by Jason Kasper
When the loadmaster moved toward the rear of the aircraft, Reilly followed her.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m Reilly.”
She stopped and turned to him.
“Vanessa. So, you guys got a fun night lined up?”
“Just taking out the trash.”
“Nice. Happy hunting.”
“You guys are based out of Charleston, right?”
She nodded at the plane.
“That’s what it says on the tail.”
“Cool. I’m not far from there, living in North Carolina. Maybe we can meet up back in the States. You know, grab a beer or something.”
“Sure, sounds great,” she said. Reilly’s face brightened until she continued, “Only I don’t think my girlfriend would approve.”
“Your—right. Got it. I’ll just stick to flinging myself into freefall, then.”
“Probably a good idea.”
She continued walking, disappearing up the ramp and into the back of the plane as Reilly stood alone.
Worthy sauntered up to him.
“You couldn’t tell she was a lesbian from a mile away? Or are you really that optimistic?”
Reilly gave a sad shrug. “Maybe a little of both.”
“All right,” David called out, “let’s load up and get hooked up for our pre-breathe.”
Hoisting their gear off the ground, Reilly and the team began shuttling their equipment up the ramp and into the cavernous aircraft interior.
7
Forty thousand feet over Turkey
The C-17’s vibrating cabin was dimly lit in red, casting my team in an eerie crimson glow. At this point I could identify them by size alone; other than that, we were indistinguishable from one another in helmets and night vision devices flipped up on their mounts. The lower halves of our faces were concealed by oxygen masks, our air hoses plugged into a central console for an hour-long pre-breathing routine to eliminate nitrogen from our bloodstreams and reduce the risk of decompression sickness.
Our parachute harnesses were a complex array of webbing and buckles, rigged with rucksacks resting on our thighs and weapons strapped to our sides, barrel down. I checked the glowing altimeter on my left wrist, finding that we’d leveled off at forty thousand feet for our upcoming border crossing. I was already sweating under several layers of insulated clothing, which weren’t optional at our current altitude.
The pilot transmitted in my ear, “Five minutes to Sally.”
I keyed my radio and responded, “Ground Force Commander copies.”
Then I held up one hand with the fingers outstretched, seeing the rest of my team was already doing the same to ensure everyone registered the time hack. “Sally” was the arbitrarily chosen brevity code for our border crossing, indicating that we were about to cross into Syrian airspace.
The female loadmaster walked past us, wearing a helmet with an oxygen mask and an emergency parachute but no combat gear. Lowering herself into a drop seat near the front of the cargo bay, she put on a seatbelt and tightened it.
This was the moment of truth—if Syrian radar “painted” our plane as we approached the border, the pilots would need to initiate the fastest turnaround of their flying career. And in the event that the Syrians launched a missile, our aircraft would drop flares and chaff while conducting a series of puke-worthy evasive maneuvers.
I tightened the seatbelt across my waist and looked at my teammates. From what little I could see of their eyes, they looked emotionless, utterly focused on the mission at hand.
The closer we got to the border, the less we talked. Our chatter naturally fell away to silence, preparation for updates surrounding our operation. Syrian air defenses catching us in the act. A change in the strength or direction of wind affecting where we’d have to jump. An intel update that our target had moved to a different location. A last-minute abort code from Duchess.
It was the last option I feared most. We’d already let BK slip through our fingers once, and were extremely lucky that he’d shown up again—luckier still that Duchess had allowed us to conduct one more operation against him. The most elite military assets had their hands full chasing top terrorist leadership, who were well-hidden and likely had several successful operations under their belt. People like BK were the up-and-comers, the young and intelligent next generation of terrorist visionaries.
And that’s why my team existed.
It hadn’t been my choice to draft our charter, of course. At the end of my mercenary career, I found myself at a lucky intersection with fate. Unbeknownst to me, a new presidential finding authorized this particular brand of covert action.
The president decided it was time to take the gloves off, to identify the rising generation of terrorist leadership—the future Osama bin Ladens—long before they rose to notoriety, and with it the access to an underground terrorist network that could hide them for years, if not a decade or more. Advances in the world of post-9/11 threat targeting had led to intelligence on rising terrorists outpacing the military’s counterterrorism capacity to deal with them. Presenting a slight complication to this new reality was the standing executive order prohibiting assassinations, a document that had been signed by every president since forever, including the current one.
So the president had simply written a new executive order, one that bypassed the previous. In this new paradigm, dumb terrorist leaders got a free pass. It was the smart ones, those with immense leadership potential, who were selected for annihilation before they got the chance to massacre innocent civilians. Of course, this had to remain deniable, so the CIA—and Duchess in particular—found themselves ordered to expand their capacity from hunting only the top terrorist leadership to removing the rising stars flagged to become the next bin Laden.
This should have been a dream shot, but, of course, there was a catch.
Using a particularly sophisticated piece of malware, the Chinese government hacked the US database for top-secret security clearances, gaining exhaustive data on the names, faces, and careers of both Tier One military operators and members of the CIA’s own Special Activities Center. The risk of capture for a qualified shooter now included US embarrassment and, more importantly, exposure for violating their own public stance against assassination.
But Duchess had also been tracking a transnational criminal syndicate that had recently been destroyed—and found that some of its mercenary force had survived, along with a clue that led her to me.
For her, it was a merger of necessity. My team represented people who’d officially left the military long ago but continued conducting global special operations as mercenaries. If we were captured behind enemy lines, not even China could prove the United States had sent us.
For me and my team, it was our one and only opportunity to continue doing what we did best.
The pilot transmitted, “One minute to Sally.”
I held up an index finger to my teammates and replied, “GFC copies.”
Anticipating a sudden turnaround or evasive maneuvers, I was met with a wave of relief as we instead continued cruising forward in a thus-far anticlimactic flight.
Then the pilot spoke again. “We are Sally at this time, situation Ice.”
We’d crossed over the Syrian border, and the word “Ice” indicated what we all knew from our continued level flight: there was no radio chatter from Syrian air defense frequencies, no radar contact or incoming missiles. A mission abort prior to our jump was now extremely unlikely; no one wanted to risk repeating this little incursion if we didn’t have to. Simply conducting a parachute jump in the first place was already a last resort for infiltration due to the sheer number of complications and variables involved. But we’d already burned one Agency ratline on our previous attempt to kill Bari Khan, and since he’d inexplicably remained in the same area, jumping was our only option.
My heart rate spiked when the pilot spoke again.
“Preparing for descent.”
I braced myself in my seat, seeing my
teammates do the same a moment before the bottom fell out.
The plane dove in a roaring descent that caused my stomach to leap into my throat, accelerating until the pilots finally pulled up to level flight. Glancing at my altimeter, I saw we were at 24,000 feet, the altitude we’d maintain until bailing out of the aircraft.
Undoing my seatbelt, I tightened the straps of my rucksack for mobility rather than comfort, then turned on my oxygen bailout bottle before disconnecting from the console as the rest of my team did the same. Worthy was seated beside me, and he checked my oxygen pressure gauge, then examined my parachute pin and automatic activation device before tapping my helmet to indicate I was good to go.
I pushed myself to a standing position. The loadmaster followed suit, walking toward the closed ramp as I waddled after her under the bulky weight of my combat gear, looking considerably less graceful as I prepared for jumpmaster duties.
Stopping short of the ramp, the loadmaster placed her hand on a wall-mounted switch and communicated with the pilots on their internal aircraft frequency. I pulled my goggles over my eyes, then flipped down my night vision device and turned it on.
The cargo’s dim red glow gave way to bright green. I cast a backward glance at my team, their torsos blazing with infrared chemlights that were visible under night vision. Turning to the loadmaster, I saw her give me a thumbs-up. I returned the gesture, and she activated the switch.
With a great shuddering rumble, the C-17’s metal ramp began to lower.
A sliver of night sky became visible, widening into a gaping maw as an arctic blast of roaring wind spilled inside. The desert at ground level was relatively cold at night, but with a temperature drop of three and a half degrees Fahrenheit for every thousand feet of altitude, the sky outside the plane was freezing.
The ramp settled into its lowered position, exposing the Syrian landscape beyond.
I walked toward the edge, the howling wind growing in volume until I stood at the end of the ramp, surveying the world four and a half miles beneath us.
Glittering patches of villages were arrayed at irregular intervals, cut by swaths of vegetation delineating rivers and crops spread across the desert sands. At this height I could make out only the largest landmarks, but the pilots—guided by the aircraft’s mission planning software—would be the ultimate authority on when we jumped.
A red light flashed on at the edge of the ramp, and a moment later, the pilot transmitted a wind speed advisory, followed by, “Time on target, six minutes.”
I relayed this to my team, who began buddy-checking each other’s parachutes before Worthy gave me a thumbs-up, signaling the all-clear. I returned the gesture, then gave the command for them to stand up before watching my team struggle to their feet. They tightened the straps on their combat gear, donned their goggles, and activated their night vision devices. Ian was the last to complete this sequence, fumbling to tighten his rucksack straps until Reilly finally smacked his hand away and did it for him.
Ian was fully qualified to conduct freefall operations, of course, but there was a difference between completing tasks in training, no matter how realistic, and executing on an actual combat operation. Still, after the time we’d spent doing full-equipment rehearsals in a wind tunnel, it was a little early in the mission for Ian’s nervousness to be on display.
“Two minutes to TOT,” the pilot transmitted. I confirmed the call, seeing my team hold up two fingers to acknowledge.
I instructed my team to move to the rear, watching them shuffle toward me as the pilots throttled back power and lowered the flaps, causing the aircraft to lurch as it slowed for our exit. My team assembled a meter away from the hinge of the ramp and stopped, making last-minute adjustments to their equipment before freefall.
“One minute,” the pilot called.
I caught a glimpse of Reilly waving goodbye to the loadmaster, ending his gesture with a solemn salute. She shook her head at him, then directed her focus to me.
Then the pilot transmitted, “Fifteen seconds.”
I called out, “Stand by” and my team responded with a thumbs-up, moving forward onto the ramp. Turning to the open air, I stepped forward to within a foot of the steel edge hovering over oblivion and looked over the end of the ramp at the wrinkles of hills and canyons leading toward my team’s last ambush point for BK. If he hadn’t been suddenly escorted by two vehicles and a small army of fighters, we wouldn’t be here.
But that was combat, I thought—random, unpredictable, chaotic—and in a way, it made more sense to me than my suburban existence in the States.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, sensed the men assembled in a tight pack behind me as the final seconds ticked away.
I was breathing faster now, as I was sure we all were—standing on a slab of metal 24,000 feet over foreign land, a surreal position made more so by the roar of the wind, the phantasmal green view through our night vision, the fact that we were assembled to conduct the US-sanctioned targeted killing of a terrorist in Syria.
I turned my night vision to the side, canting my head to observe the glowing red light with my naked eye. My heart felt like it was floating in my chest, the weight of my combat equipment seeming impossibly heavy in the last moment before the light blinked off and the green one beneath it illuminated.
The pilot called, “Go, go, go.”
I stepped off the ramp, flinging myself into the space beyond.
The chaos of exiting a high-performance aircraft took hold then: an overwhelming assault on the senses, the gale-force wind heated by scalding exhaust from the plane’s four turbofan engines as my view was filled with the green shadows of the Syrian landscape.
The only control I could maintain for the time being was body position—arms outstretched, knees bent while arching my pelvis downward. The wind blew me vertical and head-down as the sound of the plane faded, replaced by the rumbling hum of my body splitting the air below.
It took a full ten seconds for me to reach terminal velocity, and after assuming a stable freefall position I dipped a shoulder to spin a 360 turn and search for my teammates.
They were dropping to reach me, falling like black spots out of the green sky through my night vision, the blazing glare of their chemlights marking their bodies. I couldn’t make out who was who at present, save Reilly due to his size. But I counted all four, a good start, with one man higher than the rest, struggling to descend—had to be Ian, I thought.
Cancer reached me first, effortlessly dropping to hover a few meters off my right side. Reilly was next, falling like a stone as he overshot, dropping low before flattening his arch to rise level with Cancer and me. My hands and feet were already tingling with a frostbite-like sensation amid the frigid air that penetrated every layer of my cold weather gear.
I looked up, watching Worthy drift gradually toward us, making minor adjustments with his arms and legs to complete the semicircle formation as we faced one another. Terminal velocity didn’t feel like falling; it was more like floating on a burbling pillow of air, all stability maintained through adjustments to a foundational body position.
Checking the luminescent dial of my altimeter, I saw we were descending through seventeen thousand feet. Ian was still flying high above us, working his way down with a hard arch. It took him another twenty seconds to fly into the remaining slot of our circle, by which time we were crossing thirteen thousand feet—the jump altitude for a normal civilian skydive.
Over my radio earpiece, I could hear my teammates breathing oxygen through their masks. Other than that, we kept silent; until we landed, the frequency was reserved for critical communications—a missing jumper, a malfunctioning oxygen system, a strap of combat equipment loosening and sending someone into a flat spin.
But our freefall formation remained intact and the scene almost tranquil despite the cold and howling wind. We held our positions facing one another, intending to stay close until it was time to deploy parachutes; at this altitude, winds were extreme, and any break
in visual could cause us to drift far off course. I glimpsed the luminescent dial of the altimeter on my hand—we were at eight thousand feet and falling fast.
At four thousand feet, I brought my hands in front of my face and began waving them to the side. My teammates mirrored the gesture as we spun away from one another, turning away from our center point.
I locked my legs out and pulled my arms close to my sides, bending at the waist and cupping the air to begin tracking forward. In this way our circle formation turned into a starburst outward, each man gaining as much horizontal distance from one another as he could.
My hands were almost completely numb with cold as the audible altimeter began chiming in my helmet, and I broke out of my tracking position, resuming my previous arch to initiate my pull sequence.
Grabbing the ripcord pillow on my right side, I yanked it to full-arm extension and began a mental count. One thousand, two thousand—my body jerked upright, legs swinging forward as my main parachute deployed and filled with air.
Then I was suspended in a quiet sky, looking upward to see the squared corners of my rectangular canopy, fully inflated and flying cleanly forward. I quickly checked the airspace around me, prepared for an emergency turn to avoid collision with one of my teammates—but I was free and clear, and looked down to identify the flat patch of our landing area.
Activating the infrared strobe light on my harness, I grabbed my steering toggles and carved smooth ninety-degree turns to ensure my parachute was steerable. Raising my arms to resume full flight, I swung a right turn to locate my teammates as I transmitted, “Suicide, good canopy.”
I made out my teammates’ blinking infrared strobes, counting three dark parachutes as they reported in sequence.