The Fulton recovery system, more commonly known as the Skyhook, was something of a legendary device in special operations. Invented in the 1950s, the Skyhook was a personnel ground-to-air retrieval system consisting of a large balloon attached to a rope, which connected to a body harness. When the device worked as advertised, the balloon rose to several hundred feet, and an aircraft equipped with a capture device grabbed the rope under the balloon and then heaved the person in the harness up into the sky. Once alongside the aircraft an operator in the cabin could then use a device to reel in and recover the “victim.”
It sounded great in theory, a little too Buck Rogers, perhaps, but for a spy behind the lines with no other options, it was much better than nothing.
But Court had heard of no more than five or six times where a Skyhook recovery had been successfully executed in the field.
The item Court noticed in the experimental locker at the Point was a modernized and miniaturized version of the Skyhook. Named the Buzzhook, instead of a huge balloon and helium tanks, this ground-to-air retrieval device employed a 16-by-16-inch quadcopter that could climb vertically at fifty miles an hour carrying a payload of fifteen pounds.
Behind the quadcopter, three hundred yards of four-millimeter bonded Kevlar rope spun out quickly from a large, spring-loaded spool in Court’s backpack. The rope was black in color and it had been invisible in the dark attic, so thin that even with rail lights from the JSOC assaulters’ firearms they could not see it, especially with the smoke from the breaching charge in the air.
As soon as he’d blown the roof, Court pressed a preset button on the drone and it fired straight up through the hole created by the breaching charge. The Buzzhook pulled its cordage to a height of nine hundred feet in just seconds. Here it stopped suddenly and began hovering, staying perfectly in place with its onboard GPS receiver and its gyroscope.
An infrared light blinked on the drone, and a second infrared light, attached to the cord a hundred feet below the Buzzhook, blinked as well.
Within moments of the drone launching out of the roof of Alexandria Eight, a de Havilland Twin Otter with a painted-over tail number flew to the exact same GPS coordinates, but at an altitude of only 400 feet. The hundreds of people on the ground—the media, first responders, local cops, FBI, and interested CIA officials—all stood and stared. Police helicopters had seen the craft coming in from miles away, but it had claimed to be on its base leg for nearby Washington National Airport, and it only deviated from its flight path forty seconds earlier, so there was no time to begin tracking it before it arrived.
Timing had been everything, of course, and here Court had had to make a few educated guesses. He’d told Zack to plan on arriving directly above Alexandria Eight at twelve thirty a.m., but to plan to have an excuse ready for air traffic control that could speed them up by five minutes, or slow them down by the same amount.
That gave Court a ten-minute window.
The Twin Otter captured the Kevlar cord and pulled Gentry into the sky at twelve thirty-three, yanking him almost straight up by entering a steep climb.
Court looked down at an altimeter on his watch and saw he had ascended four hundred feet. He looked up and behind him, and finally he saw the aircraft, flying black now, all its lights extinguished. He kept his body tucked as tightly as possible, felt the incredible wind and cold and even the thick mist as he was pulled along through a small cloud, and he told himself that this was not nearly as bad as he thought it was going to be. As long as the tiny cord that served as his lifeline held, then he would be fine.
But as he was looking at the dark aircraft above him, he saw something that made his heart stop. The Twin Otter suddenly banked to the left . . . hard to the left.
Court knew physics well enough to understand what would come next, so he closed his eyes and held on to the harness inside his clothes by wrapping his arms even tighter across his chest.
Two seconds later he felt his harness wrenched hard in the direction of the plane above, then he whipped around at over one hundred miles an hour. He screamed a volley of curse words and he kept his eyes closed, but when he felt the pull direction change again, and he sensed he was now flying forward and not backwards, he gave in and opened them.
The Fox 5 helicopter he had flown in forty-five minutes earlier was now right in front of him, no more than one hundred yards away, its rotor blades churning the air.
The harness pulled harder now, Court seemed to climb faster, and he passed fifty feet above the whipping blades of the Bell 206.
Court vomited into the night.