Crisis Four Read Free Page A

the worst, we could actually shout to each other once we’d got off oxygen.
    Reg 2 would be looking at the display on his sat nav (global positioning device, via satellite). All he wanted was one bar in the centre of the display. Technology is wonderful. We were travelling at about thirty-five knots; the canopy gives you twenty knots, and we were running with the wind, which was fifteen.
    I checked my height – just over twenty-eight grand – good. Checked the sat nav, good. That was it. Everything was done: the oxygen was working, we were stacked. Time to get comfy. I got hold of the risers which attached the canopy to the rig, and pulled myself up and wiggled my legs to move the leg straps halfway down my thighs.
    For the next thirty minutes we minced along the sky, controlling the rig, checking height and the sat nav. I started to see lights now. Small towns and villages with street lights following the roads out of the built-up areas for about half a mile, then darkness, only car lights giving away the road.
    I looked at my alti. I was about 16,200 feet. I thought, I’ll just go for a few more minutes and I’ll take my oxygen mask off. The fucking thing was a pain in the arse. If I started feeling the effects of hypoxia, dizziness, I’d bring the mask back to my face and take a couple of deep breaths. By now I was just under 16 grand; my mouth was full of saliva and it felt all clammy. I got hold of the clip with my right hand and pulled the press stud off, and the thing just fell down and dangled by the left-hand side of my face.
    I could feel the cold around my mouth where all the moisture from the mask had been. I was freezing, but it was nice; I could stretch my mouth and chew my jaw around a bit.
    After about ten minutes I checked my alti again: 6,500 feet, time to start working. I put on my NVG (night viewing goggles), which had been hanging round my neck on paracord, and started looking for the flash on an IR Firefly (infra-red detecting system). It was the same flashing light that you would expect to see on the top of a tall tower to warn aircraft, but these are just little handheld things that throw out a brilliant quick flash of light, through an IR filter. No-one would see it apart from us – or anyone else with NVG, of course. I kept looking in the darkness. It would be easy to pick out. Bang – there it was to my half right.
    We were coming in on finals. I was concentrating on keeping myself positioned right on top and to the rear of Reg 1’s canopy, which was larger than mine as he had the extra weight to jump with. I heard him below me sounding like an infant-school teacher. ‘Right, any minute now, keep your legs bent and under your hips. Are your legs bent?’
    She must have acknowledged. I pulled the NVGs off my face and let them hang.
    ‘OK, put your hands up by me.’ I imagined her with her hands up, holding Reg 1’s wrists on the brake lines to keep them out of the way so she didn’t damage herself if they took a bad landing.
    I couldn’t see any ground yet – it was far too dark – but I heard: ‘Standby, standby. Flaring soon… flaring… flaring…’
    Then the sound of his bergen thumping into the ground, and his command to Sarah: ‘Now!’
    His canopy started to collapse below me as I flew past. My bergen was dangling by the straps from my feet; I kicked it off and it fell beneath me on a three-metre line. As soon as I heard it land, I flared too. Hitting the deck, I ran along for three or four steps, turned quickly and pulled my lines to collapse the canopy.
    A body appeared behind me. Regs 3 to 6 had been on the ground for five days preparing the job and were manning the DZ (drop zone). Fuck knows how they’d inserted in-country, and I didn’t care.
    ‘You all right, mate?’ I recognized his voice. Glen, the only one whose name I knew, was the ground commander. He looked as if you’d hear steely Clint Eastwood when he opened his mouth, but in fact what you got was softly