“You know that won’t work. It’ll be too big of an op. It will take too long to plan and get authorization for. We’ll have to go through the president if we do that. Again. And you said that Langley barely convinced him this time. Plus, if we send a team of SOF guys and people start shooting, it will get messy. It’s better to keep it just one or two people.”
“Exactly. I knew you’d come around.”
Chase snorted and rolled his eyes. Elliot was doing his best to use humor to his advantage.
“Fifteen. Jesus. Alright, tell me the details…”
Elliot smiled and opened his laptop. “Attaboy.”
Chase sat in the back of the dark grey turboprop aircraft. The Cessna Caravan was holding short of the main runway at Minhad Air Base, twenty miles to the southeast of Dubai.
It was pitch black outside. There was supposedly a quarter moon, but the dust and haze had completely hidden it. Chase checked his watch. 1:30 a.m. He could see the blue runway lights and hear the powerful engine as the pilots ran up the RPMs, conducting their pre-takeoff checks.
The copilot yelled back, “You all set? The flight should be about twenty-five minutes. We have our clearance. You good?”
Chase gave a thumbs-up. The copilot said something into his lip microphone and the other pilot said something back. The engine picked up again and seconds later they were airborne.
Chase had triple-checked his gear. Helmet with a clear visor. No smudges. He wanted to be able to see everything clearly as he parachuted into the least inhabited part of the island. His helmet was strapped on tight. He had a knife in a sheath that slid into his boot. His altimeter was matched up with the aircraft’s barometric setting. Parachute. Quadruple-checked. AAD — automatic parachute activation device. Check. And one big, rubbery wingsuit.
He and the pilots were already breathing through oxygen masks. As a safety precaution, they’d pre-breathed oxygen for one hour prior to the flight in order to prevent oxygen sickness.
His backpack was filled with another twenty pounds of gear. A silenced pistol. A small amount of food and water. A few tightly packed medical supplies. A fully charged satellite phone and an extra battery. He had memorized the number to dial.
Phone calls. His jovial mood broke shortly after his prebrief with Elliot.
Chase had received a voice mail from his sister, informing him that his brother David was missing. In the weeks since the mall incident, Chase had still not contacted David. After learning that he was missing, he was kicking himself for following orders.
Two days after the shootout at the Mall of Dubai, Lisa had traveled to Langley. She was supposed to use her source at In-Q-Tel to check up on him. But Chase had not heard from her since she left. Chase and Lisa had to go through a series of debriefs and provide written statements concerning what had happened. But between Waleed and Elliot, their names and faces were kept out of the press. Officially, the Dubai Mall shooting had been reported as a terrorist attack. No mention of Iran was made.
Chase tried not to think of his brother. He had to push away his fears of what might have happened to him. Whatever this list was, it was Chase’s fault for not warning him. But before a mission like this, he couldn’t afford any distractions. He needed to block those thoughts out and save it for when he returned.
The aircraft took off and climbed rapidly. The pilots turned off all of the external lights and switched off their transponder once they were out over the Gulf. Fifteen minutes later, the copilot rose from his seat and gave Chase a thumbs-up.
The copilot opened up a plastic panel next to the door of the aircraft, revealing a dozen switches and circuit breakers. He flipped one switch, and a soft red glow light came on above them. The copilot looked Chase up and down, patting certain areas of his gear to make sure he was secure and double-checking his chute. He then clipped himself to a canvas belt that was attached to a steel link in the ceiling and reached for the door.
The copilot flipped another switch, and a yellow light lit up above it, illuminating the word READY. The pilot flying the aircraft saw this in his cockpit as well and started to slow down to 140 knots and fly into the wind. Chase could see the copilot flip another switch and then heard a hiss and felt the temperature rapidly drop. It would be well below zero up at this altitude, regardless of how hot it was on the desert surface below.
He checked his altimeter, which was strapped to his chest. The needle was spinning up to an altitude of twenty-two thousand feet.
Chase hoped that the aviators had placed him in the right spot. He had personally overseen the wind calculations when they were on the ground. He could angle the wingsuit and use aerodynamics to glide pretty far, but a lot depended on how high they were and what the winds were doing.
The READY light turned green.
The copilot placed his hand on the long metal door handle and then pulled it down and inward. A black void of hurricane-force winds opened up in front of him. Chase patted the copilot on the shoulder and stepped out, facing forward and crossing his arms tight over his chest.
Stepping into the wind, he felt like a linebacker had hit him as the relative wind pummeled him in the opposite direction. But that feeling was short-lived, as drag slowed him down and gravity took over. The acceleration vector shifted downward, and his stomach fluttered as he fell.
Then, as he spread his arms and legs and the airflow filled the sail of the wingsuit, he had the sensation of flying. Chase forced his limbs outward and angled himself so that he would glide toward the island below. Skydivers in free fall normally traveled downward at 120 miles per hour. Yet with the wingsuit, he was falling at a velocity of only forty miles per hour, and moving forward at over 140 miles per hour.
Abu Musa consisted of a smattering of village lights around the outside of the island, and an unlit runway in the middle. Intel reports said that the aircraft here almost never flew at night. Almost never. He hoped that it would remain empty for him to land on.
For the first minute of his fall, he was above the haze. Looking up, he could see the moon and stars. He felt like he was floating in outer space. Below, there were several formations of lights. They were likely commercial ships. Oil tankers, headed to and from the Straits of Hormuz, probably.
Three minutes into his descent, he decided that the pilots had done a good job placing him where he needed to be. He was almost over the island. Now he needed to tighten his limbs a bit to decrease his lift and ensure that he didn’t overshoot. As he did that, he began falling faster.
He checked his altimeter. Three thousand feet. Any second now, his AAD would deploy his chute. It was set for one thousand feet. If it didn’t go off, Chase would pull it manually.
He felt a little flutter as the chute deployed and then a jarring slam when it fully opened, arresting his descent. Chase flipped down his night vision goggles and examined the runway. No lights, and no sign of any movement. Chase looked underneath the goggles at his altimeter every few seconds, trying to gauge his altitude.
The hard part about landing while wearing night vision goggles was the disparity between what his eyes told him was real and actual reality. It was like watching a video of what’s in front of you and trying to walk up the stairs. Yes, you could see what was there, but it was very challenging to estimate the exact distance between your feet and the ground. The trick was to look out at the horizon.