The SEALs were operating the C-130 Juliet (J-model), which had been re-engineered with a completely new set of propellers which would keep turning and providing lift in the thinner air above 25,000 feet. But even the C-130J couldn’t go much above 30,000 feet, so the one we were going to be using had been modified to go higher. The only way to trial a HAPLSS jump – at air temperatures of minus 100 degrees Celsius, and in an atmosphere thinner than that on the summit of Mount Everest – was to use an aircraft specifically designed to open its jump ramp at such an altitude.
We’d make all such trial jumps with electrodes and monitors wired up to key points of the body. They’d record stresses on the human frame from G-shocks, how many atmospheres we pulled at exit from the aeroplane, respiratory and heart rate factors, plus the impact of extreme cold on the body as it plummeted through air like ice. In a ‘normal’ HALO or HAHO jump from 25,000 feet, terminal velocity – the maximum speed at which you freefall – is 320 kph. But the thinner the air the faster you fall. Jumping from 30,000 feet plus, terminal velocity would be considerably faster – around 440 kph.
Even at 320 kph you’re plummeting through a thousand feet every five seconds. If you tried to pull your chute at the higher velocity – 440 kph – one of two things would likely happen: either you’d break your back as a result of the impact, or you’d have a canopy explosion. At that velocity, and in such thin air, the chute would come whooshing out of your backpack, and all you’d likely hear would be a massive crack and thump as the individual cells exploded, tearing your canopy to shreds. You’d be left plummeting to earth at a deadly rate of knots, with shards of torn silk flapping uselessly in the air above you.
We knew this because we’d trialled HAPLSS using a dummy – a latex model of your average bloke, laden down with metal weights to around 15 stone, and dressed in the gear you’d normally jump with (a 55-pound Bergen, plus weapons and ammo). From the dummy trials we knew that if you pulled your chute at anything above 25,000 feet, you had little chance of making it down alive – hence the default mode with HAPLSS being to freefall a good 20,000 feet prior to releasing your chute.
There was one problem with that. If you jumped and the turbulence put you into a ‘spin’, very quickly you’d be in danger of ‘blacking out’ – so losing consciousness. Ideally, you’d plummet through the turbulence of the aircraft’s wake and stabilise yourself, getting into a star shape – arms and legs outstretched – for the freefall. But if you failed to achieve that and went into a violent spin you’d have just seconds in which to save yourself – and the last-ditch option is always to pull your chute before you black out.
You might have to do that at any height after the jump, so we needed to trial doing an ‘unstable exit’ – something that would put the jumper into a deadly spin, and possibly force him to pull his chute. We didn’t even know if an operator could get out of a spin while wearing all the cumbersome HAPLSS gear … but we still had to try.
Prior to heading for China Lake I’d gone through the necessary medical trials at the JATE – the innocuously-named Joint Air Transport Establishment; the body that oversees such high-end, James-Bond-type military air techniques – to ensure that I was physically fit and robust enough to go ahead with the trials. Hence why running the base perimeter every morning was so necessary.
The JATE is based at RAF Brize Norton. My medical trials passed, I’d got the brief on what exactly the JATE boffins wanted from me out at China Lake. They were asking me to go higher than any British military parachutist had ever gone before – so jumping from well above 30,000 feet – but that wasn’t the half of it.
‘Steve, we want you to do the jump, make an unstable exit and hold it for twenty seconds,’ they told me. ‘Then we want you to try to get out of it and we’ll track whatever problems you incur.’
They made it sound so easy.
What they really meant was this: Steve, pile out of the aircraft, go into a spin, allow the spin to escalate for a good twenty seconds – or 5000 feet – of freefall, then try to save yourself. It went without saying that I’d be close to blacking out by then, so the last-resort option would be to pull the chute, with every likelihood of it exploding. But hey, the only way to perfect such techniques was to trial them, and eventually you had to switch from a dummy to a real person – i.e. muggins me.
In a way it was fair enough. As the long-serving Pathfinder Platoon sergeant I was one of the most practised military free-fall parachutists in the British Army. Airborne insertion is the bread and butter of what we do: we train for it more exhaustively than any other unit in the armed forces. I had over 1200 jumps under my belt, plus I was one of only a handful of military freefall tandem masters – meaning I could freefall with another human being strapped to my person, or a piece of high-tech weaponry, or a specially-designed canister packed with 1000 pounds of ammo.
Arguably, there was no one better qualified to trial HAPLSS over China Lake.
So it was that the modified C-130J had droned up into the hot and thin air high above the wildlands of the Mojave Desert. As we neared the predetermined altitude I started to make ready. There was only one way to ensure I did what was required of me – I had to achieve an immediate ‘unstable exit’. Normally you’d leap off the ramp front first, in what amounted to a long dive, arms and legs outstretched to anchor yourself in the air. By shifting an arm or a leg – drawing it closer to, or moving it further away from, your body – you could slow down or accelerate, and steer your fall.
This time, I was going to plummet from the heavens curled up into a tight ball – getting into a streamlined water-droplet or bullet shape.
The SEALs had zero idea of what would happen if a jumper was forced to pull his chute above 25,000 feet, in a desperate attempt to escape the spin. They made it clear they thought it was pretty messed-up to try, though they appreciated that we needed to know. They were pretty used to how the Brits operated by now: we had all the human potential, guts and expertise, if little of their kit or their airframes. Hence a Brit was today’s fall guy, and the Yanks were providing the jump platform and the space and freedom of China Lake in which to push the limits of the known and the possible.
As I hunched on the edge of the ramp in the foetal position, the wind gusting and buffeting me like a giant tennis ball in a wind tunnel, I reflected upon how I really wasn’t getting paid enough for this kind of shit. Being a Pathfinder, I didn’t even get the extra £45 a week pay uplift that the UK Special Forces got. The Pathfinders don’t sit within the UKSF family. We were formed as a completely black, off-the-books outfit, one that officially didn’t exist. We had no budget, no personnel – every man officially remained with his parent unit – plus no kit, weaponry or ammo other than what we could beg, borrow or steal from other units.
Hence the unofficial name given to us: the X Platoon.
I couldn’t see anything much while hunched into a tight ball, but I knew the red ‘prepare-to-jump’ light must have flickered on, for the two Parachute Jumping Instructors (PJIs) had grabbed hold of me. The PJIs are dedicated specialists whose only role in life is to oversee military parachute jumps. Right now I was going out blind, and these guys held my life in their hands.
The light must have flicked from red to green, for over the deafening roar of the slipstream I heard the voice of the lead PJI guy yelling: ‘Go! Go! Go!’
I scrunched tighter into a ball, as I felt the PJIs manhandle me forwards and roll me out into thin air. For an instant I plummeted, then I felt myself sucked into the maw of the slipstream, the violent turbulence throwing me over and over and over.
Spat out of the aircraft’s wake, I began to fall vertically towards earth, twisting around and around like some crazy, messed-up, man-sized spinning top. I was counting out the seconds in my head, but in the back of my mind a voice was already muttering my prayers.
‘One-thousand-and-three, one-thousand-and-four, one-thousand-and-five … God get me out of this shit alive …’
I cou
nted off the seconds and prayed for some kind of deliverance, as I tumbled through the thin, freezing blue.
The only means I had of assessing how fast I was spinning was by trying to monitor how rapidly the air around me turned from blue to yellow to blue to yellow to blue again. Blue meant I was facing the sky, yellow meant the Mojave Desert, and so on and so forth.
Had I been able to pause for the barest instant I’d have seen the clear curvature of the earth below me, but right now I was struggling to remain conscious, let alone having a spare moment to admire the view.
Being scrunched into a tight ball I was massively aerodynamic, which lowers drag and increases terminal velocity still further. I just kept accelerating and spinning faster and faster and faster, my air speed and the G-forces growing with it, the wind howling and tearing at my head like a raging hurricane.
Imagine going at one hundred kilometres an hour on a motorcycle. If you’ve ever done it, you’ll know just how intensely the wind rips into your face and your torso, as the pressure tries to slam you out of the saddle. Now imagine going at over four times that speed, without even the benefit of a full-face helmet, or a set of handlebars and a seat to keep a grip on. Imagine doing so in minus 100 degrees air temperature, and with the following strapped to your person: a bulging parachute pack, a massive Bergen, your webbing stuffed with ammo and grenades, a pistol strapped to your thigh, plus your main weapon – your assault rifle – slung over your shoulder. Now imagine all of that when you’re spinning crazily like a top, without the faintest clue which way up you are …
Sickening, right?
I was ten seconds into the freefall and the spin just kept getting worse. I could feel myself gasping for breath, as my burning lungs struggled to drag in enough gas from the bottle. My sensory awareness – my ability to judge where I was exactly, which way up I was, or who I was even – was slipping away from me.
Blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blueyellow-blueyellow-blueyellow-blueeeeellooooow...
Argghhhhh!
The air pressure was tearing at the oxygen bottle fixed to my front, plus it was trying to rip away the heavy Bergen strapped across my lower body. I could feel my weapon slamming around in the air at my side, the butt like a baseball bat cracking blows into my helmeted head. I was on the verge of vomiting. The pressure on my heart and lungs was unbearable, and I was seconds away from losing consciousness.
At which stage I’d be dead.
With my pulse juddering inside my skull and my mind reeling horribly from dizziness and disorientation, I tried to focus on the count.
‘One-thousand-and-fifteen, one-thousand-and-sixteen, one-thousand-and-…’
Three seconds to go and I had to try to break free and get into a stable freefall position, face to earth. I counted out the last seconds. Snap! I thrust my arms and legs into a rigid star shape, arching my back against the unbearable forces that were threatening to tear me limb from limb. I strained my muscles against the pain and the pressure, letting out a cry of agony at the top of my voice – one that I knew no one would ever hear, for I was alone on the roof of the world here.
My limbs were thrust out rigid to make four air-anchors, as I tried to grab at the thin atmosphere and slow my seemingly unstoppable whirlwind of a fall. Gradually I sensed the revolutions decrease, as the air howled all around me and my body screamed in pain. But I still didn’t know which way up I’d eventually come to a halt – facing the sky or facing the earth.
Finally I stopped spinning.
I forced my frazzled mind to concentrate.
I was facing blue.
Blue meant the sky.
Wrong way round.
I was plummeting at a murderous speed with my back to the earth. If I pulled my chute in the position I was in now it would open below me and I’d fall through it. It would bag around me, doing a fine impression of a sack of damp washing, and I’d plummet to earth like a corpse entombed in a shroud of tangled parachute silk.
Not good.
I brought my right arm in close to my side and threw my opposite shoulder over, trying to flip myself so I’d end up facing yellow. Yellow = earth. But for some reason it just wasn’t working. All it achieved was the very opposite of what I wanted – to send me back into the spin again.
For a moment I was on the verge of panic. My hand reached involuntarily for the release cord of the chute. I forced myself to stop. I forced myself to remember how we’d trialled this repeatedly with the dummy, and every single time the chute had ripped itself to shreds.
Don’t pull the chute.
Pull the chute and you’re dead.
There was one more thing I could try. My last option before blacking out was to do what I did now. I dragged in both arms tight by my sides, rammed my legs out straight behind me and got my back locked and arched. I was now in the Delta Track position, which should bring me into a head-down dive.
Like this I hoped to remain conscious long enough for the thickening atmosphere to slow me down to the point where pulling my chute – and survival – was a real possibility.
That at least was the plan.
2
I was three minutes into the freefall when I finally risked pulling the chute. I was at 3500 feet and I’d just completed a mega death-ride to earth. It was the Delta Track that had done the trick, getting me into a stable enough position to flick out into the star shape again, and ready myself to send 360 square feet of the finest silk billowing out above me.
It takes six seconds for the chute to deploy fully, so in reality I was at 2500 feet by the time I broke my fall, drifting silently beneath the canopy over the hot Mojave Desert. The other way to look at it was like this: I’d deployed the chute when I was a bare fifteen seconds away from ploughing into the earth at plus-320 kph. At that speed there wouldn’t have been a great deal of me to scrape up amongst the cacti and the tumbleweed, so my parents – and Ben my dog – could bury what was left of me.
Still, at least now we knew.
We knew what happened when you flipped into a death spin at well above 30,000 feet while doing a HAPLSS jump.
Once I was ‘safely’ down I gathered up my chute and the pick-up wagon trundled over to collect me. I was driven to one of China Lake’s 2000-odd hangars, halls, laboratories and other assorted buildings. There the boffins unplugged the wires, and sensors and data-recorders, to check on all the readings made during the jump.
It turned out that I’d pulled more G-forces than a top-gun fighter pilot does when putting a state-of-the-art F-15 Eagle fighter jet through its paces – and I hadn’t had the luxury of a glass-and-steel airframe wrapped around me to shield me from the bitter ice and turbulence, plus the punishing air pressure and the wind speed.
Still, that was what being a Pathfinder was all about.
It went with the territory.
The day after the jump of death I felt as if I’d been in a boxing bout with Godzilla – only it had been held in a giant washing machine set to maximum spin. You only get out of shit like that when you are at the absolute peak of physical condition, hence the runs around the Wattisham airbase, plus all the other daily workouts and the intense training.
I upped the pace as we hit the final leg of that morning’s run, thanking the gods or the fates or whoever for getting me through China Lake in one piece. We surged as a pack through the lines of the Army Air Corps, Ben out front, his fur sleek and glistening, his fine muzzle leading the way. This early morning ritual was known as ‘running the fence’, and the Apache gunship pilots had long grown used to the Pathfinder Express Train steaming through.
Of the forty men on that morning’s run, twelve were at Ready Status One (R1) – which meant they were able to deploy instantly on missions anywhere in the world. Another dozen were on R2, meaning they could deploy anywhere within twenty-four hours. The rest were on R3, which meant deployment within thirty-six. On R3 you could be on a training course or on leave, as long as you could get back to the base and be good to go within
thirty-six hours.
After a steaming hot shower I came into the ops room to find Graham ‘Wag’ Wardle, our Ops Warrant Officer, glued to the phone. From the few words that I caught of the conversation I knew that something was up. Wag and me understood each other instinctively and were the best of mates, in spite of him forever needling me about having the world’s biggest ears, and me going on about him having been hit real hard with the Ugly Stick.
Wag was short and stumpy with the body of a Hobbit. He hailed from Burnley, and spoke with a thick Lancashire accent. He was shaven-headed and a walking advertisement for the world’s dodgiest tattoos: there wasn’t one that wasn’t misspelled, off-colour or misaligned. In short he looked and sounded like a football hooligan in uniform.
To make matters worse he wasn’t the biggest fan of military freefall, which was the bread and butter of our business. I used to joke that Wag had been born with four left arms. What redeemed him was that he was a total stalwart. The Pathfinders was his life. Wag was hard, robust and fit, but his real gift lay in his powers of dynamic lateral thinking. In thinking the unthinkable Wag pretty much had no equal.
At thirty-seven years of age, he was also the ‘old man’ of the unit. I used to joke that I’d put myself through the Military Tandem Master’s course purely so I could HALO Wag in on a mission, for he was never going to make a high-altitude low-opening jump on his own. That summed up the fierce, piss-taking rivalry between us, and under our guidance the X Platoon had thrived.
As Wag came off the phone I called over to him. ‘Before you get started, mate, quick question.’
Operation Mayhem Page 3
