FOREST COUNTRY SOUTHWEST
NORTH KOREA
Dewey had on a custom-designed watch made for the CIA—hard black titanium with a bezel made of infinitesimally small pieces of diamond, heated to an air-like transparency, almost impossible to break. The dial was obsidian black with glowing numbers and glowing second and minute hands, using small traces of radioactive particles. It was an operational timepiece. Operators were not to wear the watches for long periods of time.
Macavoy had jumped seven minutes ago. That meant the closest possible missile was ten minutes out. Nine minutes from the point in time when he needed to jump. The chopper itself was set to detonate, to be found later by North Korean military, two charred bodies evidence of the mission’s failure.
He felt a sudden shot of flu-like heat rush over him. He’d forgotten—just for a moment—that he was infected. That he had less than a day before he’d be dead—if he didn’t get to Pyongyang and find the second antidote, if it even existed. It was the hope of a small syringe that Dewey needed to live. Hopefully, it was in the hands of the reporter, Talmadge. With any luck, Jenna had reached him by now.
Wind rushed in through the door of the helicopter. Dewey stood near the opposite wall. He wore a black Kevlar vest, jeans, and boots. On his back, a backpack was loaded with weapons, satellite phone, and water. Above the backpack was a parachute designed for low-altitude jumps. His face was painted black. If he survived the jump from the chopper, his only hope was to be invisible.
Right now, Dewey was in North Korean airspace. At that moment, he thought about the fact that he could’ve been back in Maine. He hated the feeling. He’d quit and yet something convinced him to come back in. It wasn’t just Dellenbaugh, he knew. Sure, part of it was duty, but a more powerful force ran through Dewey and only he understood it. It was a need to be on the outermost point of what he could do, physically and mentally, to stop those who would do harm to the country he loved. He hated the feeling—but he needed it. Once again, it had found him.
“Stop,” he said aloud. “Stop thinking. There’s one objective. Get the antidote. It’s all that matters. Don’t think about anything else.”
He looked at his watch. Seven and a half minutes out. He had time to relax.
Dewey caught the burst of light coming from in front of the chopper.
Dewey lurched toward the cockpit, looking into the distance. It was unmistakable. A missile, in wavy orange lines, was moving toward him. He glanced at his watch. Six minutes out. Someone had fucked up the calculation. Or the North Koreans had better technology than we knew.…
He heard one of the SAT phones ringing—Langley calling to tell him to get off the chopper.
All of this—every thought—crossed Dewey’s mind in a handful of seconds. The missile was accelerating with almost exponential velocity. It would hit long before it looked like it.
Jump when you can see the white of the missile.
Dewey charged for the open door, grabbing the pack in his right hand and leaping out the open helicopter door just as the roar of the incoming surface-to-air missile shook the air. The missile struck with awful violence—slamming hard just feet behind Dewey—and then the chopper exploded into smoke and fire.
Dewey fell, clinging to the bag, kicked by a furious wind, with no time to throw out the low-drop chute. The incinerated chopper was barely above the treetops, just a few feet from him. He fell holding his hands and arms up, trying to avoid breaking a leg. He could get to Pyongyang with a broken arm. But a broken leg was a death sentence.
Dewey slammed, chest first, into the branch, a brutal meeting of moving object with immovable force. There was a sharp crack upstream from where Dewey hit the branch as it broke. Dewey kept moving, trying to cling to something instead of falling from the tall pine, at least a hundred feet in the air.
At some point, he managed to grab hold of a thick branch, the palms of his hands scraping along the wood, ripping flesh, but he held on.
Dewey clung to the branch and swung for a few moments, relaxing for a brief second, though he was barely holding on, and was high in the branches of a towering pine within a thick forest.
Then the light awakened him. His head turned, his eyes focused: the helicopter’s smoldering exoskeleton dangled just a few trees away, the flames catching the pine needles like they were doused with gasoline. The forest erupted in fire.
They would be coming.
Move.
Dewey put the rucksack over his shoulder and dropped down, branch to branch, climbing with raw hands toward the ground. When he stepped foot on soil, he looked at his hands in the light from the inferno just a hundred feet away. There was no blood. What had been raw was now covered in dark patches of pine sap, congealed on his hands, like tar. They hurt but he didn’t feel it. He was beyond that.
He glanced once at the fire and turned to the north. He took a last gulp of breath and began running.