The Athena Project - Страница 4

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As the Delta recruiters cast their nets outside the military, they began haunting high-end female athletic events. They trolled for potential candidates at triathlons, winter and summer X Games, universities, and U.S. Olympic training facilities. The sport didn’t matter as much as whether a candidate possessed the essential characteristics.

The selection and assessment process was extremely difficult. Many women didn’t make the cut. Standards, though, were never dropped just to fill out the ranks.

The women who did pass the selection and assessment phases were exceptional, none more so than the brick of four women about to snatch Nino Bianchi from his extremely fortified home. They were all fiercely determined, fiercely loyal, and fiercely competitive, but other than that, they couldn’t have been more different.

Alex Cooper was the twenty-eight-year-old, biracial daughter of an Ethiopian mother and an American father who owned a small restaurant in Atlanta. After high school, she went on to attend the University of Arizona as a communications major. There she became attracted to ultramarathon running-a sport that saw competitors in events racing over twenty-four hours, several days, or even thousand-mile distances. The sport suited her unwavering, granitelike determination.

She was a quiet person by nature, and her boisterous teammates were always trying to get her to come “out of her shell.” They needled her constantly about being too reserved, too serious. She could be too hard on herself, and they saw it as their job to keep things in perspective for her. And as much as they teased her, they all knew how deep her still waters ran. Cooper was an outstanding operator.

So was thirty-year-old Julie Ericsson, a triathlete who had grown up on the big island of Hawaii and had studied multiple subjects at the University of Hawaii. Her father ran fishing charters, while her mother was a schoolteacher. Julie, like Alex, was about five-foot-nine. Though she was of Spanish and Welsh descent, her parents’ genetics combined in such a way that she had an exotic, Brazilian look about her.

She was the epitome of grace under fire and was easily the most organized member of the team. She had a real eye for detail, with equipment and logistics being her specialty. If the team needed anything done, Julie was the person they always turned to.

Megan Rhodes was the quintessential “American” girl; blond-haired and blue-eyed. The thirty-one-year-old grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Her father was a cop and her mother passed away when she was very young. Rhodes attended college at the University of Illinois, where she continued a successful high-school athletic career as a competitive swimmer. Back in her teenage years, her five-foot-eleven height, as well as her striking Nordic features, had earned her the nickname “Viking Princess,” which had stuck with her all the way to Delta. It made those who knew her laugh. Megan was every bit the Viking, but there wasn’t an ounce of princess in her. She endured the worst situations any assignment could throw at them without ever complaining. A stone-cold killer when she had to be, Megan Rhodes’s glass was always half full. She was always the first one to volunteer to go into a dangerous situation and was also an extremely talented interrogator.

The final woman on the team was Gretchen Casey. “Gretch,” as she was known by her teammates, was Texas tough. She had grown up in East Texas and had attended Texas A &M, where she was a prelaw student. Her dad was a former Army Ranger who owned a gunsmithing business and her mother was a semisuccessful artist. Gretchen’s father had her shooting from the day she could first hold a rifle. Her love of cross-country and shooting had led her to become a world-class summer biathlete who had been picked up by the U.S. Olympic Team. She competed for a while, but gave it up when she fell in love with a hedge fund manager in New York.

The relationship was good, for a while. Gretchen secured her law degree at NYU, but when she discovered that the hedge fund manager was running around on her, the Texas girl lost her taste not only for him, but for the Big Apple and the law as well.

Not really knowing what she wanted to do, she began training again and picked up her career as a summer biathlete. She was eight months into it when a Delta Force recruiter spotted her and made her an offer that sounded like it might be fun.

At five-foot-six, she was the smallest of the bunch, but height had nothing to do with her leadership abilities, which were exceptional and which had seen her put in charge of the group.

As Casey and Cooper anchored their scooters on the canal bottom, Casey said over the radio, “We’re at the entry point.”

Ericsson, who was cradling a small device in her lap that looked like an iPad or eReader of some sort, pressed a button and said, “Grafting a clean loop to the cameras in the boat garage now.”

“Let us know when we’re good to go.”

“Ten seconds.”

When the live security footage had been replaced by the team’s repeating loop, Ericsson said, “It’s all yours.”

CHAPTER 3

The entry point was Nino Bianchi’s boat garage. But getting in wouldn’t simply be a matter of swimming under the doors and popping up on the other side. Bianchi took his security much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen.

The brightly painted wooden doors, which looked like any others along the Grand Canal, hid two sheets of titanium, three inches thick, descending several feet below the water level. The titanium doors came to rest upon a wall of metal bars that went all the way down and were bolted to the bedrock beneath the canal bottom.

Under the murky water, Cooper and Casey unloaded their gear. When they were ready, Casey said over the radio, “I’m going to wrap the bars.”

“Roger that,” replied Rhodes, who was concealed in the window of an apartment across the canal. She adjusted her face against the cheek pad of her rifle and prepared to take Bianchi’s guards if they noticed what was going on below them.

Gripping the bars, Casey inched herself up as close to the surface as she dared. Though it was evening and the water cloudy, there was still a lot of ambient light spilling onto the surface. If she was seen, that would be the end of the entire operation.

Identifying the bars that they’d be working on, she wrapped them as tightly as she could with Ti wire to keep them from spreading.

Using the bars to guide herself back to the bottom, she wrapped the two bars again with wire halfway down.

Rejoining Cooper, she said, “Bars are wrapped. Let’s spread ’em.”

Cooper positioned a small, submersible hydraulic jack with titanium tubular extension poles between the two bars and went to work, silently creating an opening big enough for them to swim through.

They checked in repeatedly with Rhodes to make sure no one up on the dock had any idea what was going on. Each time, Rhodes replied, “You’re still good to go.”

After the bars had been spread far enough apart, Casey rose halfway to the surface to make sure that there was no sign of the breach. So far, so good. The wire had held.

As Cooper packed the jack back into her scooter, Casey unloaded two waterproof dry bags from hers. When they were ready, they swam through the opening, with Casey in the lead.

They quietly broke the surface of the water inside the boat garage, they came up only to eye level and took a long scan of the dimly lit room to make sure no one else was there. From what they could tell, they were alone and unnoticed.

Suspended above them, in order to keep its hull clean, was Bianchi’s twenty-nine-foot 1965 Riva Super Aquarama runabout.

Casey flashed Cooper the thumbs-up and they swam to a corroded ladder at the front of the slip.

Cooper climbed out first. After removing her mask and peeling back her hood, she took off her rebreather, reached down, and accepted the two dry bags from Casey. Quickly, the two women undressed.

They wore next to nothing beneath their dry suits. Unzipping the larger of the two bags, Casey pulled out Cooper’s cocktail dress and handed it to her, along with a pair of heels, jewelry, and makeup. They were followed by an inside-the-thigh garter holster, and a 9 mm Taurus “Slim” pistol.

Casey fished out her dress, heels, makeup, weapon, and holster and starting getting dressed as well.

“I hope you’re right about this guy wanting to show off his boat,” said Cooper.

Casey stepped into her dress. “You know what they say. The only difference between men and boys…”

“I know. The size of their toys.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll want to show us his toy.”

Cooper smiled. “But what if he doesn’t?”

Casey turned her back so her teammate could zip her up. “Then we’ll improvise. We’ll tell him we want to go skinny dipping.”

“In Venetian canal water?”

“Lex, you worry too much. Trust me, if we do this right, he’ll follow us anywhere.”

“And if we don’t, this guy is going to do everything he can to make sure we don’t leave this building alive.”

Casey shook her head. “Won’t happen.”

Cooper was easily the most serious member of the team. She was a planner and didn’t care much for improvisation. “Have you always been this sure of yourself?” she asked.

Handing her one of the miniature earpieces, Casey replied, “No, but I am this sure about men. Are you ready to go?”

“I’m guessing you don’t have a hair dryer in that bag, do you?”