McKinney pulled in on the canopy controls and got herself moving laterally just in time to come to a stumbling stop and roll over the sagebrush and sandy soil. She rolled to her feet, cursing, and unclipped the harness.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” she shouted into the radio.
She looked around for him and saw Odin sixty or seventy feet away, efficiently balling up his canopy. “Bundle your kit.”
McKinney stared at his distant form for a moment, then started rolling and collapsing the parachute. “Do you realize how close you came to killing us?”
“Two hundred and thirty-three.”
“Two hundred and thirty-three what?”
“HALO night jumps.” His helmeted head turned toward her. “Finish up, we gotta get moving. And kill your oxygen. There’s fire here.”
McKinney cursed under her breath again, then searched for the valve on her small green oxygen bottle, cinching it closed. Then she pulled the free-fall helmet off, breathing the clean desert air. She was panting and tried to get her breathing under control. It was actually beautiful out. She looked up at a brilliant field of stars in the winter sky. She felt incredibly alive.
You’re okay. Everything’s okay.
She balled up the parachute silk and joined up with him. It was only then that she noticed a field of scattered fire burning in the desert not far off.
“C’mon.” Odin led the way through sparse creosote bushes and desert scrub.
Before long they came to the first pieces of wreckage, still on fire. Odin tossed his parachute directly into the flames, motioning for her to do likewise. She tossed it in after his.
“Shouldn’t we be escaping or something?”
He kicked a small piece of wreckage away from the flames, some sort of internal mechanical component, badly charred and twisted.
“Odin.”
He kicked sandy soil onto it, smothering the flames. “I need to confirm something.” He picked up the still-smoking device with his gloved hands, searching.
He pulled his helmet off and drew a small tactical flashlight from his flight suit pocket. The flashlight had a wad of duct tape on the handle end, on which he bit down as he placed it in his mouth. He clicked it on, aiming it with his head as he examined a small metal plate printed with numbers and a logo. McKinney looked over his shoulder.
He pulled the flashlight out of his mouth. “VisStar Inertial Gyroscope . . .” Odin looked up at her as he tossed the piece of wreckage away. “Black project aerospace. Military-grade. Doesn’t mean they sent the thing, but it does mean we’re dealing with insiders.”
“But why would they leave so much evidence behind on the parts?”
“Because they don’t care if they’re found out. There’s something major going on here that I’m not seeing. And that probably means politics.” He started fishing through his flight suit zipper pockets.
“Ritter warned you that ‘they all wanted this.’ Who’s they?”
“Ritter wouldn’t know. He’s just a messenger. They’ve got ten thousand like him. We’ll need to connect the dots beyond Ritter.”
She examined the sky above them, still brilliant with stars even with the fires burning nearby. “What about the other drone?”
The sound of jet engines was now gone. In fact, there were no aircraft sounds at all, just the lapping of flames with the occasional pop.
“Those were short-range air-to-air missiles—probably AIM-92s.” On her frown he added, “They were gunning for aircraft, not ground targets.”
“What about the first drone? The one we caught in the bag?”
He produced a GPS unit from his flight suit and started booting it up. “I don’t know yet. It might have been sent by someone else. Did you happen to notice those drones swarming?”
“Are you joking?”
“Did you recognize any behavior from your weaver model?”
McKinney recalled the machines flying in formation “They were flying together. I wouldn’t call two drones a swarm. They certainly didn’t manifest any weaverlike recruitment pattern, if that’s what you mean. And it’s too small a group, too short a time frame.” She gestured to the wreckage. “You think this has a black box flight recorder in it?”
“Probably, but they’ll be coming for it. So we can’t stick around.” He examined the GPS screen. “We need to get to the rally point.”
“Where’s that?” McKinney looked around at the frozen, mountainous desert around them.
“Not close.” He pointed at the mesas lining the horizon. “A lot of this is exposed rock. We won’t leave tracks. We’ll move across the heights and keep close to cover. There might be UAVs coming.” He put a pair of thermal binoculars to his eyes and scanned the horizon. In a moment he put them away. “We’re good for now. And about ten miles northwest of Green River as the raven flies. It’s rough ground, and we need to make up time.”