Chasing the White Lion James Hannibal (essential reading TXT) 📖

to use Agency terminology, Stage Two would be over, one way or another. Ninety minutes. The team had ninety minutes to draw out the ruler of this thematic underworld and kill him.

CHAPTER

FORTY-

SEVEN

TEN THOUSAND FEET

MAE SURIN JUNGLE

MAE HONG SON PROVINCE, THAILAND

A SPEEDBUMPOFWETAIRBOUNCED FINN, chute pack and all, up from the floor of the rickety prop plane he and Mac had rented for the night. Flying in the wee hours over Thai mountain ridges was no better than driving up a rocky jeep trail. “Any chance of finding smooth air?”

“No.”

Finn waited through two more bumps for the Scotsman to offer any form of elaboration. None followed. Mac had never been a verbose man, but the terse answer likely had to do with the level of concentration required to keep the little T-41 Mescalero upright in the rough air, so Finn didn’t press. “Alright, then.”

They had found the plane at a fly-by-night skydiving operation in Chiang Mai. It met their requirements—copilot and passenger seats ripped out and door widened for jump operations. Airworthiness was a secondary concern. The souped-up Cessna 172 had started life as a Royal Thai Air Force trainer and still sported the original olive drab paint job. Looking out at the wings and struts, Finn could see several poorly matched spots where the owner had painted over fifty years of corrosion. He made it halfway through a sigh, only to be bounced off the floor again. “Okay, now you’re doing it on purpose.”

Mac pointed at a portable GPS display suction-cupped to the dash. “We’re approachin’ the drop zone, lad. Yer up.”

“Roger. I’m off comms.” Finn pulled his headset cord from the aircraft jack and plugged it into a Motorola handset. He dialed the UHF frequency Talia had given him. “Ewan Ferguson, this is Nightflyer. Come in, please.” Ewan Ferguson. Another Scotsman. What sort of purgatory had Talia thrown him into? “Ewan, this is Nightflyer. How do you read?”

The radio crackled. “Nightflyer, I read you.” He didn’t sound Scottish, although the aircraft noise and the weak signal made it hard to say for sure. “I am at the drop zone.”

By drop zone, he meant a twenty-meter clearing Finn and Mac had identified via satellite imagery before leaving Milos. Sixteen hours had passed since then, added to the hundred or more that had passed since the children first disappeared. Needles and haystacks came to mind.

Rising to his knees, Finn peered out through the prop at the fog-lined ridges. A moonlight jump into a jungle forest. Timing and coordination were everything. “Ewan, do you have the flare gun?”

An orange star, trailing flame, rose from the trees dead ahead, lighting up the wisps of cloud.

“I asked if you had it,” Finn grumbled to himself. “I didn’t tell you to shoot it off.” He keyed the radio. “Load another round, and when I give you the signal, count to thirty and fire it off.”

No answer.

“Ewan, do you copy?”

“Yes. I copy.”

Amateurs. He tapped Mac’s shoulder and shouted over the engine. “Speed?”

“Aboot eighty knots!”

“Aboot?” The calculations Eddie and Darcy had made for them required a precise heading and speed. Finn would have time to make a few adjustments under canopy, but if he fell outside his margin for error, he might wind up with a tree branch in his gut. “Right now, I’m not too fond of aboot, mate. Exactly would be better.”

“Ya get what ya get. Now quit yer whingin’ and get ready to jump.” The aircraft bucked and shimmied. Mac tightened his grip on the yoke. “Two thousand meters from the target.”

“Ewan, this is Nightflyer. Start your count in three, two, one . . . now!” Finn didn’t wait for a reply. Headset off and goggles in place, he slid the door open to the roar of the slipstream and climbed out onto a one-meter-wide platform welded to the wing strut. Mac held three fingers in the air. In tick-tock rhythm, he lowered them to a balled fist and then pointed straight ahead.

Finn let go and dropped.

Two seconds into the free fall, a cloud the size of a house slapped him in the face. The thing had weight—and depth. His first jungle cloud and all Finn could think was, Ow, and Smells like fish. He flew out the other side with a soaked wingsuit and blurry goggles. He sacrificed altitude to keep stable while wiping the goggles clean, and when he spread his arms again, Ewan’s flare had already lit the sky ahead.

Finn never saw where it came from.

The first flare—the one he hadn’t asked for—had drifted left over the trees. This one drifted left as well. Finn traced an imaginary line down and to the right from the falling orange ball and thought he saw a break in the foliage. He shifted his track and hoped for the best. Talia would have told him to pray, but pride prevented him from starting now. The whole atheist-in-a-foxhole line seemed like a cowardly out. But maybe if she was praying for him, that would be enough.

The behavior of the flares told Finn to line up right of his target, and the experience of more than two hundred night jumps told him when to pull his chute. Opening shock jerked him back. He checked his canopy and snapped both steering toggles free of their stowage. When his eyes returned to his mark, he saw a faint white spot flashing across the trees. An electric torch. Ewan.

With renewed confidence, Finn set his aim. The air chop off the treetops whipped his chute, but he kept things under control. His man on the ground did not. The torch dropped to the ground and rolled. In its wash, he saw Ewan running into the jungle. Was he getting clear of the landing zone or fleeing a threat? Two flares and a swinging torch might easily have drawn the attention of the very kidnappers they were after.

Finn scanned the tree line. He had one of Tyler’s modified machine guns strapped to his chest, but he only had two