Without waiting any longer, Flynn sprinted down the ramp and dove headfirst out into the moonlit night sky.
Thirty-Eight
Caught by the aircraft’s prop blast, Flynn whirled away through the brutally cold air. The tremendous force generated by four large six-bladed propellers, each revolving hundreds of times per minute, sent him tumbling head over heels. For a split-second, he fought down a growing sense of alarm. This churning maelstrom was far worse than anything he’d experienced during their dozens of practice jumps — all of which had been made from much smaller civilian aircraft. If these howling winds ripped his wingsuit or tore off the BMW electric impeller strapped to his chest, he’d fall far short of the Gulf Venture… and then drown in the icy waters of the Atlantic.
And then he fell out of the turbulent wake curling off the LM-100J’s wings. Instantly, the subzero, roiling currents around him smoothed out. The wind’s shrieking madness faded away, replaced by the low rumble and hiss of air rushing past the nylon fabric of his wingsuit as he plunged toward the ocean at more than 140 knots. But he was still tumbling out of control.
Carefully, Flynn spread his arms and legs into tapered V shapes — creating a wider surface to bite into the air rushing past him — and then just as quickly curled his arms back toward his chest whenever he felt himself again starting to lose control. The effect was much the same as that created when a space capsule rolling too fast rhythmically pulsed its thrusters in opposite directions to counteract the spin and slow its rate of rotation. Gradually, he regained complete control over the wingsuit and was at last able to turn himself over to face downward and extend its fabric fully to create a stable airfoil. His speed had decreased to a little over 120 knots. The glowing figures on his navigation display showed that he was now descending through 26,000 feet above sea level. “Dragon Lead proceeding to target as planned,” he said into his throat mike.
“Dragon Two is same,” Tadeusz Kossak replied over the circuit. “I have your helmet IR beacon in sight, Lead.” One by one, the rest of his team checked in, reporting that they too had made it safely through the vortex created by the Super Hercules and were following him down.
As his fear of plummeting out of control faded, Flynn felt a surge of elation. Despite the incredible danger involved, the sensation of wingsuit flying was intensely exhilarating. It was the closest thing possible to achieving the sensation of free, unencumbered flight so long dreamed of by humans. For these minutes, as he glided onward toward the still-distant Gulf Venture, he would be almost a true master of the air — mimicking the birds, and the gods of myth and legend.
He looked ahead along his glide path. Those towering masses of cloud below, etched in silver and gray by the moonlight, were now much closer. He checked his heading and lowered his right shoulder slightly, banking a few degrees to bring himself back on the most direct course toward the oil tanker’s predicted position. Under the overall sense of euphoria provoked by this near-silent flight through the darkness, he was conscious of a gnawing worry. How close were their enemies to launching their missile? If he and his men were too late after all, the first warning would be a brightening glow through those same clouds — a diffuse glow that would quickly resolve into a blinding plume of fire as the Iranian-made rocket and its Russian-produced nuclear warhead soared onward toward space, completely untouchable and unstoppable.
Still gliding toward the ocean’s surface at about 120 knots, Flynn arrowed into the clouds. Instantly, the sky around him disappeared. He was surrounded by a sea of impenetrable gray. Ice pellets hammered at his arms, legs, and chest. And then, as he descended into warmer air, the ice impacts stopped, replaced by rivulets of rain that blurred across his clear polycarbonate face shield and streamed away to either side. Without any visual reference points, he had only the faint sensation of falling through endless nothing. Time seemed to slow again. Only the steadily decreasing numbers on his altimeter and GPS readouts provided any sense of movement. Resolutely, he held to his current course. While slashing through this mass of cloud with near-zero visibility, the risk of a fatal collision with one of the other Dragon team wingsuiters was high. Several close calls during training had shown that the only way to minimize the danger was to stay on a rigidly defined flight path — and make any needed corrections only once you were free of the cloud layer.
Sooner than he’d expected, Flynn broke back out into the open. With the moon obscured by the solid overcast, the sea below and the surrounding sky were nearly pitch-black. But there, still thousands of feet below and some miles ahead, he could make out a tiny, brightly lit point against the unrelieved darkness of the ocean. As he continued his descent, it steadily grew larger and clearer. “Target in sight,” he reported.
Confirmations of the sighting from the rest of his assault force echoed through his headset. They were all now about six thousand feet up and a little more than six nautical miles out from the Gulf Venture, trailing behind him in a ragged line across the sky. This was another danger point for Flynn and his men. At their present speed and rate of descent, they were still approximately three minutes out from the tanker. And if a sharp-eyed lookout using IR binoculars spotted them on the way in, that was more than enough time for the enemy weapons crews to man their guns and blow them out of the sky. So it was time to make use of the tactical edge offered by their BMW assistive propulsion gear, Flynn decided. “Follow me!” he ordered. “And stand by on your impellers!”
He sharpened his dive angle, plunging ever faster toward the surface of the Atlantic. Swiftly, his altitude decreased, flickering from six thousand to four thousand to a thousand feet in less than a minute. Moments later, scarcely a hundred feet above the rolling wave tops, he flared his wingsuit slightly, shedding velocity to pull out of this steep dive and into near-level flight. In the same motion, the gloved fingers of his right hand curled inward and pushed buttons on a controller strapped to his wrist. “Impellers on!”
With a high-pitched whine, the BMW electric propulsion unit activated. Inside its twin engine nacelles, the tiny carbon fiber impellers spun up to 25,000 RPM, pulling him through the air like the conventional propellers used on larger aircraft. Flynn accelerated instantly. As his speed jumped, he adjusted his angle of flight carefully so that he was now flying straight and level — racing across the surface of the sea with only feet to spare. Ahead, he could see the massive bow of the Gulf Venture swinging toward him as the huge ship continued maneuvering in a series of repeated 360-degree turns. One corner of his mind noted that a huge patch of the ocean around the vessel seemed oddly flat, as though it were being held down by weights.
Through his headset, he heard sudden loud whoops of glee from Hynes and several of the others. A wild grin flashed across his intent face. He figured that overexcitement at this breathtaking flight just above the waves was better than screams of sheer terror.
The oil tanker grew rapidly in Flynn’s sights. They were drawing together with a combined velocity of almost 170 knots — closing the remaining gap between them nearly three hundred feet with every passing second. His eyes narrowed as he rapidly judged distances. There wasn’t any more time to rely on instruments. Things were happening too fast. Everything was going to come down to instinct honed by training and practice.