Death Wave

Dean felt the deck of the aircraft tilt beneath his feet. The Hercules was turning now, coming around to a northerly heading. The Marine Recon jumpers would exit the aircraft two at a time, spaced out along a line five and a half miles long, matching the south-to-north line of volcanos up the center of La Palma. Dean and Akulinin would go with the first two Marines, vectoring toward San Martin, the southern most volcanic crater.

“First jumpers! Stand ready!”

The rear ramp was fully down now, with sunlight blasting across the slanted exit track. Dean and Akulinin stood just behind the first jumpers, Sergeant Dulaney and Gunnery Sergeant Rodriguez, waiting … waiting …

A red light above the gaping opening flashed to green, and the jumpmaster yelled, “First jumpers … go!”

Dulaney and Rodriguez launched themselves forward, running down the ramp and flinging themselves into the sunlight. Dean and Akulinin were right behind them, hitting the ramp, then diving headfirst into sun-brilliant emptiness.

They fell, wind hammering at their torsos, the blast fluttering loose folds of Gore-Tex tight around their outstretched arms and legs. The sheer adrenaline rush of free fall hit Dean as it always did, a sharp, pounding exhilaration that caught at his breath and chest.

The four jumpers drifted slowly apart, turning to orient themselves. La Palma was off to the right and below, spread out against the blue ocean like an immense mottled arrowhead pointed south. Clouds massed against the north and northeastern coastline, blindingly bright in the midday sunlight. Dean could easily make out the island’s principal feartures — the vast circular formation of mountains called Taburiente in the north, the straight thrust of the Cumbre Vieja toward the island’s southern point. He could see the line of craters down the central ridge, but it took him a moment or two to positively identify his target — San Martin — for there were several other craters around it. Scattered cumulus clouds drifted slowly above their own shadows down the eastern side of the ridge. He made out the clear separation in color and texture between the forested lower slopes of the ridge and the barren, volcanic cinder and rock higher up. He spotted the area designated as his drop zone — among the trees, but in an area more open, less heavily forested than others. The idea was to land somewhere sheltered by the woods but not so heavily overgrown that he ended up stuck in a tree.

He was very glad that they weren’t doing this at night.

Dean checked the altimeter, which was mounted on his reserve chute in front of him. He was now falling past twenty thousand feet. He’d reached terminal velocity — about 124 miles per hour, or just under eleven thousand feet per minute. That gave him a bit over a minute of free fall; his AAD, or automatic activation device, would open his chute at eight thousand feet above sea level, with his drop zone target at five thousand. One of the dangers of HALO jumps lay in the possibility that a malfunction in the parachutist’s breathing gear might cause him to pass out. The AAD made sure his chute would open whether he was conscious or not.

The other jumpers in his team had spread out, with plenty of room between them. They were falling past ten thousand feet now; the ones- and tens-place numerals on his altimeter’s digital readout flickered past almost too fast to read. More alarming was the loom of the mountains below and ahead. With arms and legs extended and his back sharply arched, he’d picked up some forward momentum and literally flown toward the island. The city of Santa Cruz was spread along the coast to his left, just north of the single sharp, straight slash of the island’s airport runway.

At six thousand feet, his drogue deployed, pulling his Ram Air chute from the pack gently enough to avoid damaging it during the deployment. A moment later, the Ram Air caught hold, the sudden deceleration a sharp jerk against Dean’s harness that made it feel as though he’d suddenly grown very heavy, then started rising.

He took a quick look up to make sure the canopy had deployed properly — no rips or tears, no “Mae West” twists in the fabric. Everything was working as it should. The canopy itself was neither night-ops black nor traditional white, and it certainly had none of the bright colors popular in sports-jumping. It was a blend of neutral grays in random computer-generated patterns that blended well with sky or with distant vegetation. He was still a good six miles from the crest of Cumbre Vieja, coming in toward the beach at Punta El Lajio. “Chute open and functioning,” he reported.

“Copy, Charlie,” Marie Telach replied.

It was good to know someone was listening over his shoulder.

He could see the El Lajio lighthouse below, a stark, modernistic white tower with a rounded cap that probably had been intended as futuristic architecture but looked like a tall, skinny grain silo … or an enormous sex toy. That lighthouse had been his first waypoint marker for his drop zone approach.

“Going feet dry,” he said. “Fifty-five hundred feet and directly above the giant dildo. I have the DZ in sight.”

A fifteen-mile-per-hour trade wind out of the northeast had him on course. Ideally, a ground team should have been present to set out signal panels to mark the drop zone, but there hadn’t been time to organize that. Rubens had told him that two more NSA officers were on their way to La Palma — one to join CJ, the other to take charge of the writer, Carlylse — but they didn’t have any of the equipment necessary for marking one DZ, much less ten. Instead, each parachute team had memorized the rugged silhouette of the Cumbre Vieja, the position of each volcanic caldera, and the general appearance of the designated drop zones on the ridge’s eastern slope.

As he got closer, he realized that this last wasn’t quite as easy as he’d thought at first. There were a lot of clouds floating above the east side of the island, many of them flowing up against the ridge crest itself. North, the entire northern curve of La Palma appeared to be engulfed in a sea of dazzling white, a solid cloud deck pressing against and spilling into the hollow of the big Taburiente caldera.

The view was spectacular, the interplay of clouds and sea and mountain utterly mesmerizing. He was flying southeast, now, above a tiny village — it should be Tigalate — and that road glimpsed through the trees would be LP-132. That was waypoint two, at an altitude of two thousand feet. Beyond, the ground began rising very sharply. Directly west now was Mount Deseada, its crest at over sixty- one hundred feet, looming above him. The top was lost in a chain of clouds running down from the north, but he could tell he was already below the peak.

His altimeter read five thousand feet.

Much more quickly than he’d expected, the ground began rising up to meet him. Trees skimmed past beneath his jump boots in a blur. Tugging on his risers, he brought the leading edges of his Ram Air double canopy up, stalling to kill some of his forward velocity. He passed over another village, a cluster of white and brick-pink roofs seemingly imbedded in the steep hillside. That was waypoint three, the town of Monte de Luna, at a mean altitude of twenty-four hundred feet above sea level. He yanked at his right-hand risers, pulling into a sharp right turn, swinging from a southwesterly heading to directly west.

He saw patches of heavy forest interspersed with more open ground. He aimed for one of the thinner regions, which appeared to be riding on a bare-topped shoulder extending east from the mountain.

Treetops skimmed beneath his boots, the ground rising swiftly. He unhooked his drop bag from his hip and let its nylon tether pay out through gloved fingers until it was dangling twenty feet below. His gliding descent carried him over open ground … the drop bag struck, and he tugged again on his risers, killing more speed and settling toward the slope.

He touched down at a quick walk, the parachute dumping air and spilling into an unruly mass in front of him. He kept walking, bundling the fabric in with his arms. Fifty feet ahead and to his right, another parachutist touched down. He couldn’t tell whether it was Ilya or one of the Marines.

From the drop bag he extracted electronic binoculars, pouches holding ammunition for his rifle, Kevlar vest, combat harness, water and rations, backpack, and a last-minute piece of special gear shipped out the day before from Fort Meade. The jump harness, reserve chute, breathing equipment, helmet, and attachments went into the bag.

The other parachutist was Gunny Rodriguez, but both Dulaney and Akulinin joined them a few minutes later as they trudged up the slope from below. To the east, the falling ground offered a spectacular view of blue ocean, scattered clouds, and the village of Monte de Luna less than a thousand yards away and about nine hundred feet below. West, they looked up … and up at the slope in front of them, culminating in the peak of the San Martin caldera some fifteen hundred feet higher.

A GPS tracker confirmed they were now just twelve hundred yards from the rim of San Martin. It was going to be one hell of a long twelve hundred yards.