by Joe Poyer
`So we haven't really lost anything then,' Leycock put in, more a statement of fact than question.
`Nothing but time,' Jones answered. He glanced at his watch. 'We are now about four hours behind schedule. That means that we must camp on the north side of the pass and wait to cross tomorrow . . . tonight really. So we lose more than fifteen hours total.'
`You are right, but I am afraid that can not be helped. And, if we waste any more time, we will lose more than that.' Dmietriev stood up.
'I suggest, Mr. Jones,' he said formally, all trace of his bantering tone disappearing, 'that you have your people change into their cold-weather gear and check their equipment and weapons.'
Jones nodded and struggled up out of the seat. Ley-cock tried to make him sit still, but Jones insisted that he was all right. Gillon watched as he got to his feet, still protesting.
Jones was moving carefully, holding his head erect, as if even the slightest movement hurt him. Great, he thought, they hadn't even started yet and already one of the group was injured, and injured worse 'than he was willing to admit. Gillon had a premonition, sitting on the armrest of the seat in the warm, well-lit cabin of the aircraft, that there were drastic days ahead for Jones as well as for the rest of them. Shaking his head, he followed Jones and Leycock to the rear of the cabin to sort out gear. Stowe busied himself with checking and loading weapons. Dmietriev disappeared into the cockpit and after a moment, Rodek came hurrying back through the cabin to his duffle bag. He placed it on a seat, opened it and began to pull out cold-weather clothes and weapons similar to their own. Two AK-47 machine guns were included and two large-caliber pistols that Gillon could not identify. Two long paper-wrapped parcels were produced from the galley, where they had been hidden behind an oven unit, containing skis and snowshoes for both Russians. The other bag contained hiking packs, sleeping bags and wax-paper-wrapped blocks of gelignite explosive. Whistling soundlessly, Rodek went to work and Gillon stopped for a moment to watch him. Rodek inserted an igniter into each block of explosive and lined them up on the seat one after another. When he had finished, six two-pound blocks of gelignite stood in a row, enough to blow the entire aircraft to kingdom come and then some.
CHAPTER EIGHT
While Rodek went about his own tasks, the four Americans completed a final distribution of supplies to the packs. Then each of them stripped down and struggled into the insulated underclothing and one-piece snowsuits. Gillon found that his suit fitted as if it had been tailored for him. Jones watched, grinning, and admitted that his uniform sizes had been obtained from the Army. 'We made allowances for any weight you might have gained since.'
Gillon snorted. 'I weigh less now than I did the day I resigned.' They finished just as Rodek completed dressing and pushed past and into the cockpit. A moment later, Dmietriev came hurrying out.
'Five minutes,' he snapped. 'You will find a cargo parachute in one of those bags. I suggest that you lash everything together and the first one out the door will have to be responsible for watching it go down.'
He threw off his own clothing and began to dress quickly. 'There are also six parachutes in the galley. I supervised their packing myself this afternoon; you can be quite certain they will open.'
This was one phase of the exercise that Gillon was not looking forward to at all. His entire jumping experience consisted of the U.S. Army airborne course at Fort Benning, nearly twelve years before, and he had not jumped since.
Leycock and Stowe fetched the chutes from the rear of the cabin and dumped them down on the floor. Stowe held one up, a standard backpack type which Gillon recognized as a sport parachute that provided a great deal more steerability than the standard military chute.
'Just a backpack ... where are the safety chutes?'
'Sorry.' Dmietriev grinned. 'No way to get them aboard. You will just have to take your chances and rely on the Soviet Air Force.'
The news apparently did nothing to cheer Stowe, from the scowl he gave Dmietriev, but he slipped his chute on anyway and buckled it up.
Dmietriev unfolded a map and spread it out on his knees. He studied it for a moment, then called Jones over to him. As Jones got up from the seat and made his way back to the Russian Gillon couldn't be sure but he thought he noticed a slight stagger in his walk.
The two of them bent over the map for several minutes, then, satisfied, Jones nodded, made some notes on his own map-and came back up the aisle. Dmietriev folded his map and slipped it into his parka, then glancing at
his watch once more, hurried back up the aisle, parachute dangling from his ann.
'All right, you guys,' Jones called out, 'let's get finished up. Three minutes to the jump zone.'
Rodek stepped out of the cockpit and gathered up his pack and parachute. An air of expectancy began to build as Jones chivied them forward to the crew hatch. Dmietriev was standing half in and half out of the cockpit door from where he could keep an eye on the control panel. The aircraft was flying so slowly that they were being buffeted from side to side by the winds. Dmietriev had stopped the air-conditioning system and the air was rapidly growing thin . . . and very cold. Stowe and Rodek dragged the body of one of the Chinese soldiers out of the way and Jones started to undo the hatch. Dmietriev glanced over his shoulder, caught Rodek's eye and nodded. Rodek knelt and fussed with the gelignite charges he had placed in seats on both sides of the fuselage in back of the wings. Dmietriev jammed a long crowbar through the rubber seal and worked it into the crack between the hatch and the coaming. He motioned to Gillon and together they heaved once, twice and on the third time, the hatch slammed open, punched through the two-hundred-mile-an-hour slipstream by the cabin's higher air pressure. Instantly, the cabin was full of whirling debris as the air rushed out and he grabbed a seat back to steady himself against its tug. The temperature plummeted abruptly and Gillon gasped in surprise at its icy clutch.
Leycock stumbled forward with the backpacks and duffle bags lashed into a single large bundle and placed them near the door. He opened the cargo chute pack and extracted the rip cord, which he tied to a seat stanchion. It was difficult to hear over the wail of air rushing past the aircraft and Leycock pointed to himself and then down, indicating to Jones that he would go first. Jones nodded in a distracted way and Gillon started to move toward him, then thought better of it. There was nothing that could be done now in any case. There was no turning back. Unless this aircraft crashed somewhere in the mountains or reappeared on the southern side of the Tien Shan,' their carefully constructed diversion would be for nothing and Chinese fighter aircraft would reach them before they could get back across the border. -
Through the open hatch, he could make out the dark silhouettes of the surrounding peaks reaching almost level with the aircraft. He glanced into the cockpit and located the altimeter; it read 18,000 feet, hardly higher than some of the, peaks around them.
Dmietriev stepped out of the cockpit, glancing at his watch again, and motioned them to gather around him.
'We are coming up on the jump zone.' He shouted to make himself heard above the scream of air past the open hatch.
`Jump when I give the signal and all go out as fast as possible. As each man lands, shine your flashlights so that the others can find you. Do you all understand?'
They nodded and he turned to Rodek, who had come up after finishing with the last of the charges. Rodek nodded and shouted in Russian.
'He says,' Dmietriev translated at the top of his voice, `that the fuses are set to go off in ten minutes. That should give us plenty of time. The aircraft will be fifty miles southeast of us when it crashes.'
Gillon was conscious of his laboring lungs as they fought to draw in sufficient oxygen, as well as an icy feeling that had nothing to do with the cold wind blowing in through the open hatch. He felt giddy and nauseated. The sickly gleam of the lights in the foggy interior of the cabin emphasized the shadows on each face, accentuating the apprehension that each of them felt. The remaining minutes passed slowly a
nd Gillon swallowed hard several times. He was aware that he was sweating heavily and he knew that his tightly clenched hands would be shaking badly if he had not shoved them hard into his parka. Each of the six men stared desperately at the open doorway, each conscious of his own fear, none daring to look at his companion, frightened even more of what he might see in the face of the man next to him than of what dangers lay in wait below.
Dmietriev hurried back into the cabin to check the fuses a final time. A moment later, he returned to the doorway and peered out into the night, then stepped back and tapped Leycock on the shoulder. Without hesitation, Leycock kicked the bundle of packs and duffle bags through the doorway and followed the instant the static line snapped free. Jones was right behind, then Rodek. Stowe made a perfect start, vaulting out to drop feet first. Gillon stepped to the door right behind him, placed both hands oil either side of the frame, took a shallow breath of the icy fluid into his lungs and pulled himself out.
He had pulled harder with his right arm than with his left and had twisted so that he was looking back at the aircraft. He was aware of the fuselage sliding past as he began to drop, slowly at first, so that he seemed for an instant suspended next to the airplane looking back at Dmietriev, who had just stepped to the hatch. Then with breathtaking speed, it disappeared and with it his point of reference. Then began the silent flow of cold air past his body and the sensation of falling deserted him until the shock of the opening chute snapped him up like a broken puppet on a string. He glanced up to see the square canopy opening like a black and white flower above his head. Just past the edge of the chute he could see Dmietriev's chute beginning to billow.
Gillon, remembering his first, painful lessons at Fort Benning, caught the harness lines and pulled hard to the left to steady his descent. Quickly, the pendulum motion canceled and the chute came under control. He could see the drifting canopies of the others strung out in a curving line, as if they were all sliding down an invisible cable. The terrain below was all but invisible; the snow-covered mountains were little more than pale blurs in the starlight and only the faint images of jagged peaks could be discerned around him.
Above, the Milky Way wheeled across the sky, presenting itself for inspection in a way that only the parachutist ever sees. The crisp, thin, cold air of the high altitude carved each star from crystal and fixed it to the deepest black velvet.
He looked for Dmietriev again and finally spotted him, some thousand feet behind and several hundred feet above, his chute fully opened and the black dot that was the Russian intelligence operative dangling
below. Searching back along the way for the aircraft, he found that he could not even find the running lights.
As Gillon turned his attention back to the ground, a bright flash of light caught his eye, imprinting itself upon his retina. He jerked toward the light to see it flash toward the peaks and for an instant he thought it might be a meteorite. Puzzled, and suddenly apprehensive, he swung wide, using the harness straps to turn the chute, but whatever it was, it was gone.
As he forced his attention back to the imminent landing, he knew that the flash could only have been the aircraft exploding prematurely. It had not lasted long enough to be a flare and too long to be a meteorite. And if it was the aircraft, then the wreckage would fall into the relatively accessible area well below the Dzungarian Gate, some twenty miles southwest. It surely would have reappeared on the Chinese radar screen in the interval before it exploded and its sudden disappearance would mean that search parties would be airlifted into the area immediately. That brought the chilling realization that the search parties could be at the wreckage within hours of dawn.
Ruthlessly, he thrust those fears down for another time. If he did not concentrate on his landing, it might not make any difference to him whether the Chinese found the wreckage or not.
Their landing area, just west of the bend in the Agiass River, was relatively flat, although high, and formed a wide, but short plateau south of Musart Pass, through which they would reach the interior of the range. There was, he knew, an ancient lamasery less than two miles from their landing site on the northern edge of the plateau that supposedly had been abandoned for nearly one hundred years. They were to wait there for moonrise.
A blur of white rushed to meet him and he had only enough time to will himself into relaxation before the amazingly hard surface of compacted snow slapped him. He collapsed on impact and rolled onto his side in the classic landing position that he had been taught so many Years before, surprised that he still retained the proper reflexes. He sprawled face downward and the wind
snatched at the chute and dragged him several yards before he managed to turn over onto his back and release the harness. The chute billowed for a moment in the wind, then, shorn of its balancing weight, collapsed.
Gillon got to his feet, gasping deep breaths in the relatively thick air of the nine-thousand-foot plateau. The air was like liquid nitrogen in its intensity, almost as cold here as it had been at 18,000 feet. After a moment, he caught sight of a tiny point of light several hundred yards north of his position. He stripped off the chute harness and gathered up the canopy, wrapping it into a bundle with the shrouds, and started toward the point of light, his own flashlight glowing. Dmietriev had landed not more than two hundred feet away and Gillon detoured to help him with the chute. In less than ten minutes, the six of them had assembled around the pile of packs and duffle bags that Leycock had dragged into the shelter of a rock outcropping.
`The aircraft exploded before it should have,' Dmietriev said without preamble, speaking in short choppy sentences that betrayed his anger. 'Both Sergeant Rodek and I checked the explosives very carefully. One of the fuses must have been defective. However, that does not alter the fact that the Chinese will be able to find the wreckage now sooner than we had anticipated. I would guess that they will have reached the crash site by midmorning. By midafternoon, it is possible that they will have discovered that the bodies of four Causasians are missing. By nightfall they will be scouring these mountains for evidence that you parachuted to safety.'
Jones was half sitting, half kneeling on the pile of equipment, and, as he looked up at them and in the meager light from the torches, Gillon was shocked to see how worn and exhausted he appeared to be. Leycock saw it too and knelt down beside Jones.
`How do you feel ... ?'
Jones waved a hand in irritation. 'I feel perfectly all right. Stop fussing over me.' He looked down at the snow for a moment before speaking again. 'You can bet that when they do come, they won't confine their search
just to the air. They'll have ground parties out and in force.'
'Damn those fuses!' Stowe muttered. 'All right, Mr. Agency man, you are the fearless leader. Where do we go from here?'
Jones bit back an angry retort and GilIon turned to stare at Stowe. It was a good thing that he wasn't running the show, he thought, otherwise Stowe would be off to a very bad start . .. with a set of loose teeth.
Jones had apparently decided to ignore the comment, because he looked around in the darkness as if considering. 'We can't go stumbling around trying to climb the pass until moonrise. And we can't stay here without shelter.' As he spoke, the wind stiffened momentarily, as if to remind them of its presence.
'I think that we had better stick to the original plan and head up to the lamasery for a few hours. We could all use the time to adapt to the altitude anyway.'
Stowe started to say something and Leycock, as if guessing that it would he a smart crack, dug an elbow into Stowe's ribs to silence him. Stowe grunted in anger, but remained silent.
Jones waited for objections and, when there was none, heaved himself to his feet and picked up his pack. 'All right, open the duffle bags and pick out your weapons, then bury the chutes and bags.' The six men looked at one another, realizing the hopelessness of their position before they even began, but knowing that there was nothing else to be done.
'Well,' Jones snapped. 'What the hell are y
ou waiting for? Get busy.'
Rodek cut the lashings and dragged the duffle bags out and zipped them open. Silently, he handed out the rifles, keeping the two AK-47s for Dmietriev and himself. Leycock scooped a hole in the glazed snow, broke through the thick ice crust with his knife and in a few moments had dug a pit in which to cram the parachutes and empty bags.
Gillon glanced at his watch, noting that it was still set on Rome time. He mentioned it to Tones, who immediately ordered them all to reset at 2130, local time. They had at least four hours to moonrise and the remaining five to six hours of darkness should be enough to see them over the pass, he calculated. Staring about him at the ghostly pale peaks and the frozen landscape of the plateau, he agreed with Jones; this was no time to go stumbling about in the dark, risking turned or broken ankles.
The surface of the snow had been packed hard enough by the incessant wind that snowshoes were not needed. Since the route lay upslope, they strapped the carrying cases for the skis down the side of the packs and, with each other's aid, lashed the snowshoes on the back. Then, roped together to prevent straying only, since the slope was neither rugged nor steep, they started out, Jones in the lead, Gillon following, then Rodek, Stowe, Dmietriev and Leycock.
Jones had set an easy pace because of the altitude and the fact that there was no need to hurry . . . as vet. Their landing zone was approximately two miles below and to the north of the lamasery, and within forty minutes its forbidding black bulk was in view, silhouetted against the star field. Tones brought the party to a halt in the shelter of a jumble of boulders and untied the safety line from his waist. With a warning to Gillon to remain where they were, he trotted away to the right and disappeared into the darkness. Again, Gillon found himself impressed with the precautions that Jones was willing to take.
