You're good. It's twelve.
Then wham! Some heavy object flew down from the side and slammed into the back of my right leg with a terrific blow. Jesus, I thought, a meteorite. No a falling human body. The impact knocked me out of the posture I'd been working to hold. Worse, it knocked my bergen from its central position behind my knees and pushed it over to the outside of my left leg. In an instant I was de stabilised still face-down, but spinning.
I knew I was in the shit. A spin is the worst thing that can happen to a free-faller, the fate everybody dreads. If one starts on its own it may wind up slowly, and you stand some chance of correcting it. But after an impact of that kind, you're away. The combination of momentum and air pressure is so ferocious that you're rotating like a propellor, and that's you gone.
I struggled with hands, arms and legs to adjust my posture, to regain control. But whatever I did, I just spun faster. For the first few seconds my mind stayed clear. Maybe one of the lads will see what's happening, I thought. Maybe someone will steer in to give me a hand. Then I realised, No, they can't. This is too violent. If anyone tried to make contact I'd smash them, or they'd smash me. We'd break limbs, knock each other out. If they've got any sense, they've pulled off to a safe distance. I'm on my own.
All this went through my mind in a flash. Then I thought, I'm going to have to cut my bergen away. Pull the cord to dump it.
Lose all my kit. But by the time I'd taken that decision it had become physically impossible. The centrifugal force of the spin was so great I couldn't get my hands anywhere near my body.
No way could I reach my knife, still in its sheath on my right leg.
My arms were locked straight out, hands and fingers throbbing with the pressure of blood forced into them. They felt as if the skin was going to burst. My head seemed to be swelling, too, the skin round my eyes bulging, vision deteriorating. Geordie Sharp, I told my seW this is it. During your career in special forces you've got out of plenty of tight corners, but this time, finally, you're fucked.
I wasn't exactly frightened; everything had happened so fast there was no time to worry. I just seemed to accept that fate had got me by the short-and-cur lies and I was going in at 125mph.
Obliteration, I thought. Fair enough.
In fact I must have been losing consciousness. Then an almighty jolt brought me back to my senses. It was as if a huge hand had arrested me in mid air. The thump knocked the breath out of my lungs, and I was still spinning, but much more slowly.
It took me a few seconds to realise that the auto-release had fired my main chute, and that I was descending more slowly, in a sitting position.
Instinctively I reached up and pulled on the webbing strops to test the reaction. Something wrong: a rough, grating feeling, too much resistance. Glancing up, I saw from the outline of the chute against the stars that the canopy was lopsided. Instead of being rectangular, it was all sharp angles. The rigging lines had tangled round each other in the spin. Instead of working down to a position just above my head, the spreader bar had become jammed in the twisted ropes.
Because it wasn't properly deployed, the chute started spinning as well, winding me around like a fairground ride. But by then, thank God, my mind was back to normal. I saw my options clearly. I was descending much too fast. If I couldn't free the main chute in the next few seconds I'd have to cut it away and deploy my reserve. Also I'd have to ditch my bergen, because its weight was too great for the reserve chute to support.
I held the strops and started giving violent twists, turning my body hard to the left. The third jolt did the trick. Above me there was a hefty smack as the chute deployed fully, then a twitch came down the lines. When I next looked up, the spreader bar had slid down to its proper place and everything was back to normal. I took a few deep breaths, thanked my lucky stars and turned my attention to the ground.
As far as I could tell, I was little the worse. My eyes felt funny and my face was glowing red hot, but nothing was broken. My breathing was OK, vision fair. There was the Firefly, away to my left. Because of the spin I'd drifted several hundred metres off my heading.
I'd just started steering back towards the DZ when I became aware of someone else flying in dangerously close to me. What the hell was he doing?
"Piss off, you stupid git!" I shouted. Still he came at me, slanting in.
Belatedly I realised that, now that we were under canopy, the others should already be on com ms I switched on my set and immediately heard guys coming up to check in: "Seven, roger Eight, roger." Then Whinger was saying, "Come in, One.
One, are you OK?"
With a jab on my press el switch I said sharply, "One, roger.
I'm all right. And I'd be even better if some cunt hadn't flown into me. Now get off the air."
After that close call, the rest of the exercise seemed pretty tame.
Our reception committee met us in the forest clearing. They'd seen nothing wrong, and didn't realise we'd almost had a fatality; when they heard, there were a good few mon Dieus flying about, but I'd recovered my composure, and we let down the tension by having a laugh. We quickly established that it was Pavarotti who'd nearly written me off. I couldn't hold it against him, because it turned out that he himself had gone unstable when clearing the aircraft, and he'd had a load of trouble of his own. The result was that he'd got separated from the rest of the group. He'd been flying back in to re-establish contact when the collision occurred, and he'd never seen me until the impact.
"Christ, Pay," said Whinger.
"With eyes in your arse like you've got, you ought to be able to see in every fucking direction at once.
As we gathered up our chutes, Pay and I felt our legs stiffening from the bruises we'd sustained, and knew we were going to be pretty sore in the morning. But our French colleagues spirited us past the opposing forces and put us in position to take out the power station that was doing duty as the enemy's com ms centre.
No snags there and after a wash-up next morning, we moved into the civilian phase of our exercise, which required us to make our way back into England under assumed identities.
Use of the tunnel was banned, so we had to travel by sea, using either Dover or Folkestone. The rules laid down that we had to land between midday and midnight and we knew that the immigration authorities had been briefed by the Int Corps guys from Hereford. In other words, the bastards were poised to intercept us.
We travelled up to the Channel individually, and by the time I reached Calais at about 6:30, after two nights with no proper sleep, I was knackered.
One of the first people I saw on board the ferry was Whinger, easing his nerves with a quick pint of lager in one of the bars. It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that someone had put dickers on the ship, trying to eyeball us before we'd even landed; so I went past without giving any sign of recognition.
With his Mexican moustache, Whinger looked every inch a veteran SAS operator, and I had myself a private bet that the watchers would pick him up. His face was deeply lined, with telltale furrows up his cheeks and across his forehead, giving it that strained, prematurely aged appearance brought on by years of pushing yourself to the limit.
If I was being honest, I'd have to say I looked much the same, with the odd grey hair appearing. Worse, my eyes were so bloodshot from the centrifugal force of the spin that I looked like Count Dracula after a satisfactory attachment to some young lady's jugular.
One thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to get caught in the net and have to submit to prolonged interrogation.
I'd been through all that six years earlier, during my first tour with the Subversive Action Wing, the most secret unit within the SAS. That first time I'd been pulled in and put through the mill. Now, as then, everyone assigned to the SAW had to be able to maintain a cover identity for up to thirty-six hours: it was an essential part of our training, especially when a delicate task like our trip to Moscow was in prospect. It wasn't that, as commander of the team, I felt I should be exempt from such indignities: just that I was tired, and the thought of answering endless questions gave me a pain in the arse.