The Crisis

by David Poyer

  He couldn’t hold it any longer. His sphincter let go. Screaming inside the helmet, he charged for the square of darkness. Proper exit. Check body position. As the last metal dropped away beneath his feet, as his guts emptied in a liquid stream, he tumbled, locking his knees back, spreading his arms. Batman, falling out of the Gotham sky.

  Facing the black and enormous Earth as it sucked him down.

  THE universe spun, then stabilized as he picked out a bright planet and slipped left and steadied on it. The roaring air buffeted his ears. The agony in his belly ebbed. He didn’t fall, he floated. His heart pumped harder, slamming in his ears, but under the mask he was smiling so hard it hurt. The desert shimmered for uncounted miles, burnished to mercury by the starlight, the horizon faintly visible as a blacker threshold where the stars began. Nothing better than a jump. Except a jump followed by a firefight.

  There’d be no nights like this in LA. Just chasing dreams other people owned. This was living. If he caught a bullet, or a grenade, like Sumo, it’d been worth it. To hang here, an eye suspended in infinite night.

  He just hoped nobody collided with him. He hated being first out, low man, but he was team leader. The stick would be following him, all the way down.

  The biggest danger after lack of oxygen was one SEAL tracking through another as they descended, either before or after deploying chutes. That’d happened to two team guys not long before, on a training mission. One had fallen right through another’s chute as it was opening. The first man had two thousand feet to think about how hard he was going to hit.

  Teddy had told them over and over again in the prebrief: spread out, don’t track on each other, open up like the fingers of a hand. “And I’m the fucking thumb, down here. None of this skydiving shit. I don’t care if we land a fucking mile apart, as long as we’re all walking when we get up off the ground.”

  The grin beneath the mask held, though. He swallowed, vibrating as if charged with a thousand volts. The old SEAL saying: “Hey, if it don’t suck, why would they need us to do it.” But this didn’t suck, it was great, dropping at 120 miles an hour, terminal velocity, fixed on Jupiter, through a black and silver night into the great swelling pit of Africa. He tilted his body and rotated 360 degrees, catching jagged darknesses that must be the southern mountains. Above him, less presences than hints, specters, other absences, falling swiftly as murderer angels banished from an already forgotten Heaven.

  Yeah, he was a fucking poet, fucking Dante or whoever. Get with the mission, Teddy. He checked the glowing screen on his wrist. They needed to come left. He reoriented to put the planet above his floating, buffeted right glove, and fell slanting so he made a hundred feet forward for every thousand feet they dropped. The altimeter flickered. They’d redesigned them with numbers, not needles. In hypoxia you couldn’t read a dial, but numbers still penetrated. But those were blurring too. He had oxygen, what was wrong? He slammed his wrist against his faceplate and squinted. Better.

  Thirty thousand. Every seven seconds, another thousand less. His sodden trou and underarmor were icy cold. Ignoring it, he made one more rotation. The air was thicker. Warmer. It slashed and cut, its voice a growl now where it had been shrill.

  When he looked up the horizon was rising around them like a hydraulically powered black cylinder. Now he gazed up at the stars from the bottom of a well. The tornado buffeted him but he rode it, arms outstretched as he plummeted. Twenty-six thousand.

  Five hundred.

  Twenty-five. He slammed his hand across his chest and grabbed the toggle, sensing the others above, behind, willing them and the cargo not to be in the wrong place when he popped. Got his fist tight, and yanked.

  The opening shock on the parafoils was much softer than with the T-10s he’d first trained on. He glanced up; the black squared-off arch arced reassuringly.

  A flash of motion against the stars. Cooper, if he was in the right place. Teddy examined the foil again, steering experimentally right, then left, making sure he had the stable sink regime that meant all the cells were inflated. It responded, so he concentrated on the GPS, lining himself up on the “roadway.” With a lift-to-drag ratio of three to one, from this altitude they had a covert run in to the LZ of almost fifteen miles. He wasn’t going to stretch it that far—the meteorology wasn’t favorable for the next couple of days—but they’d be able to fly in to less than five miles from the meet point.

  The next few minutes glided as smoothly past as the foils whispered through the air, trailing edges faintly luffing. He had a good sink rate. They were on course. Opening at twenty-five thousand, at this rate they’d have almost twenty-five minutes in the air.

  After a while he looked around. This time he caught two shadows, one to the left and another almost directly above and a little behind him, enough so he could glimpse it around his own canopy. He checked glide path and the sink rate again, obsessing a little, but you didn’t want to land short. Or go long, either.

  He took another little vacation in his head. Not exactly nodding off. Still monitoring the situation. But enjoying the view. Mile after mile of shining desert. Mountains, slowly rising to meet them below his dangling boots.

  Some time later he checked again, then focused on the ground, matching his approach course with what the surface wind had been briefed at. But the wind was never what they told you it would be, and he slipped right, slipped a little more, trying to sense it through the risers without being able to feel or see it. The ground rushed up, closer every moment, but it was just a confused jumble of shadow and starlight, much rougher than he’d expected given the long study of the overhead imagery.

  Then it was on him. Prepare to land . . . boots together, knees together and slightly bent, elbows tight to flanks, chin down. In the last seconds he scanned the ground to either side of what he’d picked out as his landing point, for movement or any hint of light.

  The rock came up at the last minute, hidden by some trick of starlight and shadow that made it suddenly jump into existence only two or three seconds before he slammed full length into it. He spilled air, trying to pull up. It reduced his forward speed but he couldn’t avoid the darkness that expanded to fill his mask.

  He hit hard, stamping his whole body backed by the load he carried into the rock face at thirty feet a second. Stunned, he still registered his faceplate cracking, something snapping in his upper chest, things breaking all over his body. He tried to grab the rock but his fingers slipped off. He stuck there for a moment, molded to stone, before the chute refilled and yanked him off, smashing him into another stone face, then dragging him along the ground before he fought through the stun and got his fingers hooked in the release assembly. Then he was prone, panting. Plastic shards fell from his face mask. The pain arrived, from shins and kneecaps, ribs and face.

  When he could breathe again and took stock he got back various bruises and scrapes, a hell of a lump on his shin, but apparently nothing serious broken. Unbelievable, hard as he’d hit. Apparently helmet, faceplate, and gear had taken most of the impact.

  He got to his knees and starting fighting the harness off. A rustle and scrape told him someone else had come down, but he was too busy to look. Working silently as possible, he shucked goggles and mask and bottle. In sixty seconds he had his pants down and was scrubbing them out with handfuls of sand. He pulled his skivvies off, scooped a hole and buried them.

  With belt buckled again he breathed easier. Sand grated his crotch, but he could live with that. He pulled his rifle from its padded case and swept a 360. Why did his left arm feel weak? A luffing of nylon grew in the sky; ended in a scuffing thud. A third SEAL safe on the ground.

  “Obie. Obie!”

  “Over here, Whacker. Who’s that over there?”

  A shifting shape, face black as the darkness. “Coop. See your buddy? Where’s Donoghe?”

  “Cheeks. Cheeks,” Teddy called, keeping it low. No answer. “Fuck, anybody see him?”

  “He was above me when we exited.”


  They’d come down on a sloping hillside bare of rocks, except for the one he’d managed to locate with his nose. They oriented with his GPS and their compasses, formed a search line, and began sweeping back along the line of descent. After a hundred yards Cooper spotted the luminescent tape on the cargo pod. This was excellent, but Teddy was getting worried. Granted nothing went as planned, but you didn’t start by losing a team member, even a dickhead newbie. In fact, you were supposed to take special care of first-timers. “Cheeks,” he yelled softly. “Donoghe! Where the fuck are you?”

  They froze as hollow metal hit rock some hundreds of feet away. It sounded like an aluminum tent pole, a distinct bong that floated on the wind like a bell. “The fuck was that,” Kowacki muttered.

  “Might be him.”

  “Might not be, either.”

  “D’you bury your shit?”

  “When’ve I had time? We just fucking got here.”

  “I want this landing site sterile. Sterile. Don’t say it.”

  “I wasn’t gonna say anything.”

  “You stay with the pod, Whacker. Coop, go downwind, I’ll come upwind.”

  “Man, somebody shit his drawers. You smell that?”

  “Goats,” Teddy said. He cleared his throat softly, hooked to the right, and came around downhill on where he thought the sound had come from.

  A kneeling shadow spaded industriously in the sand. Obie came up behind it and hissed, “That you, makin’ all the fuckin’ noise? Sounds like you’re putting up a fucking carnival tent.”

  “Why you all in a knot? There’s nobody out here.” Donoghe smoothed the soil over where he’d buried his chute and got to his feet. “Everybody make it?”

  Teddy told him yes, the cargo pod too. They circled back cautiously, dragged the pod to the base of Teddy’s rock, and buried it. Then all the other chutes. This took about half an hour, with two guys digging, the other two on security. Teddy felt something grating in his chest while he dug. His left arm felt weak. Fuck, had he broken his collarbone?

  When they had the site sanitized he took another GPS fix, to be super sure. They passed a bottle of water around, drinking all they could hold before they left the cache. He checked his watch. Time to get going. He set a rally point and thought about how to move. He decided against a bounding overwatch, what they’d normally use to cross relatively flat terrain, because of the danger of getting separated. They’d move in a compact wedge, together, trusting to speed and darkness for concealment.

  He rose to a combat crouch, weapon at low port, and signaled them out. The others oriented and moved after him, the only sound the crunch of boots in sand, the occasional click of a rock. From now on, no one would speak. They’d use hand signals or whispers.

  The mission was to see without being seen, kill without being killed. They had to use every minute before dawn to reach their position, do a hasty search, then a more detailed one. And if it seemed suitable, dig in.

  Trouble was, Al-Maahdi or his men had picked a meet site that presented almost no possibility of an overlook. Even on the map, it looked bare; satellite imagery—they hadn’t dared send anything as noisy as a Pioneer in—had backed that up.

  Plodding along, he reviewed the terrain, wondering how he was expected to get off a shot. They had a hide site picked out, but only inspection would tell if it was tenable.

  Some minutes on, his stomach spasmed again. He held up a fist and squatted. So did Kowacki. The wind was rising. That was all they needed, a dust storm. On the other hand, he could pick up the pace. That’d leave them more time to prep the hide.

  He rubbed his face with his free glove, jaw clenched. His belly felt like soft pieces were tearing out. Whatever the medic had slipped him, it wasn’t doing the job. He thought again about the little blue pills in his kit every SEAL carried on mission. Then decided to hold off. If he had what he suspected, he didn’t want to put his gut worms on speed.

  OVER a slight rise, down a slope; then the ground rose again. They saw only more desert. This was good, but the lack of cover worried him. If the sun came up before the hide was ready, they’d stand out like burning bushes.

  An hour and a half later they came off the last rise and down into the gentle saddle just north of their goal. He tripped and fell as the ground gave way; a canal, or ditch, concealed by drifted sand. The desert was a lighter green now in the NVGs, which meant they didn’t have long before light, so he picked up the pace, thighs grating with sand. Regular protrusions poked up as they walked along. At first he thought, Shit, mines, but finally recognized ancient stumps. He kept taking fixes and at last picked it up ahead: low walls like broken teeth.

  They’d discovered the ruined village on the overhead imagery. Then Henrickson had located it on an Italian map dated 1924. It lay north of the saddle, where there’d once been a road. No trace of one now. Just sloping desert rising to the foothills, and to the east to a flat-topped djebel, a lone hill. The meet site was a kilometer south, at what’d been a well or watering hole.

  He signaled Kowacki and Cooper to hold as a fire element and pointed at Donoghe. Follow me. They jogged forward twenty meters apart, and dropped when they reached the first wall. Lower than it’d looked in the NVGs, barely two feet of slumped stone. He waited ten minutes, then slowly raised his head and began observing, in overlapping fifty-meter strips. He cupped his ears and listened. Ten meters away Donoghe was looking and listening too.

  When they agreed it was clear he signaled Donoghe Stay put and low-crawled forward, cradling his rifle, belly dragging over sand and pebbles. As he passed the corner of a wrecked foundation something slithered out, hissing angrily. He froze and counted to sixty, staring at the sand close to his eyes. Distorted and blurred by the night vision, furrowed by the wind, it reminded him of the scallopings of the sea bottom near a surf line. When nothing else happened he altered his course a little, giving whatever it was a wide berth, and crawled on.

  Into the center of what once must have been a thriving little hamlet. Sand lay in smooth patches between foundations. An iron pipe stuck up at an angle. Rocks grated and shifted under his weight. He slithered to the highest point and surveyed again, a slow 180. Nothing. He signaled Donoghe forward, watching as his buddy passed the hand signal back, bringing the other two into the ruins.

  Fifty meters on he came to the outliers of the village and lay prone for a long time looking over what lay beyond. The dust obscured vision past seventy or eighty yards, but out to there was flat desert furrowed by the gullies he’d fallen into during the approach. Once this land had been irrigated. Now it was moonscape. Fine sand whipped his face. He hoped this wind died down before he had to shoot. He fumbled out his GPS, fumbled up his goggles, concealing the glowing screen against his chest. They were a klick and a half northwest of the meeting point. He didn’t like locating the hide in these ruins, the first place an enemy patrol would look. But in the absence of any other cover, it was the best he could do.

  A pebble rattled. Donoghe. He twisted and signaled him up.

  The newbie’s harsh breathing rustled in his ear. Teddy pointed down and covered his eyes. Muttered, “Hide site.”

  “Right here?”

  “In the corner. Start digging. But keep it fucking quiet, hear?”

  The folding shovels had plastic-coated blades, to keep the ring of metal on stone from carrying. Still, he winced as Donoghe sliced into the pile. “Belay that, fuck that, Cheeks. Just use your hands, till you’re down past the rocks.”

  A scrape, a rattle. Kowacki slid on his belly like a snake over the foundation and down into the lee. Teddy left Cooper in overwatch as the rest set to work. This had to be good. By the time the other side sent its patrols out, they had to be invisible. And the stars were fading.

  Still, they were in position, and even early. Today, tonight, then another morning. A low murmur from fifteen yards away told him Cooper had the satcom up and was transmitting their “on station” report. He farted painfully. He found the tube of
his camel and allowed himself two slow sips. Then took out his camo compact and used the baby wipes tucked inside to sponge off the greasy blackface.

  He began again, glancing from the shallow cups of paint to the sand and rock around him. A light tan base coat. A darker stripe to disrupt and conceal features the eye would otherwise pick up. Lightening areas that usually formed shadows; darkening nose, forehead, chin, what tended to shine. He scooped up sand and patted it there and there. He cupped the mirror and checked the result.

  He crawled to Donoghe and grabbed the shovel. They needed to go deep, and be totally concealed.

  The sky began to pale an ominous dusty tan.

  THE man all the world now calls Al-Maahdi stands in his cave cradling the massive stone embedded in his jaw. He can’t open his mouth anymore. Only sip goat’s milk and a little water. He mutters thickly, “No. I don’t want to take them.”

  Round him in the cave squat the four on whom he’s depended during the uprising. The jihad that went so well at first, then so badly. But for every fighter killed two more stepped forward. A wonder, a sign his path is blessed. He rubs his lower face and walks toward light and then back into darkness, where he sits at the desk. It’s all, aside from his rifle and the drab clothes and scuffed boots he wears, the headcloth he wraps as the nomads do, that he owns. Though he’s taken to wearing a green one, rather than the Waleeli black.

  He closes his eyes, and God whispers in the pain and darkness. He says he is His messenger, His chosen one. But is the Voice real? Is it truly Him?

  Juulheed stirs. His counselor and friend, turned in strife-filled months from wayward madman to tempered fighter. He wears a headwrap as a sling; he was wounded by American counter battery fire on a night raid, when they fired rockets against the airfield. Ghedi smiles. “Yes, speak, go on. Do you find fault with me too?”

  “No, my friend. I do as you order. Take the hostages or not, it’s all the same to me. I only think, we should not meet the Americans where we say we will.”