellent, but these men knew each other, and even if she faked a garbled response in a low voice, they’d instantly know it wasn’t one of them. Now she would need to neutralize the fourth exterior guard before he made it from the rear of the compound, where she knew he spent most of his nights doing nothing.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sergei leaned against the wall as he answered the open call from inside the house, and confirmed that there was no news to report from his end. The latest in a long string of non-events, a routine weeknight in the boonies, in a shithole of a country, living amongst barbarians. He really hated his time in Chechnya and was anxiously anticipating the group’s departure at the end of the week. The boss moved around a fair amount, and they’d been told that their next posting would be in Malta, in the Mediterranean, for a month. That was more like it.

  He was fumbling in his jacket pocket for a cigarette when the PSS slug blew through his skull, fragmenting on impact and sending several chunks of lead shredding through his cerebrum. He never knew he was dying; he’d merely stopped being alive, his stay on the planet ended before his body hit the cold stone slabs.

  Jet ran full speed for the back door, knowing that she only had seconds to plunge the house into darkness. She’d affixed a small charge to the cabling that carried electricity to the villa – she depressed the remote trigger a few moments after she squirted the contents of a small canister into the lock, which dissolved with a smoking hiss. A muffled crack from beyond the wall preceded the power going off and the lights shutting down, and then four seconds later, the backup generator kicked on – just long enough for her to wrench the door open, slip inside and punch in the alarm code without the camera capturing her.

  The first interior guard fell to her throwing knife, his blood gurgling in a froth as he groped for the slim handle that had suddenly appeared in the side of his throat. She was able to catch him and break his fall just as he tumbled forward, and she lowered him gently to the carpet, leaving the knife in place, his eyes losing focus during his death rattle.

  Jet crept to the two bedrooms that had been identified as the guard quarters and slipped a plastic tube over a nipple on one end of the first canister before sliding it under the door and emptying the contents into the room. She repeated the process at the second room and listened for any sounds. The floor creaked upstairs, near the office that adjoined the master quarters. Someone was up there, awake. Maybe the guard, maybe the target.

  Every sense in her body was on alert, trying to isolate any clues that would give away the final bodyguard’s position. Perhaps he was in the security center off the kitchen – the little study that the detail had set up to use for monitoring the surveillance equipment. That would be the most likely place.

  She crept down the main hall and past the empty living room, her steps muffled by the carpet as well as the rubber soles of her boots – Doc Martens knockoffs that were all the rage in Moscow, and spuriously crafted in China, the Shangri-La of piracy. When she reached the study, she swung into the doorway with her pistol at the ready and was greeted by an empty room.

  A door opened down the hall, and a man stepped out holding a magazine – Maxim, she noted as she fired a shot through his eye. This last guard hadn’t even taken his weapon with him into the bathroom. Not that it would have mattered, but it indicated how sloppy the security team had grown from years of inactivity and relative safety.

  Jet heard another creak from upstairs as the dead man slid down the wall, leaving a ragged smear of blood. She was already at the stairs by the time gravity had finished with him.

  ~ ~ ~

  Arkadi’s stomach was in knots. Something was wrong. The power had gone off, and since it had come back on he hadn’t seen anyone patrolling outside. But m
ore unusual was that he could make out a few faint lights from other buildings across the field at the surrounding farms. The nocturnal blackouts so far had always darkened everything, not just his compound.

  He keyed the two-way radio he used to communicate with his security men and murmured a demand for them to call in. He released the button and waited for a response that never came.

  It was always possible they hadn’t heard. But he wasn’t in the business of assuming the best about anything. His gut said he was in danger.

  Arkadi moved to his desk and extracted a pistol from the center drawer – a SIG 225R – then tiptoed to the office door, listening intently for any sounds. He was working up the adrenaline to swing it open when the window burst inward and a black-clad form rolled toward him. He pivoted, bringing the gun around, but a blinding flash of pain spiked up his leg from where Jet’s razor-sharp combat knife had sliced his Achilles tendon. His leg buckled and he screamed as he pulled the trigger, but the shot missed, and the pain transferred to his stomach. He dropped the pistol on the floor as he gazed down to see Jet’s masked face staring up at him, her knife plunged to the hilt in his abdomen. She rose to her feet, gripping the knife and holding him upright, then sliced up into his heart as she’d been trained to do in countless hours of close quarter combat exercises.

  Arkadi’s eyes opened in shock from the rapid exsanguination, but also with his last living thought – the realization that his assassin was a woman. His lips stretched taut and a gurgle choked in his throat as he tried in vain to say something, and then everything went black, and he crumpled to the ground, the knife still buried in his chest.

  Jet bent down and felt Arkadi’s throat for a pulse, and then after confirming he was dead, pulled a cell phone from her pocket and snapped a photo of the body, his face clearly visible. She thumbed the phone’s buttons with the hand that wasn’t covered in blood and sent it as an e-mail attachment to a blind, single-use address, then slid the cell back into her black pants.