The Agent's Daughter by Ron Corriveau Page A

fabric. He struggled with the wings and
supports until he untangled himself. Once freed, he could see the
broken pieces of the glider. It was clear that the glider was not
going to be able to fly. It was also clear that he needed to come
up with a new plan. Fast. He was still under parachute, but he was
only about two minutes from landing on the ground.
    Evan looked up at the parachute canopy. He
needed to get to the parachute cords. If he could pull on the cords
on one side, it would create an air imbalance in the parachute that
would cause it to move in that direction. He pulled a knife from a
pocket in the leg of his jumpsuit and cut the straps that supported
the glider. He watched as it fell off into the night sky. This
allowed Evan to pull himself up to where the cords for the
parachute were located. He grabbed two of the cords on one side.
Immediately, the parachute changed direction. Satisfied that he
could control the direction, he spotted where he wanted to go,
pulled on the cords and headed down.

    ………………………… .

    "What do you mean the glider did not
deploy?" Shirley said anxiously.
    David focused at a blip on the monitor. “I
can see that he is still falling at the same constant rate that he
was falling when the parachute first opened. Seventeen feet per
second. If the glider had deployed, the rate of descent would be
slower and erratic.”
    “ Do you think that
something happened during the SSC ejection that made him lose
consciousness?” Shirley asked.
    “ Oh, he’s not
unconscious,” David said. “He’s moving in a straight line. Evan
appears to be steering the parachute.”
    “ Great,” said Shirley.
“Hopefully he can get much closer to the border, so we can send
someone in to pick him up.”
    “ Umm… he’s not headed for
the border,” David said. “He appears to be steering the parachute
right at the reactor building.”

    ………………………… .

    Evan could see the base getting larger as he
descended. He had disconnected the video camera from its swivel
housing, and he held it in his hand as he shot video of the entire
base. Then he focused the camera on the reactor building. He wanted
to take a closer look at it because he was going to try to land on
the roof. The building was two stories tall and had a roof area
about the size of a couple of city blocks. There appeared to be
half dozen guards patrolling the grounds, but nobody on the
roof.
    His plan was straightforward. He would land
on the roof where there were no guards and where he could hide the
parachute. There, he would wait while the radiation detector did
its job. Then, at the right moment, he would climb down from the
roof and find a break in the guard patrol, so he could run to the
edge of the base. After climbing the base’s perimeter fence, he
would hike the twenty miles to the border.
    At five hundred feet, Evan could see the
lights from the base begin to be reflected off him. In a few
moments, he would be easily visible to anyone on the ground. For
the last two hundred feet, he would be illuminated by the lights on
the ground. That would be when he needed some luck that no one saw
him. Evan continued to drift in silence toward the top of the
reactor building. He was fifty feet from the top of the building
when he saw a guard that was patrolling the grounds coming around
the far corner of the building. The guard pointed at him and began
to run toward the front of the building. So much for luck. He had
been spotted.
    Evan landed on the top of the building as he
heard the first wails of a blaring siren that echoed throughout the
base. Below, on the ground, he could hear the sounds of footsteps
running around the building. They must not have known that he was
on the roof because they were searching for him in the bushes at
the base of the reactor building. Evan quickly unstrapped himself
from the parachute and looked around. He had landed near the corner
of the building between two massive air