The Fall (7 page)

Briefly closing his eyes, he remembered the violet glow that had engulfed him in the ionosphere, followed by that strange lightning storm he thought was Claudette, before he punched through some sort of membrane into clear skies.

Did I dream that?

He narrowed his gaze and frowned while staring at the star-filled sky, at the moon.

Insects clicking, birds chirping on unseen trees, his tired mind did a quick calculation and decided it was impossible. Unless some drastic meteorological event had taken place while he was falling from the sky, the skies over central Florida should be not only completely overcast, but winds should have picked up by now in anticipation of—

Wait.

Where the hell is everybody?

Sitting up with effort, he looked around, shaking his head, trying to clear his mind, his throat dry, his mouth pasty.

A field of short grass surrounded him.

He heard a noise to his right, and for a moment saw the outline of trees backdropped by the very dim glow of passing lights.

A road.

Probably rural, explaining why he could see so many stars. He was away from city lights, which washed out the night sky.

He stared at his gloved hands and exhaled heavily, not understanding why he was alone in the middle of nowhere when just about half of the United States military, the FAA, NASA, Florida State Troopers—and even the frickin' Boy Scouts of America—were tracking his jump and were supposed to be here to greet him.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

Giving the stubborn skies another glance, Jack realized he wasn't wearing his helmet, only to figure out a moment later that the autopilot had ejected it when he landed to keep him from suffocating. After all, the enormous helmet weighed almost half as much as the entire suit.

Looking around again, he spotted its elongated silver shape next to the parachute, which the autopilot had also disconnected from his suit upon landing.

Angie had certainly thought of everything.

Everything except for this,
he decided, trying hard to suppress the anger that always welled in the pit of his stomach whenever he wasn't in control. And at the moment, Jack was anything
but
in control, from the time of day, the landing spot, the lack of a crowd—even the lack of Claudette, which allowed him to see that damn third-quarter moon glowing in the sky.

Is it possible that I drifted that much off course because of the jump profile change that Angie programmed instead of the one Hastings had demanded?

Seemed pretty unlikely.

If there was one thing he would bet his life on it was his wife's smarts. In fact, he had just done so by jumping off that orbital pod.

Another vehicle went by the road, engine rumbling, lights forking through a silhouette of trees before fading away.

He frowned again as his mind continued to wake up, reminding him of the multiple GPS beacons that Angie had built into the OSS to ensure his constant tracking. If he had drifted off course, NASA would have known it and diverted the rescue crews to his landing spot. On top of that, the OSS had two independent emergency locator transmitters, or ELTs, one on his helmet and the other on his lower back, designed to transmit a signal as a pair separated by twenty-four inches—something Jack always thought of as a bit of NASA dark humor. If the spacing between the ELT emissions increased, it would immediately tell controllers that his head was separating from his shoulders on reentry.

He lifted the heat shield on his left wrist, exposing a small control panel—a backup to the retina-controlled systems on his helmet display—to check on the status of his emergency beacons.

The panel was dark.

Upon closer inspection, he saw that the suit's built-in batteries, designed to last up to forty-eight hours, were exhausted.

Surprise, surprise.

No batteries meant he couldn't tell if the ELTs, which had their own batteries for redundancy, were operating. But again, since he was all alone, it was a pretty good assumption that nothing was working. The OSS, which was designed to remain fully operational for almost two days, was completely shut down.

But if that was the case, then how did the OSS eject the helmet and the parachute upon landing?

Add that to the growing list of shit that doesn't make sense.

There had to be an explanation for all of this.

But you sure as hell aren't going to find it here, Jack.

Standing with some effort, he stretched his legs, then his back, working out the kinks.

The media must be having a field day with this,
he thought, deciding that people probably thought that Phoenix had burned up on reentry since he hadn't landed where he was supposed to and his suit couldn't broadcast his location.

Walking over to his helmet, Jack leaned down, picked it up, hoisted it over his head with some effort, and lowered it over the round neck ring of his upper suit's structure, locking it in place while hoping for the best. Angela had included another set of batteries in the helmet as additional redundancy, but the thing was as dead as the rest of the suit.

What in the world drained all of these batteries?

Annoyed at the lack of answers, Jacked pulled off the helmet and dropped it by his feet before removing his gloves. Reaching under his left armpit with his right hand, he unzipped the side of his reinforced carbon-carbon upper plate, the third and final layer of his ablation shields. He did the same to his right torso before releasing the ring around his waist that connected the upper and lower sections of the OSS.

Pulling off the silvery vestlike shield over his head, Jack folded this ultra-light but amazingly strong piece of engineering that had kept him from turning into a well-done steak, for a moment remembering how skeptical he had been the first time Angie had shown it to him. All of the heat shields he had seen up to that point, including the space shuttle's TPS, were composed of very thick silica or reinforced carbon-carbon tiles. While the main ablation shields on the shoulder pads and helmet stacked to almost two inches at the start of the jump, the rest of this upper shell was less than a quarter of an inch thick, and it was all designed to be folded along with the gloves and stowed inside the large and elongated helmet. And the whole apparatus had a pair of built-in straps that Jack pulled out from their Velcro-secured niches so the jumper could wear it like a backpack.

Disengaging a second inner ring from his waist, Jack dropped the lower outer suit to his ankles and stepped out of it. Made of flexible insulation blanket materials laced with gel-filled capillaries, it resembled a pair of waders, boots included. Again, he folded it almost on automatic, just as he had drilled endlessly at NASA, also stowing it in the helmet before donning the high-tech backpack that made him look as if he were hauling an alien artifact.

He inhaled deeply, actually enjoying the cool air that now streamed through the one-piece camouflaged undergarment made of breathable compounds laced with Kevlar fibers, designed to keep the jumper comfortable but armored, ready for combat.

He frowned, realizing that the only thing in his possession that qualified as combat equipment, besides the suit, was his old trusty SOG knife from his SEAL days, which Jack had insisted on strapping to the battle dress clip on his left thigh especially made for it. He touched the handle of the sheathed seven-inch blade, verifying it was properly secured.

Giving his parachute a parting glance, Jack started for the distant tree line, feeling the soft ground beneath the spring-action soles of the carbon-fiber and rubber-compound boots integrated into his battle suit, which Angela had designed per Pentagon specifications to be worn by the jumper for the ground mission that would follow a real insertion into hostile areas.

He glanced at the sky, feeling dehydrated, wondering again what had happened, but also wishing to just be home, to be with Angie.

Jack approached a wall of tall pines separating the field from a dark road, one lane going in each direction divided by a narrow grassy medium.

Slowly, cautiously, he crossed the twenty-some-feet of forest, amid waist-high bushes, stepped onto a gravel shoulder, and just stood there staring at the dark road, trying to decide which way to turn. Since he landed just northeast of Orlando, that meant Cocoa Beach was to the south. But he lacked a compass or a working GPS.

When all else fails, you still have the stars.

Glancing back at the heavens, he ignored the moon and looked for the Big Dipper, spotting it high up in the northern sky and nearly vertical with the bowl at the bottom pointing to Polaris, the North Star, which formed the very tip of the handle of the Little Dipper, also vertical but with its bowl at the top. Tonight everything looked about the same as last night, when he had stared at the stars on the way to the Cape, though for some reason he thought that the stars had shifted a bit more than normal for just one day's difference.

Maybe it's just my imagination.

Or … maybe I really did drift way off course.

And that could at least explain the lack of cloud coverage.

He remembered dropping out of the sky into a blanket of lightning resembling Claudette. Could it be possible that he caught the leading edge of the storm and somehow got caught in its southerly winds in the stratosphere?

But where did it push me? Miami?

He shook his head. This certainly didn't look like Miami or the Everglades.

What if it pushed me farther south … like, to Cuba?

That would explain why there was no one here greeting him and why he could see the stars and the moon. Claudette's track kept it clear off Cuba and the tip of Florida.

Shit!

He stared at the road again, but with different eyes. There was a chance he was no longer in the United States but perhaps in Cuba, wearing this damned high-tech suit.

At least you didn't splash down in the middle of the ocean,
he thought, deciding to look at the bright side of this surreal event. Besides, he had been in far more exotic destinations during his years with the SEALs, from deep in the Colombian bush taking out drug lords, to the mountains of Afghanistan smoking Taliban commanders.

His SEAL training took over, forcing him to accept the undeniable meteorological facts while ignoring the gastronomical chaos in his stomach.

He retreated to the safety of the tree line, fingers brushing the handle of his SOG knife, still secured to his left thigh, but suddenly wishing that this jump had included some of the high-tech weaponry that the DOD was developing to arm the new generation of orbital soldiers.

Jack needed to reassess his next move while further inspecting the road, looking for any sign that would tell him where he was.

But he saw nothing. Just an empty, dark road.

He waited, remembering the passing lights of vehicles. Sooner or later, another car would—

Headlights pierced the darkness, grayish beams of light washing out the asphalt and surrounding trees as the road turned.

Jack remained in the shadows, waiting. The vehicle finally appeared around the bend, a large truck … no, a motor home, a very large one with a diesel engine in back towing a small vehicle.

A diesel pusher,
he thought, having seen lots of them in Florida from all over the northern states, especially in the winter months, when the “snow birds” migrated south to get away from the cold.

He watched as it drove down the road, engine rumbling.

Slowly, in a deep crouch, Jack stepped onto the gravel just as the gray and black motor home sped by, his eyes focusing on the license plate on the back of the rig and also on the towed compact sedan.

And right there, as clear as day, he read the bottom of both plates.

NEW HAMPSHIRE.

And above the license numbers,
LIVE FREE OR DIE.

He retreated to the cluster of pines.

New Hampshire?

So he wasn't in Cuba but still in Florida, and south enough to be away from Claudette? But then why wasn't anyone here? Cuba, as complicated and unpleasant as the place would be for him, at least offered some semblance of an explanation for the absence of a welcoming committee.

Jack took several deep breaths, settling his system, regaining his focus. There had to be a logical explanation. There always was.

Just as the motor home vanished around the curve, another vehicle approached in the opposite direction. Jack dropped to a crouch, his eyes narrowed, his mind racing.

The car, which Jack recognized as a Toyota sedan, had Florida tags.

Over the course of the next five minutes, he spotted three more Florida tags, two from Georgia, one from Alabama, and three more from northern states.

He finally sat at the edge of the gravel, his back against the rough bark of a pine tree, the reality of his situation taxing his trained, logical mind.

How could he be in Florida when there was no one here to greet him? The whole world was tracking his jump.

Go home, Jack. Go home to Angie.

The words flashed in his mind, washing down his anxiety. He needed to retreat, to reexamine, to think this through, and he needed Angie to help him process this.

Jack decided to just start walking. He was obviously in Florida. He had landed where he was supposed to, but the same world that was tracking his epic jump with overwhelming interest as he had leaped off that pod had somehow vanished.

The stars told him this road ran east-west, so he turned east, toward the ocean, walking on the gravel, left hand up in the air and thumb out every time a vehicle went by.

Sooner or later, he would reach an intersection, a crossroads, a roadway sign—something that would show him the way home.

Or maybe, just maybe, someone would be crazy enough to pick up a lone hitchhiker walking in the middle of the night wearing a camouflaged skin-tight battle dress and hauling a silvery backpack in the shape of the head of an alien.