The good news was that the military attache, who did speak Ukrainian and had been a Hercy pilot upon a time, was along as a passenger. He’d smoothed things out quite a bit and been really helpful with figuring out the slightly different configuration on this bird.
The AN-70s were brand new aircraft, the first new aircraft produced by Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So new the two the Rangers were using were the first the Ukrainians, themselves, had been able to afford.
The original design process had started back in the ’80s, intended by the Soviet military as a replacement for the by then venerable fleet of AN-12 Cubs. With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the accompanying economic disruptions production of the first prototype was halted then started then halted several times. Finally, in 1995 a protype was completed and entered testing. Unfortunately, on one of it’s first tests it collided with its chase plane and crashed, killing all seven of its crew.
However, the AN-70 was “the plane that wouldn’t die.” Antonov produced another protype in 1997 and continued testing with the first production planes coming off the lines, finally, in 1999.
Produced primarily for short-range, high-capacity hauling in underdeveloped countries the AN-70 was a turbo-prop, short-take-off-and-landing bird similar in many respects to the C-130 if considerably larger with a maximum payload of 130,000 kilograms or 100 jumpers vs 20,000 kg or 64 jumpers. It also had one of the most advanced designs of any cargo aircraft in the world with significant use of composites as well as a very high end avionics suite.
Compared to even the newest generation of Hercules’, it was a thoroughbred next to a cart horse. Among other things, it flew more like a fighter than a “trash-hauler.”
There was also a shit-load of room for the jumpers. They had a hundred and thirty jumpers with them. They could have, would have, cut a few if all they had were a couple of C-130s. As it was, if the mission hadn’t been so high level classified, they could have taken twenty or thirty “strap-hangers” and still rattled around like peas in a pod.
“STAND UP!” he shouted at the nearest jumper, flashing the same five fingers.
All through the aircraft the Rangers started struggling to their feet. Given that they had a rucksack over a hundred pounds in weight on their knees and a parachute on their back, it wasn’t the easiest maneuver in the world. On the other hand, they’d all done it dozens of times so they were up pretty quick.
“HOOK UP!” Guerrin shouted to the lead jumper, making a hooking sign in the air, then did so himself, albeit to the inboard cable.
Four cables ran down the interior of the aircraft, two about a foot from the skin, the “outboard” cables, and two about a foot apart running down the middle, the “inboard” cables. Jumpers hooked to the outboard cables, jumpmasters to the inboard.
Guerrin secured the cotter pin through his static line cable connector and then caught the eye of the lead jumper.
“CHECK STATIC LINE!” A sign of yanking on the static line.
Check to make sure you’re hooked up, check that the opening was “outboard” so just in case it jumped open, against all reason, you’d still have your chute pull out of the bag and open. Check the pin, check to make sure the line wasn’t around anything. If the static line got under your arm, for example, you would suddenly have a piece of nylon rope cutting into your bicep under pressure and screaming by at over a hundred miles per hour. In any airborne unit you saw the guys with “static line arm.”
Getting it around your neck was worse. You didn’t see them much after the jump. Maybe at the memorial service.
“CHECK EQUIPMENT!” A pound on the chest like Tarzan.
He and the assistant jumpmaster checked each other cursorily. Honestly, it was all Pentagon safety bullshit. You’re jumping it, you’d better have checked it. But you had to make the show.
“SOUND OFF FOR EQUIPMENT CHECK!” Lean forward with hand to ear.
The cry was repeated then from the front of the bird the troops sounded off, coming down in a string. The last one, the lead jumper, Specialist Serris, leaned forward and gave him an “Okay” sign and a big grin.
“ALL OTAY DUMPMATTAH!”
Christ, he’d told that joke once. Guerrin was prior service. He’d done time in the Rangers as an enlisted then gotten out and gone civvie. It was only after 9/11 that he’d come back in, riding an OCS ticket, a few contacts and some luck into a Ranger commander slot.
But “back in the day” as they said, Eddie Murphy was still on Saturday Night Live and doing his Buckwheat routine. Thus the “accent.” They did it all the time on jumps, just for shits and giggles.
He’d told a squad that just fucking once. So much for “opening up to the troops.”
“DOOR CHECK!” he shouted at the Ukrainian load master, pointing at the door. The hell if he could remember the German for that.
The loadmaster opened the door and the captain stepped to the opening. He took a good footing then grabbed the door edges and began his check. There were a lot of ways for a static line jump to fuck up and airborne and Ranger units had managed all of them at one point or another. One of the real killers was having a rough or sharp spot on the door edge. On the leading edge, it meant a cut hand, no big deal. On the trailing edge, though, it could mean a cut static line. And then, well, you had your reserve but bottomline you were fucked. Pull your reserve, dump your gear and hope like hell you didn’t hit too hard.
Modern “steerable” parachutes were designed to drop a standard-weight jumper at nine feet per second. The problem being that gear weights had gone up. So even if you dropped your ruck, you were still looking at thirty pounds over “standard” weights the chutes were designed for. Then there’s the fact that “standard” weight, due to increases in size in the American public and the generally heavier nature of Rangers, were not “standard” in the Batts. And even nine feet per second was damned fast when it was you hitting the ground. About ten percent of the jumpers in any drop, even in training, got injured on impact with the cold, hard earth.
Reserve chutes dropped you at a “standard” seventeen feet per minute.
He’d hit with a reserve once. It wasn’t something he wanted to experience again. So he checked hell out of the door.
But the Ukrainians, thank God, knew what they were doing. The molding around the door was as fresh as right out of the factory. Well, okay, it was darned near fresh from the factory. There wasn’t anything wrong with the door.
Door checked he leaned out and looked forward. There were still mountains in the way but he’d seen the approach maps; they were going to be looking at mountains right up until the jump. No problem. The Ranger motto is “The Whole World Is A Drop Zone.” The area they were going into was actually much better than their usual training drops. The stone walls were going to be interesting, but that’s why they had steerable chutes.
He could see an opening in the mountains, though. Probably their valley. Which meant they were close. He ducked back in and looked at the jumpmaster who held up two fingers.
“ZWEI MINUTEN!”
“TWO MINUTES!”
“WHOOF! WHOOF! WHOOF!… ”
Guerrin shook his head again and leaned back out. The troops had also picked up that he was a UGA graduate. So it naturally became “Bravo Bulldogs.” On a level he should be proud, it was a sign the troops thought well of him. But at moments like this it was a pain.
He could see the valley now. They were high. The birds were going to have to drop like a stone to get them down to anything jumpable. For that matter he noticed the air was pretty damned thin; it was a bit hard to breath.