by Bentley, Don
“All right,” Fitz said, slapping me on the back. “Godspeed, Matt Drake. Find our fallen comrade, and we will come. And when we come, hellfire and brimstone will come with us. Good hunting, son.”
With that, Fitz stepped aside, making room for the line of assaulters that had formed behind him. Each man gave me a handshake or a squeeze on the shoulder. Each stranger looked me in the eye for one reason only—so that I would know the faces of the men who would be running toward the sound of gunfire on my behalf.
After the final commando slapped me on the back, I turned and shuffled toward the Antonov An-2 Colt plane that would be my ride. Grabbing the canvas door, I pulled myself into the cargo hold and strapped into one of the webbed seats. The aircraft’s retrofitted turboprop engine turned over, coughing a cloud of jet fuel exhaust, and just like that, I was on my way.
As the aircraft taxied from the hangar onto the strip of pitted concrete that served as a runway, I looked out the grime-encrusted window. Someone once said that people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. In the hangar behind me, some of the roughest men I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting stood at attention as Colonel Fitz rendered a parade-field-worthy salute with his bear paw of a hand.
The turboprop’s roar turned into a full-fledged howl. The plane bumped down the concrete on its oversized rubber tires before taking to the sky in a liftoff that wasn’t graceful as much as practical. As the nose pitched up to an almost-forty-five-degree angle, and the wood-and-canvas plane fought for altitude, I felt an inexplicable sense of peace. My mission was still just as suicidal, the conditions just as dangerous, the outcome just as uncertain. And yet, for the first time in months, the world seemed right.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
“Okay,” the pilot said, his voice crackling over the intercom. “We’re a go. ETA to insertion point, two zero minutes.”
Twenty minutes. Time enough for one last phone call.
TWENTY-NINE
The mismatch between the Colt’s powerful turbine engine and its flimsy construction produced a constant vibration reminiscent of a jackhammer on speed. The web-belt seat beneath me quivered like a tuning fork, and I could feel the structural strain in my fillings as the plane climbed skyward.
Originally of Soviet design, the An-2 had been purchased and then manufactured in large numbers by North Korea specifically for ferrying their army of special operations forces into South Korea undetected. The aircraft’s simple design and absence of structural metal made the craft extremely hard to detect by radar. This was what I was counting on as the pilot spiraled us ever upward into one of the planet’s most contested sections of airspace.
Resisting the temptation to look outside and track our progress across the dimly lit Syrian countryside, I took my cell phone from a pocket and once again attached it to the intercom dongle that hung from my oxygen mask.
Ever since the first paratrooper had climbed combat-laden onto the first transport aircraft, the hellish flight to the drop zone had been a period of introspection. Now modern technology allowed me to pass this time in ways more creative than praying the rosary or exchanging dark jokes with my seatmates. Instead, I could place a call to someone half a world away. But as my quivering fingers punched the numbers on the phone’s touch screen, I couldn’t help but think that my paratrooper ancestors might have had the better of things.
I entered the final digit and before I could lose my nerve hit Send. Milliseconds later, the call went through, and I could hear the line ringing. A million valid reasons why this was a bad idea came and went as I hoped the call would go unanswered. But it wasn’t a prerecorded message that broke the silence. It was a real live voice.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”
The response popped from my mouth without thought, the familiarity of her voice provoking the familiar in me. But we were no longer quite as familiar as my subconscious wanted to pretend.
“Matt? Where are you? Are you home?”
“Not yet, baby, but soon.”
The silence stretched as I lingered in the warmth of Laila’s voice. God, I missed her.
“Are you okay?”
Laila would have made an excellent spy. Her appearance and aptitude for languages aside, she had a way of reading people that bordered on the mystical. By our third date, I’d confessed that I worked for the DIA. My admission hadn’t been an attempt to impress her. Somehow, she’d already realized that parts of my life didn’t add up. No, I’d told my future wife the truth because I was afraid of losing her. After six years of marriage, I was still afraid of losing her. Not because I ever worried that she’d betray her vows, but because I couldn’t imagine what life would be like without her.
“It’s been a rough couple of weeks,” I said, hoping that she’d hear the veracity in my voice but not pry.
“Why is it so loud?” Laila said.
“Sorry. I’m at work.”
“And you’re calling me? Is everything all right?”
I paused, looking out the filthy piece of scratched Plexiglas that passed for a window. Inky blackness stared back. The endless civil war had taught Syria’s people the folly of leaving lights on after dark. Lights attracted attention, and in this godforsaken place, attention equaled death.
“I’m thinking about taking a break when I get back,” I said as the Unit jumpmaster waved to get my attention and held up two gloved fingers. Two minutes. “Maybe go to grad school or something. What do you think?”
This time, the silence stretched long enough that I thought I’d lost the connection. Then she spoke.
“Matt?”
“Yes?”
“Promise me something. Promise to come back to me. Okay?”
“I promise,” I said.
The call ended before she could reply.
I told myself that I didn’t have time to call her back, but that wasn’t the reason I turned off the phone and sealed it in my cargo pocket. My wife would have made an excellent spy, and excellent spies can hear the lie in another person’s voice.
Even if that voice belongs to their husband.
THIRTY
The blast of cold air hit me like a punch to the chest. Desert countries were funny like that—brutally hot in the daytime, with temperature swings in excess of forty degrees at sunset. But this was a different kind of cold. At twenty-five thousand feet, nothing could survive without help. At least, I hoped we were at twenty-five thousand feet. To traverse the distance I had to cover once my chute opened, I was going to need every foot of altitude the rickety plane could provide.
“How we doing?” I asked through the intercom cord I’d plugged into my oxygen mask.
“One minute,” the jumpmaster answered, his helmet visor already frosted over from the sudden temperature change. “We’re at altitude, and the winds are holding. Take a look.”
Ignoring the fluttering in my stomach, I shuffled toward the gaping door that, until two minutes ago, had been a solid part of the aircraft’s fuselage. Now it offered an unobstructed view of the Syrian sky as well as my gateway to what would be, one way or another, the final chapter of my Syrian odyssey.
To say that I was scared of heights would be a bit inaccurate. I was terrified. Terrified in that soul-crushing, panic-inducing manner that small children reserved for the unseen monsters that lurked beneath their beds. Over the course of my time as a paramilitary operator, first as a Ranger and later as a DIA case officer, I’d lost count of the number of well-educated, and equally well-meaning, psychologists who’d told me that I would eventually conquer my fear of heights.
Twelve years after I’d raised my right hand and sworn to defend my nation against threats both foreign and domestic, many of life’s absolutes had faded from black or white to shades of gray. But not my fear of heights. Despite the
diagnoses of no fewer than six learned doctors, I was more convinced than ever that my fear of heights was incurable. Most days, I wasn’t required to confront my phobia, but on days like today, I really wondered why I hadn’t followed Mom’s advice and gone to dental school. Sitting in a plastic chair and smelling stinky breath certainly had its drawbacks, but dentists didn’t usually hyperventilate on their drive to work.
God, but I hated heights.
Shuffling across the bouncing floor, I edged past the jumpmaster, grabbed the handholds bolted into the aircraft’s bulkhead, and leaned into the slipstream.
At first glance, things weren’t too terrible. This high up, the sky was populated with millions of stars spread across the blackest of canvases. The moon was in its last phase, and a sliver hung just off the plane’s left wing, spilling ivory light across my dirty boots. In spite of the frigid temperature and the rushing torrent of wind, the scene was peaceful. Pastoral, even.
But I wasn’t here to stargaze. In less than thirty seconds, I was going to jump into this maelstrom on a one-way trip. This meant that I needed to ensure that the pilot’s calculations matched my own.
I needed to look down.
Drawing a shaky breath, I lowered the night-vision goggles mounted to my helmet and adjusted my line of sight from the heavens to the earth. The results were instantaneous. My stomach started turning cheetah flips, my palms grew slick with sweat, and my legs nearly buckled.
In the grand scheme of things, my jumping from a plane into darkness five miles above the earth made about as much sense as a blood-phobic doctor working in an emergency room. Then again, if the world made sense, members of a death cult masquerading as Islam wouldn’t be strapping bombs to seven-year-old children.
Pushing both my morbid thoughts and terror aside, I searched the green-tinged landscape, looking for the landmarks that would mark my insertion point. After a second or two, I found what I sought—the intersection between 216, the north–south-running road that bisected the city of Manbij, and M4, a west–east-running highway. But the intersection wasn’t just beneath our wing as I’d expected. Instead, the roads showed as a haze of black against the ambient green from the night-vision goggles. My landmark was at least five miles away.
We were off course.
“This isn’t it,” I said to the jumpmaster. “We’re supposed to be on top of that intersection.”
The jumpmaster looked where I was pointing, cross-referenced the tablet strapped to his kneeboard, and then leaned out the doorway.
“You’re right,” he said. “Stand by.”
He flipped the toggle on his intercom cord, switching from the channel we shared to a direct link to the pilots. I saw his lips move but wasn’t able to make out his words. A moment later he toggled back.
“Change of plans,” the jumpmaster said. “We’re getting pinged pretty hard by a pulse-Doppler radar. The pilots think it’s coming from a pair of Russian Su-27 Flankers. If their radar locks us up, we’re done. We can’t get you any closer. If you wanna jump, it’s got to be now.”
Fucking Russians. “How far is the landing zone?”
The crew chief punched several buttons on his tablet. “Nineteen miles.”
“Winds?” I said.
“Still holding steady at forty-five knots.”
In theory, the MT-1 ram air parachute strapped to my back should have been able to fly twenty or so miles under these conditions.
In theory.
But theory was one thing on a practice jump and something else altogether on an operational insertion. Right about now, dental school was looking pretty good.
“Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
In the Ranger Regiment, we had a saying that no plan ever survived first contact with the enemy. In other words, you could prepare, but the enemy always had a vote. Right now, the enemy was voting against my jumping at the planned insertion point. That was a pain in the ass but, in theory, surmountable. I just hoped that this would be the only time the enemy decided to vote.
“Green light,” the jumpmaster said, and slapped me on the shoulder. “Go, go, go!”
I crossed myself and then launched from the relative safety of the aircraft into the great unknown. I wasn’t Catholic, but I’d adopted the comforting gesture prior to my first jump ages ago. A theologian I was not, but distinctions in dogma tended to vanish once bullets started flying. Our chaplain liked to joke that there were no atheists in foxholes, and this was doubly true for paratroopers.
The one-hundred-knot slipstream buffeted my body like a breaking tsunami. For a heartbeat or two, the earth and sky spun as I somersaulted through the first part of my jump. This had always been my nightmare: that I would plummet in an uncontrolled fall, watching earth chase the sky until I hit the ground with the subtlety of a cinder block.
Fortunately, tonight was not the night for that.
My right hand held the rip cord’s metal handle in a death grip, and I yanked with all my strength. The canopy shot upward, like a cork exploding from a champagne bottle, dragging the rest of my rig with it. The chute inflated with a glorious popping sound, like sheets crackling in the wind. In the space of three seconds, I decelerated from almost one hundred miles an hour to a leisurely eighteen.
Navy fighter pilots liked to bitch about the stress of a catapult launch from an aircraft carrier. Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure getting hurled into space wasn’t a lot of fun, but it was a matter of perspective. If given the choice, I’m sure the flyboys would take their ergonomically designed seats and climate-controlled cabins over a HAHO jump any day. Nothing says fun like getting yanked out of your britches as your parachute whiplashes you skyward with all the compassion of a hangman’s noose. And that was before you spent the next twenty to thirty minutes dangling above the earth in subzero temperatures while riding cyclonic winds toward enemy-occupied territory.
I’d take a catapult shot in rough seas any day. At least a Navy fighter jet had heat.
Unbuckling the straps that held my jump board to my chest, I consulted the multiple displays and then made an adjustment to my course via the twin steering toggles connected to the chute’s suspension lines.
Flying the chute was relatively simple: Pull the right toggle above your head to about ear level to turn right. Do the same with the left toggle to turn left. But like everything else in my world, the devil was in the details. Unlike a powered aircraft, my parachute was at the mercy of the winds and was constantly falling. A shift in wind direction or strength could be catastrophic to the mission or fatal to the jumper. Unlike a sailor caught in a storm, I had no way to lower my sails in order to ride out the gusts.
One way or another, I was in this until my feet hit the ground.
I ran through my jump board’s displays, verifying the wind speed every thousand feet and maintaining my course via the digital compass. The first ten minutes or so of my flight had gone just as planned, even though it was bitterly cold, and my arms were getting a hell of a workout. Every pull on the toggle to adjust the chute’s course was the physical equivalent of a pull-up. After fifteen minutes, my forearms were quivering.
That’s when I realized I had a problem.
My gut had been trying to tell me something was wrong, but it was the GPS readout that finally gave me the bad news. While I was on course, I was not on glide path. In other words, I wasn’t covering as much distance as I’d intended. The wind’s speed had decreased, and my forward airspeed was plummeting.
I was going to miss my landing zone by several kilometers.
On a training drop, this would result in a longer hump back to the landing zone, or LZ, to link up with the rest of the team. Tonight, it meant that, instead of touching down in the isolated field I’d chosen for its proximity to my meet site with Einstein, I was going to land short.
Just how far short had yet to be determined.
My altimeter chimed, alerting me that I’d just crossed through ten thousand feet. I had about three minutes to find a new LZ.
Pulling up the imagery I’d downloaded onto the tablet, I entered the ground speed supplied by the GPS, my current altitude, my rate of descent, and the wind direction. A moment later, the computer rendered the data into a projected flight plan. It looked like a cone, stretching from a blue icon in the center of the map, representing me, outward in a pie slice of green lines.
The bad news was that the pie slice ended almost three kilometers short of my intended touchdown point. The good news was that I could easily land anywhere within the arc of ground enclosed by the green lines.
As I watched, the green wedge began to shrink. Time to make a decision.
Tracking along my flight path, I found a possible solution—a second farmer’s field. If I landed there, I’d be almost four kilometers from my original intended touchdown point and another two from the meet site with Einstein. However, the privacy offered by the line of trees ringing the plot of land made the spot appealing.
Even in the dead of night, a man parachuting to earth tended to attract attention. Once I landed, I’d need several minutes to dispose of the parachute and residual equipment, and the field’s anonymity, not to mention the possibility of soft, tillable earth, would offer just that. Sure, the extra distance to the remote LZ increased my risk of discovery, but risk was inherent in every part of this mission. The field might not be ideal, but its benefits outweighed its shortcomings.
At this point, that was about the best I could hope for.
Glancing at my watch, I did a final set of calculations. Even if I had to travel on foot, I should be able to cover the extra distance in time for my rendezvous with Einstein. My decision made, I locked in the new LZ, updated my flight plan, and made the course corrections the computer recommended. I kept my head on a swivel as I flew, looking for power lines, cell towers, and errant trees. Any of those obstacles could snag my chute and turn what was now a suboptimal event into one that was catastrophic. There were many mission setbacks from which I could recover. Getting hung up in a three-hundred-foot utility tower wasn’t one of them.
