Where Legal Eagles Dare: An Opco Boone Adventure: Difference between revisions

<div style="text-indent: 20px;">An eighteen-wheeler operations battle-truck, flanked by a pair of [[COO]] picket gunships, kicked up a wide pillar of dust that billowed and hung over the desert. Ahead of it, a dirt track snaked ten flat miles through desiccated scrubland to a low-lying, dusty settlement ringed by observation towers.  

“I do not copy that, sir. You are breaking up. I repeat, I am going in.”

Boone stood on the cliff edge. As he snapped it down, the sun caught his visor for an instant and flashed a beam down into the valley. If Operating Officer Kurzweil caught the sparkle through his windscreen, ten klicks, away it didn't register in the progress of that train of destruction.  

Opco Boone knew the time had come. He inched to the cliff-edge. A brisk thermal whistled up the couloir.

Boone flipped off the safety catch on his wingsuit, caught the buffet, and ''dived''.

Kurzweil flipped the rig onto auto and started to tool up. The rig steered itself.  

Kurzweil took a moment to take in the grandeur of the desert. The windscreen gave a rich panorama. The mountains swept up to a vertical, levelling off to a table four thousand metres above the valley floor. They rose like — like — well, like ''[[Africa|Olympus above the Serengeti]]''.  

High up on the ''gipfel'' the setting sun picked out a halo of the eagles circling the summit. Suddenly, one wing-morphed and dropped. Kurzweil double-took: That is one ''absolute unit'' of a hunting bird — must be a monstrous condor of some kind. At this remove, the majestic predator seemed to drift so serenely down from the crest, but Kurzweil knew it was dropping like a bullet towards some hapless creature on the valley floor.

''Wonder who?'' “Poor bastard,” Kurzweil murmured, slipping into a Kevlar responsibility diffusion sheaf in preparation for his own upcoming fire-fight. He wondered whereabouts on the plain the unfortunate animal was.  

It occurred that anything bigger than a rabbit should show up on the dash. Kurzweil checked the HUD: the RAG system still flat-lined.  

“Huh,” he said to himself. “Big bird going to be bad disappointed.” He yanked on his battle-gloves, snapped the latex and slid back into the cockpit. Over the CB, Bugsy was rocking out to Billy Joel.

Boone tilted down and tweaked the airflow over the leading edge. He trimmed his pitch. The roll and yaw were good. He rocked the [[gaze heuristic]] and kept the angle of approach constant. He targeted a zone above and ahead of the rig.  

Chip still babbled in his comlink. ''Dammit''. He cursed his own error: he  left the link back to GCHQ open when he jumped. It was too late to do anything about that: at three-twenty knots he could hardly flip it to silent now: any arm-shift would bugger his trajectory and put him into an aerodynamic stall or some kind of flat spin. He had to let the GC run. But she wouldn’t let it go. The old girl was really busting his balls.

The suit’s digital voice assistant kicked in his earpiece. The DVA was a gas: it had a west-country drawl. Boone spent hours customising it. “GROUNDSPEED READOUT: 145 KNOTS ACROSS THE GROUND.”

Boone bulleted onwards at the trailer. Two thousand metres and closing. The shaking was immense.

Chip kept up the disciplinary threat [[yogababble|babble]].  

Chip ran out of sanctimonious material and went quiet. Boone caught the tail end of Denning’s read out. “ ... impact target T-minus four seconds.”

“Okay double-oh douches — let’s be having you.” Boone yanked the ripcord. The brake-chute bloomed. Boone jerked back and up. He flipped a backwards 540. He quick-released the canvas straps and dropped the last fifteen feet through empty space. He cracked a three-point knee-down hero land on the cabin roof.

“Aieeeeeeeeee!”  

Boone hoofed the driver head-first out of the cabin, pulled himself into the cockpit, honked the foghorn and hauled the wheel hard right. The great rig began slowly to bear around towards the Operations HQ, slewing sand out over the upturned COO gunship as it went.

A dirt-bike punched through that curtain of flying sand, over the gunship’s lazily spinning wheels, and landed clean. Algernon whooped. “Let’s blow this joint, Boonester.”

Boone snarled into his wristcom, “We’re not home yet, Algy. Any sign of Georgie?”

Algernon gunned his Kawasaki. “She’s tangling with the other cruiser, boss. Sticky bogey, I guess.”

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