The Games (Private #11)(63)
When he finally released Leah and removed her visor, her eyes were wide open, dull, and bloodshot. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth and had turned bluish. He felt for a pulse at her neck and found none.
He stripped her out of the suit, hoisted her up by her torso, and got her to the lip of the freezer.
He stared in at Ricardo, said sadly, “The two of you together at last.”
Castro dumped her in so she landed facedown on Ricardo. He arranged Leah’s arms and head so their lips almost met. He recalled an image of his late wife, Sophia, in the prow of a long canoe on some remote backwater of the Amazon, smiling at him out of the deepest love.
Soon, he thought. Soon I will set off to find you.
Castro’s breath had gone shallow. He saw auras at the perimeter of his vision, purple and ice blue. His heart raced, and he felt hollow and dizzy; the pain in his skull was like hammer strikes coming from the inside.
The doctor knew what was happening, and he slammed the freezer shut. He turned around and lay down on the floor of the lab, knowing a migraine was about to incapacitate him. Not now, he thought fearfully. Not now.
“Breathe,” Castro whispered. “Lots of time. No urgency. No loss. Breathe. Lots of time. No urgency. No loss.”
He repeated Sophia’s four-line chant, the only method that had ever given him relief or comfort from the migraines he’d suffered since medical school.
Breathe. Lots of time. No urgency. No loss.
Castro repeated his wife’s prescription again and again, a monotone chant to calm himself. Minutes became an hour that way; he simply breathed with no concept of time or urgency or loss. Gradually, slowly, the hammer strikes and the flashes of lightning in his skull became weaker and fainter until the doctor slipped away into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Chapter 75
THE HELICOPTER ROARED a hundred feet over the water and two hundred yards off Ipanema Beach. Although this was the dead of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, the beaches were jammed and people were partying. Then again, it was the night before the Olympics opened, and despite the recent violence in the favelas and the traffic snarls, hundreds of thousands of fans and athletes had come to Rio for the games.
Tavia sat in the jump seat beside me, wearing black and body armor and carrying night-vision goggles. I was similarly attired and having a radio-headset conversation with General da Silva, who’d agreed to put Lieutenant Acosta and a BOPE contingent at our disposal.
At the moment, they were landing on a rooftop helipad in Leblon and would begin a straight ascent up the mountain toward the jungle clearing where we believed Andy Wise was being held.
The rest of us had other plans.
Two minutes later, the chopper landed on the highway at the south end of S?o Conrado beach. Two men were waiting. They threw long black duffel bags into the hold and climbed in.
Few words were spoken before the helicopter lifted off again and spiraled north. We left S?o Conrado, rose up over the mountainous jungle between Rocinha and Vidigal favelas. The pilot cut the running lights and soon we were hovering over the south end of the Two Brothers.
We landed on the western mountain and got out, pulling the two duffel bags and other gear out after us. Crouching there, we ducked our heads to the wind blast as the helicopter lifted off and flew away south.
Tavia and I turned on headlamps and watched as the two men opened the duffels and removed titanium poles, struts, wires, and the dark fabric of a pair of large tandem gliders. They had them ready for flight in under ten minutes.
We lifted and moved the gliders to the cliff. This was where the idea that had sounded great on paper started to look incredibly bad in reality.
“Jack?” Tavia said. “You okay?”
“I’m beginning to think we’re insane,” I said, checking the sound-suppressed Glock .40 on loan from BOPE in a chest holster and the three full magazines beside it.
“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” she replied. “We land silent, reconnoiter the place, and wait for the BOPE to ride in and save the day.”
She quickly got into a harness behind the pilot, looking over his right shoulder. She’d taken off her headlamp and was fussing to get her night-vision goggles positioned correctly, and I finally decided I couldn’t back out. It had been my idea, after all.
Harnessed behind my pilot, I asked him, “Sure you can do this?”
He reached up, switched on his goggles, and chuckled. “Look at that, will ya? Piece of cake.”
I’d kept my night-vision turned off. I couldn’t stomach seeing that first big step into the void. Tavia and her pilot ran off the side of the cliff and disappeared into the blackness without a peep.
“Let’s do this before I chicken out or puke,” I said.
We took four big steps before the bottom dropped out, and we fell away into an inky darkness.
Chapter 76
WE FELL TEN feet.
Twenty feet.
At thirty I thought we were headed for a quick ending, but an updraft caught us and, with a ripping and straining noise from the wing, we banked away on the wind like surfers arcing on a wave.
“First step’s a bitch, isn’t it?” the pilot said.
“I thought I was going to swallow my windpipe,” I said, shaking from an adrenaline rush so strong that it was several moments before I could find the switch on the side of the goggles and flip the night-vision on.