Gold tried to clear her mind. No outside thoughts. Just concentration, pure as innocence.
Green light.
Reyes disappeared. Gold made a diving exit behind him. Caught her boot on the lip of the ramp. Dropped into the void, tumbling.
She rolled, spun, with no sense of up or down. Her inner ears’ natural gyroscopes, useless. Wind whipped at her as she plunged through an abyss. In this out-of-control plummet, she could not open her parachute.
Gold spread her arms, arched her back. Rolled. Arched harder.
Her body steadied, seemed to fly. Though she could see little, she knew she’d entered a stable free fall. Her spatial references returned. The wind yet lashed at her, but from directions that made sense. Now Gold felt she dropped not through a limitless abyss, but through the atmosphere of the earth.
She relaxed the arch a bit, thankful the emergency procedure came to her when she’d needed it. No conscious thought intruded, just muscle memory. In the arch position, she’d managed to control her center of gravity and thus stop the tumbling.
Clumsy of her to make such a lousy exit. No doubt caused by bumping her foot. Better now.
Her altimeter needle swept through fifteen thousand feet. She could not see the other jumpers. The terrain below loomed as dark nothingness.
With her stable body position sustained for a few seconds, Gold seemed to float, cushioned by air. She checked the altimeter again, dropped past ten thousand feet. Shapes appeared in the corner of her eye, just a thickening of the night. Her teammates, falling with her.
Just a few seconds to go. Watching for four thousand AGL…
Look. Reach. Pull. Clear.
Time—which had rushed ahead of itself inside the Talon—now seemed nearly to stop. Gold sensed every step in the sequence as her canopy deployed. She noted just a small tug when the pilot chute inflated. As she fell through the night, the pilot chute lifted the main canopy’s bag and lines. Ruffling noise as the canopy emerged from the bag. More pull now, as the slider controlled the canopy’s rate of opening. And finally, a rapid deceleration as the canopy cells inflated.
The wind blast hushed into silence. Gold felt nothing but the pressure of her own weight against the harness. Heard nothing but the faint luff of other canopies. A moment of peace above a war zone.
She looked up, inspected her chute. A dark rectangle. It held an even shape—no twists or line-overs. Good canopy. Thank God.
Dim outlines of her teammates and their chutes took form in the darkness. All the men were above her. She must have opened just a bit lower than the others.
Indistinct patterns on the ground hinted of a bald knoll with scattered trees east and west. The Talon’s navigator had done his job; he’d put her out right over the DIP, the Desired Impact Point. Parson would appreciate the precision. The target area to the south showed no activity Gold could see with the naked eye—just a deep, black pool.
She pulled a steering toggle to set up a downwind leg toward the drop zone. Her free-fall rig was more than a piece of nylon with lines attached. The ram air parachute generated lift like an aircraft wing; the chute was actually a high-performance glider, and learning to use it had taught her some of Parson’s language.
With the canopy’s full-forward speed of about thirty miles per hour, Gold flew alongside the knoll. Glanced at her altimeter, though now she was going more on feel than anything else. Pulled a toggle to turn onto a base leg. Pulled once more to set up a final approach.
She popped a quick-release snap hook to lower her kit bag. Felt the line run out beneath her. With the bag hanging several feet below her now, she wouldn’t slam into it if she landed hard.
Gold did not land hard. As the ground rushed at her, she drew both toggles down toward her waist, went to full brakes. Stepped onto the earth like stepping off a curb. The canopy collapsed around her. Dull thuds to her right and left as the rest of the team touched down.
She’d always spent most of her time and thought on the big picture, the long-term and the eternal. But she took a little pride in a good HALO landing—about the only instant gratification she allowed herself. That she’d pulled it off in a combat zone, after a rough exit, made the glow that much warmer.
She let herself feel it just long enough to shrug out of her harness and remove her mask and flight helmet. Then she locked her oxygen switch in the OFF position, daisy-chained her suspension lines, rolled up her canopy. Opened her drop bag, dug out body armor, Kevlar helmet, night vision goggles. Unstowed her M4.
“Everybody all right?” Reyes whispered.
“I’m good,” Gold said.
The other jumpers made affirmative noises. Gold donned her ground equipment and switched on her NVGs. But what she could hear was more important than what she could see. She plugged an earpiece into the Icom handheld, turned on the radio, and listened to the enemy frequency. Nothing. She also turned on her MBITR so she could talk to the friendlies, positioned the hands-free mike over her mouth.
The rest of her team began to unpack their gear. One of the Marines assembled his rifle. As the weapon came together, Gold saw it was a Barrett M82—a .50 caliber monster with an effective range of nearly two thousand yards. The combat controller switched on some kind of radio she’d never seen, worked with other electronic gear unfamiliar to her.
Gold moved to the edge of the knoll and found a place where she could look down the hill on the bunker area. The Marine sniper and his partner set up next to her.
She trained her NVGs on the target. Gold saw four trucks parked among the ruins of what might have been a fort or stronghold since antiquity. Ancient warriors would have liked the spot for its remoteness and adjoining caves, just as the mujahideen did in the 1980s and Black Crescent did now. A narrow valley dropped away behind the ruins, appearing on night vision as a deep green cleft in the landscape.
In all the hours of watching this spot on the surveillance feeds, she’d never seen this many vehicles. They looked like cargo trucks, with tarps over steel frames. Figures began to jump down from the tailgates. All looked like full-grown men. All carried weapons. Gold began to count them: four, six, ten, fifteen, twenty.
“Are you seeing this?” Gold whispered.
“Got ’em in the reticle,” the Marine nearest her said, sighting through his nightscope. “I’d love to start firing, but we’ll let ’em be surprised when Gunny Blount shows up.”
Gold keyed her MBITR. “Golay flight,” she called, “Seraphim is in position at Objective Sword.”
The Marine commander in the Osprey answered immediately. So they were airborne and inbound. “Golay has you five by five, Seraphim. What do you see?”
“Approximately thirty armed personnel. They just arrived in four trucks.”
“Copy that, Seraphim. Keep us advised.”
The commander did not sound startled by the news. That Predator was probably still up there, its infrared eye unblinking.
In Gold’s left ear, where she monitored the Icom, the squelch broke. A voice spoke in Pashto: “Chaaku has returned with more holy warriors.”
Through his NVGs, Parson saw the lobe of ridgeline that marked Kuh-e Qara Batur. Taller mountains loomed beyond it, vast folds of rock that knew no national border, undulating until they flattened into the steppes of Russia. Rashid flew a path dictated by terrain, dipping into valleys when he could, crossing peaks when necessary.