Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [34]
Each SEALS had a 200-meter cable spooled around his waist. They uncoiled and linked together the cables from four men, latching one end to Mirowski’s chest strap. Chief Harris would hold the belay while a couple of men helped brace him in place. In the light gravity, it was hard for a man to feel like he really had his feet planted on the ground.
“Lower away,” Mirowski called, stepping backward off the ledge and leaning out to brace his feet on the cliff wall. With remarkable ease he twisted around and started to sidle sideways down the precipice, the beam of his lamp flickering back and forth between the two dark walls.
Farther and farther he dropped, with Harris calling out each hundred-meter increment of cable. By 700 meters, the light cast by the descending SEALS was a small beacon in the distance.
“Still going down, Ski?” the LT asked. “Or can you see some sign of the bottom?”
“Nothing but shadows, skipper,” the corpsman replied. “I’ve got a lot of room to maneuver, though. I can go a long way yet. And the magnetometer likes whatever it’s hearing down here.”
“All right. Hold up a second; we’ll give you a little more line.”
Harris braced the line while the cables from four more SEALS were added, bringing the total length to 1,600 meters. When he finally started to lower the man again, the flickering glow of his lamp continued to grow more faint. As he passed 1,200 meters, the men on the top of the precipice barely could make out where he was.
All the way down Mirowski’s commentary—“Still dark.” “Damn, this thing is deep.” “You guys still up there?”—provided a reassuring sense that things were under control.
Sometime after 1,400 meters, the tone of Mirowski’s voice changed. “The walls are closing in a bit. I can reach the far side with my feet still touching the near wall. Wait, here’s a rock. Looks like it fell from up above and got wedged in place here.”
“Steer clear of any obstacles!” Jackson barked, his sudden concern harshening his voice. “We don’t want to pull a thousand tons of boulder out of the way to get you out!”
“Aye, aye, sir. Hold on—I see something promising. There’s a bottom down here, where the two walls kind of pinch together. And I see a long crate resting there. Holy shit—excuse my language, sir—all my dials are spinning. This has got to be it!”
“Good job. Fix your cable to it and trail it behind you as you come out,” the lieutenant ordered.
“Can do, sir.” The communicator was silent, except for the clear rasp of Mirowski’s breathing over the next minute or so. “Got it, LT,” the SEALS reported. “Haul away, men!”
Harris used the small motor in his cable spool so that they didn’t have to hoist him hand over hand, but even so it took a good five minutes to lift Mirowski out of the crevasse. A minute later they had the crate, positively ID’d by Char-Kane as the shield driver, outside the crevasse. As she had described, it was in a nondescript rectangular crate some four meters long by one meter wide and one high.
Only twelve minutes after that the SEALS, the Shamani woman, and their high-tech prize were aboard the two drop boats. The prisoner was there, too, strapped in tightly and under the watchful eye of LaRue. Since his partner, Falco, had suffered the most serious wound of the fight, the G-Man was in no mood to grant the captive any favors.
A minute later the whole Team was strapped in. The coxswains closed the hatches and fired up the rockets, and Tommy and Mikey blasted off on a course for the nearby frigate.
The two little shuttles eased into the twin docking ports on the frigate’s hangar deck. The coxswains, each a veteran of more than two years of training and experience, expertly steered the boats toward the ventral and dorsal docks. With a final push of the rockets, the boats connected to the air locks and the docking clamps snapped home. Even as the frigate’s hangar doors closed over the upper Plexiglas hatches of the two boats, the SEALS and their Shamani passenger were