know,” he said.
As the zero hour grew near, an unspoken sense of anxiety mounted. They had taken
what precautions they could. The aircraft was fully blacked out, with no lights
and nothing that might reflect light from another source. Sitting on canvas
slings near the plane’s greasy ramp, Katsaris and Janson followed the same rule;
they wore nothing reflective. As they approached the drop zone, they put on full
black-nylon combat garb, including face paint. To have done so too far in
advance would have been to risk overheating. Their equipment-laden vests looked
lumpy beneath the flight suit, but there was no alternative.
Now came the first great improbability. He and Katsaris had three thousand jumps
between them. But what would be required tonight was beyond anything they had
experienced.
Janson had been pleased with himself when he first had the insight that the
compound’s sole point of vulnerability was directly overhead—that the one
possibility of an undetected arrival would be from the night sky to the center
of the courtyard. Whether there was a serious chance of accomplishing this, on
the other hand, remained purely conjectural.
To arrive undetected, they would have to fall to the ground, silently, through
the starless, moonless night that the monsoon season would provide. The
satellite weather maps confirmed that at four o’clock in the morning, and
extending through the next hour, the cloud cover would be total.
But they were men, not action figures. To succeed, they would have to land with
extraordinary precision. To make things worse, the same weather system that
provided cloud cover also provided unpredictable winds—another enemy of
precision. Under ordinary circumstances, any one of these complications would
have led Janson to abort a jump.
It was, in too many ways, a shot in the dark. It was also the only chance Peter
Novak had.
Honwana opened the hatch at the altitude they had agreed upon: twenty thousand
feet. At that altitude, the air would be frigid, perhaps thirty below zero. But
exposure to those temperatures would be relatively brief. Goggles, gloves, and
the tight-fitting swimming-cap-like helmets they wore would help, as would their
nylon flight suits.
It was another reason they wanted to release off the water, more than a lateral
mile from the Stone Palace. As they descended, they would want to be able to
discard items like the rip-cord handle and their gloves, and to do so with the
assurance that these items would not come raining down over their target like so
many warning leaflets.
The high-altitude release would also give them more time to maneuver themselves
into position—or to get themselves hopelessly out of position. Without physical
rehearsal, it was impossible to know whether this was the right decision. But a
decision had to be made, and Janson made it.
“OK,” Janson said, standing before the open hatch. “Just remember. This isn’t
exactly going to be a hop-and-pop. Time to play follow-the-leader.”
“No fair,” Katsaris said. “You always get to go first.”
“Age before beauty,” Janson grunted as he made his way down the four-foot
aluminum ramp.
Then he leaped out into the inky skies.
CHAPTER FIVE
Blasted by the aircraft’s powerful slipstream, whipsawed by icy crosscurrents,
Janson struggled to keep his limbs properly aligned. Free fall, it was called,
and yet it did not feel like falling. Surrendering to gravity, he felt perfectly
still—felt himself to be immobile in the face of powerful, loudly whistling
winds. Moreover, free fall, in this case, would have to be anything but free.
Four miles below him was a heaving ocean. If he were to achieve the necessary
trajectory, almost every second of his fall would have to be carefully
controlled. If the next two minutes did not go as planned, the mission would be
over before it had begun.
Yet the turbulence made control difficult.
Almost immediately, he found himself buffeted by the wind, and then he began to
spin, slowly at first and then faster. Dammit! He was overcome by paralyzing
vertigo and a growing sense of disorientation. A deadly combination at this
altitude.
Facedown, he arched hard, spreading out his arms and legs. His body stopped
spinning, and the vertigo abated. But how much time had elapsed?
In ordinary free fall, terminal velocity was reached at about 110 miles per
hour. Now that he had stabilized, he needed to slow the descent as much as
possible. He moved into spider position, keeping his limbs spread out and
rounding his spine into a C. All the while, the freezing winds, seemingly
angered by his efforts to harness them, whipped at his rig, equipment, and
clothing and burrowed behind his goggles and flight cap. His gloved fingers felt
as if they had been injected with Novocain. Slowly, he moved his right wrist
toward his face, and he peered through his goggles at the large, luminous
displays of the altimeter and the GPS unit.
It was high-school math. He had to make it to the drop zone within the forty
seconds that remained. An inertial fiber gyroscope would tell him if he was
moving in the right direction; it would be less help in figuring out how to
correct his course.
He craned his head to see where Katsaris was.
There was no sign of him. That was not a surprise. What was the visibility,
anyway? Was Katsaris five hundred feet away from him? Fifty? A hundred? A
thousand?
It was not an idle question: two men hurtling blindly through a dark cloud could
collide, fatally. The odds were against such a collision. But then the whole
operation itself was in defiance of any rational calculation of the odds.
If, at the end of the jump, they were off the destination point by a mere twenty
feet, the result could be disastrous. And the same cloud cover that conferred
invisibility also made a precision landing immeasurably more difficult.
Normally, a paratrooper would land on a well-marked DZ—tracer flares were
standard practice—using his vision as he tried to direct himself with the rig
toggles. To an experienced sky diver, this became a matter of instinct. But
those instincts would be little help in this case. By the time they were close
enough to the ground to see much of anything, it could very well be too late.
Instead of instinct, they would be forced to rely upon global positioning system
devices strapped to their cuffs and, in effect, play an electronic game of Marco
Polo.
Thirty-five seconds. The window was closing: he had to get into delta position
as soon as possible.
Janson swept his arms back and steered himself with his shoulders and hands. No
good: a walloping, gale-level crosscurrent struck Janson and pulled him into an
overly steep flight path. He immediately realized what had gone wrong. He was
consuming altitude swiftly. Too swiftly.
Could anything be done about it?
His only chance was to increase his drag. Yet he had to progress toward the
compound as fast as possible if he had any chance of reaching it. To do both
would be impossible.
Had he destroyed the mission only seconds into it?
It could not be.
But it could.
Lashed by icy winds, Janson found the quiet commands of expertise competing with
a din of internal recrimination. You knew this wouldn’t work; it couldn’t work.
Too many unknowns, too many uncontrollable variables. Why did you accept the
mission in the first place? Pride? Pride in your professionalism? Pride was the
enemy of professionalism: Alan Demarest had always said so, and here he spoke
the truth. Pride gets you killed. There never was a reasonable chance of
success. No sane person or responsible military branch would accept it. That’s
why they turned to you.
A quieter voice penetrated the din. Max track.
He had to move into track position. It was his own voice he heard, from decades
back, when he was training new recruits to a special SEAL team. Maximum track.
Could he do it? He had not attempted the maneuver in many years. And he had
certainly never tracked on a GPS-directed jump. Tracking meant turning one’s
body into an airfoil, with the humped profile of an airplane’s wing, so that one
actually acquired some lift. For several seconds, Janson accelerated, with his
head down and his limbs spread out slightly. He bent his arms and waist
slightly, and rolled his shoulders forward, as if preparing to kowtow; he cupped
his hands. Finally, he pulled his head back as he put his legs together,
pointing his toes like a ballet dancer.
Nothing happened. He was not tracking.
It took ten seconds of acceleration before he experienced a sense of lift and
noticed that his dive was beginning to flatten. In a max track, a human being
should be able to reach an angle of descent that was close to forty-five degrees
from vertical.
In theory.
In max track, it should be possible to move as rapidly horizontally as one was
moving vertically—so that every yard downward took one almost a yard forward,