Page 73 of Into the Gray Zone (Pike Logan #19)
Jennifer rolled over the railing on the balcony of the lowest residential level and lay on her back, breathing hard. She felt
lucky the lights were out in the attached room, letting her rest in the darkness, because she didn’t know if she would have
had the strength to climb parallel to a different balcony.
The climb up the foliage of the lower six floors hadn’t been technically hard, but the work had been physically demanding.
She’d basically had to muscle her way up all six stories, testing each new handhold in the foliage before trusting her weight
with it while holding that very same weight with her other hand and a meager toehold. Her lack of equipment hadn’t helped.
There hadn’t been time to return to the Rock Star bird to change clothes or retrieve any safety assistance, so she was free
climbing in the clothes she’d been wearing in the slum. She’d taken off her loose cotton shirt and tied it around her waist,
leaving her with a sports bra, and her Solomon hikers were lashed together with the laces draped around her neck. She’d decided
the soles were too thick for adequate purchase, preferring her bare feet for the work. For weapons, she’d opted only for a
Staccato pistol holstered in the small of her back, leaving her rifle for Pike to bring up.
She keyed her radio and said, “Pike, Pike, I’m through the parking garage. At the first residential level.”
She heard, “Atta girl! Hey, not to bring any pressure, but that took over twenty minutes. You’re going to have to do the next
sixteen floors faster than that.”
She sat up, feeling the hum of fatigue in her hands and shoulders. She said, “I think I’ve found a way to make that timeline,
but I can’t promise anything if I’m wrong.”
He said, “Just do your best. If you can’t get up to the veranda and we have to assault without you, break into the building
at whatever level you’re on and use the stairs to meet us. We’ll wing it.”
This plan is getting better and better.
She went to the edge of the balcony and looked up the side of the building, spotting the large veranda jutting out into the
night sixteen stories up. She studied the walls and found the potential climbing route she’d seen earlier on the tablet, a
zigzag of concrete going back and forth down the side of the building, making a design that could only be perceived from the
ground. On the tablet it had looked about an inch thick and solely for aesthetic purposes, but she suspected it was more.
The design extended down to the balcony of the first residential level—the one she was on—and she was relieved to see it was
at least a foot in width.
Rising at about a fifty-degree angle, it would allow her legs to do the work, with the only tricky part being climbing over
to the top when the concrete conducted a switchback in the other direction.
She crossed the balcony rail and put her left foot on the ledge, the concrete cool to the touch. She followed with her right,
then let go of the railing, crouching down and grabbing the edge with her right hand, her left flat against the glass of the
building.
She hesitantly scooted forward, then began gaining confidence. In short order she was scrambling up the side of the building like one of the baboons she’d seen in Delhi. She reached the first switchback and stood up, pressing her hands against the higher shelf. She glanced below and immediately focused back on the shelf, the earth so far away it was dizzying.
She cinched her hands on the edge of the higher shelf and shinnied herself up, sliding her legs over like she was mounting
a gymnastics beam. She took a breath, calming herself, and pulled her knees up underneath her, then began scampering again.
She made it to Thakkar’s residential rooms on the twenty-first floor in fourteen minutes, the large veranda stretching out
one floor above her. Unfortunately, she was at the end of her concrete highway, the shelf’s final turn going to ninety degrees
and running under the large plate glass windows of a bedroom.
She looked up again, seeing the veranda tantalizingly close, but far enough away that it might as well have been on the moon.
She studied the windows, seeing that the metal ribs holding panes in place were a little farther apart than a large doorway,
maybe four feet total. She stood up on the shelf and put her hands out until her palms rested on the metal, pressing against
the ribs. They held. She placed her bare feet against the metal and tested the ribs with her full weight, hanging in space
like a giant spider in a web.
She slid her hands up, then her feet, moving inches at a time, chimneying her way to the top. She came level to the lower
shelf of the veranda and saw she was going to have to make a dynamic move to reach it, leaving the safety of the window to
launch herself in the air. If she missed, it was a long way to the ground.
She grasped the outside rib with her right hand and turned her body until her left foot was straight up and down on the left rib. She bent her leg like she was cocking a spring, then pushed off with all her might, sailing through the air and catching the floor of the veranda.
The momentum swung her body underneath, but she held on. When she swung back, she chinned herself up until she was at waist
level. She grabbed the top of the glass railing with her right hand, then her left, and pulled herself over.
She scuttled to the side to get out of the light spilling onto the veranda from the cathedral-like den. She crept forward,
seeing Nadia and Annaka sitting on a couch, several security men in black uniforms in the room. On the far side she saw Jaiden
talking to another man, this one in a red uniform.
She keyed her radio and said, “Pike, I’m up. I have both hostages in sight. Approximately five security.”
Pike said, “Holy shit, Koko, you made it! That’s a record.”
“You didn’t think I could?”
“Well, let’s just say I thought it was iffy. So it is the twenty-second floor. What about the suspected IEDs?”
She scanned the room, going from left to right, but saw nothing. She started back the other way and spotted something black
taped to a pillar, a cord coming out of it. She followed the cord to another fixture, this one also on a pillar. She kept
tracing, finding one black blob after another, ending up at a final package near a doorway, this one having a square top.
She saw it had some sort of box affixed to it, a blinking red light flashing intermittently and what looked like a small spiral
antenna sprouting from the center.
She said, “Pike, Nadia was trying to warn us. The room’s rigged to blow, but I don’t think the IEDs are anti-personnel. They look like they’re positioned
on support structures, like they want to drop the roof.”
“How are they initiated? Trip wires?”
“No. It looks like it’s command detonated. The last in the daisy chain has an antenna.”
“Figure out who’s got the detonator. We’re out of time.”
“How the hell am I going to do that?”
“I don’t know, but we’re coming in now. I can’t wait anymore.”