When she opened her eyes, she felt a little more assured that things would go according to plan. Not necessarily her plan, or even the JSOC frag order she’d been given, but a concept of operations from higher command. The notion untangled some of her worries and distractions, put her at ease enough that she actually dozed, caught a few more minutes of precious sleep.
The cool, calm evening brought a dream of home in Vermont. Perhaps because Gold was about to fly into darkness herself, she saw night-flying woodcocks migrating south from Canada, silent as death in their passage. They’d rest in bogs during the day, resume their mission after sundown. The russet-colored, long-billed birds flitted overhead in twos and threes. When Gold saw them no more in the black sky above her, she realized she was awake.
A while later, Reyes and the Air Force combat controller showed up. Both nodded to Gold as they entered the AOC. When they emerged, they carried armloads of bags and equipment. Reyes clenched a pencil between his teeth. He put down his gear next to Gold, flipped through a spiral-bound manual.
“We’ll have to prebreathe oxygen for thirty minutes,” he said.
“Are you going to be the jumpmaster?” Gold asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
That worked for Gold. When translating, when communicating, she was at the height of her powers. But parachuting, as much as she enjoyed it, was an ancillary skill. Especially free fall. Reyes, by contrast, had probably logged hundreds more HALO jumps than Gold. Pararescuemen joked that skydiving was just a way to commute to work, something embedded in their culture. It was even half their job title.
The two Marine Corps Force Recon men—a sniper and spotter—checked in half an hour before scheduled showtime. They looked more than a little surprised to see a woman on the jump stick with them, but they said nothing about it. With all five of the jumpers assembled, Reyes declared it was time to suit up.
He and Gold donned their parachutes using the buddy system. First, Gold leaned forward as Reyes held the MC-4 by its main webs. He placed it on her back, and she threaded and fastened the chest strap. They worked together to tighten the leg and shoulder straps. She stood up straight, stretched, pulled at her sleeves to try to get more comfortable. The weight of the canopy felt good on her shoulders.
She picked up Reyes’s rig, held it for him. He put it on in half the time she’d taken. The cinching of straps seemed to draw up cords within him, as if the rig had become some natural part of him. The pararescueman’s ease with his equipment gave Gold even more confidence about following his lead through the jump.
The two Force Recon guys geared up together, and Reyes helped the combat controller. They attached their kit bags, double-checked security of rifles, oxygen bottles, and radios. Though the jumpers represented three different services—Marines, Army, and Air Force—their procedures for HALO drops were nearly identical. Reyes glanced at his watch, led the way to the flight line.
An MC-130 Combat Talon had flown up from Kandahar for them. Gold had jumped out of C-130s many times, but this special ops variant, named for the talons of a bird of prey, had a strange look. It sported a funny-looking nose, or radome, as she knew Parson would call it. Probably contained some kind of super terrain-following radar used during the insertion of special ops forces. In the world of special ops, Gold had worked only around the edges, advising and interpreting. Now she found herself in the middle of it.
She walked up the Talon’s open ramp with her fellow jumpers. The aircraft’s loadmaster had already installed a six-man prebreather, a green metal box marked AVIATORS’ BREATHING OXYGEN. The prebreather was secured to the floor with five-thousand-pound-test cargo straps. Six hoses extended from the device. Two Air Force physiological technicians checked the hoses and fittings. The phys techs would not jump, but would ride along to make sure no one showed signs of hypoxia or other problems.
“It won’t take much more than half an hour to get to the DZ,” Reyes said. “We’ll have to start prebreathing on the ground. Go ahead and arm your CYPRES and get all your gear set before you start on oxygen.”
Gold checked the control unit for her Cybernetic Parachute Release System, mounted on her right-side lift web. It was a silver box not much bigger than a lipstick container, with a single button and a numerical screen. If a jump went very, very badly, with an unconscious parachutist plummeting toward earth, the CYPRES would automatically deploy the canopy when the parachutist passed through a certain altitude beyond a certain speed. The latest generation of what old-school jumpers called AODs, or Automatic Opening Devices.
Gold remembered an instructor at Fort Bragg who liked to say, “Don’t depend on an AOD. Because what’s AOD spelled backward?” Still, Gold felt safer knowing her chute would probably deploy even if she couldn’t open it herself.
She pressed the button on the control unit. After one second a red light glowed. She pressed the button again, repeated the sequence two more times. That put the CYPRES into a self-test mode. The device checked good.
The drop zone at Kuh-e Qara Batur was at about a five-thousand-foot field elevation. Gold intended to open four thousand feet above that. She programmed the CYPRES to fire at twenty-five hundred feet above ground level if she was still falling faster than sixty-five miles per hour. So many details to remember, procedures to get right. If you missed something and got yourself killed, you were just doing the enemy’s job for him.
Next, Gold strapped the altimeter to her left wrist and checked its internal light. The face of the instrument glowed yellow with the electricity from a fresh battery. She switched off the light to save power.
When she looked up, she saw the Talon’s aircrew gathering in the cargo compartment.
“Who’s the jumpmaster?” the aircraft commander asked.
Reyes stepped forward. The aircraft commander and navigator briefed the takeoff time, time over target, and emergency procedures. Reyes nodded, wrote a couple of numbers on the heel of his hand. To Gold’s relief, the mission required no last-minute changes.
She sat on a troop seat and strapped in. Gold seated the hose from her oxygen mask into a connector on the prebreather. Her four fellow jumpers also plugged in as she placed her mask over her face and fastened its bayonet clips. One of the phys techs connected his own mask to the six-man prebreather, and the other phys tech hooked up to an oxygen regulator mounted on the wall of the aircraft.
The pure oxygen felt like a tonic as it filled her lungs. It went down a little cold, and Gold could almost sense it reddening her blood cells and flowing through to her brain. But though the oxygen woke her up fully and made her feel alert, that wasn’t the reason for prebreathing.
By saturating her bloodstream with oxygen, Gold could prevent decompression sickness. When a parachutist or aviator flew to high altitude in an unpressurized aircraft, the effect resembled a diver surfacing from deep water. As air pressure decreased, nitrogen in the blood could come out of solution and form bubbles. Very painful and potentially lethal. But not an issue if pure oxygen replaced the nitrogen.
She checked her watch. Now that she’d started prebreathing, she could not take off the mask. If she inhaled ambient air, which consisted mostly of nitrogen, she’d have to start the thirty minutes all over again.
Boot steps thudded up the ramp, which remained open to the airfield’s stadium lighting. In the glare, she saw Parson greeting the Talon aircrew, backslapping like old friends. Probably former squadron mates from his days as a C-130 navigator. After handshakes and happy words Gold could not quite make out, he pulled himself away from the fliers and sat beside her. The crew headed for the cockpit, presumably to begin their own prebreathing from hoses on the flight deck.