Shift: A Novel

across the hold and smashed face-first into the far wall. His crucifix punctured his lip, and a stream of blood poured from his mouth. His murmurs, barely tolerable before, turned to wails.

“Jesus Christ, will someone shut that bitch up,” Sturgis said. “Pablo’s trying to talk.”

Melchior noted how quickly Sturgis shifted gears. He might be an asshole and a turncoat, but he was a professional. And let’s face it: they were all assholes, which was why they’d become soldiers of fortune in the first place, and the only thing that mattered was whether they could do their jobs. Melchior figured he could count on Sturgis in the days ahead—assuming he didn’t have to kill him first.

“Bogey at four o’clock,” the Guatemalan pilot was calling through the open door of the cockpit. “Too low for commercialism. No se if they made us, but you gonna have to bail just in case.”

“Shit,” Sturgis said. “At least tell me we’re over land.”

“Cerca de. Nearling.” Between the accent and the engines, Melchior couldn’t tell if Pablo was joking or not.

The plane banked hard to the right. Robertson, who’d been reaching for the door handle, smacked his head against the window, and the spoon sticking out of his mouth clanked against the glass.

“Jesus Christ, Pablo, give a guy some warning. You could-a poked a hole in my cheek.”

“Definitely bogey. You want out, you got to go now.”

“Fuck. I wasn’t finished eating. Last American food we’re gonna have for a while, I wanted to enjoy it.”

Even as Robertson spoke, he rolled the hatch open. Outside, the clouds were dense as cotton batting. Except for the rain that whipped into the hold, he could’ve been standing in front of a blank movie screen, one hand reaching casually for his chute like a commuting businessman grabbing an umbrella before heading off to the train. He stood in the spray, chewing slowly, then tossed the empty can into the void.

Sturgis had buckled Don Gutierrez Rave de Mendez y Sotomayor’s chute on him and was dragging him toward the door. Blood streamed down the defector’s face, and his legs trailed after him as limply as the tentacles of a jellyfish. “I’m gonna have to jump with Donny here, or he’ll be too busy praying to open his chute. Rip, you come next. Garcia, Lopez”—the Miami exiles, although Melchior hadn’t bothered to learn which was which—“after that. And you, Agent Domenico”—the contempt was audible in Sturgis’s voice—“bring up the rear.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Just tossed Donny out the side of the cabin like a bag of garbage and hopped after. Robertson waited till Sturgis was gone before grabbing three cans of Spam in one of his big hands.

“Betcha I finish ’em before I pull cord.” Spoon in one hand, cans in the other, he jumped out of the plane. Another sharp turn more or less dumped Garcia and Lopez into the clouds, and then it was Melchior’s turn.

Up in the cockpit, Pablo was manhandling the unwieldy cargo plane through the zero-visibility slop like a little boy on a dirt bike. Something about the kid—the sharp-featured face, shiny and desperate for approval—reminded Melchior of Caspar, and before he knew it he’d taken one of the cigars out of the box and lit it as he made his way to the cabin. Dick Bissell, the Wiz’s replacement as deputy director for plans, could deduct it from his pay.

It was damn good cigar. Sat on the tongue like gunpowder and blood. If the Catholics handed out these instead of those stale wafers, he’d go to mass seven days a week.

“To keep you company on the ride home, Pablito,” he said, stealing one more drag before passing off the fragrantly smoking imperiale. “Cuban tobacco. El mejor. Gracias, Senor.” Pablo shoved the cigar in his mouth, more Groucho Marx than Jimmy Cagney. “Next year in Habana!”

The honor of being chosen haloed the kid’s angular face. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-one. Caspar’s age. Most kids his age were just getting out of college, starting a family, and here these guys were, risking their lives for Company and country. He didn’t care how many chemicals TSS pumped into someone’s bloodstream. Only a leader could inspire this kind of loyalty.

Melchior had just turned from the kid from when something slammed into his back and threw him ten feet into the hold. He thought it was turbulence at first, or who knows, maybe one of Castro’s hand-me-down Russian fighters had actually managed to get off a shot. But when he turned back to the cockpit he saw that the blow had come from inside the plane.

Pablo’s torso still sat in the pilot’s chair. His feet were still on the pedals and his hands still held the wheel, but where his head had been there was just a jagged stump spurting fountains of blood.

“Oh give me a goddamn fucking break,” Melchior said, even as the plane dipped and spun toward the left. He’d known the plan was going to be stupid, but he had no idea it was this stupid. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

The plane’s sharp turn put the open hatch almost directly above him, and he had to climb the floor like a ladder, cursing Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Sidney Gottlieb, and everyone else who had anything to do with such a cockamamie scheme. Grunting, he chinned himself through the opening. The plane’s engines screamed as it dipped into a death spiral. If he timed his jump wrong, he was going to get sliced in half by a tail fin. But Pablo’d been instructed to come in under 2,500 feet, so it was now or never. He counted—three, two, one!—and threw himself clear. The left elevator ripped by so close that if he’d turned his cheek, he could’ve gotten a free shave. A second later, the plane disappeared into the clouds.

He pulled the cord as soon as he was level. There was that interminable quarter second when it always seemed like nothing was going to happen, and then he felt the familiar snap and tug as the chute opened and caught. He listened for the sound of a crash but the cloud-choked air wrapped around his head like a pillow, and all he heard was the sound of his own breath. The cigar’s smoke still sat on his tongue.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered as he spat the taste of gunpowder and blood into the cottony void. “Exploding fucking cigars.” In the category of need-to-know, he was pretty sure someone could’ve bothered to mention that.

The next minute or so was a surreal interval, as he floated through a layer of cloud so dense he could’ve been a fly suspended in amber. He found himself remembering certain rumors that had come to him—rumors that, until sixty seconds ago, he’d dismissed as Communist propaganda or, who knows, an exercise in disinformation on the Company’s part, an attempt to make the rest of the world think CIA had lost the thread in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. Now it was starting to look like the rest of the world was right.

Before he left the Congo, Joe Mobutu—this was before all that Sese Seko Nkuku nonsense—told him about a