A Knife Edge

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—