by Peter Nealen
The light changed, and Hancock pointed out the door. “Go, go, go!”
Brannigan grasped the edges of the door, feeling the buttstock of his G3 pushing back against his shoulder, then hurled himself out into the night.
He couldn’t see anything at first, but he wasn’t looking. He was just trying to stabilize himself, throwing his arms and legs wide, holding his hands and feet carefully to keep from spinning or tumbling. The weight of the rucksack strapped to his chest helped, dragging down like an anchor. He checked his altimeter one last time, waved off, and pulled.
Once again, to his relief, the chute billowed out above him, a ghostly, nearly invisible dark green rectangle in the image of his NVGs overhead. He couldn’t see much, but he could at least tell that his lines weren’t twisted, and the chute was all the way open, without tears or twists. He’d been a bit worried; he always was when someone else had packed his chute. There had not been the time or the facilities for the Blackhearts to pack their own in Sri Lanka.
He looked around. There was no moon, and the stars did not shed enough illumination to make up for it. The rest of the Blackhearts and their chutes were invisible in the dark, except for the infrared strobes blinking brightly in his NVGs. Hopefully the Burmese weren’t looking up with night vision; he hadn’t heard that they had many such devices, if they had any at all.
He started counting. Three of the strobes were actually below him; somebody had opened late. Not disastrous, but it could lead to some troubles as they got closer to the ground. If the low men were low enough, it could shorten their offset and lead them to miss the DZ altogether.
Craning his neck, he kept counting. He had to circle a little to make sure he spotted everyone, but finally breathed a sigh of relief. Sixteen strobes, and none of them plummeting like a stone toward the ground. Everyone’s chute had opened.
He tried to adjust his seat in his leg straps a little. Parachuting is never all that comfortable, though he’d lucked out and hadn’t gotten too badly pinched. The weight of his rucksack was pulling on his harness, helping to further try to compress his spine as he rode the parachute toward the ground.
It was even more uncomfortable because it was bitterly cold at that altitude. High-altitude jumpers usually wore several layers of warm clothing; the necessities of the operation meant that they had gone as thin as they dared. They couldn’t just jump in cammies; at thirty thousand feet, the average air temperature was around seventy degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Despite the warming layers he had on over his cammies and kit, the chill was still starting to bite, as the wind of his forward flight started to cut through the layers. His fingers were nearly numb where they gripped the steering toggles above his head.
After a while, he started to see the lower lights getting more and more separated. Whoever was down there, they were more than likely going to miss the DZ. He hoped they at least stayed together. He kept an eye on them as they cruised down toward the darkness of the Burmese highlands, hoping to see wherever they landed, the better to facilitate the rendezvous after everyone was down.
What felt like hours passed, in the rushing wind and the darkness. He knew that it was only around an hour and a half in the air, but the pain, the cold, and the sheer monotony made every second seem to drag. He began to look forward to the danger of the jungle, if only because it meant getting out of the harness and warming up.
In fact, it was already getting warmer, and he checked his altimeter again. The hills were getting closer, still almost invisible in the blackness, alleviated only by the faint lights of towns that glittered, small and far apart, across the wild, jungle hills and valleys.
They were passing through eight thousand feet AGL, or Above Ground Level. It was a rough approximation, give or take a few feet, but it was enough for the purpose.
Looking down, he could see that the three low men definitely weren’t going to make it all the way to the DZ. They were already nearly low enough that they would have to turn into the wind soon. Sure enough, after another couple of minutes, they were making their final turns into their last leg to land, having apparently given up on reaching the drop zone.
He couldn’t see much in the way of details, but took in the directions and distances to the nearest towns, compared to where the three were going to set down. They would have to move fast to link up.
Even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. Moving fast in the jungle is rarely even possible, and at night it becomes almost infinitely harder. Brannigan had spent most of his career oriented on fighting in the desert, but he had enough experience in forests and jungles to know that much.
Soon enough, the three strobes had fallen away behind, masked by terrain and vegetation, and then he had to focus on preparing for his own landing. He watched his altimeter carefully, to time his turns in toward the DZ and into the wind. Once on his final leg, he lowered his ruck and got ready to land. The DZ was ahead, a hopefully-abandoned clearing in the jungle, barely visible in the green glow of his NVGs.
He was lower than he’d thought. Judging his height by eye was tricky in the dark, and he felt his rucksack brush the treetops as he crossed the treeline and into the clearing. He waited just a few more seconds before he pulled down on the toggles to flare, slowing his forward momentum before dropping the last few feet to the ground.
Of course, before he could touch down, the weight of his ruck hit the ground and dragged, acting as an anchor and pulling him down sharply as the canopy spent the last of its forward momentum. He managed a decent parachute landing fall, half-rolling to absorb the shock as he hit, even as the grass and brush tried to tear at him through his thick outer clothing.
Without sparing a moment to catch his breath, he was shrugging out of his harness and getting his G3 freed from its straps and ready for action, even as more dark figures dropped out of the sky around him with billows of collapsing nylon.
They were in Burma.
***
Flanagan made sure he had his rifle out, his Z-Point turned on, and stayed on a knee next to his parachute for a long five minutes or so, motionless and listening. He was soaked in his own sweat, broiling in the thick clothing that had warded off the chill at altitude, drops falling off the end of his short black beard with faint pattering sounds on the vegetation beneath him, almost inaudible over the noises of the jungle night. He ignored the discomfort. Being hot, sweaty, and itchy was a small price to pay compared to giving his position away and getting shot.
Besides, he knew that he’d only just started to be hot, sweaty, and itchy. They were in the jungle, after all. Might as well get used to it.
Finally, it was apparent that no one had seen him come down, barely missing getting caught in the trees, to land in what looked very much like a dry, abandoned rice paddy. He supposed he should be thankful it wasn’t flooded, though he reflected that he was already wet to the bone from his own juices; landing in a flooded paddy wouldn’t have made that much difference.
He carefully set his G3 against his pack tray, and began dragging his chute in, careful to keep his movements slow and quiet. Twice the chute snagged on something, and it took a great deal of discipline to slowly and carefully get it freed and pull it the rest of the way to him. Finally, he had a rustling pile of nylon canopy and suspension lines, that he started packing into the kitbag that he’d had tucked into his harness. Stateside, in training, he would have thrown the kitbag over the top of his ruck and carried it back to the DZ team. Here, the chute’s job was finished, and he wouldn’t use it again. He was already looking around for a good spot to cache it. He didn’t have the time or the means to dig a deep enough hole to simply bury it.
There. Barely visible in the tropical darkness, he could see a fallen tree at the edge of the old paddy. It hadn’t gone all the way down; its upper branches appeared tangled in the rest of the canopy above, but it had tipped over far enough that its root ball had been torn free of the ground below it. There should be enough of a hollow under the ro
ot ball to stash the chute and get it covered over.
He just hoped there weren’t any snakes or banana spiders lurking in there. He hadn’t had time to go over the dangerous fauna of Burma, but he knew just enough about the jungle to know that there would be plenty.
He couldn’t see either of the other two who had pulled late, but he was pretty sure they were on the other side of the treeline to his east. He’d been able to see just enough to make out that there was an open space there, possibly even a road. Which presented problems of its own.
Flanagan hadn’t pulled late by accident. He’d gone out of the plane and seen Gomez in a flat spin below him, with Wade not far behind, trying to help the other man stabilize. Flanagan had left his own drogue in the pack tray as he’d dived toward them, only finally throwing it out and deploying his chute once the other two did. Two men alone in the jungle was not going to be a good thing, and while three wasn’t much better, he figured they had better odds of surviving and linking up with Brannigan and the rest with an extra gun or two.
With his chute pulled in and packed up, he pulled his ruck in by its lowering line and pulled it free of its drop bag. The drop bag would go in the hole with the chute, stuffed with his high-altitude gear. He gratefully stripped off the warm clothing, though the muggy night air hitting his sweaty cammies only did so much to cool him off. He pulled his helmet off, quickly drawing the “skullcap” NVG mount out of his pack, re-donning the night vision goggles, and then topping them off with a short-brimmed boonie hat. The helmet went into the drop bag.
Then he was slinging his ruck on his back, hanging his G3 on its sling in front of him, and dragging the chute and the drop bag toward the leaning tree.
Neither piece of kit was light, and he was working hard to stay quiet, so it was slow going. Quiet was a point of pride for Joe Flanagan, especially in the bush. And in the middle of the Burmese jungle, off the DZ and with hostiles presumably everywhere, it became even more a point of survival than pride.
As he’d hoped, the root system had been pried out of the clay soil, and there was a good-sized hollow underneath. It was still only barely large enough for both the parachute and the drop bag, but once he got several rotting fronds and some dirt piled over them, when he stood back a couple of feet, the gear was practically invisible. Of course, it might be different in daylight, but he hoped to be far away by then.
Taking up his rifle in both hands, he looked around, checking the compass attached to his watch to get his bearings. He had a proper lensatic in his pocket, but time was of the essence at the moment. Figuring out where Wade and Gomez should be, he started through the jungle.
It wasn’t quiet. The chirps of insects, cries of night birds, and hoots, barks, and moans of all sorts of other nocturnal animals served to disguise the swish of his wet cammies through nearly as wet vegetation, along with the occasional, unavoidable, snapped twig. Down there under the trees, with even the faint light of the stars that made it through the broken cloud cover shut off by the canopy overhead, he was moving more by feel than by sight. The image in his NVGs was dark, nearly useless.
The night noises of the jungle masked his movement, but also meant he could not hear what was happening only a few hundred yards away, where he thought he’d seen Wade and Gomez land. He resisted the urge to rush forward. Time was crucial, but so was patience.
He finally came to the edge of the woods and slowly took a knee, scanning the open space in front of him. He was at the bottom of a wide draw that ran down from higher up in the hills, leading south toward the town they’d passed over on the final approach. The jungle was mostly cleared along the valley floor, and there was the thin, pale line of a road running along the depression.
Movement on the other side of the road caught his eye. It took a moment’s scrutiny in the dim illumination to see that one of the other Blackhearts had gotten his parachute tangled in the trees, and one of them was trying to get it down. He couldn’t see the other, so presumably either Gomez or Wade was on security, while the other tried to get the chute down.
He was about to signal them when something stopped him.
There were voices coming from farther down the valley. Only now did he realize just how relatively quiet the jungle noises really were; whoever was down there was presumably just chatting, but it sounded shockingly loud in the night.
He couldn’t tell if they were speaking Burmese or Mandarin; even if they’d been closer, he probably still wouldn’t have been able to tell. He knew neither language well enough to even recognize it by casual listening. It didn’t matter, anyway. Whoever was down there was a threat. Either they were militia or government-sponsored paramilitaries, in which case being spotted meant getting in a fight and possibly killed, or they were locals out for a stroll in the middle of the night, in which case they might spot the chute and alert the militia or the paramilitaries. Which would probably lead to being hunted, then getting in a fight and possibly killed.
He faded back into the vegetation. There was no time to link up with Wade and Gomez. No time to hash out a plan, or even just try to get away from the chute that would have to be left in the tree. He had to act, and as quiet and reserved as he might often seem to his compatriots, Joe Flanagan was a man of action at his core. He just didn’t talk about it much.
Stalking through the trees and brush, he worked his way south, down the valley, toward the voices. They were going to get a lot closer to Gomez and Wade before he could get close enough to do what he had in mind, but that was unavoidable. Surprise was going to be his only advantage, and he didn’t dare risk losing it.
He could see them now, in brief glimpses through the trees. It looked like about half a dozen men, trudging casually up the road. They would have been little more than silhouettes in the darkness, except for the pair of glowing coals that lit them up in his NVGs like torches. They were smoking something. He didn’t know what and he didn’t care. As long as it was destroying their own night vision and lighting them up for him, it only made his job easier.
He stopped and sank to his belly, just inside the thicker vegetation. The group was now only about a hundred yards from him. They were relaxed; whoever they were, they obviously thought they were on friendly ground.
They were also armed. In the glow from the cheroot coals, he could just make out the silhouettes of AKs.
He was almost ready to engage when things suddenly changed.
One of the men near the back of the group suddenly barked something, and the chatter ceased. Both cheroots were dropped to the road and crushed out with boots. Rifles were lifted, not pointed at anything, but the group was evidently more alert, ready for action.
Did they see me, or hear me? No, they’re not looking over here. The chute, maybe? Regardless, he was now committed. Even if all that had happened was that they had just crossed an invisible line of departure that he didn’t know about, and now considered themselves in enemy territory, they were still heading toward Wade and Gomez, and were on the alert. If they reached that hung-up chute, it was all over.
Slowly, carefully, he rolled to his side and pulled one of his HG 84 grenades out of its pouch on his vest. Shaped like a barrel, it weighed about the same as any other frag he’d thrown, whether it was the old M67s in the military, or the Russian F1s they’d used on Khadarkh. He hefted it, trying to judge distances in the dark, then pulled the pin and flung it over his head.
The ping of the spoon flying free sounded horrifically loud in his ears. He flattened himself to the ground, hoping that his targets stayed dumb for only a couple of seconds.
He heard a muttered exclamation, then the grenade detonated right at the leading man’s feet. The tooth-rattling wham vibrated through the ground and fragments whickered with deceptively soft hisses through the foliage overhead.
Flanagan picked his head up, finding the red dot of his Z-Point with his NVGs, trying to find targets through the settling cloud of smoke and flying mud.
The first three men were down and
presumably dead. None of them appeared to be moving. All the rest were down flat, but while several seemed to be wounded, the man at the rear was clearly on his belly behind his rifle, searching for where the grenade might have come from.
Flanagan shot him. The rifle boomed in the sudden silence left behind after the grenade blast, and flame stabbed from his muzzle, though slightly masked by the vegetation he was lying in. He put two rounds each into the still-moving shapes. One shuddered and was still. The man in the rear simply stopped moving. The last one started keening, a high-pitched, mindless sound of an animal in pain. He probably didn’t have long.
Squirming backward through the vegetation, Flanagan beat a hasty but quiet retreat, making sure he was nearly fifty yards back in the jungle before he got to his feet and started moving back up the hill.
***
There was no movement on the other side of the road when he returned to where he’d seen the hanging chute. It wasn’t all the way down yet; he could still see the last corner hooked on a branch. He was pretty sure that meant that Wade and Gomez were still on-site, but had gone still and silent when they’d heard him spring his ambush.
He reached up and triggered the IR illuminator on his NVGs twice. Then he moved to the right and waited, barely breathing. He wasn’t too worried about getting shot at by either Wade or Gomez; Wade seemed like he was wound a little tight, but he hadn’t screwed much of anything up during training. Gomez was downright unflappable, from what he’d seen. He honestly didn’t think he’d heard the man utter more than a couple dozen words since he’d met him.
But under the circumstances, he wasn’t going to get complacent. Especially not when he’d just left a half-dozen men dead or dying on the road below.
After what felt like a lot longer than the couple seconds that it actually took, an answering IR flash came from the other side. He returned it, then got up and dashed across the road, slowing again as he got to the thicker vegetation.
“Did you hear the firefight down there?” Wade asked in a harsh whisper as Flanagan turned and took a knee next to him.