Soar (22 page)

Trying to maintain the arched, Frog stable-flight position, Wei-Liu wasn’t sure she’d live that long.

Ritzik took a look at his compass. They were still heading due east. “I’m going to turn us to the south.”

No one had told her how to make turns in free fall. “What do I do?”

“Hold your position. Don’t change a thing.”

Above her, Ritzik bent his torso and head to the right, brought his left arm six inches closer to his body, and extended his right arm out by six inches.

The pair of them glided laterally and to the right for two seconds, and sixty degrees, then Ritzik straightened his body and arms out, resuming the stable free-fall position. “Good.”

He checked the altimeter again. Twenty-five thousand eight hundred feet. Four seconds until deployment.

“Steady—we’re ready to deploy.”

His right arm moved toward the rip-cord handle. Simultaneously, he extended his left arm over his head and drew his legs up farther, in order to keep them from toppling into a head-down position or barrel-rolling to the right. Ritzik peered down to where the main rip-cord handle sat in its pocket, making visual contact. Then he extended his left arm forward, simultaneously reaching his right hand down toward the handle, careful to stay away from the oxygen
hose. On Ritzik’s first HAHO night-combat-training jump—from 17,500 feet—he’d been so pumped up he’d reached down without looking, grabbed his O
₂
hose instead of the rip-cord handle, and yanked the frigging thing right out of its socket. By the time he’d cleared 10,000 feet, he’d damn near had a case of hypoxia.

His gloved hand closed around the handle, and in one fluid motion he unseated it and pulled it from the rip-cord pocket. Now both his arms were fully extended in a forward position, and he glanced upward, over his right shoulder, to make sure his canopy was deploying.

When Ritzik pulled the rip cord, it yanked a pin on the chute assembly, releasing a pilot chute bridle, which opened its flaps and launched upward. The bridle’s release extracted the deployment bag from the main container, which in turn unstowed the suspension lines from their retainer bands. When the suspension lines were fully extended, they pulled the main chute from the deployment bag, the sail slider was driven downward toward the risers, and the big Ram Air cells began to inflate.

This,
Wei-Liu thought as the harness cut into her and she jerked upward,
must be what a head-on collision feels like.
Her downward speed went from terminal velocity—125 miles an hour—to 18 miles an hour in less than four seconds. The G-force was incredible—it was like being dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows. Her head was yanked backward. Her arms flailed helplessly. She closed her eyes tight and screamed into her mask.

And then, as quickly as it had all happened, it was over. She felt herself dangling, pendulumlike, in the air, the soles of her boots parallel to the ground. Tentatively, she opened her eyes and dared to breathe. She actually pinched herself to make sure she was still alive. Wei-Liu looked up past Ritzik and saw the huge rectangle of the Ram Air chute, its
cells filled with air, above her head. “We made it,” she said. “We actually made it.”

R
ITZIK
’
S BODY ACHED
in every joint from the big chute’s opening shock. But there was no time to think about pain. He pulled the extended steering toggles from the brake loops and released the control lines. He raised his head and looked at the big canopy above them again, double-checking to ensure it was fully inflated.

Wei-Liu’s voice was hyperexcited. “Oh, Mike—”

“Quiet.” Ritzik didn’t want to talk right then. There was too much to do. He was already scanning a three-sixty, as well as up and down, while straining to listen for canopy chatter just in case they’d deployed dangerously close to another jumper.

It was unlikely. The Yak had been flying at just over two hundred miles an hour. That speed translated to three and a half miles per minute. In a normal HAHO insertion, jumpers would either leave the plane at one-second intervals, or jump as a group, depending on the aircraft type. Tonight, they’d had to use a slide for the covert operation. Moving as quickly as they could, they’d still taken five to six seconds each to jump. It was easy—and depressing—to do the numbers. Twelve jumpers times six seconds exit time per jumper equaled seventy-two seconds. At 210 miles an hour, the Yak was traveling 3.5 miles every sixty seconds, 308 feet per second. A six-second interval would separate each jumper by 1,848 feet. Multiply that by twelve jumpers, and Ritzik’s crew was separated by more than four miles of dark, uncharted sky. Even forming up was going to make for problems.

He reached up and removed the tape from his night-vision device, flipped it down, and turned it on so he could
pick out the infrared flashers on his men’s helmets. He scanned—and saw nothing.

Ritzik switched the secure radio to the predetermined inflight frequency. “Skyhorse leader. Respond-respond.”

He listened—and heard nothing but white sound. Not only were they separated by distance and altitude—now the goddamn multimillion-dollar satellite radio system wasn’t working. He cursed silently at the crackling circuitry.

Then he heard Rowdy’s familiar growl, stepped on by Bill Sandman’s.

Ritzik used his upwind toggle to turn the canopy in a tight circle. He would repeat this maneuver until the rest of his team assembled around him. As he pulled on the handle, he heard a partial transmission. “Sk—c.”

Ritzik held steady and broadcast again. “Skyhorse leader—repeat.”

“Shep confirms.”

“Goose confirms.”

“—z confirms.”

“Skyhorse leader. Repeat-repeat.”

“Skyhorse leader—Doc confirms.”

Followed by white sound. Then: “Tuzz confirms.”

And right on top of that, “Mickey D confirms.”

That was seven.

“Curt confirms.”

Eight.

The altimeter on Ritzik’s wrist read 25,300 feet. He was moving in a slight updraft. He adjusted his toggles to increase his speed and descend.

“TV confirms.”

Nine.

One to go. “Skyhorse leader—Barber-Barber.”

S
USPENDED BELOW RITZIK
,
Wei-Liu saw one, then two other chutes, even though she wasn’t wearing night-vision. They, like she and Ritzik, were circling. And then she felt Ritzik adjust the toggles, and the big sail above their heads swung them around, and she watched as the other parachutes began to adjust their positions.

She strained to look up at Ritzik. She couldn’t hear him because her headset was tuned to another frequency.

Ritzik was oblivious to her. “Rowdy—repeat.” He was trying to hear Rowdy Yates, but the frigging transmission kept fading out.

“Repeat.”

“ … caught u…”

Who? What? Where?

“Repeat.”

“Stick … came … Un … down.”

Dammit. “Repeat-repeat-repeat.”

And then, just as inexplicably as the net had decided to stop working, Rowdy’s voice suddenly blew five-by-five into his headphones. “ … went out just ahead of me. The Yak hit an air pocket—real bad buffeting for five, six seconds, boss. He bounced off the slide into the stairway header—slammed him hard—then he was gone.”

Ritzik said: “Skyhorse leader. Did you see a chute?”

“Negative-negative. But I was busy fighting the vibration and turbulence trying to get myself out alive.”

“You okay?”

“I got smacked pretty good, but I’ll live.”

Ritzik knew it was altogether possible that Barber’s automatic rip-cord release had deployed at twenty-five hundred feet even though the man was unconscious. “Skyhorse leader. Anybody see Barber’s chute deploy?” Ritzik waited for answers. But deep inside he knew there would be no responses.
And to confirm what he knew, all he heard was white noise.

This was not good. Todd Sweeney was one of the element’s two snipers. He also had been carrying two of the five Chinese claymores they’d brought, along with two spools of firing wire and two firing devices. And six hundred precious rounds of ammunition. Yes, the man had left a wife behind. And parents, both still alive. And two gorgeous kids—Ty Weaver was their godfather. But there’d be time to mourn him later. Right now all Ritzik could think about was how to compensate for one less shooter on the ground. One less weapons system. Fifty percent of the sniping team, and—most critical—the suppressed MSG90 sniper’s rifle. Doc Masland was every bit the shooter Barber Sweeney was. But Sweeney’d been carrying the big HK rifle. That was the other fatal loss.

In a night ambush, the sniper’s role was critical. They’d pick off the drivers before the bad guys even knew they were being attacked. Ritzik had learned this in Kosovo, where he’d used his sniping team to take down a heavily armed convoy belonging to a group of Serb paramilitary goons known as Arkan’s Tigers. There were ten trucks in the Tiger column. By the time the Serbs realized what was happening, Ritzik’s snipers had already head-shot eight drivers. Two trucks overturned, the Serbs panicked, and Ritzik’s fourteen-man element had been able to take an entire company-sized unit out of action and turn it over to NATO.

Tonight, Ritzik needed not only to stop the tango convoy, he would require at least three of its vehicles to make his escape. That was the genius of using two snipers with their silenced weapons, as opposed to claymores. But with only one long gun now available, the situation was going to become far more dicey.

Plus this nasty possibility: given the omnipresence of Mr. Murphy on the op, it was not inconceivable that Barber Sweeney’s body would drop right on top of some effing PLA general. The Chinese could very well know they had visitors hours before Ritzik’s element was even on the ground. That prospect, Ritzik understood all too well, was not good juju.

“Skyhorse leader.” Gene Shepard’s voice forced him to focus on the here and now.

“Skyhorse leader sends.”

“We are forming on you.”

Ritzik illuminated his GPS screen, took a reading, called out his position, and asked for a verbal confirmation that they’d all received it so they could assemble. The infrared chem-sticks on Wei-Liu’s legs would help them see him as he circled. He checked his elapsed-time readout and cursed. They hadn’t even begun yet, and they were already running behind schedule.

Since it was dark, they’d be flying a trail formation. In daylight, Ritzik preferred a wedge, with the element spread out at seventy-five-foot intervals in a broad spear tip. But at night, a wedge was problematic. Jumpers could miss the wide, echelon turns and go astray. And so they’d form up single file. Since he was the slowest, given the tandem chute, he would take point. They’d be an eleven-car freight train, with Ritzik as the engine, Rowdy as the caboose, and the others in predetermined positions in between.

R
ITZIK BLINKED TWICE
,
sucked some O
₂
, and scanned through his NV, counting the flat Ram Air chutes as they banked into a line behind him. He verified the heading on the GPS unit strapped to his wrist and checked the elapsed-time display. When he was satisfied that everyone was there he called out the element’s initial flight heading and asked
for verbal confirmation. After he’d received ten wilcos, he used the Ram Air’s toggles to adjust his trim and bank gently southeast.

As soon as he’d confirmed his heading, he set the lap timer so the leg could be measured, rolled his shoulders, which were sore as hell given the weight he was carrying, then switched his comms package to the radio frequency Wei-Liu could hear. “This is your pilot, Johnny Cool, speaking from the flight deck. We’re expecting smooth sailing all the way to Las Vegas, but please keep your seat belts fastened anyway. The steward will be around with liquid refreshments in just a few minutes. Have a nice day.”

Hanging there helpless, suspended five miles above the earth, and still more than an hour away from landing, WeiLiu wished Ritzik hadn’t just used the word
liquid.

5 Kilometers West of Markit,
Xinjiang Autonomous Region,
China. 2035 Hours Local Time.

S
AM PHILLIPS GROANED
and blinked a puffy right eye. There wasn’t a part of him that didn’t hurt. He looked over at X-Man and Kaz’s inert forms and realized they were screwed. Pure and simple. And they’d done it to themselves. No. That was not correct.
He
was the guilty party. He’d screwed everybody. After all, he was in charge. They should have tried to make their break earlier. He should have had the balls to insist, the audacity to make a decision and act on it. Because he’d just fought his way to the canvas and taken a peek—and what had been a mile-wide lake was now little more than a hundred yards wide. No cover. No concealment. Nothing but sandy marsh. It looked like the southern Virginia bog where he’d taken the CIA’s landnavigation
course. In which, he remembered ruefully, he hadn’t done very well.

At the time he’d rationalized his dismal performance because he was a city boy. He’d grown up in Chicago, where his father was a stockbroker and his mother stayed at home to raise him and his two sisters. He’d never done the Boy Scout thing, or asked to be taken camping, preferring Soldier’s Field and skiing trips to Aspen to neckerchiefs, poison ivy, and hobo stoves. But right now, realizing how badly he’d screwed up, he wished he’d paid more attention to the instructors at the Farm when they’d tried to inculcate the Ways of the Wild in him.

The way Sam saw things, they had two alternatives. The first was to make a break for it tonight. The Tarim Basin was basically an egg-shaped oval, 650 miles long and 275 miles wide. They hadn’t yet traversed the basin’s western border, which was a wide, well-traveled highway that ran from Kashgar, on the western edge, to Yarkant Köl, in the southwest. But they were close—Sam had spent the past hour guesstimating how far and how fast they had come in the past three days. If they could make it to the highway, he was even willing to risk contact with PLA troops. After all, their documents were in order.

Well, that might be a problem. They didn’t have any documents—Mustache Man had their passports and wallets. But Sam and his team had been duly vetted when they’d crossed the border. So they were official. They could bluff their way through. Of course, if the Chinese called the British consul general to come and get them, they’d be in the proverbial deep du-du, because Sam was pretty certain that Langley hadn’t informed the cousins, as MI-6 was known, of SIE-l’s existence.