Court soared through the broken roof, his eyes closed and his appendages tight against his body lest he rake them across the jagged edges marking the border of the breach created by the charge he’d affixed to the ceiling soon after his arrival here at Alexandria Eight. Once he felt the cool of the night air on his skin he opened his eyes, and he watched the large CIA safe house fall away below him as he rose, shooting upwards as fast as he would if he were flying in a plane.

He still wasn’t feeling great about his chances—his heart pounded and his stomach cinched tight with terror—but he’d made it out of the range of the JSOC boys, so he knew there was nothing else he could do to affect his chances now.

Court told himself he should just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Instead, however, he fought a wave of nausea as the motion and the nerves played havoc on his insides.

—

At the Special Activities Division cache in Harvey Point, North Carolina, Court had run across a new piece of equipment that immediately reminded him of something very old.

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.