The jumpmaster gave a signal. "Ten seconds! Get ready! Good luck, you guys! And good hunting!"
"HAHO! HAHO!" Doc sang. "It's off to work we go!"
The seconds passed… a light on the bulkhead winked green.
"Go! Go! Go!"
This was no one-at-a-time airborne leap like the static-line jumps of World War II. The entire platoon rushed down the broad ramp in two close-arrayed squads, each flinging itself as a single organism headlong into the night, then breaking up as its members spread arms and legs and snagged the currents of the sky. Murdock was last off the ramp, hurling himself headfirst into the darkness after his men. Wind battered and tugged at him, snapping at the sleeves and legs of his coveralls and at the equipment secured to his vest, threatening to yank him out of position and send him into a sprawling tumble, but he held himself poised against the storm, arms swept back, legs bent at the knees, back arched. The glorious, buoyant, flying sensation of free fall thrilled within, like a favorite piece of martial music… no… like Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."
For a HAHO jump, free fall lasted only eight or ten seconds, just enough time to clear the aircraft and to get clear of the other jumpers. Murdock watched the luminous flick of the seconds on his watch, then yanked the ripcord on his primary. A drogue popped free, fluttering behind him, steadying his fall… and then his chute unfolded after it, deploying slowly at first, then snagging the wind with a crack like thunder, the harness snapping at Murdock's thighs and chest and shoulders, yanking him upright, yanking him so hard it felt as though he'd just reversed course and was on his way back to the Combat Talon.
Silence. After the roar of the wind passed his helmet, the silence was shocking in its intensity, its completeness. Murdock dangled beneath the rectangular wing shape of his ram-air chute, suspended between a crystalline, star-powdered heaven and the faintly luminous clouds below.
HAHO — High Altitude, High Opening — as opposed to the more usual HALO — High Altitude, Low Opening. With HALO, a SEAL could leap from an aircraft at 30,000 feet, too high for anyone on the ground to hear the plane's engines, then ride thin air in free fall all the way to 2500 feet or less — about a two-minute trip, express only, no waiting. The chute jerked you up short within spitting distance of the ground and let you glide in the last few feet in death-dealing silence.
With HAHO it was different. His steerable chute let him extend the jump with a very favorable glide ratio, literally flying like a tiny, unpowered aircraft for as much as fifteen miles cross-country, a flight that would typically take seventy-five minutes… definitely life in the slow lane. His coveralls and much of his equipment were radar-absorbent, and the chute would reveal only a tiny cross section to watching enemy radar. They should be able to fly silently right across the border, and on this mission the decision to violate Albanian airspace provided a bonus. The planners back aboard Jefferson had thought it most unlikely that the enemy would be expecting an airborne assault from the direction of Albania. Nobody paid attention to Albania, especially these days with its increasingly nonexistent military. Likeliest would be an airmobile assault by helicopter coming out of the southeast, mountain-hopping across the rugged, forested border with Greece. Most of the enemy's attention, Murdock was willing to bet, would be focused in that direction, not to the west.
And he was betting on that… with the lives of himself, his men, and the hostages they'd come to rescue as the stakes.
Course… course… Checking his compass, he determined that zero-five-zero was that way, about eighteen degrees to the left. Reaching up above his head, he grasped his steering toggles and lightly tugged downward on the left-hand control, watching the point on the horizon he'd picked swing around until it was directly ahead. To extend the range of a HAHO jump for as long and as far as possible, the rush of air across his chute had to flow unhindered between its two panels. That meant he had to leave the toggles in the extreme up position for as much of the trip as possible; each maneuver, left or right, cost him precious altitude. Stabilized, he seemed to be descending at about six meters per second, not bad at all considering how much gear he was carrying. Some of the others — the Professor and Mac and Bearcat — were packing much heavier loads. He hoped they didn't have to jettison.
It was astonishing, now that his free-fall flight was ended and he was drifting to earth, how alone he felt. The Combat Talon was gone, already lost in the night. Looking around, he thought he could make out several other chutes… though most of the fourteen other men were invisible, jet-black canopies against the blackness of the night. Looking up, he might, if he were lucky, catch one of his men when he occluded a star. Below, the cloud glow was so faint he would have to be pretty close to see a chute silhouetted against it. He wished he could talk to them, and they to him. Radio communication was possible, certainly, and the encryption gear would guard their words from eavesdroppers. But radio silence was the order of the day. Even encrypted, radio chatter might tell listeners that something was happening. They would save the radios until the fun began at the target.
An hour later, arms cramping from their grip on the control toggles, back aching with the dead weight of his rucksack dragging at his harness, he approached the clouds, which were rushing up toward him like a vast, fuzzy cotton floor. The cloud deck flashed past the bottoms of his boots, an indicator of just how quickly he was moving. The clouds were so thick, he almost expected to feel them drag at his legs as he sank into them, but there was nothing except a sudden close blackness that wiped away the stars and coated his visor with droplets of water that turned almost immediately to ice.
Damn! He couldn't see a thing… not even the altimeter on his chest. Releasing his riser, he scraped at his visor with his gloved hand, but there was ice on the glove too, and all he managed to do was smear the mess around. Finally, he reached up and unlocked the visor, sliding it up on his helmet. Blinking against the rush of cold, wet air, he checked his altimeter.
Sixteen hundred eighty-two meters… but that was set to register off sea level. Lake Ohrid was at an altitude of 695 meters, so he should be nine hundred eighty and some meters up — just over three thousand feet. Though his fall had slowed somewhat as he'd descended through increasingly denser air, he was still only about two minutes from touchdown.
Vision returned with startling suddenness as he punched out through the bottom of the clouds. Until that moment, he'd had no way at all of knowing whether he was steering a proper course, short of the rather abstract knowledge that he'd been steering the course given him before he'd left the aircraft, falling at a constant rate, across a known range.
"Damned if geometry doesn't work," he said aloud as the panorama swam into view below him. The scene was cloaked in darkness, of course, but that yawning, black emptiness below was water, and the lights of the castle were dancing off the surface eight kilometers — call it five miles — ahead. North, he could see the town of Ohrid, and beyond that, the lights of what must be the local airport. South were the lights of other towns, their glow outlining the vast, oval blackness of the lake. He'd fallen almost six miles across a distance of fifteen, with a lake seven miles wide and fifteen long as his target. With over one hundred square miles of water to land in, he was coming down almost perfectly on target, almost precisely in the middle of the lake.
Twisting in his harness, he searched for other SEALs but saw no one… not surprising given the night, their garb, and the fact that they were bound to have scattered a bit during the descent. Reaching up to his shoulder, he snapped on his strobe. The IR hood had been removed. While it was possible that someone ashore might see the pulsing flash of the light, the chances were slim across a distance of more than a mile or two, and in any case, an observer might well assume that he was watching a plane. Murdock looked left and right again. There! A flashing red light, and not very far off either, though range was next to impossible to estimate at night. DeWitt was flying parallel to Murdock to the north and just a little below. Gently, Murdock dro
pped his left toggle slightly, easing his chute into a converging course with the other.
Now, please God, everybody else made it through, and everybody else can see our beacons. Murdock began to concentrate on his landing.
He checked his altimeter again. One hundred ten meters to go. He thought he could see the surface of the water now, sweeping past his feet at an alarming speed. Reaching down, he unsnapped his rucksack and secondary equipment bundles, then let them go. The shock of their release rocked him alarmingly, setting up a nasty oscillation, but he kept control and paid out the rest of the line, allowing his gear to dangle some twelve feet beneath his feet. Next he turned the quick release box to the unlocked position, pulled the safety pin, then opened the safety covers on his Capewell releases.
Closer now… and closer. The water was rushing toward him now, and he could see just how fast he was descending. Ten meters up he pulled down on both steering toggles, curling down the upper rear edge of his canopy like a gigantic set of flaps. The change in aerodynamics brought the front of the chute high, and for a moment, Murdock hung there in the sky, seeking the balance between a gentle landing… and spilling too much air too soon, which would plunge him hard into the lake.
Forward speed arrested, he dropped toward the lake. His equipment bundle struck with a splash, and then the strap holding it gave him a savage tug. The last of his forward velocity was killed by the drag of his rucksack in the water.
The surface rushed up, his feet kicked up spray…
17
0024 hours Lake Ohrid Southwestern Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic)
At the last possible moment, Murdock squeezed the left-hand Capewell release and yanked down. The chute snapped free on that side, billowing up and spilling its remaining air.
Murdock plunged into the water with a splash, bitterly cold, black water enveloping him as his rate of descent drove him down… down… still further down into the depths. The force of the landing tore the oxygen mask from his face. God, the water was cold. Despite his multiple layers, the water of that mountain lake was frigid. Then his equipment strap yanked at his harness, this time from above and behind, threatening to turn him head-down.
The pack included an inflatable rubber raft, a small one, just big enough to support one man and his equipment, and it had begun to inflate as soon as it hit the water. Still descending, Murdock twisted sideways in the water, and the strap was entangling him. Reaching behind his back, he found the gear release and squeezed it; with the jerk, the ruck broke loose, the strap trailing free in the water. His oxygen mask… where was his mask? Was it still attached? He fumbled with the right-side Capewell, trying to release the chute entirely. What he didn't need at the moment was to become entangled underwater in its shrouds. There! He was clear!
A pull ring at his waist inflated the rubber flotation jacket he wore over his combat harness. He estimated, from the pressure on his sinuses and ears, that he must have descended a good forty or fifty feet down before he finally started to rise again. Holding his breath despite the pounding in his chest, the growing, squeezing sensation in his ribs, Murdock kicked toward the surface, kicking… kicking… and then he broke through into blessed, cold air.
Even without his rucksack, Murdock was still heavily weighted down. His MP5 weighed two and a half kilos with a loaded magazine; he had lots more magazines tucked into pockets in his assault vest, not to mention radio, grenades, and at least five kilos more of sundry equipment. Even with the life jacket, each moment, each second brought him closer to being dragged under and drowned.
One of the first ordeals undergone by recruits at BUD/S training at Coronado involves dropping them into a nine-foot-deep tank of water with their hands and feet tied, requiring them to sink to the bottom, then push themselves off and back to the surface. After that, they learn tricks… like donning a face mask, or swimming the entire fifty-meter length of the pool, hands tied. The process is called "drown-proofing," and it is designed to strip recruits of the panic reflex that is the usual cause of drowning.
Despite the weight, Murdock stayed at the surface, kicking hard and moving his arms, treading water until he spotted his flotation pack a few yards away. Moments later, he was lying across the raft, savoring air and the lack of any need to move.
As he lay there, bobbing low in the water, he heard someone splutter and gasp for breath, not far to his left. Gently, he began kicking, propelling his ungainly life preserver toward the sound. Softly, he called out the password "Shadow."
"Bucephalus."
It was Nicholson — Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Eric "Red" Nicholson, of Gold Squad. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Swallowed a little water." He was shivering. Damn, we were loaded a bit heavy that time, weren't we?"
"We've done worse."
The difference was that training was always different from the real thing. There were no instructors standing by, ready to share the mouthpiece from their scuba tanks, no divers ready to go in and pull you out if you found yourself facing something you could not handle. Even on a mission, SEALs generally tried to stage a "dip test," dropping into a water tank with their full equipment loadout as a buoyancy test. There'd been neither time nor facilities for that luxury this time around. They'd just been lucky that the waters of the lake were as calm as they were.
Working quickly, Nicholson and Murdock strapped their flotation packs together, then got rid of all excess weight. They gathered in their parachutes, bundled them with their reserve chutes and harnesses, and let them sink. Their bailout bottles and masks — Murdock found his mask had snagged somehow beneath his reserve chute pack — went too, sinking into nine hundred feet of water. They freed their weapons, balancing them atop the float packs. After that, they drifted motionless for a time, huddling together for warmth, with Murdock continuing to show his flashing beacon, but turned so that it could not be seen from shore. After five minutes, two other SEALs — Frazier and Sterling — paddled up, giving the recognition sign. After another five minutes, no one else had shown up. By this time the whole team ought to be down, and hypothermia in the cold water was becoming a serious concern.
Side by side, the four SEALs began kicking their raft of inflated nylon bundles toward the shore.
0035 hours Gorazamak Lake Ohrid
General Mihajlovic had not been able to sleep. He liked Gorazamak, liked this mountain lake with its clear air and rugged, beautiful terrain. Years ago, he'd come here as a tourist. He and Katrina, his young wife, had stayed at the Mladinski Center, up in Ohrid, and the two of them had done some marvelous hiking in the federal park that enclosed most of the mountains and forest to the east.
That had been in 1979… or 1980? No, it had been the year before Tito had died, the year before the federation of republics that Tito had forged from the blood and agony of war had begun to unravel.
So much had changed in just fifteen years. A whole new world had come into being. And an old one had died.
He walked the stone parapets of the inner ward, a solitary watchtower overlooking the black waters of the lake. Blood and agony had returned to the Federation, despite the best efforts of Tito and everyone after him. Katrina…
In 1987, Slobodan Milosevic had become the leader of the Communist Party in Serbia, still a position of tremendous power despite the toppling of Communist regimes that had eventually reached even into the Kremlin. His public vision of a "Greater Serbia" had proven to be the trigger that had driven the two restive northern republics of the federation, Slovenia and Croatia, to elect non-Communist governments three years later, and to declare their independence. Within a year of that, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia had broken away as well. The Albanian population of Kosovo was restless, as always, and Bulgaria was again casting covetous eyes on Macedonia. The situation had been deteriorating faster than even the most gloomy of pessimists in Belgrade could have imagined.
Then, early in 1991, Serbian nationalists had staged demonstrations that verged on riots in several Croat
ian towns. They'd been deliberately incited by Milosevic's people, of course, with the aim of provoking either a pro-Serb military coup in Zagreb, or the implementation of martial law. When that failed, Serbia's state-controlled radio and TV stations had broadcast reports, all completely fabricated, that ethnic Serbians living in Croatia were being massacred, a prelude to reintroducing federal rule in the breakaway republic.
The plot had been badly mishandled. Those responsible had forgotten that many Serbs living in Serbia opposed the state as much as Croats living in Zagreb… and worse, that there were other forms of communication available besides the official news media, forms not under the state's control. The truth had gotten out, the clumsy lie had been revealed. A pro-democratic mob had besieged the TV studios in Belgrade, demanding that those at the station responsible for this blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion be fired. Milosevic had panicked and ordered the police to disperse the crowd. Hundreds had been arrested, and hundreds more badly beaten.
According to the official reports, only two had died in the riot that day, shot down outside the television studios when the police opened fire on the demonstrators. The actual number of fatalities, counting the casualties in Belgrade's back streets and those who had died in the SBD's interrogation chambers, had been higher than that. How much higher would probably never be known.
Damn it, Katrina hadn't even been involved. The shot that had struck her down hadn't even been aimed at her. She'd been sitting at a table in an outdoor cafe on Skadarska Street, and a stray bullet fired somewhere else in the city had found her, a senseless, random twist to the violence that flamed everywhere in Yugoslavia now, either openly, as in Bosnia, or quietly smoldering just beneath the surface.
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