Danger Close by Charlie Flowers Page B

to the small oxygen bottles on our belts. The loading bay lights were dim red, and had been for a while. Swallow and I now began to buckle ourselves together into the tandem harness. It was a good thing he was a big lad, I was basically hanging off him. Damn this rig was awkward. We were going to fling ourselves into the Afghan airspace from four miles up, so high that no-one on the ground could hear the plane, and Swallow was going to do all the steering. We both made sure everything was strapped down tight, AKs made safe, racing jockey goggles on, oxygen masks clipped snugly. We were all wearing insulated jumpsuits made of special radar-absorbent material.
    A loadie held up a flashcard. That was the signal. The team waddled down the fuselage to the carrier ramp in a close file like penguins. The loadies stood around us, holding cards which they illuminated with red orienteering torches strapped to their heads. They presented the cards just like in playschool, in a set order to make sure no-one had missed an item. The loadies also checked their harnesses were attached to the webbing on either side of the fuselage. Nobody wanted to fall out of the plane without a chute. We watched the jumpmaster.
    The ramp whined open. We shuffled forward until the team was on the edge. I could hear and see nothing but howling blackness. The four turbines roared. Red lights went on on the left and right of the tailgate.
    ‘Red on! Red on!’ everybody shouted.
    The lights went green.
    ‘Ready… set… GO!’
    We flung ourselves out and off the ramp.
    ‘Enjoy the ride, Tel’ said Swallow in my headset. Above us, our drogue chute deployed. Around us in the blackness, the other team members would be forming up in a loose diamond pattern around us, watching the tiny glowfly lights on their helmets and grabbing each others’ flightsuits to hold onto that formation. I tried to remember the drills and kept my limbs as straight as possible in the buffeting air. I looked down and around as the howl of the C130’s turbines faded and was replaced by the rushing wind. Now I could see a sprawl of lights through the clouds. Maybe Kabul. If it was, that other cluster would be Bagram to the north. Hello, Afghanistan, here we come, I thought.
    At 15,000 feet the diamond formation separated as the team checked their altimeters. Seconds later Swallow’s AOD went and our main chute deployed. THUMP. It was like being on the end of a bungee. We seemed to rush to a halt in the sky and the howl of air stopped. The harness bit into my thighs. Now we would all glide in a series of long curves in the air, down to the landing zone. Above me, I could hear Swallow putting on his night-vision goggles. He’d be looking for the firefly sparks of the other team members’ infra red strobes and watching his chest-harness GPS display, tacking left and right as we went to the little blip of the landing zone, many miles ahead.
    ‘Got ‘em.’
    We trailed down through the night sky, gently forming up into a stack, Swallow and me on the top and bringing up the rear. I tried to relax and enjoy the ride as Swallow had said. I looked around. It was just past three in the morning local time. The moon had just set. We had a good twenty miles to fly and it could take over an hour, depending on the winds.
    ‘Get ready, Tel. Remember the drills.’
    The scented ground of Afghanistan was coming up to us, and then it started to rush.
    ‘Stand by, stand by… bend ze knees…’
    I laughed. I raised my arms and gripped his wrists as he got ready to land. Swallow pulled down on the risers and the chute flared. Below us our packs hit the ground with a small thud on the end of their three-metre line, and then THUMP.
    We were down.
    Swallow ran us forward a few paces and turned so the lines folded around him. He extracted himself from the chute and unstrapped us. First things first. Swallow cleared and cocked his AK, and patted my shoulder. I unstrapped my AK and tore off the