The Big Burn. Terry Watkins

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      “I’m not going until you explain everything.”

      “You have no choice. Make yourself comfortable.”

      “No beds?” she said sarcastically.

      “Sorry, no beds.”

      He went and sat with the other men in the back of the plane.

      Anna was furious. How dare they kidnap her like this? As the plane taxied up the runway, she realized there were no windows. It was a weird sensation sitting facing the tail of the plane as it taxied, and she didn’t like having no way to see out. It gave her a claustrophobic feeling. This was all too much.

      But she was just too tired for panic. After two weeks of riding in planes to jump fires, she told herself this was just another ride. And just another opportunity to catch a few minutes of sleep. As soon as they’d landed, she’d make them take her home.

      Yawning, she grabbed a small pillow from the seat next to her, stretched out and fell dead asleep even before the plane was airborne.

      Chapter 3

      Anna woke to the steady hum of the plane’s engines, the occasional murmuring of voices, but didn’t bother to open her eyes. They felt as if they were glued shut and she didn’t have the will or strength to force them open before they were ready.

      Instead, she replayed the fire jump: cutting herself free, finding the students, calming their fears, getting them to trust her, the desperate digging, the waiting to see if they would survive as the fire blew over them, sucking out their oxygen and laying down intense heat.

      They had been lucky.

      “Hey, sleepyhead.”

      Now she opened her eyes as Brock dropped into a seat across the aisle from her. He handed her an open box containing a sandwich, a package of Oreos, coffee, creamer and sugar packets.

      “It’s not much, but it’s all we have.”

      She accepted the offering, and dug right in. The hot black coffee tasted especially good. “Thanks,” she said in between bites of cookie. “But this in no way changes the fact that I’m being hijacked.”

      “You boarded voluntarily.”

      “I had to go to the bathroom.”

      “Blame it all on your father.”

      She bit into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was the first time in forever she’d eaten white bread and it tasted great. The whole meal was just what she needed to get her blood sugar going again. Straight to the sugar high, no stops for nutrition, then slow it down with the peanut butter. Get herself back on cruise control.

      She was glad he’d left the aisle between them. Maybe he couldn’t smell her sweat-laden body odor the way she could.

      “I’m going to tell you far more than I normally would, or should,” he said. “That’s because of the abnormal circumstances involved. Your need to know, because of what you have to do, is high.”

      “Are you trying to recruit me, or scare me off?”

      “Maybe both. Your father has been working clandestinely with the CIA for the past eight years. He converted to Islam over a decade ago and married a Malaysian woman not long after he divorced your mother.”

      She stopped in midbite, eyes wide, giving Brock her full attention.

      “His wife worked with an import-export company out of Kuala Lumpur, while he wrote inflammatory articles for local papers under an assumed name. He condemned American policies in the Islamic world. His wife had relatives very deep in the radical al-Qaeda sister organization Jemaah Islamiyah.”

      “Terrorists?”

      “To the core. Your father, through one of his wife’s cousins, was able to penetrate deeper into this organization than any other agent has in the past. I won’t go into details beyond that. All you need to know is that he has in his possession something we desperately need.”

      It was like being broadsided by hard wind. She had to recover. When she found speech, she asked, for want of a better question while she tried to process the rest of it, “What does he have that’s so important?”

      “A laptop. It belonged to one of the leaders of Jamaal Islamiyah. We have reason to believe there is information on that laptop of an imminent terrorist mission.”

      “And he can’t get it out?”

      “No, he’s hurt—”

      “How badly?” she asked, interrupting. Panic filled her.

      “He was shot in the leg. We don’t know more than that.”

      Her father was hurt. He needed her. Decision made. She’d do whatever she had to, to help her dad.

      “Tell me the rest, Brock,” she said, leaning back in her seat.

      “Most of his network has been killed. He’s in hiding on a small island off the coast of Malaysia. He made an attempt to escape, but couldn’t make it. There are thousands of tiny islands, some so insignificant they don’t even have names. He’s on one of them. There are fires on the island and it’s under a huge plume of smoke. It’s also in the middle of a dangerous area. You’ll get a full briefing from CIA when we get to the IC.”

      “You said that would happen at Miramar. Why should I believe you now that we’re on our way to Guam?”

      “Sorry about that, but those were my orders. I can tell you this much. An extraction requires a HALO jump into extremely bad conditions on an island controlled at the moment by pirates patrolling the waters and terrorists searching for your father.”

      A high-altitude, low-opening jump. “And this is something my father thinks only I can do?”

      “Apparently that’s the case. Yes.”

      She knew about the incredible fires that were almost yearly events in that part of the world. Thousands of hectares of jungle in the heart of the Malay peninsula, peat-soil fires similar to the fires in Indonesia. The pollutant haze and smoke spread across the entire region all the way to Hong Kong. Most of them were started in land-clearing operations by farmers. They got out of control in the heat of a dry season and just kept burning. Jungle fires have been known to burn for months and months.

      She knew that right now over a thousand fires were burning in East Kalimantan province of Indonesia alone. It seemed they would never get a handle on the fires if they couldn’t stop farmers from clearing bush for crops and companies from burning forests and jungles after logging to make way for new palm oil plantations. Between the two, the fires came every year. And now, more than a year after the horrible tsunami, and the endless battles with radical guerrilla groups, the fires were burning again.

      “You’re going to be jumping at night. The fire there is really bad because of all the debris left from last year’s tsunami.”

      “You said I was going to be trained. Trained for what? Jumping I already know.”

      “Small-arms СКАЧАТЬ