There was one last check. The Tracker saw Jonah’s mouth open but heard not a word. Down the line, Curly, the last out, checked Tim, the trooper, in front of him to ensure his chute and oxygen had no tangles. Then he shouted, “Seven OK.”
Jonah must have heard it because he nodded at Tim, who then did the same for Pete, the medic, in front of him. The mutual checking rippled down the line. The Tracker felt the clap on his shoulder and did the same for Barry in front of him.
Jonah was standing in front of the giant, facing him. He nodded as the Tracker made the last check and stepped aside. There was nothing left to do. After all the pushing and shoving and grunting, the seven free fallers could only hurl themselves into the night five miles above the Somali desert.
Barry took one step forward, lowered his torso into a dive and was gone. The reason for the line being tightly bunched was that wide separation in the air could be disastrous. A three-second gap in the blackness, and two fallers could be so far apart they would never see or find each other. As briefed, the Tracker went out within a second of Barry’s heels disappearing.
The sensations were immediate. In half a second, the noise was gone; the roar of the C-130’s four Allisons, the Wagner—all gone, to be replaced by the silence of the night, broken only by a gentle and rising wind hiss as his falling body accelerated past 100 mph.
He felt the slipstream of the departing Hercules try to flip him over, ankles above head, then onto his back, and fought against it. Though there was no moon, the desert stars, hard and bright, cold and constant, unmarred by any pollution for two thousand miles, gave a low illumination to the sky.
Looking down, he saw a dark shape far below. He knew that close behind his shoulder would be the para captain, David, with the other four strung out upward to the sky.
David appeared beside him, arms by his sides, adopting the arrow position to increase speed and close up on Barry. The Tracker did the same. Slowly the big black form ahead came closer. Barry was in the starfish shape, gloved fists clenched ahead of him, arms and legs half spread, to slow the fall to 120 mph. When they came level with him, the Tracker and the captain did the same.
They fell in a rough echelon formation, joined one by one by the other four. He saw the captain check his wrist altimeter, adjusted for the ambient air pressure above the desert.
Although he could not see it, the altimeter said the troop was passing through 15,000 feet. They would open chutes at 5,000. As the lead jumper, it was Barry’s job to ease ahead and, using experience and the dim light of the stars, try to pick a landing zone as smooth and rock-free as possible. The Tracker’s concern was to stay with the para captain and do whatever he did.
Even from 25,000 feet, the free fall only lasted ninety seconds. Barry was by now slightly below the other six, scanning the ground rushing toward him. The others gently moved into staggered line formation, never losing eye contact with each other.
The Tracker reached for the pocket in his chute pack to make sure he had contact with the chute release mechanism. Pathfinders do not use the D ring rip to open the chute. They can opt for aneroid pressure-triggered release, but things mechanical can and do go wrong. Coming down at 120 mph is no time to discover the gizmo has not worked. David and the rest preferred manual release.
This is what the Tracker was reaching for. It is a parachute-shaped piece of cloth attached to a twine and stored in an easy-access pocket on the top. When thrown into the slipstream, it will pull the entire BT80 out of its pack and deploy it.
Below him, the Tracker saw Barry hit the 5,000-foot mark and the flash of the canopy, gray in the surrounding blackness. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw David toss his release drogue into the air and then disappear upward.
The Tracker did the same and almost instantaneously felt the jerk of the huge chute pulling him backward and upward—or so it seemed. It was, in fact, simply slowing him down. The sensation was of driving a car fast into a wall and the air bag going off. But it lasted just three seconds; then he was floating.
The BT80 is nothing like the domed parachutes of paratroopers jumping on a military exercise. It is a colossal oblong of silk, mattress-shaped, a flying wing that, on a high-altitude opening, can let the trooper glide mile after mile behind the enemy lines unseen by radar or the human eye.
The Pathfinders liked it for that, and another reason. It opens silently as opposed to the whip-crack of others, which can alert a sentry below.
At 800 feet, the para captain released his Bergen, which dropped on its lanyard to hang twelve feet beneath him. The Tracker did the same. A few feet above them, the remaining four followed suit.
The U.S. Marine watched the ground, now clear in the starlight, rushing toward him, heard the plop of the Bergen hitting the sand and performed the final braking maneuver. He reached upward, grabbing the two toggles controlling the canopy, and pulled down. The chute flared and slowed, permitting him to hit the deck at a brisk run. Then the chute lost its shape, folded and flopped to the ground as a tangled mess of silk and nylon cords. He unclipped the chest and leg harnesses, and the remainder of the para pack fell to the sand. It had served its purpose. All around him, six Pathfinders were doing the same.
He checked his watch. Four minutes after two a.m. Good scheduling. But it took time to clear up and form a line of march.
The seven chutes had to be collected, along with the no-further-use helmets and oxygen masks, plus the oxygen canisters. They were all piled together, and three Pathfinders covered them with rocks.
Out of the Bergens came the sidearms and night vision goggles, the NVGs. There was enough starlight for them not to be needed on the march, but they would certainly give an unmatchable edge when attacking the village, turning pitch-black night into green and watery day.
Dai, the Welsh Wizard, was poring over his equipment. Thanks to modern technology, their task was simpler than it would have been before the drone.
Somewhere high above them was a Global Hawk RQ-4, operated by J-SOC out of MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa. It was gazing down at them, and at the village, and could see them both. It could also detect any living creature by body heat, showing up as a pale blob of light on the landscape.
J-SOC headquarters had patched through an image of everything Tampa saw to the communications room at Djibouti, with sound and picture. Dai was setting up and testing his direct radio link with Djibouti, which could tell him exactly where he was, where the village was, the line of march between the two and whether there was any activity in the target area.
After a murmured conversation with Djibouti, Dai reported to the rest. Both controllers could see them as seven pale blobs on the desert. The village was mo
tionless, seemingly fast asleep. There were no human beings outside the cluster of houses, inside which they could not be detected. But all the village’s wealth, a flock of goats, four donkeys and two camels, was in a corral or tethered out in the open and showed up clearly.
There were a few smaller blobs that moved about—the pye-dogs. The distance was 4.8 kilometers and the optimum line of march on a compass heading of 020 true.
The para captain had his own Silva compass and his own SOPHIE thermal imaging system. Despite the assurances of Tampa, he switched it on and ran its beam in a circle around them. They froze when a small blob showed up on top of a ridge along the edge of the sandy basin Barry had chosen as a good place to land.
Too small for a human but big enough for a watching head. Then it gave a low whine and disappeared. A desert jackal. At 02.22, they set off in Indian file to the north.