Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

Though she’s not a big person, Rainy is squashed in a sandwich between her own seat back, her main chute, her belly chute, and the pilot’s seat back. This does nothing to calm her, but, she reminds herself, she’ll have lots of fresh air as she plummets toward the ground.

Skip revs the engine, which is not a reassuring sound, and the tiny plane goes bouncing down the dirt field, swerving to avoid a mud puddle and then lifting off in a sort of crablike, half-sideways fashion.

The cockpit is tiny and freezing but at least there are ample windows, and with the wing above them the view of the ground is good. They fly over the town of Maktar, on overcultivated fields now fallow as they head into winter. It’s interesting enough for a while—Rainy has not only had no experience with parachutes, this is her first time up in a plane—but it soon becomes monotonous as signs of human habitation disappear and the ground below becomes one long stretch of sand and rock.

She passes the time replaying her hasty instruction in the use of the parachute. Climb up into the doorway, legs dangling out. Push hard away from the plane and for God’s sake don’t pull the rip cord too soon. Or too late. Or forget to pull it at all.

And if the main chute should fail to deploy, she should calmly and without panic go to her emergency chute. Calmly. While falling like a rock.

They run into some turbulence, and the little plane starts to rise and fall just like a boat on the waves, elevator up, and a playground slide down. Up . . . down. Up . . . and the combination of the movement and the fear, the growing fear of jumping, turns her stomach acid. She needs to pee. She needs to vomit. She needs to not be here, not be in a tiny plane on her way to the middle of nowhere, and not be contemplating a parachute jump with zero experience.

Skip yells something back to her that she cannot hear, so he makes a chopping motion off to their right, and when Rainy looks she sees vehicles on a road, heading north. They’re nothing but tan rectangles, but she’s had enough training in reading recon photos to recognize German tanks and trucks. They’re leading a long plume of dust.

Those are the Germans she’d have run into had she tried to reach her destination by jeep. Unfortunately this means she will almost certainly be cut off once she drops, retreat barred by the enemy.

Skip holds the stick with his knees and jots notes into a notebook, tapping his compass to check their bearing and unfolding a map to compare what he’s seeing and what the map wants him to be seeing.

Skip reaches back to tap her leg and get her attention. Then he holds up one hand, fingers splayed.

Five. Five minutes.

This is a terrible idea.

This is crazy.

This is suicidal.

She feels like something large is stuck in her throat, like she tried to swallow a hamburger in one bite and now can’t get it down. Her heart is pounding in her chest.

Skip motions again, and now he unlatches the door, which will be hard to push open against the wind. Harder still is climbing up there. Left leg forward, squeezing, sucking in her breath while all the while she feels she can’t breathe, leaning into Skip, her weight on his left shoulder, her face practically pushed into his bald spot. He’s scrunching over as far as he can get while still keeping a hand on the stick, and then she slips. Her hand reaches instinctively for anything solid—the stick—and the plane plunges right and down. Something much bigger and much, much faster goes blazing by.

Backwash buffets the plane, it’s rattling, the engine is coughing, the door is unhitched, and in the wild careening Rainy sees the flat-nosed Focke-Wulf 190 banking into a tight turn to come back at them.

“Now or never!” Skip yells.

She’s got her back to the door, hunched over like a cooked shrimp.

“Are we there?”

Skip strong-arms her, pushing hard on her chest. Her hands tear loose from their hold, the door bangs on her thigh, air pressure like a hurricane hits her full force, and she’s falling, tumbling, head over heels, head over heels, like an acrobat.

She does not scream but wants to, her mind a blur, her body in a state of rigid panic. But a part of her brain, some cold, calm, reasoning fragment, says, Pull the rip cord, you meshuggeneh fool!

She pulls the cord. Nothing happens. She’s stopped breathing. The desert is whirling around, blue sky, beige dirt, blue sky, and then there is a sharp, almost brutal jerk that digs straps into her crotch and gives her whiplash as the chute brings her upright, feet dangling.

But she’s still falling, falling to her death . . . No. No, she can see the white-silk canopy above her, so she’s done it, she’s done it, she’s parachuted.

You still have to land!

A quarter mile above her and away to the south, the spotter plane comes apart, pieces flying as the Focke-Wulf pours machine gun fire into it. She watches but does not see Skip getting out, does not see a second chute blossoming, just the plane falling nose-down in wild loops. Part of the wing comes off, and the loops become a disorganized tumble.

She looks away as the plane hits the ground, a puff of dust, soundless.

And the ground is rushing up at her, and she forgets everything she was told about landing, no bracing, no bent knees, no rolling to spread the impact, she hits hard, bone-jarringly hard, and falls over. The chute, still full, drags her on her back for a few feet before she can roll over, get first to her knees and then to her feet, and the chute collapses.

She works her way free of the parachute harness. Rainy Schulterman has just parachuted behind enemy lines. And gotten a man named Skip killed.

Featureless desert sand in every direction. She lies on her back, panting, willing her heart to slow down enough to actually pump blood rather than just hammer at her rib cage.