I dropped away from the worst of it. Falling. Escaping. It all happened so fast, I wasn't even sure what had happened. Butler and Dortmund. They'd completely lost it. Snapped. Killed everyone. Everyone except me.
I fell through the night. The altimeter on my wrist read 20,000 feet. I had survived. I had a chute. I wondered who else had made it out, if anyone. Maybe I could—
A huge weight suddenly slammed into me, punching the air from my lungs. I'd been struck by something, maybe a piece of plane. No, it was one of the men. Something gave way beneath me. I looked into the face of a giant black fly. It was Butler. I knew it was Butler because he held a long thin dagger in front of my face, where I could see it, so there'd be no misunderstanding, no doubt. A Fairbairn-Sykes. Wright's missing knife. Ruben Wright. That sensation — the one of something giving way beneath me? Butler had cut through the thigh straps of my chute harness. A flash of memory took me back to Clare Selwyn's office and her explanation of exactly what had happened to Ruben — how he'd died.
And then Butler continued with the practical demonstration of how he killed Wright. He reached for my rip cord, and pulled it.
I only had a few seconds. The drogue chute snapped out of the bag and crackled in the slipstream behind my back. It began to pull the main foil out of the bag. I grappled with Butler, fighting, grabbing, clawing for straps, webbing, anything. My hand found something as my main chute deployed, coming open with an almighty bang. The sudden deceleration ripped me out of the chute harness, just as Ruben Wright had been ripped out of his. It also nearly tore my hand off, the one holding on to Butler. I tumbled, spinning, disoriented, for a thousand feet or so. When I regained control, I saw Butler in the high arch close by, following me down. Behind the oxy mask, I'd be willing to bet he was smiling that smile, the one I saw as he checked my gear earlier. Now I knew what the smile meant. He waved goodbye as he pulled his rip cord, just like he did when he left Hurlburt Field — the “fuck you” wave. I watched his drogue chute appear and drag the foil out of his chute bag. It opened with a bang and Butler instantly disappeared somewhere into the black sky above, while I was left alone to plunge without a chute toward certain death.
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.