Joe sighed. “I really have to talk to my travel agent. This trip is getting worse all the time.”
As Kurt and Joe waited for the light to go green, the pilots up front were easing the huge aircraft down over the trees. A crosswind coming down off the slope of the island was making it difficult and they were actually flying sideways, a tactic pilots call crabbing. The problem was that they couldn’t drop the Humvee in that alignment or it would land sideways and flip, killing the occupants instantly.
The copilot was on the instruments while the pilot flew with
night vision goggles on.
“Ninety feet AGL,” the copilot said.
“Can’t get any lower until the trees clear,” the pilot replied.
“We should be over the site in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
The trees finally dropped away from under them and the pilot saw the dirt strip stretching out before him in a long thin line. He corrected to the left and brought the C-17 almost to the surface, stomping on the rudder to straighten the huge bird out.
The C-17 was now thirty feet off the dirt strip, screaming at full power and headed for the trees five thousand feet ahead.
In a chair behind them the loadmaster hit a switch, changing the jump light in the rear of the aircraft from yellow to green. “Release the payload,” he said into the intercom.
For what seemed like an interminable length of time but was, in fact, only a few seconds, nothing happened except the trees ahead looming larger. Then the pilot felt the plane rise as the five-thousand-pound payload was pulled out the back.
At almost the same instant, Sgt. Connors’s voice came over the intercom. “They’re away. Payload clear. I repeat, payload clear.”
In a synchronized move, the pilot jammed the throttles to full as the copilot retracted the gear to reduce the plane’s drag coefficient.
“Positive rate,” the copilot called out, seeing the altimeter begin to move.
The pilot heard but did not reply. The dirt strip was only a mile long. The trees at the far end were no more than a few hundred yards away. It was a very tight window.
“Climb, baby, climb,” he whispered to the plane.
With its engines screaming and its nose pointed skyward, the gargantuan aircraft clawed for altitude. It crossed the end of the dirt strip and pulled just clear of the trees, close enough that the mechanics who inspected her later would find streaks of green chlorophyll all across the underside of the fuselage.
Clear of the danger, the pilot leveled off, picked up airspeed, and then turned to the southwest. In short order, they were out over the Mozambique Channel. Only now did the pilot consider the fate of the men they’d just dropped, wondering if they would live out the night.
For their part, Kurt and Joe had wondered if they would survive the drop itself. It felt as if the plane was maneuvering desperately the last thirty seconds or so. As the light went green, Connors had pressed a red deploy button and shouted “Go,” or something along those lines.
Neither Kurt nor Joe truly heard him as the sound of the drogue chutes deploying and the sudden whiplash of being pulled backward out of the aircraft snapped their heads forward and commanded all their attention.
The Humvee was yanked out of the aircraft and in free fall for all of two seconds. Kurt distinctly remembered the sight of the aircraft pulling up and banking to the right as the vehicle skidded across the dirt on the pallet like a toboggan out of control on an icy slope. The first sensation was like skipping like a stone on a lake. And then they decelerated as the pallet maintained contact with the packed dirt of the runway. The last forty or fifty feet seemed smoother. And then suddenly they lurched to a stop.
Up ahead the C-17 just barely cleared the trees, and Kurt was certain he saw brief fires in the treetops where the heat of the engines singed them.
At that moment just being alive was a thrill. Kurt looked over at Joe and saw him grinning from ear to ear. “Okay, I’d do that again,” he said giddily. “I’d even pay for another ride.”
Kurt had to agree, but duty called. He opened the door and released the lock that connected them to the parachute and another lock that held them to the pallet. Joe performed the same task on the driver’s side and then climbed back inside, turned the key, and brought the Humvee’s 6.2-liter fuel-injected diesel to life.
In a moment they were speeding across the last hundred yards of the runway and onto a dirt road that led them south.
“Hope you’ve got the map ready,” Joe said, “ ’cause I’m not from around here.”
“Just stay on this road,” Kurt said. “We’ve got seven miles to go.”
With their infiltration suits switched off and well-worn robes covering them, Kurt and Joe raced along the dirt road in the Humvee. The landscape flying past in the dark was hard to see, but this section of Madagascar was made up of wide grassy fields, occasional copses of small trees, and plenty of sky.
So far, they hadn’t passed a single hut or another vehicle. Joe let off the gas to negotiate a bend in the dirt road and they began to drift sideways as the rutted ground gave way beneath them. But with a slight punch of the throttle, the knobby tires bit a little deeper into the soil and the four-wheeldrive Humvee snapped back into a straight line and continued forward.
Kurt was in the passenger’s seat, holding on to the roll bar with one hand and checking the GPS with his other. “You always drive like this?”