EDDIE JERKED AGAINST THE SHACKLES that confined him to GROND’s workstation. Tyler had been a little too honest during the airfield surveillance trip when he had joked about chaining a hacker to the computer.
“Stop, please.” Darcy glanced back from the driver’s seat. “You will only damage your little wrists, yes?”
Why did she have to hurt him like that?
“They’re not ‘little wrists.’” Eddie considered the validity of his argument for a heartbeat, then sighed. “Okay, maybe they are little. And maybe I like Star Wars and fantasy role-playing games, and maybe I have an unhealthy collection of fidget spinners, but I’m still a real man. I can do things with digital code your mindless ogre friend Mac never dreamed of.”
“Mac was in Europe’s astronaut program.”
Eddie couldn’t even win on the brains front. He let out a guttural “Aaaaggh!” and thrashed against the shackles.
“Okay. Okay. I do think of you as a real man. I always have. Happy?”
He settled down and dropped his head onto his knuckles. “No.”
The two were alone in the van. Eddie knew this from sound, not sight. He had woken up chained to the workstation and wearing a blindfold, but he could not hear Finn’s obnoxious accent or smell Mac’s sasquatch breathing.
The last thing Eddie remembered was Mac’s ugly face hovering over him in the darkness of his bedroom. He had felt the prick of a needle and heard Tyler’s voice as the blindfold went over his eyes. That traitor had told him to be thankful it wasn’t a bag.
It irked Eddie to realize he was thankful it wasn’t a bag. Bags were stinking, musty breeding grounds for mold and fungus. Gross.
Okay, maybe he wasn’t a real man.
The motion of the psychotic yet undeniably cute Frenchwoman’s driving felt unnatural. Maybe it was an effect of the drugs, and maybe not, but Eddie had vertigo. And the engine noise was all wrong—too loud, too droning. “Are we in a plane, Darcy?”
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t have to.
The cargo plane. Before Lauterbrunnen, Tyler had asked Eddie to find air transport for GROND and the balloon truck from Milan to the Black Sea. Eddie had put out a request, and a little Albanian outfit with a propeller-driven Antonov AN-70 cargo plane had been happy to oblige. No questions. Cash only.
Eddie’s ears popped. They were descending. Beneath his sneakers, he felt the grind of the gear coming down, followed far too closely by the jarring bump of the landing. Minutes later, light filtered in through the blindfold, and he heard the bang of metal hitting concrete behind them. Darcy backed GROND down a ramp and stopped.
A man came to the window and conversed with her in French. Eddie heard the flip-flip of paper currency changing hands. Moments later, the ramp motored up and the thunderous growl of the propellers receded, leaving the two of them in relative silence.
The blindfold came off.
From behind his chair, Darcy placed Eddie’s glasses on his nose at an awkward angle, and he immediately looked around. Through the tinted rear windows he could see a broken tarmac with crops of weeds growing in the cracks. Out the front windscreen, he saw nothing but deep blue water.
Darcy settled her chin on his shoulder. “You know. I kind of like you this way, Red Leader, all chained up so I can do whatever I want.” She rose up again and flicked his ear.
“Don’t do that. It’s cruel.”
“Perhaps.” Darcy made a popping sound with her lips and flicked his other ear. “But I think you like it, no?”
He did. A little. That was so wrong. Pouting, Eddie tried to cross his arms, but the shackles caught him. He sighed. “I hate you.”
“No you don’t.” Darcy opened the door, dragged out a pair of bulky duffel bags, and slid it closed again.
He glanced over his shoulder. She was gone.
“You might think about rolling down a window!”
Eddie took a deep breath to put her out of his mind and surveyed the workstation. Cursors blinked on every monitor. All the CPUs were humming, and the shackles gave him enough freedom of movement to work the keyboard. Darcy had left him there with several teraflops of computing power and a SATCOM antenna linked to the CIA mainframe. She might as well have left him with a machine gun in one hand and a nuclear missile in the other.
“This might be fun.” Eddie rolled his wrists in the shackles, cracked his knuckles, and let his fingers hover over the keyboard. “Okay. Here we go.”
“Oops!” Darcy flung open the van door, flooding his monitors with daylight. “I almost forgot.” She reached in and flicked a lighted switch on the floor, about six inches beyond Eddie’s reach. The monitors blinked off. The CPUs spun down. She gave him a wink. “I will be back, yes? Do not run away.” The door slammed closed again.
“Aaaaggh!” Eddie cried again. “I hate you!”
She pounded on the door and he heard her muted, melodic voice from outside. “No you don’t!”
Eddie let his chin drop to his chest. “No. No I don’t.”
FINN LOOKED UP from his work in the back of the box truck to see Darcy lugging a pair of duffels across the desolate Black Sea airbase. Crumbling buildings, crumbling bunkers, all on a peninsula of sun-bleached concrete jutting out into the Black Sea. And then there were the rows and rows of rusted, forgotten aircraft. He found the sight of them depressing. Lukon had sent them to a kind of post-apocalyptic purgatory—once a Soviet naval airbase, later a military storage facility called a boneyard, and now abandoned to decay.
“You have the capsule ready?” Darcy let the bags drop to the concrete.
Those bags were filled with explosives. “Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
He traded a screwdriver for a wrench, adjusting one of the four small reaction control jets used for positioning the balloon in flight. “Nothing.”
A few minutes later, the two carried the capsule to a helicopter pad at the water’s edge. After using a pneumatic gun to anchor the launch clamps to the concrete, Finn hooked up the balloon to a hose running from more than a dozen hydrogen tanks and began the long process of inflation.
He lifted his hand off the valve. “Watch this while I change into my pressure suit. Do not let it fill too fast. This hydrogen gas is mixing with the oxygen inside the balloon. One little rip, a spark of static, and boom.” He spread his hands to form a mushroom cloud. “Comprendez-vous?”
Darcy made an incredulous pbbt sound. “Your French is atrocious. I am a chemist. You think I do not know how to safely handle hydrogen?”
“Yeah. Well”—Finn glanced at the bags of rockets and explosives she had dropped onto the concrete—“safety really isn’t your thing.”
A few minutes later, Finn emerged from the truck wearing a formfitting pressure suit and an aerodynamic back shell filled with his chute and equipment. With the high-pressure hydrogen pouring in, the polyethylene balloon had already stretched to the height of a small skyscraper.
He strolled over and checked the gauge, casting a glance at Darcy.
Darcy unzipped one of her duffels. “I told you. I know what I’m doing. Now come here, yes? It is time to strap on your wings.”
She called them wings, but in reality, they were packs of three rockets each, fueled with Darcy’s own special blend of insanity. She strapped the first set to his right ankle, then moved on to his left. “You must use rockets because a wingsuit will not work in the mesosphere.”
“And neither will a parachute.” Finn raised his arms so she could secure a control box to his waist. “I remember the briefing. The chute in my shell pack is a streamer. It won’t inflate. The air is too thin up there.”
“Correct. The streamer stabilizes your flight, nothing more.” She handed him a trigger wired to the control box. “Acceleration, deceleration—you do it all with rockets. Comprenez-vous?”
“So that’s how you say it.”
“Shut up and get in the capsule.”
Capsule was a strong word. Finn climbed aboard XPC’s conical jumping platform. It might have been stitched together from soda cans. The thing had barely enough structural integrity to survive the ascent, let alone any positioning maneuvers with its RCS thrusters. And it had no door, leaving him exposed to rapid drops in temperature and pressure.
Heating elements laced into the metallic mesh of his pressure suit would counteract the cold, but the batteries had limited life. Finn would have to wait until the brink of hypothermia before activating the system. He turned around and knelt inside the glorified aluminum can. “I can’t believe Lukon talked me into this.”
“You did not need to be talked into anything.” Darcy turned the valve to shut down the hydrogen and began disconnecting the hose. “All you needed was the opportunity.”
She had a point. Finn’s entire life had been a search for the status of legendary. Jumping from target to target within the mesosphere would earn him that title for sure.
“The last mountain was empty,” she said, bringing him his helmet. “Now you climb a new mountain to seek a new god, yes?”
“No.” Finn jerked the helmet from her hands. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He put it on and pressurized the seal. When he tried to speak again, his voice bounced back at him, muted by the polycarbonate face mask. “Head over to the van. Let’s do a SATCOM check before I launch.”
Darcy held a hand to her ear and scrunched up her nose. “Launch? Okay, if you think you are ready.” She laid a hand on the actuator that would unlock the anchor clamps.
Finn waved his hands. “No, no, no! That’s not what I said!”
“Au revoir.” She pulled the lever.