Devil's Gate

50

TWO HOURS LATER, still on the old jet, Kurt and Joe had moved from the cockpit back into main section of the fuselage. They now stood in a cavern of metal, surrounded by equipment, small containers, and tie-down straps.

Despite a pressure suit, gloves, boots, and fighter pilot — style helmets with noise-canceling headphones and forced oxygen, Kurt could feel the bite of the frigid cold at thirty-five thousand feet. He could feel every shudder of the aircraft and hear nothing but the piercing whine of the jet’s narrow seventies-era engines.

Such were the accommodations in the cargo bay of a Russian transport.

Standing beside him, in a parka with fur lining around the face and a headset and oxygen mask of his own, Joe Zavala appeared to be saying something, but Kurt couldn’t make out the words.

“I didn’t copy,” Kurt shouted.

Joe pressed his oxygen mask and its microphone tighter on his face and repeated his thought. “I said, you must be crazy,” he shouted back.

Kurt didn’t respond. He was beginning to think Joe might be right. Holding firmly to a strap that dangled from the side of the airframe like a man on a crowded subway, Kurt turned toward the aircraft’s tail. A crack began appearing near the rear as the ramp in the tail opened.

As the ramp went down, the old jet shook worse than ever, and the wind swirled through the cargo bay, buffeting him and Joe and threatening to knock them over.

The aircraft had been depressurized thirty minutes before, so there was no rush of escaping atmosphere, but the temperature instantly dropped from just above freezing to fifteen below, and the howling of the jet’s engines jumped four notches at the very least.

Kurt stared out the yawing opening into the waiting blackness of the night sky. He was sucking oxygen off a tank and wearing a specially designed parachute. And while he’d made over two hundred jumps in his lifetime, including twenty HALOs (High Altitude — Low Opening), what he was about to try was something he’d never done before, something Joe had been continuously advising him to rethink.

So far, he’d laughed off Joe’s pessimism, calling him a “mother hen,” but now, staring out the back of the jet, Kurt wasn’t so sure.

Letting go of the strap, he stepped cautiously toward an object near the open tail ramp. It looked like a cross between an Olympic bobsled and a “photon torpedo” from the Star Trek series. The designers called it a Single Occupant Tactical Range Insertion Unit. The men who’d tested it out called it the LX, or Lunatic Express.

It worked like a one-man glider. Dropped from seven miles in the sky with a glide ratio of twenty to one, the Lunatic Express could transport its occupant on a one-way trip across a hundred forty miles and do it without a sound or a heat trail or a radar signature, since the whole thing was actually made of specialized plastic and covered with a radar-absorbing layer that looked and felt like soft tire rubber to Kurt.

To fly it, the occupant climbed in, lay down face-first, and grabbed a pair of handles that did not seem too far removed from the grips of an old ten-speed bicycle. He then jammed his feet into what felt like ski bindings.

The most-forward section of the device was a clear Plexiglas windshield with a basic heads-up display projected on it. It gave him speed, altitude, heading, glide ratio, and rate of descent. It also offered a visual glide- slope indicator designed to help the pilot maintain the correct angle and reach whatever destination had been targeted. In this case, that meant the tanker Onyx, seventy-five miles away.

Because of her odd position in the ocean, the Onyx had proved hard to get to. Not only was she far away from the closest shipping lane, there were no air routes anywhere close to her. To fly overhead, even at thirty-five thousand feet, would have been instantly suspicious, but there was a heavily traveled air route seventy-five miles to the south, and on radar the IL-76 would appear as just another passenger jet on the airborne highway. Kurt couldn’t imagine it being worth a second look.

And even if they were watching, no system Kurt knew of would pick up the glider and its single occupant.

It was a simple setup in theory. In the simulator Kurt had felt like he was playing a video game. Somehow the real thing was slightly more intimidating.

“Come on,” he said to Joe. “Get me into this thing before I chicken out.”

Joe moved up to the glider. “Do you have any idea how many things could go wrong with your plan?”

“No,” Kurt said. “And I don’t want you to tell me.”

“The launch could go bad, you could get ripped up by the jet’s wake turbulence, your oxygen could fail, which means you’ll pass out before you can even get down to a safe altitude…”

Kurt looked up. “What did I just say?”

“… You could freeze to death,” Joe continued, ignoring him. “You could be unable to release the cover or pop your chute. Your feet could get stuck. The airfoils could fail to open correctly.”

Kurt climbed over the rail and into the torpedo-shaped glider, giving up on stopping Joe.

“What about you?” he asked. “You have to stay on this contraption. Did you see the corrosion near the wing root? Did you see that smoke pouring from the number three engine when they all were fired up? I can’t believe this old bird even got up into the air.”

“All part of the Aeroflot experience,” Joe insisted. “Not that I wouldn’t rather be flying American-made, but I think she’s safer than what you’re about to do.”

Kurt wanted to disagree, but he couldn’t. In truth, he believed the transport was safe, even if it shook and rattled and whined like a banshee. But if Joe was going to make him sweat, he was going to return the favor.

“And don’t forget the pilots,” Kurt added. “I think I saw them doing shots of sake kamikaze style right before we took off.”

Joe laughed. “Yeah, in your honor, amigo.”

A yellow light came on. One minute to the jump site.

Kurt locked his feet in, lay down flat, and switched on the video display. As it initialized, he gave the thumbs-up to Joe, who snapped the thin cowling over Kurt’s back, covering him and his specially designed parachute.

A second yellow light came on, and a red light began to flash. Thirty seconds.

Joe moved back out of Kurt’s view and toward the launch control.

A few seconds later Kurt heard Joe counting down—“Tres… Dos… Uno”—and then with great enthusiasm, “?Vamonos, mi amigo!”

Kurt felt the glider accelerate backward as a powered conveyer belt sped him toward the back end of the plane. And then he dropped, and was slammed back even harder as the torpedo-shaped glider hit the 500-knot airstream.

Seconds later, a tiny drogue chute deployed behind the glider, and the g-forces from the deceleration hit Kurt as hard as a launch from a carrier deck, but in the opposite way.

The restraint harness crushed Kurt’s shoulders as he slid forward. His arms bent, and his hands bore the rest of his weight, and all the while his eyes felt like they might pop out of his head.

It went like that for a good ten seconds before the deceleration slowed.

Once he got his body stabilized, Kurt scanned the heads-up display. “Four hundred,” Kurt called out to no one but himself. A few seconds later, “Three-fifty…”

The glider slowed and dropped, heading toward the waters of the central Atlantic like a giant artillery shell or a manned bomb. Finally, as the speed dropped below 210 knots, Kurt released the chute.

It broke away with a resounding clang, and the descent went from a shaky violent ride to an unnervingly smooth one. The whistling wind was almost completely blocked out by his helmet, and the buffeting was all but gone.

A moment later, as the airspeed hit 190, a pair of stubby wings extended, forced outward by a powered screw jack.

This was the most dangerous moment of the flight, in Kurt’s mind. Prototypes had been lost when the wings did not extend evenly, causing the glider to spin out of control and break apart.