“Divine wind,” he said to himself.
It’s what the kamikaze pilots called themselves.
Chapter 2
Garrett had spent the day resting, doing a few push-ups, and chowing on combat rations. One thing about a parachute jump that Matt knew for certain was that you rarely landed in your intended location. Therefore, he needed to be rested and well fed in preparation for the abundance of energy required once on the ground.
He cinched the parachute straps, tightening them against his legs and across his back. He patted the Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife he had taped beneath his cargo utility pants, then tapped his Baby Glock and visually inspected his SIG 552 Commando rifle. He felt the reassuring weight of his 9mm and 5.56mm ammunition in his outer tactical vest. All seemed to be in good order.
What was not in good order, in Matt’s mind, was the text he had just received. A group of Filipino Rangers had just been shot down somewhere over the island of Mindanao. Matt’s handler had sent a text indicating that one C-130 was a catastrophic loss, meaning everyone was killed, while the lead airplane had some jumpers get away.
The question he was to answer was, Were there any survivors?
I come here looking for Predator connections, and now I’m looking for dead Filipino Rangers, Matt thought, shaking his head. It was not that the task was a nuisance; just the opposite. He knew damn well that the soldiers who had just died were fighting in the name of freedom.
More sacrifice.
The Casa 212 airplane bounced along the runway and lifted easily into the sky. Matt was jumping a square parachute so that he could steer it to a precision landing. He had asked the pilots to put him over the wreckage site, and he would work from there. The reported crash site was thirty kilometers east of Compostela.
Through a map recon, Matt had selected a drop zone about a kilometer away. It was the best he could do, and even at a kilometer, he believed that the blank level-looking spot on the map was probably a banana plantation or, worse, a recently harvested sugarcane field. Either way, he stood a good chance of being impaled on a freshly cut banana tree or sugarcane stalk. Neither was a particularly good option in Matt’s view.
Once he had silk over his head, he would flip down his night-vision goggles and steer to the best possible landing point.
The flight from the Davao City airfield to his drop zone took about ninety minutes, even though the release point was only eighty kilometers north of Davao. Matt had asked the pilot to fly south over the water, then to circle around the island and approach the drop zone from the north, which doubled the flight route. He would be jumping from 3600 meters above ground level, which would put the airplane at about 5400 meters above sea level. The plains of Mindanao were surrounded by jagged volcanic mountains that ran parallel along the west and east coasts. The heat and rainfall had, over the course of time, spawned lush tropical rain forests on both the windward and leeward sides of the island. Matt would be jumping in the bowling alley between the two ranges, which topped out at about 4300 meters, but he would be cheating toward the eastern range, where the airplanes had last been sighted.
As they flew, Matt used his goggles to survey the landscape. Once the pilot made the turn to fly from north to south, Matt saw the city lights out of the front right of the airplane. He was standing between the pilot and copilot seats, observing through the windscreen, and assumed the city was Compostela.
“There,” Matt said, pointing to his left front. He saw the faintest evidence of fire. Stepping away from the cockpit, he walked over to the port personnel door, which was open, and held on to the rails of either side, leaning out of the aircraft but staying out of the slipstream.
With his goggles, the fire was more evident. He could see the smoldering remnants of something burning. As they approached, he saw he was looking at two spots of burning wreckage.
Seems right, he thought.
He walked back to the cockpit, lifted his goggles, and said, “Just get me over those two hot spots. I’ll open at about a thousand AGL and find a good location. That’s where I need to be.”
Paramount in his mind was the fact that there might be some survivors. He was jumping in with a small rucksack, which included a first-aid kit. He would be able to treat a few patients, but that was all. Unfortunately, Matt knew, a few might be all that were left from a plane crash.
“Okay, sir, we’re over top. Anytime now,” the copilot said, leaning back and looking at Matt.
“Roger. Thanks, guys.”
Matt checked his gear once more, then walked off the back of the open ramp, fell forward into a swan dive as if he were going to do a belly flop, and flared his arms to stabilize his free fall.
Initially he was unable to detect the two fires he had seen from the airplane, and as he checked his altimeter, he saw he was approaching 1100 meters above ground level. He spun once, then again. On his second spin, he saw them and adjusted his airflow to direct his fall toward the wreckage.
At just above 350 meters, he pulled the rip cord on his parachute. It opened cleanly and he had good silk above him. The cool air offset the typically warm Philippine nights and felt good on his face.
He retracted his goggles from their pouch, steered them to his face, and placed the harness on his head, securing it with a chin strap. The “dummy cord” flapped against his windbreaker but would prevent him from losing the goggles should they come loose.
Through the green-shaded world of the goggles, he studied the wreckage. He saw an unpleasant sight at the southernmost airplane.
There were hundreds of people milling around the burnt remnants, but he could determine the oblong shape of the airplane and concluded that aircraft must have been the second in the order of movement. Making a snap decision at about 200 meters before landing, Matt pulled hard and steered about a kilometer away from the southern airplane and toward the northern wreckage.
The only obvious problem was that he couldn’t see anywhere to land.
“Oh shit,” he whispered. He realized that talking to himself while under canopy never did much good, but thankfully he caught an updraft and rode it over a small ridge. His quick-firing mind realized that the reason there seemed to be no people near the northern fire was because the terrain was too severe. They might arrive soon enough.
At 40 meters above ground level, he could see the fire burning, and its ambient light gave him enough visability to conclude that the only place he could land, if at all, would be in the middle of the plow field of the wreckage.
So, his two options were to land in burning, twisted metal or a stand of twenty-meter oaks, chestnuts, and mahogany trees.
His goggles refracted the glint of something elongated running perpendicular to his axis of descent and he realized, perhaps a bit too late, that it was the moon reflecting off water, which in those mountains could even be a waterfall.
Just as his feet were skimming the tops of the trees, he miraculously found a clearing of sorts and toggled hard into a spiral that took him into the hole. Beneath the jungle canopy, his goggles were less useful but still better than the naked eye.
His parachute caught on something, and he swung forward. He was suspended in air, oscillating back and forth as if on a playground swing set. He had his rucksack on a seven-meter lowering line, so he pulled the quick release and heard it thud into the ground shortly after.
Matt flipped his goggles back onto his head, removed a flashlight from his vest pocket, and shined it beneath his feet. He was a mere two meters off the ground.
He removed his Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife from its ankle sheath, cut one riser, then grabbed above his intended cut on the remaining riser, cut it and held on with one arm. He flipped his knife into the ground, heard it stick, then let go.