Chapter 21

21

Juan grabbed the red door handle and prepared to lift it to the open position, but he stopped in his tracks.

He turned around and stared at the cargo bay brimming with weapons and ammunition. It was all headed somewhere, no doubt a conflict zone. But in Cabrillo's experience, such weapons of war were only nominally used in combat against enemy forces. Most often, they were used to brutalize and kill the unarmed civilians caught in the middle. Judging by the size of this cargo of death, that meant a lot of innocents were going to suffer.

But it couldn't be helped. Cabrillo had the option of calling the Oregon and ordering them to shoot down the airliner after he jumped out. That would spare whatever civilians were waiting on the other end of this ratline. But it also meant he and his crew would never find the network of this so-called Vendor character. And who knew how many more lives might be at risk if the Vendor network was allowed to continue its operations?

It was a classic moral dilemma—the kind of thing that operatives like him weren't supposed to concern themselves with as they carried out their orders.

Save the few? Or sacrifice the few for the good of the many?

Juan looked at the manual door latch in his hand. His anger flared.

He refused to sacrifice anybody.

He would fight to save them all or die trying.

He scanned the automated plane's bulkhead. He didn't have access to the cockpit or the onboard computer. But the whole system couldn't be only automated. After all, the exit door could be manually opened. Why couldn't the cargo bay?

His eyes tracked along the floor until he spotted a run of electrical conduit that snaked its way into a hole in the cargo floor. He then traced the conduit's path in reverse until he spotted a locked electrical panel higher up on the bulkhead.

Juan raced over to it and tried to pry it open. No luck. He fished around in his combat leg and pulled out his lock picks. He seldom used American Express these days, but he never left home without his picks.

He slipped the torsion wrench and pick into the lock and with a couple of surgically precise twists popped the panel door wide open.

Pocketing his pick set, he scanned the control panel and flipped the manual bypass toggle to on . He then mashed the cargo bay door button. Hydraulic motors spun up and moments later the bottom of the plane opened like bomb bay doors. The cargo bay was now filled with the roar of the big turbofan engines screaming beneath the wings and the howling ice-cold wind careening inside the space. The parachute deployment bags on top of their cargo pallets shuddered in the tornadic wind. The temperature plunged with each passing second.

Juan then pressed the launch button. The rollers embedded in the ramp began spinning and the first row of two pallets lurched forward. The next row of pallets advanced behind them and so on all the way to the back of the cargo bay, including the pallet he had plundered.

The first row of pallets tipped off the edge of the ramp and tumbled into the air. Cabrillo smiled knowing that all of these weapons and the carnage they represented would soon find a home at the bottom of the Gulf of Oman.

The second row of pallets were the next to fall, and shortly after that, the third. Each subsequent row continued marching into the airy abyss like square lemmings off a cliff.

While he was waiting for the last two rows of pallets to drop off the ramp, he reexamined his drogue chute one last time, then gripped it tightly in his hand. If he deployed it too quickly there was a danger the jet exhaust could tangle it up as it unfurled. He needed to clear the plane for at least a few seconds before releasing it.

Juan watched the last row of pallets, the twentieth, fall into the sky. The cargo bay was now empty.

That was his cue.

He charged down the ramp like a Viking berserker, shouting, " Valhalla! " as he leaped spread-eagle into the void.

★

Cabrillo wasn't sure if he jumped into the air so much as the plane vomited him out, speeding away from him at over seven hundred feet per second.

Whichever it was, the effect was the same. He felt as if he'd jumped into a frozen lake of air. Without benefit of goggles or oxygen mask, the force of wind rabbit-punched his face, robbing him of breath and stinging his eyes.

Three seconds after clearing the plane Juan deployed his chute. The ripstop nylon canopy deployed perfectly. Seconds later, the drogue pulled the big cargo chute out of his pack, dragging its suspension lines behind it. The enormous canopy snapped fully open with a familiar pop! The pack's jerry-rigged straps cut sharply into Juan's inner thighs and shoulders like tourniquets yanked down by a circus strongman.

Suddenly the problem of the too-large cargo chute for too-little weight presented itself.

At first, Juan's downward progress stopped and then he shot up like a slingshot. Way up.

But without the downward force of heavy cargo weight, the fully deployed chute began losing its inflation. Worse, the flaccid canopy collided with the violent turbulence pummeling the air behind the jet's powerful turbofan engines, threatening to collapse the chute entirely.

Juan jerked on the suspension lines—this kind of cargo rig didn't have steering lines—hoping to keep the chute from collapsing on itself.

He needn't have worried.

The cargo jet erupted in a massive ball of flame, throwing pieces of the fuselage, wings, and tail section tumbling toward the sea, and shooting shrapnel across the sky.

A giant piece of red-hot aluminum sliced through Juan's fragile canopy like a drunken samurai's katana through a rice-paper wall, shredding his chute.

And plummeting Cabrillo to his doom.