by Jason Kasper
Any rest we got would end the moment we arrived in Nairobi. There we would don our parachutes, rig our equipment for the jump, and move into a smaller container filled with legitimate aid supplies to be uncovered in the ensuing investigation of a mid-air emergency .
After being loaded into the DC-9-30, we’d wait an hour before taking off on a flight that we’d remain on for less than forty-five minutes before initiating our escape. From landing under parachute, to recovering the case, to our extraction by helicopter, we would be on the ground in Somalia for less than twenty-four hours. The schedule left us no time to rest besides what we could manage as we crossed the Atlantic Ocean .
The prospect seemed less daunting in the wake of Jais’s words. Most of the senior operators here have never seen his face and never will .
I wasn’t even a junior operator yet; hell, I hadn’t even embarked on my first mission with the Outfit. How long would it take me to amass Jais’s level of seniority? And even he couldn’t give me a straight answer on why the Handler granted him a meeting beyond attributing the honor to a vague notion of his master seeing everything .
What was I to do, continue racking up missions for years and hope I eventually fell among the minority who got to meet the Handler? That seemed as effective a strategy as assassinating the president by committing one’s lifetime to charitable achievements in the hope of one day getting an invitation to the White House .
Yet my glimpse into the Handler’s affairs, coupled with the Indian’s nebulous information as our sole source of intelligence, led me to believe that this was apparently the best that Ian and I could do .
My thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a sleek white plane fuselage rolling into view between the open hangar doors. Its engines slowed to an idle as it stopped, and a rear section of the plane unfolded to expose a row of five stairs that came to rest a foot over the ground .
A man emerged from the plane wearing a plate carrier covered in pouches and carrying an SR-25 rifle with suppressor. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and as he turned his sweaty face toward us, I recognized him as Cancer .
The man who had put cigarettes out on my flesh looked to me for only a moment before cutting his eyes to Jais as if I weren’t there. He gave a slight shake of his head .
Jais nodded back .
Cancer descended the stairs as another man appeared, his weapon slung over his shoulder and both hands behind him, holding something heavy as he carefully negotiated the narrow staircase. I couldn’t make out what he was carrying until the third man appeared a few seconds later, stepping out the door and lifting his arms to keep his cargo off the steps. Suspended between them was a length of shiny black material contoured into a long, familiar shape .
It was a body bag .
Several more men emerged from the plane, hauling equipment bags down the steps to the concrete floor and toward the opposite pickup. The last man in their number waved us toward the aircraft .
Jais grabbed a bag out of the back of our truck, then threw it over his shoulder and hoisted another to carry by hand. “See?” he yelled to me over the plane’s engines. “I told you we’d beat the rain .”
With that, he turned to the waiting aircraft. After watching him approach it for a few seconds, I grabbed two bags and jogged after him. I slowed as I caught up to him, and together we neared the lowered stairs of the plane, its engines idling as an unseen pilot waited for us to board .
DESCENT
Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur
-A true friend is discerned during an uncertain matter
6
December 28, 2008
29,000 feet over the Kenya-Somalia border
Beyond the orb of our helmet lights loomed only blackness in the cargo area, a frigid, vacuous metal space more comfortable to me than any warmly appointed room of my lifetime .
There was a peculiar harmony to be found amid the rumble of a plane’s interior, the white noise of a thousand aircraft flights whose dichotomy was twofold. During travel, its soothing presence eased me to sleep in a way I rarely experienced on solid ground; during a jump, its sudden disappearance proudly heralded the exhilarating rush of freefall .
The sound of the flight was, however, muffled by the radio earmuffs hugging the side of my head, which were attached to a helmet made heavier by the binocular night vision device flipped upward on its rotating mount. Between that and the rubber contour of my oxygen mask forming a seal over the lower half of my face, propelling a steady flow of air into my mouth whenever my lips parted, only my eyes were visible, and even those were shielded by clear goggles tightened snugly over them .
The rest of me was a mass of equipment strapped over cold weather gear, the combined bulk turning Jais and me into waddling marshmallow men unfit for any Hollywood depictions of combat. The parachutes alone were tremendously large, both main and reserve canopies able to bear the weight of a grossly over-equipped jumper. Add to that the inverted combat packs with water, survival rations, first aid supplies, and ammunition, all of which was encapsulated by an intricate H-harness that hung them over our thighs, and the Israeli Galil assault rifles we wore flush against our left sides like a splint from shoulder blade to waist, and we were scarcely able to walk, much less jump .
The coup de grâce was the oxygen bottles mounted in a pouch beneath our rifles. Absent any oxygen panels on the aircraft, we’d needed them to sustain us for an hour of pre-jump breathing to reduce the nitrogen levels in our bloodstream and prevent decompression sickness. The bottles may as well have been bowling balls slung beside our hips and, by virtue of taking all evidence of our presence with us out of the plane, had to be jumped along with everything else .
Adding to our mobility issues was the fact that we wore extreme cold weather gear, a vital consideration in the unheated cargo bay. With a 3.5-degree decrease in temperature for every thousand-foot increase in height, our current altitude put us somewhere around negative twenty-three degrees, cold enough to induce frostbite on unprotected skin even in the short time it took us to exit the plane. Given the added wind chill in freefall, the cold would quickly prove fatal to an unprepared jumper .
I turned my head to orient the circular glow of my helmet light over Jais’s gloved hands as he carefully positioned the explosive charge over the rear airstair, which was locked into place by a clamshell door just under the plane’s tail .
A sudden jolt knocked me clean off my feet, and I hit the metal floor hard under the weight of my gear, the back of my helmet bouncing sharply .
“You all right?” I called to Jais .
I could see his helmet light beside me on the floor as his distorted voice echoed through my radio earmuffs. “Yeah. We must be hitting turbulence . ”
The plane suddenly plummeted, causing my body to levitate for two long seconds until the floor lurched back toward me and I smashed into it once again. Then the fuselage jolted sideways as if pushed by an invisible hand, stabilizing for just a moment before ascending and pinning us to the ground .
“This feels pretty rough,” I said. “Should we bump the timeline ?”
I slid sideways and crashed into a crate as he answered, “If we’re still on this plane when it lands in Mogadishu, he’ll kill us both . ”
“I thought I was the expendable one, not you .”
“We’re both expendable. If we die, he’ll send another pair within a day. And another pair after them, and another after them, until he gets what he wants . ”
Our already dangerous infiltration into Somalia was now further complicated by raging winds, and the prospect was thrilling to me. Maybe it was because I wasn’t in charge and it wasn’t my mission to fail, but above any fear for our personal safety came the simple fact that I liked when things went wrong on a jump .
Nothing was more anticlimactic than a parachute affair that went exactly according to plan, a sure sign that one would sooner or later forget the jump had ever occurred. Any potential at transcending mediocr
ity would soon be lost amid the same groundswell of monotony that swallowed up everything else in life. When I looked back upon the hundreds of jumps I had done, the ones that stood out were those that, with better judgment or more experience, would never have occurred .
And whatever happened this night over East Africa, I was certain that, if I survived, the jump would be seared into my memory like the cigarette burns on my body, taking its place among the other proud scars of gunfights and combat and missions both good and bad, military and criminal, their sum total just barely making the meaninglessness of life worth enduring .
“Well,” I said, “at least this will make for a hell of a story. If we survive it .”
Jais’s helmet light swung to the GPS on his wrist. “Goddammit, there must be a storm. They’re diverting south off the flight path. Stand by for emergency bailout . ”
I scrambled to my feet, moving as quickly as the bulk of my equipment would allow, and shone my lamp along the interior of the fuselage to locate the smoke detector. Fumbling thickly gloved hands into my pocket, I withdrew the butane lighter and said, “You know, between the storm outside and the cabin fire in here, these poor fuckers flying the plane are about to have the worst night of their lives .”
“Light it! Now ! ”
I cracked the lighter into a spike of blue flame, holding it toward the rectangular detector above me. Within seconds, a red dot began blinking rapidly .
“Smoke detector’s activated,” I said .
No sooner had the words left my mouth than a vast whooshing noise drowned out the droning engines. My ears popped twice, and then over and over in rapid succession .
“We’re depressurizing. Air pressure is fifteen thousand feet… twenty thousand feet… standby for detonation . ”
I checked my wrist. “We’re still flying over 180 knots .”
“If we don’t jump now, we’ll be over the Indian Ocean. Three. Two. One . ”
I breathed the words, “See ya,” as a blinding orange glow erupted amid the sharp bark of the explosive charge, illuminating the plane’s cabin and then immediately plunging it into near-blackness .
A sharply defined portal glowed an eerie phosphorescent blue as it punctuated the darkness, its edges lined in whistling flame .
I charged toward it, my combat pack bouncing off straining thighs as Jais yelled, “Go! Now ! ”
His helmet light shone to my right beside the missing door, and I extinguished mine a split second before his too went dark. Only the sky’s radiance remained. Wind whipped against my helmet as I closed in on the empty doorway—five feet, three—and a hard bounce of turbulence caused me to plunge through it virtually headlong .
My vision became a violent cyclone of dark hues, and I barely glimpsed the plane, now two hundred feet distant, as I was ripped by the undertow of wind into the night sky over Somalia .
I arched my back, trying to stabilize as the combat pack beneath me became a center of gravity around which I twirled in a flat spin, the mask pressing against my face in one direction and the goggles in the other. Twisting my shoulders against the rotation, I began to slow as my mind struggled to fathom how I had been able to see the plane after jumping at night. Bewildered by the flashes of light around me, I wondered if I was losing consciousness .
As my spin slowed, I looked around and saw that I was freefalling between storm clouds of immeasurable height, their undulating columns flickering with bursts of lightning a mile in every direction. The plane must have been threading its way between them as we jumped, and I looked down at a featureless blanket far below me, unsure whether it was the ocean or a base of clouds and realizing there was nothing I could do about my situation in either case. To pull my parachute was to ensure its immediate collapse amid the winds that buffeted me from seemingly every direction at once .
A dark shape descended toward me from above, stopping at eye level with impossible grace, its outline fluctuating with expert adjustment amid the wind .
The next bolt of lightning revealed the shape as Jais, and we connected arms as the sky went darker again, his body now silhouetted only by the blue indigo beyond .
I couldn’t believe it—the speed at which we exited was too fast for any jumper, however skilled, to make a linkup mid-air, much less at night while burdened with tactical gear. And yet there he was, clasping my right wrist and I his, just as we had on two dozen practice jumps in the desert outside the Complex .
“No one’s going to believe this!” I said into my mask, hearing only garbled static in response .
The green disc of the altimeter on my left hand showed us descending past eleven thousand feet. The flat surface beneath us was much closer than that—clouds, I realized, rather than water. It rushed up to meet us as Jais tightened his hold on my wrist and I did the same to his before a hazy mist obscured my view .
I strained to read my altimeter through the fog and saw the needle descend past six thousand feet just as we passed through the bottom of the clouds. Somalia appeared below us, an endless black void beneath intermittent flickers of lightning .
No sooner had the ground materialized than Jais pulled his hands away from mine, yanked his rip cord assembly, and was plucked from my view by his deploying canopy .
My first thought was that my altimeter was off—we had planned to take it down to 3,500 feet before pulling—until I turned my head to see what he had been looking at as we cleared the clouds .
Behind me was a vast city, a thousand fires burning within the glowing windows of densely packed structures ending in three concave semicircles that marked the coastline .
I immediately pulled my rip cord, and my body jerked upright as I took control of the steering toggles. Frantically glancing behind me, I directed my canopy north, away from the ocean, while aiming for the outskirts of the city. As I lowered my night vision device in front of my eyes, the town appeared in murky shades of green. Gusts of wind blasted my canopy from the left, and I adjusted control inputs to counteract it as my body swung under the risers .
“Jais? Jais?” No distorted voice responded this time, not even static, as I desperately tried to identify a suitable landing area amid the rapidly approaching ground. The buildings were spread farther apart as I flew northward, but for every surge of forward momentum came a headwind that pushed me back or a crosswind that rocked my parachute sideways .
I dared not release my combat pack to dangle on its lowering line, fearing the volatile winds would turn it into a pendulum that would further complicate an already bad situation. Instead I chose to ride it into the ground, passing over a walled compound before pulling my toggles down to bleed off altitude. I descended into an open patch between buildings, flaring as much as possible in a hard, rolling landing right into a slick of mud .
What followed was a frantic rush to strip off my gloves and parachute in a desperate bid to free my assault rifle from its rigged configuration at my side. I tore at the quick-release folds in canvas straps, pawed at metal buckles, and writhed in a series of contortionist maneuvers while trying to remain prone and avoid detection .
Somewhere in this process, I heard a rippling flutter growing in volume over the wind and swung my night vision upward to see Jais descending under canopy to a running landing twenty-five meters away .
The rain had stopped, and a low growl of thunder rolled across the clouds as I finished stripping off my equipment. A necessary inconvenience in the aircraft, the cold weather clothing had become a sweltering death trap amid the sea-level air .
By the time I made it over to Jais, my own parachute stuffed into a kit bag now resting over my combat pack, his rifle was on the ground at his side while he gathered his canopy .
I took a knee a few feet away to provide security, scanning the green landscape of low rooftops and compound walls, looking for movement but seeing none .
I whispered, “We’re in Kismayo, aren’t we? Pretty much the al-Shabaab capital ?”
“Yup,” he replied, continuing
to bundle his chute .
“If my grasp of Somali geography is right, and I’d like to think that it is, we’re about a hundred miles southwest of our landing zone .”
“At least a hundred .”
I heaved an exasperated sigh. “Well, at least it’s better than landing in the ocean, right ?”
He shoved his parachute harness into the kit bag and then slung his combat pack over his shoulders. “That depends on whether or not we can find a car .”
* * *
Through my night vision, the landscape around us was an eerily familiar convergence of translucent emerald shapes marking primitive construction. Dirt roads and alleys collided and parted in a skewed mishmash that had evolved from footpaths over hundreds of years. The building density fluctuated without rhyme or reason as the outskirts of the city unfolded .
It just as easily could have been a dozen towns I had patrolled in Afghanistan, with the exception of the sporadic trees and power lines overhanging narrow streets. And while the night air was saturated with fresh rainfall, I knew what scents the next day’s scorching sun would bring: the residue of dust and livestock, sand and feces both animal and human, the smells of prehistory that had remained intact amid the world’s undeveloped and forgotten corners .
Jais and I walked toward the main road leading north out of town as sheets of fading rain came and went. I scanned for movement only to find that the passing storm was now, and only now, working to our advantage by keeping the population indoors. Stray dogs betrayed our presence, darting between buildings in scattered packs and barking noncommittally before melding into the shadows .
We had both taken the time to strip our cold weather gear and transfer our night vision devices to lightweight head mounts, but we still had to tote the kit bags holding our jump gear that made any progress on foot a burdensome endeavor .