Thirty seconds later and only a minute and ten seconds after leaving the attic of the CIA safe house, Court found himself hanging right next to the open cabin door of the aircraft. The pilot had made no more evasive maneuvers; Court knew the massive starboard-side propeller of the Dash 6 was only fifteen feet behind him, so he prayed no more aerobatics were forthcoming. He looked into the dark cabin and saw Zack Hightower wearing a flight suit, a large earmuff headset, and goggles. His blond hair whipped in the wind as he reached out with a hooked device in his hand. With this he grabbed onto Court’s harness and pulled him towards the cabin doorway.
Court’s feeling of weightlessness went away in an instant when Zack grabbed the harness with his hand, then pitched backwards, heaving himself and Court to the floor of the cabin. While both men lay there in a heap, Zack spoke into the mic of his headset. “Punch it, Travers!”
Court looked up and forward into the open cockpit. Chris Travers sat alone in the left seat, a baseball cap turned around backwards and big earmuff headphones on his own ears. Immediately he reached up to the throttle above him and shoved it all the way towards the windscreen. The pitch of the engine outside the open left side door rose markedly. Court climbed up to his knees and off of Zack, but Zack remained on his back. For some reason Court saw him sniffing his gloved hand.
“Did you puke? That’s nasty, bro.”
Court helped him shut the cabin door.
—
The Twin Otter wasn’t the fastest aircraft in the CIA’s inventory, but this one was one of the few that Matt Hanley could plausibly deny as belonging to him. It had been stripped of all markings in preparation of reregistering it and using it on special operations in Central and South America, and since the new registry had not been completed, the aircraft remained in a perfect state of limbo to be employed in the Gentry rescue operation.
It was also a dependable aircraft, and although its top speed was barely two hundred miles an hour, that was fast enough for the plan devised by Court and Zack, and then tweaked by the pilot.
Just two hours earlier when Hanley called Travers asking for some quick help, the young Ground Branch operator ran some numbers and looked at some maps, then he rushed frantically to attach the tubular polymer capture “horns” to the port wing of his aircraft and get the bird in the air.
While he did all this Zack worked on acquiring the gear the three men would need for the next stage of this operation. Namely, food, water, camping gear, and three parachutes. All this he had stowed in the cabin and strapped down, and while Travers set the autopilot just five minutes after picking up Gentry, the other two men began quickly donning their chutes. Travers had already turned off his radio because he got tired of listening to air traffic control yell at him, but he assumed Air Force F-16s from Langley Air Force Base had been scrambled and were en route to intercept the illegal flight. He knew a Dash 6 didn’t have much of a chance against a World War I–era fighter plane, much less an F-16, so he wanted to be long gone from this poor bird before they got in range.
Three minutes later, after a quick handshake from Travers and a forced hug from Zack Hightower that made Court’s gunshot wound to his ribs hurt like hell, Court opened the cabin door and leapt out. The other two men did the same, each far enough apart to where, in the darkness, there was no chance they’d find one another on the ground.
By design, all three men landed in different parts of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
After he buried his chute and put on his backpack, Court checked his GPS and found himself only five miles west of the town of Sperryville, Virginia. His first inclination was to walk those five miles, arrive by daylight, and then stop at the first Waffle House he could find.
But he fought that urge with a wistful smile, and instead he turned east, heading away from civilization and deeper towards the dark mountains.
Zack Hightower splashed down in a dank oxbow lake alongside the South Fork of the Shenandoah River. He cussed and bitched as he climbed out of the murky water, slicked slime off his clothes, and slung his pack over his back. Checking his GPS and looking over this terrain, he decided he’d make camp right here, just so he could get out of his clothes and get some sleep. First thing in the morning, he told himself, he’d walk east to Luray, Virginia, and he’d hop a bus back to D.C. He had no idea if he would have a job at CIA, but tomorrow was a workday, and he wanted to be ready for work, just in case his new master called.
Chris Travers sat alone in the back of the aircraft for a few minutes, then he jumped out himself. He misjudged the wind around his landing zone and ended up stuck in a tree in the mountains on the Virginia/West Virginia border. He wasn’t hurt, but it took him till well past sunup to untangle himself, climb up his lines to the canopy, and get out of the pine tree.
By noon, however, he walked into the town of Brady, West Virginia, sat down in a diner, and ordered a turkey sandwich and a Diet Coke. While he ate at the counter he watched TV coverage of the event the evening before in Alexandria, culminating with an airborne rescue and an attempted escape.