Charles Amadi. Nephew of Abbu Amadi, known publicly as the prime minister of the Republic of Iran; known privately as an ardent foe of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Charlie was just as ardent, and I planned to tap his zeal.
Charles hadn’t followed his uncle’s footsteps into politics. Charlie had spent a few years in America running errands for the Iranian drug cartel in the 1970s and had returned to his native land after the revolution, intent on maximizing the black market that was the inevitable result of a nation run by a tyrant. Over the years, he’d built an underground network that smuggled and sold everything from electronics and booze to hard cash and information. Charlie wasn’t picky about what he sold as long as the bottom line was drenched in black.
He and I hadn’t seen each other in years. No matter. He would listen to my pitch because that’s how men of honor acted when it was time to repay a debt.
Dooley disconnected the umbilical cord that connected me to the airplane’s electrical power. He switched off our handheld comms and relieved me of mine. Now the static inside my earpiece went silent and the drone of the C-17’s turboprops replaced it. The console battery had thirty minutes’ worth of juice to power my GPS system and to heat my suit and gloves.
A battery of servos groaned. The hull at the back of the fuselage cracked apart. A pair of thin, bright lines connected together by a quirk of physics appeared. The lines widened into a parallelogram framed by the aft cargo doors and ramp. The sky shone white and brilliant, like a glimpse into a different dimension.
I blinked and felt my adrenaline surging. The plan was to land in predawn darkness. This was more like the glare of an early-morning sunrise, the kind that made driving east a royal pain in the ass. The split second of alarm passed as quickly as it had come when logic set in, and I realized we were forty-two thousand feet above my landing sight. Up here, dawn was already a reality. By the time I’d enjoyed the ride of my life and deployed my parachute, I’d be nicely masked by twilight.
The ramp descended until it was level with the cargo floor. The sergeant held up an index and middle finger. Two minutes.
One hundred twenty seconds. Okay, I’d successfully navigated for four minutes and Mother Nature still hadn’t called. I guess I was up the creek if she did. Dooley was still staring at me, waiting for some sign that I had gotten his message, so I gave him a brief nod.
He gestured toward the ramp ominously hinged to the cargo deck. The gesture meant: Take your position. Dooley stepped up to the door and stood beside me. He put one hand on my shoulder, and we both stared at the jump light.
My heart rate spiked — ninety-one beats per minute by my calculations — and I found myself breathing too deeply. Settle down, Jake. You’ve done one hundred six jumps. What’s one more? Other than the absolute need for pressurized air, the subzero temperatures and the fall from eight miles above the earth into the lap of America’s most vehement enemy, hell, this was a cakewalk.
Dooley gestured. Thirty seconds!
Adrenaline pumped into my muscles and made me hyperaware of the details around me. The rhythmic drone of the engines. The hum of the cargo deck. Lights blinking. The sweat glistening on the sergeant’s face. The way his eyes were pinched in concentration. Oh, yeah, and the void of space staring back at me like a black hole.
I saw the jump light blink from red to green. Dooley slapped my arm and pointed out the aircraft. Go!
With so much gear, there was no graceful way to navigate to the edge of the ramp, so I resorted to an exaggerated waddle. I peered out at the glistening blue black of a new day. The earth below was a big gray ball.
I tapped the button on the instrument console to start the Elapsed Time stopwatch, then raised my arms and leaned forward. I tumbled out into space. I arched my back and stretched my arms and legs into a rigid cross position. There was a momentary whooshing sensation as I passed from the plane’s sphere of influence; the calm that followed was total and complete.
I steadied myself in weightless free fall. I used my hands and feet to weathervane around and give the C-17 a farewell glance as it shrank farther and farther away. If I never saw another high-altitude plane again, it would be too soon.
I spun around until the visor readout put me on a straight shot to my destination. Into the lion’s den, Jake. Let’s do this.
I don’t know where the music came from. But there it was, ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” pounding in my head. The music was usually a heat-of-battle thing. Then again, if this wasn’t the heat-of-battle, then what the hell was?
Clouds blanketed the ground. No matter. I navigated using my GPS. I drew my arms into a V shape, steered with my feet, and maneuvered by twisting my body. I’d been dropped twenty miles north from my LZ, and the body position I’d assumed allowed me to track two miles more or less horizontally for every mile that I fell. The sensation was like an out-of-body experience, but I didn’t have time to enjoy it. I’m not sure I wanted to. Just get on the ground and go to work.
Pressure Altitude: 38,924 feet and whistling through the air at two miles per minute. My heart raced in time to the numbers scrolling on the readout.
I tracked on course and plunged through the clouds. White vapor masked my visor. I felt the chill against my face. All I could see were the yellow digits of the instrument readout shining on the inside of the visor.
In what was essentially the blink of an eye, I had suddenly punched through the clouds and was streaking through a layer of air so clear and clean that I stopped breathing for a split second. It was like being reborn.
The sun rolled below the horizon and I was instantaneously shrouded by twilight; it was as if I had stepped into a time machine and been transported back in time. In a way, I guess I actually had been.
Pressure Altitude: 22,956 feet. Time Elapsed: one minute, thirty-nine seconds.
I followed the GPS reading as it counted down the Distance to LZ. 16.8 miles. I sliced through another bank of clouds.
Altitude: 17,217 feet. Absolute Height Above Ground: 10,925 feet. Time Elapsed: two minutes, fifty-four seconds. Distance to LZ: 8.3 miles.
I kept on track until my Distance to LZ read one mile. I checked the terrain against the geo maps I had memorized. My landing point was a shallow draw five hundred yards northwest of a hilltop that looked down on the fork in the Fasham — Tehran Road, a ribbon of asphalt that traversed the rugged Alborz Mountains. The tops of the hills were light gray and serrated — like broken teeth — and the valleys between them were black and forbidding with dense vegetation. Lights twinkled from the village of Fasham, just north of the fork. Smoke plumes vented upward, straight as the strokes of a crayon, meaning no wind.
Altitude: 7,571 feet. Time Elapsed: four minutes, forty-six seconds. Distance: zero. I was right over the LZ and resumed the cross position to stop my horizontal movement. What a way to travel!
I rotated slowly, reconnoitering the area and separating it into grids. Along the eastern horizon, a band of azure heralded the new sunrise. To the west and north, tiny lights peppered the gloomy mountains. Headlights trickled along the Fasham — Tehran Road to the spiderweb of highways north of Tehran. To the south, far in the distance, the illuminated sprawl of the city caused a shiver to sprint along my spine. Below, my landing point centered on a gash of tawny-colored ground flanked by shrubs and trees.