The signal cut out suddenly.

  “Report, people,” Tanner said. “I’m getting disconnection signals, here.”

  There was nothing for a second. Malena decided to speak up. “I’m here. Psi-agent Marin.”

  “Good. Who else feels like talking?”

  Malena could hear the tension in his voice.

  “Sir, I’m falling sir,” came a voice. It sounded faint, distant.

  “Anderson? Explain your situation.”

  “I’m sliding. I can’t control it. I think my leg’s broken. Chute won’t open again. I’m tangled up. Rate of descent increasing.”

  “You’re not making sense, Anderson. Anderson? Do you copy?”

  Silence.

  “Anderson, do you copy? Anyone from Bravo Team, report now.”

  There was nothing else. No one said anything.

  “Malena, are you still there?” Tanner asked.

  “Yes, no problems.”

  “I don’t know what happened to the rest of the team, but they deployed much lower than we did. I think they were taken out by—something.”

  “How long do we have?” Malena asked. She knew they would soon be reaching the altitude the rest of the team had reached when they were stricken. She thought of the first wave of helicopters that had come to this swamp. They’d been knocked out at about the same altitude. She wondered if her first field mission was about to become her last.

  “Less than a minute. Direct yourself inland, and slow your rate of descent. Maybe it’s some kind of anti-air weapon. Dammit, I never saw a thing. There were no emissions, nothing.”

  “Can we at least transmit a report to base?” Malena asked. “They should know what we encountered before they send a third team.”

  “Not until we reach the ground—and probably not then, either. Our communications agent is not responding.”

  Great, she thought. She checked her altimeter. They were down below a thousand meters now, so whatever—

  Wham! She hit something. It struck her feet and twisted both her ankles. Hissing in pain, she found herself being dragged along over a smooth surface by her parachute, tumbling and twisting.

  “I hit something! Some kind of solid surface. Tanner, brace yourself.”

  “There’s nothing to hit—” he broke off, making an inarticulate cry. “I’m down. I don’t know what it is, but I’m on it now too. Are you stable, Marin?”

  Malena thought she was anything but stable. She was on a slick surface that felt like nothing at all and which also appeared to be nearly frictionless. The ocean winds had grabbed her parachute, which was now whipping in circular loops and still dragging her north.

  “I’m still being dragged. I don’t know what we hit, but I’m sliding down a surface on my butt. My parachute is pulling me down an incline. Should I cut loose?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tanner said. “I’m in the same situation. I think I know what this is, it might be a field, a very big one like the field we dropped through when we left the orbital. Only this is much stronger and curved. It’s like a solid glass dome.”

  Malena tried to think, but it was hard. She grunted and cursed. It was like sliding on ice—curved ice that never ended.

  “I seem to be falling faster,” Tanner said. “I’m going to try to cut my chute.”

  “No, don’t,” Malena shouted. “Get the chute behind you. Remember what Anderson said? He was falling, sliding. Speeding up. If it goes to sheer vertical, and you don’t have a chute behind you—”

  “Got it. Agreed. Try to get as untangled as you can. We’re only two hundred meters up now. The surface is becoming more sheer, like a cliff. I’ll see you at the bottom.”

  Too busy for talking now, the two of them fought their chutes and tried to get them to play out behind them. Gravity helped, but there were tangles. In the hot dark night, it was hard to even know how fast they were sliding.

  Malena smelled the jungle before she hit the trees. It came up to her as a mix of stinks and warm puffs of gas. She braced herself, aiming her feet downward. Her chute flapped and rattled overhead, nearly useless. She was sliding down the strange surface they’d landed upon, barely in control of her fall. It felt like she was falling down a thousand foot mountain of ice to the very bottom.

  A leafy tree branch smashed into her face moments later. Several others followed, beating at her. She covered her face with her hands and braced herself for impact. She broke through the treetop canopy, grunting in pain. A final branch hit her in the ribs, and she rolled off it and fell onto her back. Twenty feet farther down, she finally hit the bottom. She expected death. She figured they’d find her broken and twisted body wrapped over the gnarled roots.

  But instead, a wave of warm fetid water washed over her. She was under, and she kept going until she hit the bottom.

  Struggling painfully, bubbles exploding from her mouth as the air was driven from her lungs, she managed to get to her knees. Choking and gasping, she looked around.

  The swamp was quiet except for the buzzing insects and peeping frogs. She looked every which way, but didn’t see a light or a house. Nothing.

  Standing waist deep in muck, she rubbed her body gently, but found nothing broken. Possibly, she’d cracked a rib or two. It was hard to be sure, but her left side was hurting like a mother.

  “Tanner?” she whispered.

  No one answered. She looked this way and that, and a breeze came up, cooling her brow and drying the mix of sweat and mud that clung to her hair in clumps. She found some relatively clean water and scooped it over herself, washing away the worst of the grime.

  “Tanner?” she whispered again, but there was still no response.

  She wrapped up her black parachute into a ball and stashed it under the tangled roots of the tree she’d crashed into.

  “This is Agent Marin,” she said aloud. “I’m down near the target. Is any team member able to hear me?”

  Still nothing.

  Great, she thought, welcome to Cuba. Somehow, she told herself bitterly, the allure and mystique of being a field agent had already lost its luster for her.

  She slogged toward the driest strip of land she could find. The mud pulled at her boots greedily with every step. She found the force wall she’d slid down with outstretched fingers. The surface was perfectly slick, and felt as if it vibrated slightly at her touch.

  She reasoned that Tanner would have to be somewhere nearby at the bottom of the force field, like a stricken bird flopping and dying at the bottom of the bay window it had just slammed into.

  She decided to walk a hundred paces in both directions, searching for him. Periodically, she called to the rest of her team members. Only the frogs answered, splashing around at her feet.

  As she walked through the pitch-black swamp, she didn’t even try to fool herself. She was searching for Tanner’s body, and she knew it.

  -7-

  Malena felt her way in the darkness back to the wall of force she’d slid down. It wasn’t difficult to find. Her fingers touched what felt like a vast sheet of solid glass. It was cool to her fingertips and vibrated ever so slightly under them. She slid her hands down the strange surface, reaching for the base of it. The contact continued into the water, all the way to the muddy bottom. There didn’t seem to be any way to go under it.

  She shook her head, marveling. How had the Cubans come up with something like this? Everything she knew about them said they were relatively backward, and their technology was stuck in the past. Many of the cars on the island had been built sixty years ago, before embargos had shut down trade with the rest of the world.

  Deciding she had bigger things to worry about, she crouched in the darkness and dug in her survival pack. Carrying it down now seemed like a wise move. She found a flashlight and flicked it on using her other hand to cover it. She didn’t want the light to give her away if there were hostile forces in the area. After all, she was pretty sure her government had neglected to call Havana and tell them about this little visit to their southern swamps.

  Using the light, she immediately saw something odd. Her suit, which had been a bright silvery color before she’d jumped insanely down to Earth, was now a dull color. It had changed itself to match her surroundings. The suit’s colors were all dark: grayish-green and blackish-brown. She nodded, impressed. At least she didn’t have to walk around shining and reflecting every stray beam of light like a piece of aluminum foil.

  Her light caught two small frogs in its beam. They were a yellowish-green with big black eyes. She recognized the species immediately, osteopilus septentrionalis—commonly known as the Cuban tree frog. They were tiny and cute, and on any other day she would have been excited about the sighting. But today she wasn’t on a peaceful excursion into the wilderness.

  She zipped open her belly-pack and dug through it. She pushed the light inside so it would be muted from the point of view of any searching eyes. There was a large amount of ammo for her gun in there, which she hoped she wouldn’t need. There were rations too, enough for a few days. She found the first aid kit at the bottom of the pack and some utility items like a knife and pliers. But the prize she’d been looking for wasn’t there.

  “Shit,” she whispered. “No radio.”

  She’d planned to use whatever communications device she had to call for help. Even if it was help from the other side, it might be worth it. If any members of her team were still alive, they probably needed medical attention she couldn’t provide with her snakebite kit.

  Zipping the pack back together, she chewed on an energy bar, sipped some clean, body-warm water and headed north. She decided she would walk one hundred steps along the edge of the force wall, then turn around and walk two hundred the other way. With any luck she would find Tanner using this approach, whether he was dead or alive.

  At step forty-one, she felt something bite her right calf. As her legs were knee-deep in muck, she had to struggle to pull away. The teeth let go a moment later, and she stifled a wild exclamation. Fortunately, the bite didn’t hurt. All she’d felt was dull pressure.

  When she’d stopped muttering curses, she got out the flashlight and directed it down into the water. She couldn’t see anything other than brown muck and green sprigs of swamp grass. She wasn’t quite sure what had tried to take a hunk out of her leg, but she guessed it was some kind of water snake. The bogs rippled with them.

  Her suit, rather than the snakes, caught her eye. It seemed to be reacting to the attack. Her right pant leg had stiffened. It was as if the suit had sensed the bite and become hard, like metal. She rapped her knuckles on her calf. They clacked dully.

  Shaking her head, she limped onward, trying to keep her count going. When the count had reached sixty, her clothing relaxed again and became flexible. She was suitably impressed. She hadn’t realized the importance of her agents’ outfit. It was so advanced, it was doing things she didn’t even understand. She’d never suspected XCU had equipment like this. It could change appearance automatically, shape itself to fit her body, and stiffen up into armor when it sensed danger. She wondered if it could stop a bullet, and at the same time she hoped she’d never find out.

  At her eighty-ninth step she found a body. She almost stumbled over it in the dark. Tripping in the dark was nothing new to her, as she was walking through an unfamiliar swamp. Logs, rocks, and deep pits of mud plagued her steps. But this was different. There was something about the way it felt when she slammed her boot into it in the dark—she knew right away.

  Malena knelt and probed gently with her hands. She hoped fervently it was a team member, and they were still alive. Even if that meant she’d just given them a hard kick in the ribs.

  She could tell it was a person, and they were equipped as she was. The body was shrouded in a pile of luffing parachute. She pushed the fabric away and found the body below. It was a team member, one of the bigger guys. He was the one she’d seen carrying a thirty caliber machine gun, and now he was face down in the mud. There were no bubbles, nothing.

  She steeled herself, rolling him over in the darkness. She flashed her light into his face. The eyes were dead and unresponsive. It looked like his neck was broken. She flicked the light off and slouched back on her haunches. She took a moment to calm down and try to think. Her hands were shaking. It was her first body, and she had no real idea what she should do. She didn’t have a radio to call for help. She couldn’t drag him anywhere or bury him. She didn’t even have body bag or a shovel. She was going to have to leave him for now.

  Right then, she decided she’d been crazy to take this job. She’d somehow become an instant field agent on a doomed mission. No wonder XCU paid so well—the odds of her collecting even a single check seemed grimly low.

  Malena wanted nothing more than to run off into the swamp, screaming for help. Her eyes stung for a moment, but she grimaced, rather than cried. There might be others out there she told herself, people who were still alive and in need of help.

  While she crouched there, collecting her thoughts, she heard something. It was a distant sound of splashing up ahead, to the north. She stood up, instantly on guard. After a moment, she saw flashing lights sweeping back and forth. She wanted to signal whoever it was, but didn’t dare. Not yet.

  She felt an instant bolt of fear. Whoever it was, they were using light openly and they weren’t calling out. She didn’t like that. Her own team mates would be stealthy. Rescue parties would be shouting. These people were acting like they’d seen the team crash down and were coming to arrest survivors.

  She crouched down over the body again, grabbing the .30 SAW. After lifting, it, she put it back down. It was just too heavy, and she had no idea how to use a weapon like that. Instead, she reached down and found the man’s belt. There was a pistol there, a twin to the one she already wore. She took it and stood up. Then she drew her own weapon from its holster. She felt slightly better with a gun in each hand.

  Retreating along the edge of the force wall, she headed south next, back the way she’d come. Whoever was carrying lights behind her turned and followed her path, but she didn’t think they’d seen her. She stayed in the dark, bending at the waist to keep a low profile. The lights flashed over the water behind her, sending up a thousand rippling reflections.

  Malena caught words as they came closer, something that sounded like Spanish. A thrill of fear ran through her. They had to be Cubans, not her team. There had to be more than one of them, because it sounded like they were having a conversation. She also realized she had to assume they were not friendly. After all, the Cuban government had never liked Americans much—especially spies. They had presumably just engineered the deaths of two entire teams of XCU agents.

  Her breathing became labored and her feet began to trot when they weren’t snagged on various roots and water plants. She pushed into a mass of bulrushes and hoped that from their perspective, she’d become invisible.

  A minute later, she reached the tree she’d landed on. She recognized the dim outline of the tree, which pressed so close to the force wall it touched it. Underneath this monster was her stashed parachute. She felt a moment of relief. The voices and splashing behind her had been left behind. They seemed to have stopped following her.

  Her relief was short-lived. A crackling sound ripped the air. Shots were being fired nearby. She ducked down and gripped her pistols tightly. It took a second for her to realize that the burst of fire hadn’t been directed at her. She stared back into the darkness, peering at their flashlights. She could see there were two lights aiming down at something.

  A second burst of fire erupted, causing the night birds to shriek in the swamp. Everything else fell wisely silent.

  Malena squinted. She’d seen the second burst. The flashing, flaring light was unmistakable. They were firing downward into the mud at their feet.

  And then, with cold certainty, she knew what she’d witnessed. They’d found the body along the wall. They’d found the man with the machine gun and had shot him, even though he was so clearly dead. They’d wanted to be absolutely sure.

  Panic assailed her. These people weren’t going to take her prisoner, she realized. They weren’t going to take her name, rank and serial number and inform the consulate in Havana. They were going to murder her the moment they found her.

  Her only thought was to run off into the swamp, to turn away from the edge of the force wall which these men were so obviously patrolling, and race away into the safety of darkness. Daylight could only be a few hours away, and by then they might have dogs, helicopters and maybe even boats to look for survivors. Her chute might be found and they’d know one of the enemy had escaped.

  She contained herself with difficulty. The men were only a few hundred feet away. If she ran to one side now, they might hear her or even see her. She decided to retreat farther along the wall, then move away from it at an angle that took her as far from here as possible. Once she reached a safe distance, she planned to run an extra mile then find the tightest hiding spot in the forest.

  Keeping up a steady, desperate pace, she moved forward as quickly as she could. Unfortunately, she ran into a wall of brush that didn’t want to let her pass. The mud was deeper here, too. She felt panic grip her as she glanced over her shoulder frequently.

  Malena noticed it was raining lightly. She wasn’t surprised, she recalled from climatology courses it typically rained down here in the Caribbean tropics about fifty to sixty inches a year.

  She kept moving and noticed the enemy troops were moving again, too. Their lights flashed and glared now and then, making her duck reflexively. The bright beams reflected from the glittering droplets of rainwater that were now falling steadily.

  She scratched and rattled at the reeds, quickly finding a way through the thicket. Then she paused, frowning. Had she heard something else?

  “Hey!” someone whispered.

  Malena’s head whipped around wildly. Her hair, now a wet mass of mud and sticks, slapped her shoulders. She had her guns in her hands. Finally, she looked up.