And then Butler continued with the practical demonstration of how he killed Wright. He reached for my rip cord, and pulled it.
I only had a few seconds. The drogue chute snapped out of the bag and crackled in the slipstream behind my back. It began to pull the main foil out of the bag. I grappled with Butler, fighting, grabbing, clawing for straps, webbing, anything. My hand found something as my main chute deployed, coming open with an almighty bang. The sudden deceleration ripped me out of the chute harness, just as Ruben Wright had been ripped out of his. It also nearly tore my hand off, the one holding on to Butler. I tumbled, spinning, disoriented, for a thousand feet or so. When I regained control, I saw Butler in the high arch close by, following me down. Behind the oxy mask, I'd be willing to bet he was smiling that smile, the one I saw as he checked my gear earlier. Now I knew what the smile meant. He waved goodbye as he pulled his rip cord, just like he did when he left Hurlburt Field—the “fuck you” wave. I watched his drogue chute appear and drag the foil out of his chute bag. It opened with a bang and Butler instantly disappeared somewhere into the black sky above, while I was left alone to plunge without a chute toward certain death.
FORTY-FOUR
The altimeter told me I had around thirty seconds of free fall, plenty long enough for the life flashing before my eyes to go into reruns. Somewhere below, the big end was rushing toward me at around a hundred and twenty. No way to fight it. Nothing to do but wait. This was it. The Death Fall that powered my flying phobia had arrived.
The seconds dragged by like the wind tearing at my helmet and filling my ears with a roar. When it happened, it would happen quick. I'd be alive, then not. Solid, then liquid, a splash on the earth. I was falling through cloud, buffeted by windborne snow. Ten seconds left. Dying's not so—
* * *
As I swam in and out of consciousness, I became aware of a series of loud bangs nearby—gunshots—then familiar voices. I tried to speak, but then the blackness welled up from beneath and dragged me back to nothingness.
* * *
I was numb. Floating and, at the same time, sinking. Conscious, but not. A trickle of ice water ran down the back of my neck, between my shoulder blades. I was aware of the pain in my chest. Jesus, my hand hurt. And then the blackness gobbled me up.
* * *
Every muscle ached. I coughed the icy wetness out of my mouth and opened my eyes. The light hurt. White all around—above and below. I couldn't move my arms or legs. I lay there motionless until I recognized that the whiteness above was cloud. In fact, it wasn't white. It was low and gray, and full of snow. I lifted my head and discovered I was encased in snow. I couldn't feel my toes. I tried to roll. The snow gave a little. I moved, rolled some more. The snow tomb collapsed, releasing me. I lifted my knees, then my arms. My face was numb, my oxygen mask ripped away. One of my hands was numb. I'd lost a glove. I looked at my fingers. They were blue; two were dislocated, poking up at odd angles like the broken teeth of a cheap hair comb. My brain was starting to function. I remembered the fall. I remembered Butler. My fingers had been mangled trying to hold on to him. Why wasn't I dead?
I pulled myself up to look around, feeling every bone and muscle in my body scream when I did so. I was on a high, treeless plateau. Snow met the horizon all round. With my good hand, I unclipped the M4 carbine from my webbing, followed by the para-ruck. The SpecterIR sight was smashed and the carbine's barrel was slightly bent. It—I—had taken a hell of a hit. Butler had made such a big deal about this weapon system, all that bullshit about the Bofors ammunition. He knew I would never get to use it.
My chest ached beneath the ceramic plate in my body armor. I opened the para-ruck and pulled out a couple of chemical hand-warmers and a pair of shooter's gloves. I broke the seal on the warmer and fed it inside the glove. Then I took one finger at a time and relocated them. Each went back into place with a wet crack. The numbing cold reduced the pain to bearable. I hoped the circulation hadn't been completely cut—I wasn't enthusiastic at the thought of losing them to frostbite, or to anything else. They were the same two fingers I'd broken on my last case. Unlucky fingers, both of them.
I carefully slid the shooter's glove on. I felt the glow of the hand-warmer on my palm, but nowhere else. Maybe it was too late for those fingers. I gave myself an examination, patting down my legs and arms with my good hand. There didn't seem to be any other broken or otherwise damaged bones. I was overcome by a feeling of total, all-consuming amazement. How had that happened? How had I managed to walk away from a fall of at least 20,000 feet? I'd heard of people surviving high falls by landing in hay bales and deep snowdrifts, but from what I could tell, there weren't any hay bales around and the snow a couple of feet down was hard and compacted.
I sat up on my knees and took in the surroundings again, searching for clues to this miraculous escape. The plateau was featureless except for a mound of roughly piled snow a hundred feet away. I stumbled toward it. Halfway there, I found part of a large chute. I grabbed hold of it with my good hand and pulled. Some more of it lifted out of the snow and I used it to haul myself forward. I arrived at the mound and scraped away some of the snow. Beneath was one of the Ski-Doos. The handlebars were bent and broken, the windshield cowling smashed. Something heavy had landed on it from above. Me?
I sat with my back to the mound of snow, cradling my injured hand. I didn't remember hitting anything during free fall, but then, I wouldn't have. Traveling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, I'd have been knocked instantly unconscious. I struggled to piece it together. My survival had something to do with these machines—had to. I remembered the Ski-Doos sliding out the back of the plane. Their chutes had not deployed—not immediately, anyway. I remembered seeing the cable to which their static lines were attached get ripped away from the fuselage and follow them down the ramp. I'd fallen free of the aircraft shortly after. The Ski-Doos' enormous equipment chutes would have opened very late. Maybe I'd fallen into one of these vast nylon canopies while it was still inflated; all sixty-four feet of it. If so, it would have acted much like a giant airbag as it collapsed, breaking my fall without breaking me. Maybe I then rolled off it and fell, crashing into the Ski-Doo, hitting it with my chest, before continuing the remainder of the journey to earth riding it, unconscious. All this was a million to one. Ten million to one. I could see the T-shirt: “I free-fell 20,000 feet without a parachute and all I got were these two broken fingers.” Which reminded me. They were starting to throb and the pain was getting through the frozen nerve endings. I laughed and gave a whoop. Fuck, I was alive. If surviving a fall like that didn't cure me of the flying phobia, I should transfer to the Navy.
After five minutes of sitting and thinking about just how goddamn invincible I was, I decided to inspect the Ski-Doo. Maybe my luck would hold and I could jury-rig a pair of handlebars and just ride the thing out of here, back to Afghanistan. I scraped away more snow to inspect the engine. It had been shot up. Shit. This puppy was going nowhere. Butler had to have been here. He'd found this Ski-doo and shot half a dozen rounds into it, put the thing out of its misery. I had a vague memory of hearing gunfire and Butler's voice when I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The other two Ski-Doos were gone. Maybe Butler and Dortmund had taken them. I glanced around. There were no tracks—a light snowfall had covered them. The landing must have thrown me free and into snow deep enough to hide me from Butler's SpecterIR. Obviously, Vin Cooper was one lucky guy who the gods obviously thought was way too handsome and clever to be cut down in his prime. Obviously, I was getting delirious. Hypoxic, even. I checked the altimeter on my wrist, just in case. It was smashed.
Movement at the edge of the plateau caught my attention. I started to stand, to move. I heard a hard crack and a bullet whistled past my Kevlar, trailing a mini sonic boom. What? Men on horseback were trotting toward me, yelling. I had the M9, but I'd never get it out of the holster in time to do anything other than get myself shot dead. I heard another couple of cracks and the snow at my
feet kicked up. I raised my hands above my head. Maybe I'd used up all my luck.
I counted around twenty men, all on horseback. They surrounded me, yelling. I heard the words kafir and aspai—”infidel” and “dog.” They swirled around me, the horses turning and snorting steam. The men were mostly wrapped in dark or black wool blankets. Some wore Afghan pakool caps, others had black fabric rolled loosely around their heads. At a guess, I'd have said the band was Taliban with some al Qaeda mixed in for added nastiness. There was nothing “maybe” about my luck having run out.
One of the men slid down off his horse, shouting at me. He was carrying an AK-47, coming toward me with the stock raised, yelling. I was about to—
FORTY-FIVE
Ruben Wright and I were sitting in a slit trench dug into a snowdrift, the air around us swirling with frozen ice crystals that reflected the available light like diamonds. The cold had numbed my ass so completely I wasn't even sure I had one anymore. I was so cold I'd crack if I tried to move. Ruben was sighting down a Squad Automatic Weapon, an M249 machine gun, his left cheek wrinkled with deep clefts beneath an eye clamped shut. He was aiming at a far ridge over which we knew the enemy would be charging. It was just Ruben and me, alone in the snow. He looked good for a dead guy and I told him so. Perhaps being dead he wasn't affected by temperatures frigid enough to freeze skin to exposed metal. “Death agrees with you, buddy,” I said.
“Nice of you to say, Vin. In return, I'd like to tell you that you're kinda stupid.”
“Oh, yeah? Why's that?”
“Did you really think I'd committed suicide?”
“It looked bad there for a while, Wrong Way.”
“Would I cut myself out of my own harness?”
“There were conflicting signs.”
“Goddamn it. So I had MS. I could still do what I needed to do—jump out of planes, kill the bad guys…”
“Knowing you, I wasn't sure how you'd have handled it—wasting away slowly…”
“I was handling it fine, for Christ's sake. Just another challenge.”
“What about Amy and Butler?”
“Yeah, well, shit happens.”
“You were stalking them.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I found the MPEGs.”
“Always knew they'd turn up.”
“I know you. At least I thought I did. I looked at the facts. They told me it was possible you might have decided to take Butler down with you—leave while the party was still happening, and get in a little revenge of your own.”
I turned to face him. His gray eyes were clear and his skin glowed pink with health. He was going to say something, but he appeared to change his mind and instead commented, “You don't look well, Vin.”
“I don't feel so good,” I agreed. Indeed, I was pretty sure I'd reached the point of no return. My blood was so thick with cold my heart couldn't pump it around my body. I noticed that blurred black-and-white shapes had appeared over the far ridge, a wave of them. The enemy had returned. Behind them, giant mushroom clouds from an earlier dream blossomed and reached far into the upper atmosphere, and this time they were white rather than orange. Ruben let off a burst of fire from his SAW. I started firing my weapon at individual targets, my trigger finger the only part of me that I could move. I hit nothing. Ruben hit nothing. The enemy kept coming. The rifle bucked and jumped in my hands over and over. No hits. I managed to change mags and then flicked the selector to full auto. The rifle reared and sprayed its deadly load. I glanced to my right. Ruben was no longer beside me. Just like I'd suggested, he'd had the good sense to leave before the situation climbed into the toilet.
I woke shivering so hard my top and bottom teeth were banging away at each other like a couple of castanets. I was lying on a hard, dirty floor. My head hurt with a pounding pain. My hands were locked behind my back. I licked my lips. They were cracked and bloody and swollen. One of my eyes wouldn't open. Maybe it didn't want to know what was on the other side of the lid. My captors had stripped me down to my BDU. No shoes, no gloves. Everything ached. I craved water. I rolled onto my side and sat up and tried to get my bearings, stop my shivering. I couldn't feel my hands or toes.
A door kicked open, letting in so much light it was almost blinding. Several dark shapes entered. When they came closer, I saw the shapes were a couple of men leading horses. They came past, close. Both animals lifted their tails and dropped piles of steaming shit in front of me. I accepted the invitation, wriggled forward on the bones of my butt, and dug my toes into the crap. Delicious warmth surged through my feet and up my legs. Someone yelled something and slapped my face a few times. I was numb so it didn't hurt too bad, although it changed the rhythm of the headache between my ears, shifting it into four/four time.
Another man bent down, grabbed my hair and yanked my head back. “You are American,” he said in heavily accented English.
There were no identifying patches on my uniform or gear, but I had to have come from somewhere. “American,” I said.
I earned another slap. Whack. “I hate Americans,” he said. “What are you doing in Pakistan?”
I didn't answer. Whack.
“What are you doing here?”
“Tourist,” I said.
I knew what was coming. I wasn't disappointed. Whack. My brain bounced around inside my skull.
“I will kill you if you do not answer my questions. Will you answer my questions?”
“Yes,” I said, though I made no promise to answer them truthfully.
There was a discussion going on between the guy slapping me around and someone else I couldn't see. They were arguing excitedly in Pashtu.
“Do you know what this is?” the man demanded, suddenly back in my face. His eyes were green, his skin olive. Up close, he reminded me of a badass-biker type. A wild, light-brown beard began somewhere inside his nose and ended raggedly mid-chest. He didn't seem in a particularly good mood. I glanced down. My Beretta sat in the palm of his hand.
“Yes,” I replied, keeping it simple. I knew what it was.
He pulled the slider back to chamber a round, lifted my head, and put the muzzle against my forehead. My good eye watched his finger squeeze the trigger. I watched as the skin on his dirty index finger between the second and third joint whitened with pressure against the metal. The trigger moved. I couldn't. Any moment the hammer would hit the—
Clack.
“Next time, American, there will be a live round behind the hammer.”
I saw him raise the gun like he was going to use it to chop wood, saw the down swing, felt—
FORTY-SIX
There were no dreams. There was just nothingness, then awareness. During this awareness, mostly what I was aware of was my own shit. I'd been moved blindfolded from the stable to a small one-room storehouse. Maybe all my groaning was bothering their animals. My hands were secured behind my back, and they in turn were tethered to a ringbolt set in the wall by a length of thin, rusting cable. There was enough free play in the tether to get me to a bucket on the floor. I'd knocked it over a couple of times trying to use it.
I was fed water and food at reasonably regular intervals—a little dried bread, rice, and some kind of slop. And for my main course, knuckle sandwiches. It was warmer, at least, in the new place. I was shivering less. My dislocated fingers throbbed continuously. They were swollen but I knew that, under the dirt, they were pink with circulation.
My captors asked a lot of questions about my government and said they didn't like it. I replied they weren't alone and that around half of America, give or take, felt the same way. They thought I was joking, giving them lip, and beat up on me some more.
I gave up nothing of a military nature, which caused them a lot of stress and anger, which they then took out on my face. I didn't know whether these beatings made them feel better because I was mostly on the floor, thinking selfishly about the mess I was in.
But I had to give them something. Eventually, they got my name, rank, p
lace of birth, and my mother's maiden name. I figured that if I could give out that information to a cable guy to get connected, what could it hurt giving it to them? And my captors felt at last that they were getting some cooperation. The beatings lessened.
My captors pulled the pistol trick twice more. On the last of these occasions, they fired off the M9 a couple of times and then put the pistol to my head. I smelled the burnt powder, the gun oil, and some kind of spice on the guy's fingers that reminded me of curry. He pulled the trigger again on an empty barrel. Everyone thought this was a lot of fun and there was plenty of laugher. Yeah, side splitting. Afterward, they dragged me back inside and urinated on me.
“Abu Ghraib,” they said a couple of times as they wove yellow figure eights on me.
At least the urine was warm. See, I said to myself, you can be a glass-half-full guy. The allusion made me laugh, which brought on another beating.
I was right about there being two distinct groups within the party, and probably right about the Taliban/al Qaeda mix. One set was Afghan; the other, Arab. The Arabs hit harder, but were in the minority. I got the impression the Arabs thought they were in charge, but I don't think the Afghans agreed with them on that point.
The chief inquisitor, an Afghan who occasionally translated questions for everyone else in the band, wasn't putting his shoulder behind the hits after what I estimated were a couple of days of softening-up. I liked to think it was because his hand was starting to hurt after I smashed my face into it repeatedly. But then I began to wonder if there wasn't another reason. Like if they were going to video my execution and broadcast it, for example. It wouldn't be great PR if my face resembled a strawberry shortcake dropped on the sidewalk. I thought about this in a distracted way, like it was happening to someone else.
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