“The launch could go bad, you could get ripped up by the jet’s wake turbulence, your oxygen could fail, which means you’ll pass out before you can even get down to a safe altitude…”
Kurt looked up. “What did I just say?”
“… You could freeze to death,” Joe continued, ignoring him. “You could be unable to release the cover or pop your chute. Your feet could get stuck. The airfoils could fail to open correctly.”
Kurt climbed over the rail and into the torpedo-shaped glider, giving up on stopping Joe.
“What about you?” he asked. “You have to stay on this contraption. Did you see the corrosion near the wing root? Did you see that smoke pouring from the number three engine when they all were fired up? I can’t believe this old bird even got up into the air.”
“All part of the Aeroflot experience,” Joe insisted. “Not that I wouldn’t rather be flying American-made, but I think she’s safer than what you’re about to do.”
Kurt wanted to disagree, but he couldn’t. In truth, he believed the transport was safe, even if it shook and rattled and whined like a banshee. But if Joe was going to make him sweat, he was going to return the favor.
“And don’t forget the pilots,” Kurt added. “I think I saw them doing shots of sake kamikaze style right before we took off.”
Joe laughed. “Yeah, in your honor, amigo.”
A yellow light came on. One minute to the jump site.
Kurt locked his feet in, lay down flat, and switched on the video display. As it initialized, he gave the thumbs-up to Joe, who snapped the thin cowling over Kurt’s back, covering him and his specially designed parachute.
A second yellow light came on, and a red light began to flash. Thirty seconds.
Joe moved back out of Kurt’s view and toward the launch control.
A few seconds
later Kurt heard Joe counting down—“Tres… Dos… Uno”—and then with great enthusiasm, “¡Vámonos, mi amigo!”
Kurt felt the glider accelerate backward as a powered conveyer belt sped him toward the back end of the plane. And then he dropped, and was slammed back even harder as the torpedo-shaped glider hit the 500-knot airstream.
Seconds later, a tiny drogue chute deployed behind the glider, and the g-forces from the deceleration hit Kurt as hard as a launch from a carrier deck, but in the opposite way.
The restraint harness crushed Kurt’s shoulders as he slid forward. His arms bent, and his hands bore the rest of his weight, and all the while his eyes felt like they might pop out of his head.
It went like that for a good ten seconds before the deceleration slowed.
Once he got his body stabilized, Kurt scanned the heads-up display. “Four hundred,” Kurt called out to no one but himself. A few seconds later, “Three-fifty…”
The glider slowed and dropped, heading toward the waters of the central Atlantic like a giant artillery shell or a manned bomb. Finally, as the speed dropped below 210 knots, Kurt released the chute.
It broke away with a resounding clang, and the descent went from a shaky violent ride to an unnervingly smooth one. The whistling wind was almost completely blocked out by his helmet, and the buffeting was all but gone.
A moment later, as the airspeed hit 190, a pair of stubby wings extended, forced outward by a powered screw jack.
This was the most dangerous moment of the flight, in Kurt’s mind. Prototypes had been lost when the wings did not extend evenly, causing the glider to spin out of control and break apart.
True, he still had a parachute on if that happened, but there was no telling what it might do to his body if the vehicle began to spin out of control or came apart in midair at nearly 200 knots.
The wings locked into place, accompanied by tremendous pressure on Kurt’s chest and stomach, as the glider developed lift and transformed itself from a manned missile on a downward-sloping trajectory to an aircraft pulling up and then flying almost straight and level.
Once Kurt had control, he decided to test the wings to make sure all was working well. He banked right and then left. He put the glider back into a dive and then leveled off, and used its momentum to enter a climb.
All systems were go, and despite the danger ahead and all Joe’s pessimism, Kurt could not remember feeling such exhilaration. It was the closest thing he could imagine to being granted the power of flight, like a great bird.
The little glider responded instantly to his touch, and he found he could turn it by using his weight and leaning this way or that like a motorcyclist racing along an open road.
All was dark around him, save the dim illumination of the heads-up display and the pinpoint lights of the stars.