Sanctus

Chapter 134

The empty hold of the C-123 felt like it was shaking itself to pieces as Gabriel pulled himself along the ribs of the plane towards the point in the floor where it angled upwards. He reached it and hooked his right leg and arm into the cargo net lining the fuse-lage, then braced himself for the suction and hit the red punch button to lower the ramp.

A loud clunk punctuated the thunderous clatter of the engines and a thin horizontal crack appeared at the back of the plane pulling the air from the fuselage as the ramp started to lower. Gabriel held on, felt the howling wind tug at the flaps of his wing-suit until another loud clunk told him the ramp had locked fully open. Outside he could see the reflected glow of the city on the underside of the tail. He pulled the skydiver goggles over his eyes and crawled towards the edge. He peered over the side and through the arctic blast of outside air. Below him, nearly two miles down, was the city of Ruin, the four straight lines of the boulevards converging like crosshairs on the darkness at its centre.

He’d done airdrops from this plane before, but never at night and never at this altitude. It was a useful way of getting round red tape when governments dragged their heels over visas while the people on the ground desperately needed help.

He unhooked his leg from the net and shuffled round until he lay centred on the ramp, his feet pointing back towards the howling night. He did a final pre-flight check on the packs strapped to his front and back then edged backwards towards the lip of the ramp, his hands clinging tightly to the cargo net and straining against the pull of the slipstream.

His feet hit the edge and he slid them over into the freezing air, continuing to work his way backwards until his hands were the only thing still holding on. He was in the air now, his body stretched out horizontally from the back of the plane, held up by the fluid roaring rush of the night. He held on tight, staring straight down at the city, watching the patch of darkness creep closer. He fixed his left eye on it and closed his right, as though sighting down the barrel of a rifle.

Then he let go.

The plane was doing a little over eighty miles an hour when he dropped into the churning, frozen air of its prop wash. The moment he cleared the turbulence he opened his legs and arms, flaring the Parapak membranes stretched between them and inflating the wing. The combination of airspeed and the shape of the suit generated instant lift and he felt himself being pulled upwards. He adjusted his arms, leaning one way then another, his open eye never leaving the dark target below as he flew down towards it.

Wing-suit training had been the last course he’d completed before mustering out of the army. They were the latest development in HALO jumps — the High Altitude Low Opening drops that were the cornerstone of covert ops deployment. The theory went that by jumping at high altitude the delivery aircraft could stay well out of range of surface-to-air missiles and by deploying a chute at very low altitude it minimized the risk of being spotted by forces on the ground. A man in freefall is also too small to be picked up on RADAR. It was the perfect method of inserting highly trained troops quickly and covertly into enemy territory. It was also the perfect way of getting into a mountain fortress no one had ever breached.

Gabriel checked the altimeter on his wrist. He was already below four thousand feet and dropping at eighty feet per second. He leaned over and began to turn in a tight circle, watching the darkness grow as he spiralled down towards it, searching its dark centre for the garden he knew was there.