Dark Savior. Don Pendleton

bathroom, the room nearest to him.

      He kicked the door in, checked behind the shower curtain, then turned toward the window. Funny that it didn’t have a screen to keep the bugs out. Moving closer, Hume peered through the frame and saw the screen in the flower bed below, twisted from being hammered out, dented from someone stepping on it as he cleared the window.

      Hume retreated, found the others scanning bedrooms and returning empty-handed. “Spike!” he called. “We lost him.”

      “What?”

      “See for yourself.”

      O’Connor checked the window and immediately turned the air blue with profanity. When that storm passed, he turned to Hume and asked, “How could we miss him leaving?”

      “Don’t ask me. I was with you. Sordi and Gounden had the east side covered.”

      “Shit!”

      “What now?” asked Mueller, from the bathroom doorway.

      “Now we split,” O’Connor answered. “Now I call the man and tell him we screwed up.”

      “He won’t like that,” Hume said.

      “No shit.” O’Connor scowled and hurried past him, out the door.

1

      Over the Sierra Nevadas, California

      “This is crazy,” Jack Grimaldi said. “It’s snowing like there’s no tomorrow. If I didn’t have the instruments—”

      Mack Bolan interrupted him. “There won’t be a tomorrow for the target, if we wait. The window’s small and closing fast.”

      “What window?” Jack asked. “Can you see anything down there?”

      “It doesn’t matter. We’ve been over the terrain.”

      “From photos, sure. What good is that when you can’t see the ground?”

      “None at all,” said Bolan, “unless you, or one of a half dozen pilots skilled enough to drop me on the spot, is in the cockpit. And you’re the best among them.”

      “Half a dozen?” Jack looked skeptical. “I would’ve made it three or four.”

      “Well, there you go then.”

      “All right, dammit. Flattery will get you anywhere. Almost.”

      The aircraft was a Cessna 207 Stationair, thirty-two feet long with a thirty-six foot wingspan. Its cruising speed was 136 miles per hour in decent weather, with a maximum range of 795 miles.

      Today was far from decent weather, any way you broke it down.

      They’d flown out of Modesto City–County Airport, traveling due east. The storm had been barely a whisper in Modesto, but it was kicking ass in the Sierras.

      Bolan’s chosen landing zone would be bad enough on a clear day, great fangs of granite jutting ten thousand feet or higher, bare and brutal stone on top, flanks covered with majestic pine trees and red fir. A drop directly onto any one of those could easily impale him, or he might get tangled in the rigging of his parachute and hang himself.

      In theory, the jump was possible. In practice it was rated very difficult. But in a howling blizzard—for a novice jumper, anyway—it would be tantamount to suicide.

      Bolan was not a novice jumper. He had more than his share of combat drops behind him, and had mastered new techniques as they developed, both in uniform and after he’d left military service, following his heart and gut into an endless private war. Today he’d be doing a modified HALO jump, a form of military free fall. The good news: the Cessna’s altitude meant there’d be little danger of hypoxia—oxygen starvation—or potentially fatal edema in Bolan’s brain or lungs. The bad news: with the blizzard in full cry, he could be whipped around like a mosquito in a blender, lucky if the winds only propelled him miles off course, instead of shredding his ripstop nylon canopy and leaving him to plummet like a stone.

      All that to reach the craggy ground below, where the real danger would begin.

      “We could go back and get a snowcat,” said Grimaldi. “Go in that way. Any small town up here should have one.”

      Bolan shook his head. “That means an hour’s turnaround back to Modesto, grab the four-wheel drive, and what? Pick out the nearest town—”

      “I’d land at Groveland,” Jack replied. “They’ve got an airport, they’re closer to the mountains—”

      “And a snowcat maxes out at fifteen, maybe eighteen miles per hour if the visibility is good enough to risk that. That would mean five hours over mountain roads without the blizzard. The weather we’ve got now, it could be a day and a half on the road, and I could end up driving over a cliff.”

      “Still safer than the jump,” Grimaldi countered.

      “I can handle it. Just get me there.”

      Frowning, Grimaldi said, “Your wish is my command. Five minutes, give or take.”

      Bolan got up and started toward the Cessna’s starboard double doors, head ducked, crouching in his snow-white insulated jumpsuit. He secured his helmet, ski mask and goggles, and double-checked the main chute on his back and the emergency chute on his chest. He was laden with combat gear to keep himself alive once he was on the ground.

      Assuming he reached the ground.

      One of the side doors opened easily, caught in a rush of frigid air. The other required more of an effort, the wind pressing it closed, but Bolan got it done.

      Outside and down below was a world of swirling white.

      Bolan watched and waited for the signal from Grimaldi in the cockpit, answered with a thumbs-up, and leaped into the storm.

      The Cessna’s slipstream carried Bolan backward, his arms and legs splayed in the proper position for exit from an aircraft, then the plane was gone and gale force winds attacked him like a sentient enemy. His goggles frosted over almost instantly, which wasn’t terribly important at the moment, when he couldn’t see six feet in front of him regardless, but he’d have to deal with that soon.

      The insulated jumpsuit kept him relatively warm, but it wasn’t airtight, and the shrieking wind found ways inside: around the collar, through the eyeholes of his mask, around the open ends of Bolan’s gloves. The freezing air burned initially, then numbed whatever flesh it found, threatening frostbite.

      From thirteen thousand feet, Bolan had about two minutes until he’d hit the ground below. Ninety seconds before he reached four thousand feet and had to deploy his main chute. If dropped any lower without pulling the ripcord, the reserve chute would deploy automatically in time to save his life.

      In theory.

      At the moment, though, Bolan was spinning like a dreidel in a cyclone, blinded by the snow and frost on his goggles, hoping he could catch a glimpse of the altimeter attached to his left glove. Without it, he’d have to rely on counting seconds in his head. A miscalculation, and he’d be handing his life over to the emergency chute’s activation device, hoping it would prevent him from plummeting to certain death in the Sierras.

      Bolan brought his right hand to his face with difficulty, scraping at the ice that blurred his goggles. For a second they were clear enough for him to raise his other hand and glance at the altimeter. Eleven thousand feet, which meant he had to count another seventy seconds before deploying his parachute.

      And what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.

      If he didn’t survive this jump, it could mean a massacre. A dozen lives, and maybe two or three times more, depended on him without those people knowing it. If he arrived in time,