Wilkes tried to think about the jump ahead rather than allowing his mind to wander over the situations that could face them on the ground. HALO jumps were potentially dangerous, especially when there were so many men jumping in a relatively small block of night sky, all heading to the one destination.
He looked across at the row of men sitting opposite. In the JSLIST suits and with their tac radios off, Wilkes didn’t know who was who. That anonymity would amplify once they landed. They’d be working independently of the Indonesians because of the language barrier. The Kopassus were also on a different radio frequency. Add the twilight to the communications separation, and the fact that they were expecting fierce resistance…well, fuckups were guaranteed…Jesus, concentrate on the JUMP!
Wilkes got his mind back on track by again checking over his gear. His preferred weapon, the 5.56mm Minimi light machine gun, hung from his side by its strap and was secured by the parachute harness. Wilkes’s usual insurance policy, the cut-down Remington 870 pump, modified in the garage and loaded with heavy #4 buckshot, was attached to his right leg with Velcro strips, barrel pointing down towards his boot. Wilkes also carried half a dozen M36A2 frag grenades that weren’t at all kind to humans. His oxy bottles were attached to his parachute harness, and readily accessible. He moved his hands carefully over his kit, accounting for various items and making sure the lot was secure. The oxy mask prevented him from looking down, but he couldn’t do without it and that was that. His gloved hand told him his ripcord was in place and weapons secured. He looked at the altimeter strapped to his wrist: still bang on eighteen thousand feet AMSL. He ran the coordinates of the target area through his mind together with remembered wind speeds and forward throw details.
Across the other side of the plane lined up on pulldown seats, Wilkes could see that his men were going through similar routines, touching gear with their hands, mentally ticking it off. Lance Corporal Ellis and Troopers Littlemore, Robson, Beck, Morgan, Coombs and Ferris carried the usual assortment of weaponry: Minimis, M4A2 carbines with the underslung M203 grenade launchers, Heckler & Koch MP5SD nine millimetre submachine guns, H&K sidearms and M36A2 frag grenades. For once, Atticus was happy to fit right in, and strapped to his parachute harness was a plain, ordinary Minimi. Maybe that was the best way to distinguish between his men and Mahisa’s: by the weapons they carried. The primary Indonesian weapon appeared to be the American M16A1 and the locally made FNC80s, a type of M16 lookalike.
Canberra had wanted this to be a joint exercise — Australians and Indonesians working together — and Jakarta had agreed, perhaps because the threat to the two nations was equally split. Wilkes could see the logic but the practice worried him. He turned his tac radio on briefly and, through his earpiece, heard Atticus Monroe humming a tune: ‘…oh, when the saints go marchin’ in…’ Well, at least someone was happy about things, thought Wilkes.
The interior white overhead lights had been replaced by a dull, blood-red glow so that the soldiers’ night vision wouldn’t be impaired. The flight from Jakarta to the exit point was a mercifully quick one and red parachute jump lights beside the rear hatch lit up the back of the plane. Three minutes to exit. All the men jacked out of the aircraft’s oxygen system and switched to their portable bottles. The ubiquitous roar from the C-130’s turboprops became a high-pitched scream as the plane’s rear ramp lowered on its hydraulic struts. The smell of burnt AV-TUR, exhaust from the turboprops, found its way into Wilkes’s oxygen mask. It was a smell Wilkes had always liked: the perfume of action. He watched Captain Mahisa stand, illuminated by the red glow, and move to the back of the ramp. All the soldiers stood. The temperature inside the aircraft had dropped below zero. The green jump lights suddenly began to flash and a large number of men stepped into the void behind the ramp and disappeared — no speeches, no fanfare, no bullshit. A second later, the remaining Kopassus fell into the blackness.
Wilkes counted to four as he walked to the back of the ramp and turned. His men were right behind him in a tight knot. He grabbed the shoulder straps of the two men facing him, and the three of them fell away from the aircraft. The rest of his men followed a second later. Wilkes and the two men beside him quickly assumed the high arch position and stabilised their descent. No one somersaulted or jumped off with a pike and half-twist, the usual horseplay. None of his men had jumped in a JSLIST suit and there was a concern that the hood, even though heavily taped out of the way, might somehow catch their slipstream and act as a sail, flipping and rolling them out of control with disastrous results.
Wilkes looked up and watched the black shadow of the C-130 diminish as he fell away from it. He saw his remaining men drop from the back of the plane, Ellis the last to leave. The men separated quickly, controlling their respective flight paths, heading away at right angles to each other and then lining up with the aircraft’s track. The airflow buffeted Wilkes like a hundred small fists as he shot through nine thousand feet, chasing the minute glowing bars of green chemlights winking faintly below.
Fifteen seconds later, Wilkes glanced at his altimeter. He counted off another ten seconds before pulling the ripcord. He felt the buffet as the airflow pulled his drag chute clear of the parachute container and then…BANG. It was as if a massive hand had reached down from above and wrenched his harness. He looked up and was reassured to see a patch of stars obliterated by the canopy deployed overhead. A vague premonition of dawn, the faintest green glow, gathered on the horizon to Wilkes’s right. The wrist altimeter read four thousand feet. Bottled oxygen was no longer required, so Wilkes tore off his helmet and oxy mask and attached them to the parachute harness on his side. The green chemlights of the Kopassus below were closer, and brighter, a set of glowing dashes that led all the way to the ground. By now, the first of the Indonesians would have touched down and bundled their chutes and unclipped their parachute containers, leaving the lot where they landed.
With some difficulty, Wilkes reached behind him and pulled on the hood of the JSLIST suit. It came away after several tugs. He jammed the hood into his parachute harness and then grabbed hold of the parachute’s risers. The two men he’d jumped with were slightly above and beside him. Good training. Although he couldn’t see them, he knew the rest of his men were also just where they should be.
The ground lay approximately a thousand feet below, as black as a blacksmith’s anvil and every bit as unforgiving. He located the pair of NVGs attached to his belt with Velcro straps and released it. Slipping the unit’s harness over his head, he flipped the lenses down in front of his eyes. The blackness under his feet suddenly became two pools of green light with the terrorist encampment plainly visible. He could see the Kopassus landing beneath him, flaring their rectangular parachute canopies above the airstrip. There didn’t appear to be any gun battles going on, which could only mean that, somehow, they’d managed that most vital of tactical advantages — surprise. But that, surely, would not last too much longer.