CHAPTER 4
Kyle took another tug at his leg straps. He’d once made a jump with straps insufficiently snug, and the shock of the opening canopy had almost crushed his testicles. It wasn’t a lesson he would forget. He always double-checked his straps and triple-checked the legs and laterals, which held the bottom of the container firm against his back. They’d just donned the rigs now, and it hurt where the straps dug in. Wade had his adjusted and didn’t move. He looked very relaxed. Good act, Kyle thought. Kyle was tense, sweating in the jumpsuit, even with it zipped open at the throat and the temperature in the plane down below fifty.
Wiesinger was fumbling back out of his container harness. Right. He needed to drain excess coffee in a hurry. Idiot. That was another reason not to drink coffee on the way in; it was a diuretic. There was no way to go around the gear, with the ruck hung in front. Kyle laughed silently.
It was a quiet half hour later before anything else happened. Kyle was reading a novel, his usual pulp SF with an exploding spaceship on the cover. He figured to leave the book for someone on the crew, assuming he didn’t have to file it to prevent problems. He asked and was told someone would be happy to take it. He nodded and sat back down, leaning against the cargo webbing behind him.
They got the signal from the jumpmaster to go on oxygen. The signals were Army standard, even though the jumpmaster was Air Force. He was a Special Operations Weather Parachutist, who jumped before assaults and put out the data the pilots needed. He jumped along with a Combat Control team who provided landing, flight control, and terminal guidance for munitions. It made sense, but Kyle had never even known that job existed. There weren’t many of them. Up here, in lieu of his gray beret, the man wore an insulated flight suit, parka, and oxygen mask, as well as a harness on a line to keep him inside the aircraft. Kyle secured his mask and plugged into the plane’s bottle, then had to pop his ears as the pressure dropped. It got much cooler, too. For that, he was welcome. He’d been sweating his ass off inside his suit. The ramp cracked open, and a sliver of light appeared. It was a dark sky, light only in comparison. The air currents changed and roared and the temperature became decidedly chill. The sliver became a band became a hole into space, with a faint rumbling Kyle could feel. He’d done this only a few days before in training. It was different now. No recovery crew, and an international nightmare if they were found on landing—though from this altitude, any errors were likely to be in the first few seconds and fatal. He took a deep draft of oxygen to reassure himself, and stepped up.
The jumpmaster crawled to the corner of the ramp and the fuselage and stuck his head out enough to view conditions. It wasn’t as if he could actually see the landing zone from here. That would require a lot of work on the soldiers’ part to reach. He could check for storms, bad cloud cover, and confirm the approximate location just as a double check. That done, he stood carefully and held a thumb up. The jump light turned green, indicating they were over the drop point.
Kyle nodded. He shuffled forward, the ruck between his legs causing him to waddle. He checked behind and got a response from Wade, who was just behind him. Wiesinger was following, and gave him a nod that seemed to imply he should hurry the hell up.
Hampered by the ruck, Kyle took long, loping steps down the ramp and leaped into blackness.
The wind snatched at him, slapping him across the front as he fell head down, then tumbled. He stiffened his body in a hard arch—arms and legs spread-eagled and drawn back behind the plane of his torso. It worked as it was supposed to; he became stable and face to Earth.
For just a moment, all was still, silent, and weightless. Add the blackness before the few dim light sources beneath penetrated his vision, and it was as close to perfect solitude as one could get. For that moment, Kyle was alone with nothing but his thoughts.
Then gravity started to return as friction with the air braked his acceleration. His weight built back up as the sibilant breeze increased to a buffeting roar. Icy daggers of wind stabbed through the edges of his goggles, chilling his eyes. It was like a motorcycle ride in deep winter, the rarefied air at 35,000 feet well below 0°F.
The jump was a cross between HALO—High Altitude, Low Opening, which was designed to keep troops invisible from observers until the last moment, and HAHO—High Altitude, High Opening, which allowed lots of time under the canopy to literally glide to a target some distance away. They’d left the plane during its normal flight path, and would fall to 25,000 feet, where they’d deploy their canopies and fly several miles to their designated landing zone.
The altimeter strapped to his wrist had a luminescent tritium dial. He glanced at it and read 32,000 and some feet. He didn’t worry about the dividing ticks between numbers. All he was waiting for was the needle to hit the 25. Total free fall time should be about thirty seconds, as thin as the air was. Lower down it was seven seconds per thousand feet, roughly, but at this altitude the friction was lower and terminal velocity higher.
Below, the ground was dark, with bare, shadowy shapes of mountains. Off to the sides were lighted areas. Those were small towns, oil and gas operations, and far to the north, the town of Lhokseumawe. First things first: Determine direction. That was north and down.
Kyle fell through wisps of clouds, the denser, wet air changing the sound of the wind to a rumble. Clouds could be very dangerous. At 120 mph, even raindrops could cause injury. Hail could be lethal. But these were just tendrils of high cumulus in an otherwise clear night. A dark shape falling to his right was Wiesinger. Everything was equally affected by gravity, but Wiesinger had more mass in the same area, so he had less wind drag. Kyle and Wade were close enough to barely matter. He bent and spun, seeing Wade behind and slightly above. Using the lights to orient himself, he turned back around. So far, so good.
The altimeter swept past 25 as his goggles started to fog. He brought in his arms, the left on his helmet, the right reaching and snatching for the release.
The pilot chute snapped into the air, trailing the bagged canopy and its banded shroud lines. It stretched the lines taut, popped the fasteners on the nylon bag and began to unfurl into an inflated wing. All Kyle felt was a firm tug at his crotch and chest straps. The sound was that of a flag flapping in a strong breeze. Then he was half sitting, half hanging in the harness and facing the horizon instead of the ground. A quick glance let him reach for the brakes and tug them loose from their Velcro, and he was able to steer.
Working quickly, he drew his Night Vision Goggles from a pouch on his front and slipped them over his helmet. In a few seconds, he could see things much more clearly. He immediately looked up to see if his officially overloaded canopy had any tears. It seemed fine for now. He let out a breath in relief and looked below.
In the clear monochrome of the enhanced image, his trained eyes resolved dark areas as woods, lighter areas as fields, and found roads and industrial areas off to the horizon. Below was a hillside field, likely around 2000 feet, with a beacon flashing straight up. It should be exactly 2112 feet. That was their LZ. The “beacon” was a tiny pocket flashlight set to strobe, mounted in a can. It would be hard to see from the sides, but was plenty visible from above with image intensifiers.
Now it was time for a long, hopefully boring, ride. Another check didn’t show any problems with the canopy, but he was coming down fast. That was to be expected with an additional forty pounds of weight on the harness.
He drew the left brake in hard and made a tight circle, moving his head rapidly to scan the sky with the narrow aperture of the goggles. There was Wade, above and behind, and Wiesinger below and behind. He’d fallen faster, being denser. He chuckled at the alternate meaning of that term as he completed the turn and resumed “flight.”
The wind shifted as he fell through different levels of atmospheric movement. It required adjustment every few seconds to keep oriented. That was also due to the fact that no canopy was ever perfect once deployed. A single line tauter than the others would affect the steering.
He had been told the wind should be from the west, so he angled that way, wanting to stay upwind so he could be blown onto the LZ if there were problems. The ride took a long time, sitting in a harness much like a ski lift, only going down instead of up. He paid attention to his oxygen bottle. It should have plenty for the time involved, but if it ran out, his only option was to take a deep breath of whatever dregs he could and pull one brake in to spiral down as fast as possible below 14K feet.
The altimeter swept slowly, steadily down into the 14,000s, then past. He should be fine with ambient air now, but he’d stay on oxygen anyway. There wasn’t any need to ditch it yet. He’d wait until 12K to be sure.
It was actually a nice night, though still cold. The stars were brilliantly bright. Below, they were matched by the glow of lights, warm and mellow from sodium in residential villages and the edges of towns, stark bluish where mercury vapor lights were in use.
They’d been dropped very close to the mark, and Kyle found he had plenty of altitude to spare. He was west of the LZ and still at 9000 feet and some. That wasn’t a bad thing. He yanked down on the left brake and the end cells fluttered, lift lost. The right continued on at speed, throwing him into a counterclockwise turn that got tighter until he was almost facing down as he spun. After a few seconds, he eased off, steadied out and spiraled the other way to avoid dizziness. He checked the altimeter. Six thousand. Altitude for the beacon was supposed to be 2112 feet, which he couldn’t rely on, and his altimeter was accurate to perhaps 50 feet anyway. Still, it was time to get into a landing pattern.
He zigzagged back and forth, losing altitude while remaining over essentially the same spot, as he turned upwind each time. There were rising thermals over the trees that held him aloft, so he steered over the meadow and the lower growth higher up. He dropped smoothly and steadily. In the last thousand feet, he turned downwind, past the beacon.
Then he turned upwind to reduce his forward velocity before landing, and removed his goggles. They offered no peripheral vision at all. He had done it right so far and was just where he needed to be. It was, in theory, a straightforward task, but in the dark, over unfamiliar terrain and with no immediate weather conditions, it was still a job to be proud of. He sailed into the clearing and watched nervously for terrain features, all of which were hidden by scrub that might be eight inches or eight feet high. The ground below was rough, bumpy and uneven. Tendrils of mist wove lazily among the growth tops. But it was either land there, or land lower down in jungle. Landing in jungle was not an appetizing option.
He’d eyeballed Wade as he turned; he was just behind Kyle and turning himself now. Wiesinger was nowhere to be seen. He’d been below, and should be down already. But either he wasn’t in the area, or he was very adept at hiding.
Kyle didn’t think he was that good at concealment. Still, the only thing to do at this time was get down and hidden, then deal with other issues. He slipped the ruck and let it drop on its cord, which would give him much more maneuverability for landing, as well as lightening the mass to be supported by the canopy once it hit.
The ruck touched down with a thump and suddenly his descent was much more gentle. He’d made it, overloaded and without ripping the canopy and plunging to his death. Sighing in relief, he checked the steering brakes he’d use to land now. He was near ground, five meters, and preparing to flare, when gunfire erupted lower down, at the edge of a patch of stunted trees.