by Andy McNab
Ethan remembered hearing a few people talking about the AFF, but he’d never taken a booking for it. ‘Why don’t more people do it?’
‘Because it costs about fifteen hundred quid,’ said Johnny. ‘And that’s a lot of cash.’
Ethan ran the figure around in his mind. It didn’t get any smaller. ‘Bollocks,’ he said.
‘Steep, isn’t it?’ said Johnny. ‘Got anything tucked away?’
Ethan shook his head. ‘You’ve seen where we live. We all chip in together. We’re not exactly poor, but no way have we got that amount of cash just sitting in the bank…’
‘What about the job?’ asked Johnny. ‘Could you save up?’
Ethan shook his head. ‘It’s a great job, but I’m hardly raking it in.’ He attempted a smile. ‘Hey, at least I managed to bag a free tandem. I mean, how many people can say that, eh? And a couple of weeks ago I’d never have thought I’d be able to do something like that.’
‘There’s nothing stopping you doing another tandem,’ said Johnny. ‘Or you could do a static line jump.’
‘I guess,’ said Ethan. He knew about static line jumps, but he wasn’t really interested. Jumping from a plane and having the canopy open automatically just didn’t seem to have the same buzz about it as skydiving. And you didn’t get the freefall rush either. It was just a jump from the plane and then a glide down. That was it.
Ethan tried not to think about how much he wanted to do the AFF – and how much he couldn’t afford it. He smiled at Johnny. ‘Anyway, thanks for the DVD. Couldn’t stop watching it last night. The soundtrack sucked though.’
‘We use the same one for all the DVDs,’ said Johnny. ‘Even the training one. Can’t beat a nice bit of eighties metal!’
Ethan turned and saw Sam’s head round the door; he was looking at Johnny. ‘Got a minute? I’ve a little job for you. Right up your street, I think.’ Then he glanced at Ethan. ‘And, Ethan – make sure you’re in early tomorrow. Seven thirty, OK?’
‘Yeah, no worries,’ said Ethan, and Johnny followed Sam out of the shop.
Ethan thought again about the AFF and felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. The tandem had been amazing, had totally blown his mind. He didn’t want to just do that again; he wanted to skydive properly, do what Johnny did. But fifteen hundred quid? No chance, he thought. No chance at all. He spent the rest of the day trying not to think about skydiving.
For him, it was just impossible.
The next day Ethan arrived at FreeFall dead on seven thirty, skidding to a halt beside the café. To his surprise, Johnny was already there, sitting outside, shades on. He smiled, waved. Ethan returned the gesture.
‘So,’ he said, slipping into a chair in front of Johnny, ‘what’s this all about? Why are you here? Did Sam ask you to be in early too?’
Johnny just grinned and pushed his shades back. ‘You still thinking about that skydive?’
Ethan nodded. ‘Too right I am. Can hardly think of anything else. Bit of a pisser about the AFF, though.’ He still felt gutted.
‘True,’ said Johnny.
‘I’ll get over it,’ said Ethan. ‘I’ve been thinking I might do it next summer. You know, celebrate the end of school with it or something. If I keep working here and maybe take another job as well, I should be able to save up enough.’
Johnny nodded thoughtfully then leaned forward. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here’s the thing…’
‘What thing?’
‘It’s all been taken care of.’
Ethan didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean? What are you on about? What’s been taken care of?’
‘You. The AFF. It’s sorted.’
‘Shut up,’ said Ethan. ‘And don’t be a dick.’
‘I’m not being a dick,’ Johnny insisted. ‘It’s true. That’s what Sam wanted to see me about yesterday. He wants me to help him put you through the AFF.’
Ethan opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Surely Johnny was just taking the piss.
‘Sam will be teaching you,’ Johnny told him. ‘He’s the business, as you know. Doesn’t miss a trick and doesn’t let you jump unless he’s confident you’re not going to spin out and kill yourself.’
‘You’re not serious, are you?’ said Ethan, but Johnny simply went on:
‘I’ll be doing the filming. I need the practice anyway. We’ll be able to assess every single jump you do, show you what you’re doing wrong, what you’re doing right. And you’ll have a nice little souvenir at the end, won’t you? A little bit of Ethan Hollywood all of your own.’
At last words formed in Ethan’s head. ‘But… who?’ he asked. ‘ Who’s sorted it? This doesn’t make sense…’ And it didn’t. He’d spent the whole of yesterday dealing with the fact that he wouldn’t be able to do his AFF until next summer at the earliest, and now here was Johnny telling him he’d be doing it right away. It sounded nuts.
A throaty growl interrupted his thoughts as Sam pulled up in his Defender and climbed out.
‘Ethan. Johnny,’ he said, striding over to them. ‘Ready?’
‘I sure am,’ said Johnny, standing up. ‘Ethan’s still in shock, though, aren’t you, mate?’
Ethan looked up at Sam and slowly got to his feet. ‘How am I supposed to pay for this?’ he asked. ‘It’s OK you helping me out by teaching and filming and stuff, but it’s still going to cost, isn’t it? And I just don’t have the cash. I really don’t. I mean, fifteen hundred quid… that’s-’
‘A lot of money, I know,’ said Sam, cutting Ethan off. ‘But hasn’t Johnny told you? It’s all sorted.’
Ethan nodded. ‘Yeah, he said, but-’
‘Then here’s a little tip: shut up and accept it, right? I have ways of getting extra funding when I need it. That’s all you need to know.’
‘But I’ll still have to pay it back,’ said Ethan.
‘No,’ said Sam, ‘you won’t. That’s what “sorted” means. I’ve also arranged cover for you this week so you don’t have to worry about work. All you need to think about now is keeping your eyes and ears open, listening, learning and making sure you don’t die. Got it?’
Ethan stood there for a moment, trying to take it all in. The tandem – that had been pretty crazy. But now this! How on earth had Sam sorted out the costs? And why? It didn’t make sense, but Ethan didn’t want to ask any more questions in case Sam got annoyed and changed his mind. It started to sink in. He was going to learn to skydive… bloody hell!
Adrenaline raced through him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ he said, and as he looked up at Sam, he saw a flicker of a smile cross his face.
‘I’m always serious,’ said Sam. ‘So sort your shit out and I’ll see you and Johnny in the hangar in ten.’
He went over to the café door, unlocked it and disappeared inside.
Ethan turned to Johnny. ‘I’m actually going to be learning to skydive? For real?’
Johnny nodded, and came to put his arm across Ethan’s shoulders. ‘Not just skydive,’ he said, ‘but skydive with the best.’
‘Sam?’
‘No,’ said Johnny. ‘Me.’
11
‘The AFF course,’ Sam began, ‘takes you from beginner to category eight qualified skydiver in eight jumps.’
Ethan was sitting in the hangar, Johnny next to him. He was fully rigged up and hanging on Sam’s every word. Outside, the day was clear; sunshine was streaming in through the windows. ‘Eight jumps?’ he said, thinking it hardly sounded enough.
Sam nodded. ‘Today we’re doing ground training,’ he went on. ‘You’ll do your first jump tomorrow.’
Ethan immediately felt disappointed. He was impatient, wanted to jump now, get back into the air, feel the sky rushing past him, experience again that strange moment when the world below just seems to sit there, perfectly still, not getting any closer, your brain unable to compute that you’re at terminal velocity, falling at around 120 mph.
Johnny went
and stood next to Sam. Ethan thought how different they were – Sam with his startlingly short hair, hard face and unflinching stance; Johnny looking like an advert for why extreme sports make women want to sleep with you.
‘Sam’s going to be leading on this,’ Johnny said. ‘I’m helping out. When you do your jumps, you’ll leave the plane with both of us. We’ll help you get a feel for the air, sort your positioning out, that kind of thing. And I’ll be filming it all too. So at least you’ll look good.’
‘It’ll give us something to analyse on the ground,’ said Sam, ignoring Johnny’s comment. ‘Just another way of being extra thorough. The quicker you get the details right, the better you’ll be when you’re up there.’
‘It’ll also give us something to laugh at,’ added Johnny.
Ethan noticed a smile start to flicker across Sam’s face, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. He was beginning to understand the man a little more now, and since the jump he felt he could trust him absolutely.
‘As Sam said,’ said Johnny, ‘today’s ground training.’ He went over to the hangar wall and pulled out what looked to Ethan like a tea trolley.
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘The perfect way to make you look a total knob,’ said Johnny. ‘We’ll be using it to show you the basic moves you’ll need. You lie on top of it – that way you can practise the correct positions and movements in freefall.’
‘Are you having a laugh?’ Ethan looked doubtfully at the trolley.
Johnny shook his head and Ethan saw a rare seriousness on his face. ‘If you can’t do it down here, and do it well, then there’s no way we’re going to throw you out of a plane,’ he said. ‘It’s human error, not equipment failure that kills. Skydiving is only as dangerous as you make it. Get the basics right, and you can do this stuff without even thinking about it. It becomes instinctive. You’ll be fine.’
Ethan remembered Luke saying something similar about human error versus equipment failure. He listened even more intently to everything Sam and Johnny were saying.
Sam looked at him, his eyes hard. ‘Questions?’
Ethan shook his head. ‘Not yet anyway.’
‘Good,’ said Sam. ‘You’ve learned your first lesson: shut the hell up. It’s the only way you’ll learn. I’ll tell you when you can ask questions. Until then, just listen to us and do what we say. Understand?’
‘Totally,’ said Ethan, and meant it.
Johnny bent down and picked up a skydiving rig. ‘By the end of today you’ll know what this is, inside and out. You’ll know how to read an altimeter. You’ll know how to exit an aircraft and how to do a freefall – the correct body position, hand signals, canopy control – everything.’
Ethan nodded. Sam knew his stuff, that was obvious, but so did Johnny. He was a flash git – everyone knew it – but he was also an astounding skydiver. And Ethan could see that Sam had a lot of time for Johnny, despite the fact that they were different in almost every way. Johnny lived and breathed skydiving. What he didn’t know, you didn’t need to know. Ethan wondered if he’d ever be like that; hoped he would.
Johnny interrupted his thoughts. ‘Tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, you’ll be jumping from twelve thousand feet. Forecast is good – we shouldn’t have any problems. For each of your AFF jumps, we’ll be in constant radio contact, so we can guide you down, help you correct what you’re doing. Jump eight, your last jump, will be your first solo. You’ll be entirely on your own. Complete that, and you’re qualified. However…’ He paused and looked at Sam.
‘What?’ said Ethan.
‘Qualifying to jump solo doesn’t mean you can then just get into any plane and start throwing yourself out whenever you want,’ said Sam. ‘After AFF you have to do a further ten consolidation jumps before you’re classed as capable, experienced and safe. With each of those jumps, one of us will jump with you.’
Ethan saw a smirk slide across Johnny’s face. ‘And it’ll take a miracle for you ever to make it look as good as I do.’
Sam didn’t respond, but Ethan laughed.
It all felt so unreal. He couldn’t believe he was sitting there, listening to Johnny and Sam, learning to skydive. And somehow he’d got all this training for free. Somehow, Sam and Johnny had sorted something out. He had no idea how or why. But he knew Sam well enough to realize that any more questions about it would not go down well.
What followed was a day so intense, Ethan felt like his brain would burn up. Sam and Johnny pushed him hard. Lying on the trolley, he practised the freefall body position again and again. Sam didn’t mince his words. If Ethan got something wrong, he knew all about it. Sam wouldn’t accept anything less than perfection. And that perfection had to become instinctive.
What really intrigued Ethan, though, was that in the midst of the info-dump he was undergoing, Johnny and Sam seemed really interested in who he was. When they weren’t telling him stuff or demonstrating something, they were asking questions – not just to make sure he was remembering what they were teaching him, but about his background, how he’d come to be there at FreeFall with them, learning to skydive.
‘Everything’s important,’ Sam had said over lunch. ‘Not just who you are, but why you are. I don’t want to put just anyone in the sky and throw them out of a plane attached to a silk bag. That’d be irresponsible. I want to know why they’re in the air in the first place, what kind of person they are, their motivation. Understand?’
By the end of the day Ethan’s mind was leaking terms he’d never heard before. He found himself rattling off phrases like he knew them: AAD, body position, burble, cut away, RSL, terminal velocity, wave off, and the term used to describe people who don’t jump – wuffo. He was never going to be a wuffo ever again. That felt good.
Sam had drawn the day to a close with a ‘Well done, Ethan,’ and a firm shake of the hand, before driving away in his Defender. Now Ethan was sitting on a bench outside the hangar, his head resting against the wall.
‘So,’ said Johnny. ‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m knackered,’ said Ethan, and meant it. ‘Sam’s a hardarse, isn’t he? Really drives stuff into you like your life depends on it.’
‘That’s because it does. Sam lives and breathes skydiving. He’s done it all his life.’
‘You’re no different,’ Ethan told Johnny.
‘Oh, I am,’ he said, sliding down next to Ethan. ‘I’ve been jumping for two years. I’m a qualified rigger. I can do formation stuff and solo. But Sam? He’s a god.’
‘Yeah. A scary one,’ said Ethan. ‘But that’s the funny thing about him. He’s this terrifying perfectionist but at the same time you can’t help liking him. What’s his story?’
Johnny shrugged. ‘He doesn’t speak much about his past, his military life. But I know he’s done plenty of HALO and HAHO jumps, and that’s some really serious shit. He’s one of the most experienced skydivers in the business.’
‘HALO?’ asked Ethan.
‘High Altitude, Low Opening,’ Johnny explained. ‘Used by special forces when they want to get in behind enemy lines nice and quickly.’
‘Sounds pretty intense,’ said Ethan.
‘You’ve got that right,’ Johnny agreed. ‘You’re jumping at over thirty thousand feet. You have to carry oxygen cylinders because you can’t breathe that high up. You also have to wear special thermal kit to stop yourself freezing to death on the way down.’
‘Nice.’
‘Yeah. It’s pretty difficult to pull a ripcord if you’re an icicle doing a hundred and twenty.’
‘So how low’s the low opening?’ asked Ethan.
‘Real low,’ said Johnny. ‘When you eventually release your canopy, you’re under two thousand five hundred feet.’
‘Freefalling for over twenty-seven thousand feet? That’s crazy!’
‘Sure is. And pulling your canopy at under two thousand five hundred doesn’t allow any room for error.’
Ethan was quiet for a moment;
then he looked at Johnny. ‘Imagine it – freefalling all that way. Unbelievable. You fancy it?’
‘Do I really need to answer that?’
Ethan grinned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really. So what’s HAHO?’
‘High Altitude, High Opening,’ said Johnny. ‘You jump from the same height, wear thermals, but you need more oxygen, because you release your main canopy pretty much immediately after leaving the aircraft. You can be up there for some time.’
‘That’d be amazing!’ said Ethan. ‘Like flying!’
‘Sam described it just like that,’ said Johnny. ‘He reckons a HALO jump is the closest thing to nearly dying, because you’re just plummeting and you can’t really believe you’re going to survive. But a HAHO is totally different. The advantage of HAHO is that you can leave an aircraft outside a hostile area and land silently inside enemy territory. There’s no danger of the noise of the aircraft alerting the opposition. Also, they’re safer. Easier to control. Higher survival rate.’
‘Survival rate?’
Johnny nodded. ‘HALO is pretty dangerous. Screw that up and you hit the deck. A few people have died doing it. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘looking forward to tomorrow?’
‘Like you wouldn’t believe,’ said Ethan.
‘It’s a whole different ball game now,’ Johnny told him. ‘But just remember what we said and you’ll be fine. And if you thought doing a tandem was incredible, wait till you find yourself under your own canopy.’
And when the time came, when Ethan actually found himself at the door of the plane at 12,000 feet, Johnny on one side, Sam on the other, everything Johnny had told him, everything he’d felt during the tandem, was blown out of the sky. This was a totally different experience. In the tandem jump, the decisions had all been made by Sam. Now, even though Sam and Johnny were with him, Ethan decided when to jump. And he wasn’t strapped to anyone at all.
The call came, and Ethan jumped.
