Ghost Sniper

32

Gil and Lena sat across from each other in the back of a prop-driven P-750 XSTOL aircraft, their knees almost touching, flying twenty thousand feet over Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany. Each wore a composite wing suit, sometimes called a “bat suit,” which had extra fabric between the legs and under the arms, adding greater surface area to the human form for the purpose of creating lift. This allowed for a human being to glide, or “fly,” two and a half meters horizontally for every meter of vertical drop, often at speeds greater than a hundred miles an hour, before finally having to deploy a BASE-jumping parachute in order to land safely on the ground.

Gil’s suit was black with red fabric between the legs and arms; Lena’s, white with blue fabric.

“Nervous?” she said over the rush of the wind coming in through the open door.

He grinned. “You bet.”

She smiled back, liking him very much. “You look like Die Fledermaus in that suit with those colors.”

“Like who?”

“Die Fledermaus: The Bat. It’s a German opera — or an operetta, rather.”

He laughed self-consciously, having no idea of the difference between the two. “Well, a bat knows a helluva lot more about flying than I do.” He tested the zippers on his arms to make sure he would be able to free them easily when the time came to steer his parachute. “You know, doin’ this without a formal lesson is really kinda stupid.”

“But more fun!”

“For you,” he chuckled. “Not for me. I’m a trained paratrooper — not a bat.”

“Well, that’s about to change.” She leaned across and kissed him. “You’ll do fine. Just remember to fly the suit like I told you: make your body like a wing. You have to keep rigid; concentrate on strength of muscle.”

“Strength of muscle,” he muttered, feeling guilty as hell over the fact that Lena excited him much more intensely than his estranged wife, Marie, ever had. They were two entirely different types of women: Marie, loving and gentle; Lena, sexy and adventurous. He reflected briefly on the high divorce rate among Navy SEALs, now understanding it on a visceral level. He told himself that he deserved to die on the jump he was about to make — for many reasons — and with that thought, all nervousness left him.

“Have you done this with Sabastian?” he asked idly.

“With who?”

“Sabastian.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.” She got to her feet and grabbed the rail mounted along the fuselage just above the windows, offering her hand. “The light is red. Almost time.”

He took her hand and got to his feet.

She put her face very close to his, their noses millimeters apart. “Don’t ever mention that name outside of business. We’re moving forward — you and me — every second from this day on. Agreed?”

He felt the energy of her personality, their mutual attraction, in the pit of his stomach. “Yes, ma’am.”

A few seconds later, the jump light turned green, and they were out the door.

Gil spread his arms and legs, feeling immediately the strong resistance of the air. Lena streaked past him, her white-and-blue suit shimmering in the bright sunlight. He formed his body to match hers and soared after her, bringing his legs up too far behind him and falling forward into a brief tumble before regaining control and leveling off again.

With no hope of catching up to Lena after that, he decided to experiment with the suit, testing its limitations against his free-fall skills, based on his experience as an expert parachutist. The wing suit had long been employed by American Special Forces, but Gil’s own focus had been that of a sniper, so wing suit infiltrations had never been incorporated into his training.

He saw at once the potential for such a swift and accurate infiltration system, knowing that the perfection of a chuteless landing technique must still be the ultimate military goal.

Gil soared after Lena’s shimmering form, banking left and right, testing the performance capacity of the suit, and found that his extensive free-fall experience very definitely helped to cut the learning curve. As the ground drew within a thousand feet, he deployed the parachute and unzipped the wing sleeves so that he could reach up and grab the steering toggles.

He touched down lightly within a few hundred feet of Lena in a snowy field at the base of a mountain and quickly gathered the chute into his arms. Gil pulled off the helmet and stood looking around at the beauty of the countryside, which was not unlike the Montana of his youth.

She walked up to him with her chute and helmet under one arm, her blond hair blowing in the wind. “So what do you think?”

“I think I like it,” he said. “When do we do a BASE jump?” BASE stood for building, antenna, span, earth—earth typically being a cliff. “I wanna try it off a mountain — or a bridge.”

She vacillated a moment and then replied, “Whenever you like.”

He smiled. “You’ve never BASE jumped, have you?”

She shook her head. “You?”

“A couple times — but with a chute, not a wing suit.”

“Have you bungeed?”

His smile turned to a deep frown. “Bungee jumping is for drunken college kids. BASE jumping actually takes balls.”

“Good!” she answered. “Then we’ll go to Lauterbrunnen. The mountain jumps there are incredible.”

“Where’s Luaderbooken?”

She laughed. “Lauterbrunnen. It’s in Switzerland.”

He saw their ride, a black Land Rover, coming toward them through the snow. “Don’t you ever get tired of Switzerland?”

“No!” she said, not quite offended. “I’m a Swiss. Besides, what’s to get tired of?”

He chuckled. “You people are too damn tidy. It makes me nervous. You need to make a mess once in a while.”

She laughed. “We made a mess of the hotel room last night.”

“Yeah.” He gave her kiss and sauntered off toward the truck. “But that’s a German hotel room. It doesn’t count.”