by Bentley, Don
As I broke through fifteen hundred feet, I could smell the uniquely Syrian scents of wood fires, open sewers, and animal dung. While I was floating above the earth, it had been easy to forget what lay beneath me as I concentrated on flying my chute. But this close to the ground, the devastated nation’s medieval nature was readily apparent.
Sweat trickled down the back of my neck as I turned my head left and right in slow pans, searching for landmarks. I detested this part of the jump. From here on in, I had to ignore the looming collision of flesh and earth in favor of flying my chute, even as the ground grew larger in an unstoppable rush.
After a panicked moment, I found the solitary structure I’d marked as my initial approach point. I doglegged into a turn and saw the field just beyond. Passing through five hundred feet, I sailed over the structure on silent wings and then pulled down on my left toggle, turning my chute into the wind.
For the first time in my nearly twenty-five-minute flight, I felt the wind on my face. Fixing my attention on the centermost portion of the field, I fought the butterflies that ground rush always generated. A final scan showed the ground free of obstacles, and then I was committed, flying by instinct rather than by instruments. The point on the ground I’d designated as my landing spot swam toward me. I yanked downward on both toggles, flaring the canopy to cushion my landing, then sank the last twenty feet.
It was then that I noticed that one portion of the field was a little taller than the rest. A pile of stones stood about six inches tall and four feet wide. I had no idea why the stones were there. Perhaps they’d been a marker for an ancestral burial ground or were the remnant of an abandoned fence or a onetime livestock pen. In truth, their purpose didn’t really matter.
What did matter was that the jumble of rocks was full of jagged edges, and I was heading straight for it.
THIRTY-ONE
I jerked hard on the toggles, trying to gain the bit of lift I’d need to skim over the top of the rock pile. But in that same instant, the brisk breeze that had been battering my face for the final portion of my approach dropped away.
In Syria, wind was a fickle thing.
I wasn’t an aeronautical engineer or pilot, but I didn’t have to be to understand what happened next. Just as with an airplane lining up for its final approach, the headwind had been providing me with lift. When the breeze vanished, my lift disappeared right along with it. Instead of sailing up and over the jumble of stones, I careened toward it like a child belly-flopping from the community pool’s high dive. I shot out my left leg to keep from impaling myself.
Then flesh met stone at ten miles per hour.
The results were predictable, if not pleasant. My ankle snapped with an audible crack. I saw stars and passed out. When I came to, I was lying facedown in the dirt. The wind had returned with a vengeance, and my inflated parachute was dragging me across the field like a makeshift plow.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it—this was not a new scenario for me, or any paratrooper, for that matter. Ever since the first man had trusted his life to a backpack full of silk, jumpers have been knocking themselves unconscious in the drop zone. Normally, the fix for this predicament was fairly straightforward: Grab hold of your risers, pull yourself to your feet, and gather your parachute. But a simple fix for a simple problem becomes infinitely more complex when a shattered ankle is added to the equation. Ignoring the throbbing agony already radiating up my leg, I tried to get to my feet—or, rather, one foot.
I failed.
I managed to push myself somewhat upright, bearing the weight on my right leg while using my left as an awkward pivot point. I was in the process of reaching for my risers when the wind gusted. In an instant, my chute went from a mostly deflated, docile creature to a bucking bronco. Once again, I was facedown, plowing my way through the rocky soil.
At some point in every mission, an operator has a moment in which he wonders why exactly he bothered to climb out of bed that morning. My moment had just arrived.
Gritting my teeth, I grabbed the toggles with both hands, rocked my weight backward, and tried to spin into the chute. I wanted to harness my parachute’s forward momentum like a water-skier used the boat’s motion to pull himself from the water.
It didn’t work.
The wind gusted again, and I fell to the ground, wrenching my broken ankle as the parachute snapped merrily along, dragging me behind it like an enormous kite’s misshapen tail.
My situation was rapidly deteriorating from comical to potentially deadly. My last scan of the LZ at altitude hadn’t revealed a human presence, but neither had it revealed the collection of stones that had ruined my ankle. I couldn’t afford to keep flopping around like a beached whale, hoping that one of the four factions of fighters who called this neck of the woods home didn’t stumble across me.
Time for plan B.
I reached for the red cutaway pillow with my right hand, then pulled it across my body like I was throwing a jab toward someone on my left. The parachute released, sailing away in a crackle of fabric.
My forward motion stopped.
Spitting out a mouthful of dirt, I turned into a seated position and flipped down my night-vision goggles. The world swam back into view, rendered in comforting shades of green. After a moment of searching, I found what I was looking for and breathed a sigh of relief.
There was a reason why I hadn’t just cut my parachute free earlier. Without me to hold it earthbound, the lightweight chute would have sailed through the air, wrapping itself across the first obstacle it encountered. That might have been okay if the chute came to rest somewhere nearby. But it was just as likely that the wind would carry the parachute far out of reach or, even worse, tangle it around a telephone pole or tree. If that happened, not only would I be unable to retrieve the parachute with my broken ankle, but the first person who saw a two-hundred-seventy-foot length of silk snapping in the breeze would raise an alarm.
There were many aspects of my presence I could disguise or explain away. An errant parachute wasn’t one of them.
Fortunately, the parachute had come to rest against the man-made structure I’d used as the initial point for my flight plan. The squat one-story building was manufactured from stone and appeared to be a barn or some sort of storage shed. Even better, it looked unoccupied.
In a final stroke of good luck, my facedown voyage across the field hadn’t been entirely in vain. The wind had carried me away from the stone wall that had been my nemesis and toward the structure where my parachute now rested, about fifty meters away. The distance would be no stroll in the park, but neither was it insurmountable. Things were starting to look up.
And that was when the dull bass thumping of rotor blades echoed from somewhere behind me.
The distinctive sound of helicopter blades churning through thin desert air can’t be mistaken for anything else. For me, this sound had often been the herald of good news. Sometimes, the good news came in the form of a high-pitched whistle as an AH-6 Little Bird gunship nosed into a rocket run, obliterating a nest of Iraqi insurgents. Other times, it was the mature-sounding bass of a UH-60 Black Hawk flaring for a landing in preparation to take me home.
Either way, I was programmed to associate the whump whump whump of helicopter rotor blades with something positive.
But not today.
Today, all that was good had ended at the edge of Russian-controlled airspace some twenty miles behind me. For the first time in my life, the helicopter rapidly closing on me was not from Team America. Just that quickly, my night turned from bad to potentially fatal. Scanning the sky with my night-vision goggles, I whispered my second prayer of the night.
According to my premission briefing, there were almost as many helicopter variants in theater as there were factions of armed men trying to kill one another. While the whumping of rotor blades wasn’t exactly a happy sound, it
wasn’t necessarily my death knell, either.
The vast majority of helicopters were transports. These rotorcraft were either lightly armed with defensive machine guns or fitted with rudimentary munitions known as barrel bombs. Barrel bombs were fantastic for terrorizing urban centers, but much too valuable to waste on a single man standing in a farmer’s field. The helicopter’s door gunner might take a potshot or two, but otherwise I should be fine.
Unfortunately, the steel monster I spotted thrashing through the air wasn’t a transport. It was a dual-rotor monstrosity of Russian make. Officially, it was known as the Ka-52 Alligator. Unofficially, we called it death personified, and it’s caninelike snout was lined up on me.
I froze, watching the helicopter edge closer, praying its thermal optics were fixed somewhere else. Anywhere else. After all, I was still just one man standing in an uninteresting field. Surely the Syrian battlefield contained more lucrative targets. But apparently, the ex-commies piloting the killing machine were having a slow night. I’d no sooner located the helicopter than twin flashes of light split the darkness to the accompaniment of artificial thunder.
Rockets.
I dove headlong for the ground. Not only had the damn chute wrecked my ankle, but it had also left me perfectly equidistant between the two structures that might have provided me with protection—the ankle-breaking wall and the parachute-snagging barn. Facedown again, I had just enough time to register the fragrant smell of cow manure before the detonating warheads split my world in two.
The explosion tossed me in the air like a rag doll, my left foot flopping from side to side as white-hot lightning bolts pulsed through my leg. The shock wave hammered my body, driving the air from my lungs like a body blow from Smokin’ Joe Frazier. When I came to my senses, my ears were ringing, the night-vision goggles were gone, and I was dry heaving.
Wiping the bile from my mouth, I poked my head up and tried to locate the helicopter. Big mistake. Dual images of everything but the gunship greeted me. I turned my head to the side, just in time to eject another burning stream of bile. A concussion and a broken ankle in less than twenty minutes. This operation was going to be one for the record books.
The thumping rotors returned. I looked up to see the inky outline of my nemesis almost directly overhead. The helicopter was sliding in and out of the thin cloud cover like a circling shark.
The first pair of rockets had gone long, both of them detonating against the barn’s wall. The pilot wouldn’t make the same mistake a second time. I’d seen enough gun camera footage to know that faking dead was more effort than it was worth. Modern gunships sported thermal optics. There was no way to confuse the heat signature of a man whose heart was still beating with that of a rapidly cooling corpse.
The helicopter pilot knew I was still alive, and he was coming back to finish the job, plain and simple.
I wish I could say that some brilliant bit of tactical insight floated into my mind or that I pulled my pistol and defiantly squeezed off my magazine at the looming angel of death, but neither of those things happened. My body was bruised and broken, and the gunship had me dead to rights. Escape was impossible, so I didn’t try. Instead, I raised both hands and flipped my Russian executioner the bird. I might have also screamed, Come and get me, motherfucker, because, well, why not?
And that’s how I know that God has a sense of humor. Even though He’d conveniently ignored my previous prayers, the dual-middle-finger salute apparently got the Almighty’s attention. As the helicopter rolled its stubby wings level in what I knew was the pilot’s final adjustment before unleashing another rocket volley, a stream of yellow tracers arced into the sky. The bullets came from somewhere to my right, reaching for the helicopter like a probing tentacle.
The gunship rolled right and nosed up, pirouetting toward the threat with a nimbleness that belied its seventeen-thousand-pound bulk. Firing rapidly, the helicopter unleashed four or five rocket pairs, each launch smashing through the sound barrier with an earsplitting roar. A second stream of ground-based tracers joined the first, but the Russians were undeterred. The gunship fired another salvo of rockets while adding its 30mm cannon to the mix even as one of its engines began belching flames where a crimson stream of tracers hit home. The helicopter wobbled, righted itself, and then limped out of view, a cloud of greasy smoke trailing behind it.
At this point, I genuinely didn’t know who to root for: the Russian pilots who’d just tried to kill me or the ISIS sympathizers who would surely do so if given the chance. Maybe both the Russians and ISIS would have to get in line, because once again, Abir and her mother were greeting me. The two were standing by the barn’s entrance, draped in shadows. Abir gave an excited wave when she caught my eye, and she squirmed in her mother’s embrace. The broad smile stretching across her chubby face certainly didn’t feel malevolent, but before I could return her wave, she and her mother were gone.
The hallucinations were appearing with greater frequency, but I had no idea what they meant. Was my subconscious trying to tell me something? If so, what? That I was on the right track? Or that I was edging ever closer to a complete break with reality? I just didn’t know. But what I did know was that I needed to get out of the field before the gunship crew decided to give up on the machine-gun nest in search of easier prey.
Gritting my teeth, I crawled toward the stone barn on my hands and knees, dragging my broken ankle.
THIRTY-TWO
Five agonizing minutes later, I made it to the barn’s entrance. Or at least the barn’s new entrance, courtesy of the pair of 80mm high-explosive rockets that had slammed into the wall. The soil in front of the opening was littered with stone fragments mixed with razor-sharp metal shards.
When a rocket detonated, the warhead’s ten pounds of high explosives sent chunks of superheated steel from the rocket’s casing scything through the air in every direction. I was impressed that the wall was still standing. And while crossing the minefield of metal and rock slivers on my hands and knees hadn’t been a lot of fun, it beat the alternative. It could have been my body shredded instead of the stone.
As with many things, I’ve found that happiness was often a matter of perspective. As I crawled into the barn, my perspective changed for the better. A battered car was resting against the far side of the dimly lit structure. The car, a late-model Kia, looked so inviting that I almost hopped over to the front door and climbed inside. Almost. But as much as I wanted to slide into that undoubtedly plush interior and go for a spin, my ankle was demanding attention in no uncertain terms.
Easing onto an overturned bucket, I ran my hands down the length of my leg, searching for evidence of a compound fracture. Don’t get me wrong. A broken ankle is no laughing matter, but if my hands found bone protruding from the skin, all bets would be off. That kind of injury was mission ending.
Fortunately, my fingers discovered nothing more serious than swelling.
This was a pleasant development, but it didn’t negate the need for treatment. Escaping the murderous helicopter was all well and good, but the shock and accompanying adrenaline had begun to fade. My ankle hurt like a son of a bitch. If I didn’t find a way to stabilize it soon, I would risk passing out from the pain or sustaining permanent injury from freely moving bone shards.
A workbench fashioned from rough wood ran the length of the far side of the barn. I hobbled toward it, using a shovel as a makeshift crutch. Even so, each step was agony as pieces of fractured bone ground together.
On the bench, I found the usual debris one would expect in a farmer’s workshop—a vise, a grinder, a hammer, a few scattered wrenches, and a screwdriver or two. I grabbed a pair of wrenches and fit them lengthwise against my ankle, but abandoned the idea. The metal handles were much too thin to offer real immobilization. Besides, I was afraid they’d slip and slide across my pants, even if I found a way to bind them together.
Hobbling another few steps to my
right, I ducked under the workbench and struck pay dirt—a pile of discarded wood. Quickly sorting through the rough-hewn scraps, I found a pair of suitable lengths. The wood was cracked with age, and the pieces weren’t the same size, but they would do. Setting the wood aside, I removed my outer shirt, and then cut my T-shirt into strips. After fashioning the rags to a satisfactory length and thickness, I placed the wood along my boot and tied the makeshift splint together with the strips of fabric. Once I was sure the knots were secure, I took a hobbled step back toward the car, still using the shovel as a crutch.
The results were immediate. Pain still radiated up my leg, but my ankle no longer flopped from side to side as I moved. I’d immobilized the break, but done nothing about the underlying injury. The recipe for fixing a broken ankle once the bone was set was simple—stay off it and wait for the limb to heal.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.
Reaching down to my boot, I adjusted the laces and fiddled with the knots until it was as tight as I could make it without cutting off the circulation. The swelling had already ballooned the canvas fabric to its breaking point, but I didn’t dare ease the pressure. At some point, a medic would have to cut away the boot, but for now, like my improvised splint, it was the best I could do.
My phone vibrated as a silent alarm was triggered. Forty-five minutes to go until my meet with Einstein. Forty-five minutes to cover five kilometers. Under normal circumstances, traveling that distance in the allotted time would have been a walk in the park. But now those five kilometers might as well have stretched to the far side of the moon. On foot, I’d be lucky to get a kilometer before the broken ankle became too much to deal with.