Bob nodded. He was too old for this. He felt weighed down with the rifle, the optics gear, the boots, the helmet, the parachute, all of it too much, all of it pulling on him.
“You got it? You just cannonball when you go out. You fall, you fall, you fall, then the thing opens up automatically. You can stabilize with the risers on the left or the right of the chute. I don’t need to tell you. You’ve done it before.”
Again, Bob nodded, as Bonson went ahead nervously into his own microphone.
“No problem. You get there, you save the women, you’ll be all right. And we get Solaratov, no problem. We’ve got it all set up. As soon as the weather breaks, another team goes in; it’s all taken care of.”
Another nod.
“Okay, they’re saying thirty seconds now.”
“Let’s go.”
Bob moved slowly toward the gap in the rear of the plane. There was no sense of anything; just blackness beyond the ramp.
“Okay, get ready,” said Bonson.
Bob paused in the buffeting torrent of black air. He was scared.
“Go!” said Bonson, and Bob stepped forward and off, into nothingness.
Nikki awoke early, before first light. It was a habit she could not break, partially because of her own pulsating energies but also because she had for so long awakened then to feed the horses.
Today, there were no horses to feed, but there was a whole new world of snow to explore.
She threw a bathrobe on over her pajamas and stepped into her moccasins and went downstairs. The fire was sleepy, so she threw a log onto it, and amid a spray of sparks, it began to stir to life. Then she went to the doorway, cracked it open. A wintry blast howled through, and yes, it was still snowing, but not as hard. She got the door open and crept out on the porch, pulling her bathrobe tight.
The world was lost in snow. Its natural shapes were blurred and softened. It was everywhere; on the fences, drifting over them; in strange hills that had been bushes; mounded on the roof of the barn and on the woodpile. She had never seen so much snow in her life.
The children who had once lived here had a sled; she’d seen it in the barn. She knew where she’d go, too. Off to the left, not too far, there was a slope, not a steep one but just enough to get up some good momentum.
She looked through the darkness to the mountains of the east, invisible in the slanting, falling snow. But she could feel a change coming somehow. She couldn’t wait for daylight. She couldn’t wait!
Solaratov watched the child through his night-vision goggles, a far-off figure in a field of green in the bottom of the aquarium that was the world of electronically amplified ambient light. Excited by the temptations of snow, she’d come early and stood, outside on the porch, a little green blob. Then she reached down and cupped a clutch of snow into a neat little ball, and threw it out into the yard.
The waiting was at last over. He pushed up the NV goggles, and took up the Leica range finder. He put the ranging dot on her and pressed the button, sending an invisible spurt of laser out to bounce off her and back, trailing its logo of data. Five hundred fifty-seven, it said in the display superimposed on the right of the image.
Five hundred fifty-seven meters. He thought for a second, computing drift and drop, and then lifted the rifle to place the mil-dot beneath the crosshairs on her. It felt obscene to target a child like this, but he had to familiarize himself with the sensations.
The dot blotted out her heroic little chest. His muscles, though stiff, remained hard, and he locked the rifle under a bridge of bone to the earth, and held the dot there with the professional shooter’s discipline. No wobble, no tremble, nothing to betray fear or doubt. His finger touched the trigger. Were he to will it, four and a half pounds of pressure and she would leave the earth forever.
He put the rifle down, glad that he still had energy.
Clearly now, it was just a matter of time.
He knew something was wrong immediately.
Instead of curling his body into a cannonball, he flailed, feeling panic and fear. He had never fallen before, and the sense of no control completely stunned him. It was no question of courage, just his limbic system; he was suddenly unmanned by the sense of utter helplessness. The wind hammered at him like fists; his body planed and fluttered and he tried to bring his ankles up to his wrists but he could get nothing to work against the power of the air rushing up at him at hundreds of miles an hour.
He screamed but there was no sound, because he screamed into an oxygen mask. But it was a scream, nevertheless, mad and ripped from his lungs like a physical thing, like an animal. He heard it rattling around in his helmet.
He had never screamed before in a hundred or a thousand fights. He had never screamed at Parris Island or any of the places where he’d had to kill or die. He had never screamed on the nights before action, in contemplation of what might happen on the next day, and he never screamed the day after, in contemplation of the horrors that he had seen or caused or had just missed him. He’d never screamed in grief or rage.
He screamed.
The scream was pure fury boiling out of his soul, unstoppable but lost in the hugeness of the air pressure.
He fell through darkness, feeling lost and powerless and, above all, vulnerable.
Don’t let me die, he thought, all commitment to mission, all dedication to justice, all sense of fatherhood gone. He fell screaming in complete treason to everything he thought he believed in, his arms clawing at the air, his legs pumping, the sense of weightlessness almost rendering him useless.
Don’t let me die, he thought, feeling tears on his face under the Plexiglas of the helmet, gasping for breath. Please don’t let—
The parachute shuddered open with a bang; he could simply sense it mutating strangely on his back, and the next split second, he was slammed into something that felt like a wall but was only air as the chute filled and grabbed him from doom. He could see nothing in the blackness, but he knew the ground was close and then, far before it should have happened, he whacked into it and felt his head fill with stars and concussion and confusion, as his body went hard against the ground. He staggered to his feet, trying to find the release lever for the chute in case it filled with air and pulled him away. He could not; it puffed and began to drag him, and the Plexiglas before him splintered; his face began to sting and bleed. His arm was numb. The equipment bag banged over the rocks as he slid along and seemed to rack his leg a couple of extra inches. He clawed at the harness, and then it popped open and the harness somehow rid itself of him, as if he were unwanted baggage, and deposited him in the snow as it went its merry way.
Oh, Christ, he thought, blinking, feeling pain everywhere. He looked around and saw nothing at all recognizable. He struggled to pop off his helmet, and felt just a second’s worth of air until the air turned frozen. He pulled a white watch cap from his pocket and yanked a snow mask down from its folds. He pulled the equipment bag over, opened it and got the parka and the leggings on. The warmth comforted him. Then he yanked out the night-vision goggles, fiddled for the switch and looked around.
Oh, Christ, he thought.
Nothing was as it seemed. He was on a slope, not a flat; there was no ranch house ahead because in the most obvious possible way there was no ahead.
There was only down, barren and remote.
He was way up.
He was lost in the mountains.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Julie was dreaming. In the dream she and Bob and Donny were at a picnic somewhere in the green mountains by a lake. It felt very real, but was still clearly a dream. Everybody was so happy, much happier than they’d ever been in their conscious lives. Bob and Donny were drinking beer and laughing. Her father was there, too, and Bob’s father, Earl, who’d been killed way back in 1955, and she was cooking hamburgers on a grill and all the men were drinking beer and laughing and tossing a ball around and flirting with Nikki.