Assassin

5

Several thousand miles away to the west, Samuel Carver was hurtling across the night sky like a human dart. With every second that passed he travelled 175 feet forwards through the air, and fell 50 feet closer to the surface of the earth.

For six weeks, Carver had been planning and training, gradually dropping out of sight, going off-grid. Nobody who knew him knew where he was. The people who had encountered him lacked any clue to his true identity. The chartered De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft from which he had just jumped, almost five miles up, was routed from Richmond, Virginia to the island of Bermuda, several hundred miles out to sea. The crew were men who worked on the same principles as Carver. They did the job, took the money and kept their mouths shut. They did not know or want to know what he intended to do once he left their aircraft. They got him to a specified point at the time required, and then they flew away.

Now he was lying face down with his back straight and his head tilted slightly downwards to streamline his shape and encourage maximum velocity. His arms were extended behind him at forty-five degrees from his body and his legs were wide apart. Thin membranes of rip-stop fabric formed wings that stretched between his arms and his torso, and from his crotch down to his ankles. There were four minutes to go before he hit his drop zone. But there were a myriad ways he could die before he got there.

The higher you go, the colder it gets: a little less than two degrees centigrade for every thousand feet of altitude. Speed merely adds to that problem by generating intense wind-chill. Carver faced roughly the same risk of death from hypothermia as if he'd walked out of the Amundsen-Scott research station, down at the South Pole, straight into an Antarctic blizzard, but his only protection from the intense cold came from two layers of full-length thermal undergarments beneath his nylon flying suit.

Altitude also thins the atmosphere. This can lead to hypoxia, or oxygen starvation, which in turn causes blackouts. An unconscious man in a wing-suit will lose control and tumble helplessly down to earth like a stricken aircraft. Carver's chute was set to deploy automatically at around two thousand feet, but if his body position was unstable his lines and canopy could wrap themselves around him like a spider's web round a fly. And then they'd just be shrink-wrap for his shattered corpse.

To combat hypoxia, Carver was using a personal oxygen supply. But the extreme cold can play havoc by icing up an oxygen mask, leaving the user blind and disoriented. That, too, can lead to a fatal loss of control.

Buffeted and deafened by the air being forced around his body as he plummeted, and as numb with cold as a deep-frozen T-bone, Carver wondered how much difference blindness would make. If he looked straight down, there was nothing below him but the infinite blackness of the Atlantic Ocean. But then out of the corner of his right eye, he saw a sparkle of light, far beneath him, that expanded and brightened with every second that passed, and now he was able to get his bearings.

He was travelling from east to west, towards the eastern seaboard of America, still so high that he could detect the curvature of the earth. To his left, a dusting of lights from roads and buildings and a faint line of pale grey marked the sandy shoreline of the Outer Banks, the ribbon of barrier islands that curved around the North Carolina coast, enclosing a great stretch of water between them and the mainland. To his right, looking north across the Virginia state line, the lights he had seen glittering against the black earth were the cities of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News.

Few places on the planet held more concentrated military firepower than that coastal conurbation, packed against the shoreline where Chesapeake Bay opened out on to the Atlantic Ocean. The US Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force owned thousands of acres, given over to bases that housed hundreds of combat aircraft and massive fleets of warships: aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and nuclear submarines. But Carver was all alone in the sky, aiming for the man who was his target, the man all those armed forces were paid to protect.