Ghost Flight

24

Jaeger did his best to blank the crazed, frenzied singing from his head. For a moment he locked eyes with the tall, finely muscled Russian woman standing before him. She looked to be in perfect shape: there didn’t appear to be an ounce of excess weight anywhere on her sparse frame.

Jaeger didn’t know exactly what he expected to read in her gaze.

Apprehension? Fear?

Or maybe something approaching panic?

Narov was ex-Spetsnaz, about the nearest the Russians had to the SAS. By rights, as a former Spetsnaz officer she should be shit hot. But Jaeger had known many a top soldier crap out when on the brink of diving off the ramp into the freezing, screaming blue.

At this kind of height the curvature of the earth would be clearly visible, stretching away to the pencil-slim horizon. Jumping off a C-130’s ramp was daunting enough at the best of times. When doing so from the very outer reaches of earth’s atmosphere it was a total leap of faith, and it could be terrifying as hell.

But as he looked into Narov’s ice-blue eyes, all Jaeger could detect was an unreadable, inscrutable calm. A surprising emptiness filled them; a resolute stillness – almost as if nothing, not even a 30,000-foot dive into the churning void, could reach her.

She flicked her gaze away from his, turned her back on him and adopted the position.

They shuffled closer.

On a tandem, you jumped both facing the same direction. Jaeger’s parachute should be enough to stem their combined fall, giving them an expanse of shared silk to glide under all the way to the touchdown. The PDs standing to either side proceeded to strap the two of them together, vice-tight.

Jaeger had tandemed up scores of times before. He knew he shouldn’t be feeling as he was – awkward and uncomfortable at having another human being in such close proximity to his person.

Before now he’d always tandemed with a fellow elite operator; a brother warrior. Someone he knew well and would gladly fight back-to-back with, if ever the shit went down. He felt far from comfortable getting strapped skin-tight to a total stranger, and a woman.

Narov was also the person in his team that he least trusted right now: his chief suspect for Andy Smith’s murder. Yet he couldn’t deny it – her striking good looks were getting under his skin. However much he might try to zone out such thoughts and tune into the jump, it just wasn’t happening.

It wasn’t helped by the music – AC/DC’s wild lyrics pounding into his skull.

Jaeger glanced behind him. It was all happening fast now.

He could see the PDs rolling the two para-tubes forward on the rails that ran the length of the hold. Kamishi and Krakow shuffled ahead, and bent as if in prayer over the bulky containers. The PDs proceeded to strap the para-tubes to their chest harnesses. The two jumpers would roll the tubes ahead and leap out with them, just seconds after Jaeger and Narov were gone.

Jaeger turned back to face the sun-whipped void.

All of a sudden the screeching racket from the aircraft’s speakers seemed to stop dead. ‘Highway to Hell’ had been cut short. There was a few seconds’ wind-blasted silence, before Jaeger heard a new burst of sound. In the place of AC/DC’s hell track, a uniquely powerful and evocative piece of music began to pulsate through the C-130’s hold.

It was unmistakable.

Classical.

Jaeger allowed himself a smile.

The pilot had needled him for a while there, but he’d come good in the end. It was Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ after all – and for the final few seconds before jump time.

Jaeger and the music went back a long way.

Before joining the SAS, he had served as a commando in the Royal Marines. He’d got himself jump-trained, and it was the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ that had been played during the ceremony when he’d gained his parachute wings. Many a time he’d hurled himself out of a C-130 along with his fellow SAS blades, Wagner’s classic composition blaring out over the speaker system.

It was the unofficial anthem of British airborne units.

And it was as fine a track as any to be jumping to, on a mission such as this.

As he steeled himself for the exit, Jaeger gave a moment’s thought to the aircraft that had been on their tail. The C-130 pilot had made no further mention of it. Jaeger guessed it had disappeared – maybe calling off the pursuit as the Hercules had crossed the border into Bolivian airspace.

It certainly couldn’t be about to interfere with the jump, or the pilot wouldn’t be letting them go.

He blanked it from his mind.

He nudged Narov forward, shuffling as one towards the open ramp. To either side the PDs strapped themselves to the airframe to avoid being torn out by the howling gale.

The secret to making a HAHO jump was to always keep a grasp on your spatial awareness; to know exactly where you were positioned within the stick of parachutists. As lead jumper, it was vital that Jaeger held them tight. If he lost someone he couldn’t exactly use his radio to call them back; the turbulence and wind noise made communications impossible during the freefall.

Jaeger and Narov came to a halt at the very lip of the ramp.

Figures lined up aft of them. Jaeger felt his heart beating like a machine gun, as the adrenalin surged and burned through his veins. They were on the very roof of the world up here, the realm of the starry heavens.

The PDs did a final visual check on each of the jumpers, ensuring that no straps were snagged or tangled, or hanging free. With Jaeger it was a case of doing so by feel, making sure that all Narov’s points of contact with him were attached good and tight.

The lead PD started yelling the final instructions. ‘Tail off equipment check!’

‘TEN GOOD!’ the rearmost figure cried.

‘NINE GOOD!’

As each figure called out his ready status, he thumped the one in front. No thump on the shoulder and you knew the guy behind was in trouble.

‘THREE GOOD!’ Jaeger felt a whack from the jumper to his rear. It was Mike Dale, the young Aussie cameraman who’d be filming him and Narov as they piled off the aircraft’s open ramp, with a miniature camera strapped to his helmet.

Before the words could freeze in his throat, Jaeger forced himself to yell: ‘ONE AND TWO GOOD!’

The line shuffled more tightly together. Too much separation in the sky and they’d risk losing each other in the freefall.

Jaeger glanced at the jump light.

It began to flash red: get ready.

He glanced ahead, peering over Narov’s shoulder. He felt a few strands of her loose hair whipping into his face, the stark oblong of the ramp silhouetted against the bright, snarling maw of the heavens.

Outside was a whirlwind of pure, raging, blinding light.

He felt the wind tearing at his helmet and trying to rip the goggles from his face. He got his head down and steeled himself to drive forward.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the red light burn green.

The PD stepped back: ‘GO! GO! GO!’

Suddenly Jaeger was thrusting Narov forward, driving her ahead and then diving into thin air. As one they tumbled into the snarling emptiness. But as they left the open ramp, Jaeger felt something catch momentarily, the force of it snagging and then tearing loose, serving to throw them violently off balance.

He knew instantly what had happened: they’d made an unstable exit.

They’d been thrown off-kilter and they were going into a spin.

This had the potential to be really bad.

Jaeger and Narov were sucked through the churning maw of the aircraft’s slipstream, the violent turbulence throwing them over and over faster than ever. Spat out of the aircraft’s wake, they began to plummet towards earth, twisting round and round like some giant crazed spinning top.

Jaeger tried to focus his mind on counting out the seconds before he could risk opening the chute.

‘Three thousand and three, three thousand and four…’

But as the voice counted out the beats inside his head, he realised things were rapidly worsening. Rather than stabilising, the spin just seemed unstoppable. It was the nightmare of the centrifuge all over, only now it was happening at 30,000 feet and for real.

He tried to gauge how fast they were rotating – to see if he could risk pulling the chute. The only way to do so was by counting how rapidly the air around them turned from blue to green to blue to green and back again. Blue meant facing the sky, green meant the jungle.

Blue-green-blue-green-blue-green-bluuue-greeeeeen-blueeeennnnn… Aaarrgggh!

Right now Jaeger was struggling to remain conscious, let alone get a grip on the view.