Operation Fortnight

Sieben: Haken, Linie, Senkblei

11949 0100hrs

In freefall somewhere hundreds of feet above the highly oppressive country of Kosovo

The wind on my face and in my hair had a soothing effect on me, even if I must have looked ridiculous with my cheeks getting pushed around and my braid fluttering behind me. 

After about thirty minutes of falling, I reached back and yanked hard on the ripcord of the parachute that I had strapped to myself just before jumping out of my ride. 

My body jerked to a stop and I began a steady coast downward into extremely hostile territory. 

It was still dark and it would continue to be for five hours, which gave me plenty of time to find a place to hide until morning. I would need to find a place to rest if I was going to have a chance of being able to carry out my plan. 

There was no guarantee that the floodlights that were screening the skyline for unwanted visitors wouldn't chance to sweep upon me as I coasted my way down to the ground below. 

I didn't have a very good idea of the landscape of Kosovo, and in the dark I couldn't see a clear spot that would be good for landing in. I would just have to take my best guess and hope I didn't end up strung up by a wayward tree branch. 

I saw the open area of what looked like a basketball court nearby and I picked that as my landing spot. I was reminded of when the Kosovo Slavs won the international basketball tournament when I was seven. Everyone was talking about the underdog who took the crown that year. They don't talk much about Kosovo nowadays. I fact, many of the countries who were top contenders in the INBA haven't been seen since the war ended; their economy could no longer support a sports program. Of course, Australia hasn't dropped out, but then again, the Wallabies would rather wander off into the desert and never come back then miss out of an opportunity to challenge their rivals, the three years undefeated Goldcrest of Luxembourg.  

I drifted down, undetected so far, unhitched the cables of my parachute, and landed right on the free throw line as the parachute floated over me and out of bounds, where it collapsed into a messy pile of black nylon and latexy fabric, tangled up in a scraggly bush. 

I got up quickly and rushed out of the clear view. The area I was in might have been an apartment complex at some point or maybe a school if it was really low budget, but now it was nothing but a mound of weeds. In the crushing darkness, I could hear my own steady breath and slightly elevated heartbeat, and it was the only thing I could hear at all except for a single cricket in the great distance.  

It felt like one of those cowboy movies where the rough-and-tumble-ladies'-man-gunslinger protagonist rides into a completely abandoned ghost town, covered in dust and half-soaked in sweat, expecting to find the place bursting with life, but only finding empty beds and vulture calls. 

What happened to this place? Where did all the people go? How did a place that was once so filled with a most powerful object on Earth, that unstoppable force called humanity, become so absolutely broken and empty that not even the mindless beasts of the dirt would dare come near?

Something tells me that the answer lies with Kriegan. 

But first, I have one slightly more important directive to attend to. 

I very quickly learned that not only this block but the next block and then the next ten blocks after that were just as silent and just as empty. There was the occasional band of armed soldiers who would roam the streets, splitting up to search each individual house for what I guessed was refugees who had escaped whatever force had emptied out such a large space or prisoners who had escaped from a military camp nearby.