“We’ll jump from twenty-thousand feet,” Lazarus said. “We’ll be using static-line deployed ram-air canopies. That means they’ll open as soon as you jump. No free fall, no counting to fifty. The chutes will function like glider wings. The control toggles are intuitive. Pull left to go left, right to go right. Just before touchdown, pull both hard to flare…brake. I’ll talk you through all that on the way down.
“Hook in,” Lazarus directed. Despite the wind rushing through the cabin and the throaty roar of the engines, Pierce heard him clearly, courtesy of the earbud connected to a digitally encrypted walkie-talkie clipped to the combat vest under his coveralls.
Carter snapped a D-ring, connected to the ripcord on her parachute pack, to the cable that ran the length of their chartered plane. Lazarus checked the connection and then moved to do the same for Pierce.
Pierce hooked in, then gave the carabiner a tug. Lazarus checked the D-ring and gave Pierce a thumbs-up before hooking his own chute to the line.
The pilot’s voice came over their comm system. “Forty miles out.”
“Roger,” Lazarus replied. He turned to Pierce and Carter. “Ready?”
Pierce nodded. Despite the fact that he was about to jump out of a plane for the first time in his life, nothing short of a missile would keep him from helping the people he loved.
They would be leaving the aircraft thirty miles out, distant enough that the Cerberus men would not hear the sound of the plane’s engines, much less suspect that an incursion was underway, but close enough for them to glide to the objective. With their ram-air chutes and about four miles of air between them and the ground, there would be plenty of time to find a good landing spot.
Lazarus had acquired Landsat imagery of the target zone, a high plateau in the Roraima region, surrounding what appeared to be a deep sinkhole. The imagery revealed nothing about what lay at the bottom of that chasm, but Pierce felt certain it was Kenner’s true objective, which presented yet another challenge. The Cerberus force had already been in place for several hours, which meant that they were probably already inside the sinkhole. The only way to get ahead of them was to bypass the summit and drop directly into the unknown abyss. While that course was fraught with risk, the biggest concern was getting back out again.
That, Pierce decided, was something to worry about once Gallo and Dourado were safe.
At their current speed, he guessed it would take less than three minutes to cover the ten miles to the drop zone. It turned out to be the shortest three minutes of his life. After what seemed like only a few seconds, the pilot began counting down. When he got to zero, Lazarus shouted, “Go!”
Carter immediately trundled to the edge of the cargo ramp and stepped out into the void.
Pierce felt fear tugging at him, but squelched it down and followed Carter, leaping into the abyss. He expected the fear to surge as the fall began, but instead he felt something unexpected. Exhilaration.
His parachute harness went rigid — painfully so — as the chute deployed above his head.
The initial discomfort passed after a moment, as his body began to compensate for the abrupt change in inertia. He experienced yet another wave of excitement and euphoria, as he processed the new sensation. He was still falling, but he could feel the resistance from the chute, holding him back.
He saw the control lines hanging down in front of him and took hold, one in each hand. Off to his left, he saw Carter and Lazarus, both of them angling back and forth across the sky like skiers slaloming down a black-diamond slope.
Pierce tugged the controls, getting a feel for the system. When he pulled, he could feel increased resistance on the respective sides of the chute, comparable to dragging an oar in the water while rowing a canoe. Once he figured out the right amount of pressure to exert, he lined up behind the others and let gravity and aerodynamics do most of the work.
Further out, the dark silhouette of their destination rose above the forest, and gleaming at its tip, like an enchanted emerald, was a dot of artificial light marking the presence of humans atop the remote tepui.
The light of the Cerberus camp drew them onward, like a beacon. When they got closer, Pierce could see the bulky outline of a helicopter. A few seconds later, they passed over the parked aircraft, still several hundred feet from touchdown, but there was no sign of human activity around it or anywhere else on the mountaintop.
“I see them,” Lazarus said. “They’re rappelling down into the sinkhole.”
Pierce craned his head around and spotted the network of ropes that extended from the top of the tepui, down into the chasm where they were lost from view. Tiny shapes moved down the ropes, like spiders on a web.
“I count nine,” Lazarus said. “No way to know if any of them are friendly.”
Pierce strained to see if he could pick out Gallo, but they were still too far away. “Will they see us? Or hear us?”
“They’re using flashlights, so they won’t be able to see much of anything.” Lazarus was silent for a moment, then added. “Stay ready though, just in case.”
Pierce let a hand fall to the Heckler & Koch MP5K that hung from a sling across his chest. Pierce had never fired this particular weapon before, but Lazarus had assured him that it was as simple as point-and-shoot. It was even equipped with an infrared laser sight that would show him, with a fairly high degree of certainty, where the bullet would go.
Killing someone has never been so easy, he thought darkly. But the men they were going up against weren’t innocents. Kenner and Rohn had already tried to kill him once, and they had kidnapped Gallo and Fiona. He intended to remember that when the time came to pull the trigger.
“Let’s take it in,” Lazarus said. “I’ll go first. Corkscrew down and watch for a safe drop zone.”
Pierce held back until both Carter and Lazarus were at least a hundred feet below him before pulling on his right-hand toggle to begin a clockwise spiraling descent into the sinkhole. When Lazarus had told him they would be parachuting into a sinkhole, Pierce had imagined something like diving into a swimming pool from four miles up. It was only now, as he turned lazy circles in the sky above the tepui, that he understood just how big the sinkhole was. It would be more like diving into the East River.
He could not distinguish the ground. Although the walls positively radiated infrared light, the bottom of the sinkhole — which was rushing up — looked like a Jackson Pollock painting in hues of green and black. There was no way to know what awaited them down there.
As the remaining distance closed to almost nothing, he was able to make out the landscape in relief. There were irregular patches that might have been vegetation or uneven terrain, perhaps even trees, and in-between them an unnaturally smooth black surface. He steered toward the latter, realizing too late that it was not flat ground at all, but water.
Almost directly below, Lazarus’s chute seemed to curl in on itself as he pulled his control toggles hard. Then, the canopy settled gently into an amorphous heap, marking the spot where the big man had touched down. Carter flared her chute a moment later, and landed about thirty yards from Lazarus. Pierce guessed he had about ten seconds to do the same.
He hauled down on the toggles a couple of seconds later and his descent came to what felt like a screeching halt. Then he dropped another fifteen feet into chilly, waist-deep water. The thick muck that rose halfway to his knees absorbed most of the impact of landing, but it also wrapped around his legs. He wobbled for a moment and then heaved himself out of the mud and onto the shore. He quickly removed his respirator, unbuckled his harness, reeled in the water-logged parachute, bundled it up and shoved it beneath some tall ferns.