Chapter 22

22

Juan’s canopy collapsed as quickly as it had filled. His subconscious lizard brain told him there was nowhere to go from here but down.

Way down.

Cabrillo had long ago learned the art of detachment, especially when facing fatal catastrophes. Improvisation was one of his superpowers, but detachment was his impenetrable shield against the fiery darts of chaos. Emotions clouded the mind in a crisis, hampering decision-making. But panic was a mind-killer—and always fatal.

His Caltech-trained brain began running calculations. He knew the typical parachutist fell at an average speed of 120 miles per hour. That meant he had already covered over a thousand feet, give or take. The math all pointed to a simple question:

How long was it going to take him to die?

There was no way he could survive a fall of fourteen thousand feet without a working parachute.

Since down was the only direction he was capable of at the moment, he turned his gaze in that direction. With no small delight he spotted the blooming black mushroom caps of at least seven pallets far below him, falling away in stair steps, with more opening as the seconds passed. If he had to guess, the altitude sensors had been set to automatically deploy at five thousand feet.

The only problem was that pallets with deployed chutes were now falling at a leisurely rate of around fifteen feet per second, while he was knifing through the air at closer to one hundred seventy feet per second. He needed to make some adjustments—fast.

One of the advantages of fighting and surviving innumerable gunfights was that Cabrillo had developed superlative muscle memory in regard to quick reaction, aiming, and eye-hand coordination. Instinctively he spread his limbs wide to create as much drag as possible to slow his descent, and used his arms and legs to control his direction.

He was falling too fast to catch the nearest deployed parachute. He blew past it like a Ferrari on a straightaway, so he aimed for the next one.

Juan braced for the impact, uncertain as to what to expect. The fully deployed canopy was stretched to its max by the massive weight of its cargo below, its inflated fabric taut as a backyard trampoline.

Thanks to Newton, Cabrillo knew that force was a function of mass times acceleration. At the moment he was two hundred pounds of meat hurtling ever faster through the air at thirty-two feet per second.

With that kind of force he would either hit the canopy and bounce off it like a golf ball hitting the sidewalk—or punch through it like a Buick through a pool cover.

Cabrillo crashed into the crown of the big canopy. To his surprise he neither bounced nor penetrated.

Instead, the force with which Juan hit the chute collapsed it.

The chute folded in on itself, and closed in around Cabrillo like a bug in a Venus flytrap. He twisted his body as if rolling off the world’s flimsiest mattress and escaped the chute’s feathery death grip before his own lines got tangled with the others.

Out of the frying pan, Juan thought as he found himself once again plummeting toward the unforgiving sea.

What he felt, however, was that his rate of speed had slowed considerably thanks to the collision with the chute. He took aim at the next parachute some five hundred feet below him and twenty feet to the right, his twisting body and limbs mimicking the ailerons and flaps of the world’s least aerodynamic plane.

His exertions paid off and he found himself crashing into the next canopy at half the speed with which he’d hit the previous one. With any luck he’d be able to ride this one down without collapsing it.

But as an engineer, he knew that neither physics nor aerodynamics had anything to do with luck.

The chute fluttered for several seconds before collapsing in on itself. But that gave Juan enough time to pick his next target—and change his tactics.

Unfortunately, he had sped past nearly all of the other floating pallets. The last ones available to him were the first three pallets pushed out the cargo bay door. As near as he could tell they were about three thousand feet above the sea—and less than three minutes away from impact.

Picking his next and last target, Juan didn’t aim for the one nearest him, floating almost directly below. Instead he picked the lowest of the bunch, which was also some distance away on the horizontal. It was the pallet he had the greatest chance of missing.

And it was also his best shot at survival.

Cabrillo stretched himself out to create as much drag as possible and slow his descent, stiffening his limbs against the upward force to keep from tumbling keister over teakettle. Once stabilized, he angled his arms and legs to alter his aerodynamic profile and targeted the last chute. But this time, instead of shooting for the canopy, he aimed for the pallet.

Juan crashed smack-dab into the center of the stack—and hit it like a speeding hockey forward cross-checking a parked Zamboni. Every bone in his body rattled.

But because the free-floating pallet wasn’t fixed to the ground, it gave way under Juan’s impact, lessening the blow. He snagged the cargo support straps with his nearly frozen fingers, halting a bounce from the pallet that would have sent him plummeting to his death.

Juan’s weight and impact swayed the load back and forth, but the giant parachute held its shape. Cabrillo climbed hand over hand up the cargo straps until he reached the top of the pallet. He used the suspension lines to pull himself up and then to steady his stance as he stood on top of the stack.

The dark blue waters of the Gulf of Oman were rushing up fast. Standing on top of the speeding pallet that was still dropping at fifteen feet per second felt like riding a free-falling elevator to the bottom of the shaft.

Cabrillo’s only hope of survival was to crawl up into the chute rigging as high as he could without collapsing the canopy. He inched his way up, careful to distribute his weight as evenly as possible in the lines. With any luck, the pallet would crash into the sea and temporarily relieve the downward pressure on the parachute, while he remained in the rigging safely above the crash, and just long enough to leap beyond the pallet below.

But, of course, Cabrillo didn’t believe in luck.

The two-ton pallet hit the water with a thundering splash like a World War II depth charge, blasting a geyser of water high into the sky—and straight into the parachute canopy above.

But the blast of water was a boon. It blew Cabrillo out of the rigging into a high, cartwheeling arc that dropped him twenty feet away in a splashing, high diver’s belly flop. The crash landing hurt like the dickens and drove him under the surface. He crawled his way back up, coughing up seawater that burned his sinuses like a soldering iron—a painful proof of life.

All things being equal, it was better than being dead.

A sudden jerk yanked him backward, hard. Survival instincts kicked in. Cabrillo gulped down a mouthful of air just as he was dragged beneath the surface. His shocked brain instantly understood that the fifty-foot-long lines of his own failed chute must have become entangled with the pallet chute lines. The two-ton pallet was dragging him down headfirst to the seabed thousands of feet below.

Cabrillo’s fingers clawed at the buckles securing his improvised parachute harness. Every passing second dragged him deeper into the abyss, the rising pain stabbing in his ears like knitting needles.

Panic’s icy fingers began gripping Cabrillo’s heart, but he soldiered on, loosening the last buckles and stripping away the harness as fast as he could. All of that exertion burned out the last of the oxygen in his lungs.

All Cabrillo could do was exhale away the noxious fumes in a stream of trailing bubbles as he clawed his way back up until he finally broke the surface, gulping in air as fast as his bellowing lungs would allow.

Another geysering splash thundered just a few yards away from him. He was still in harm’s way. He glanced up and saw the sky filled with parachuting pallets. Some were falling away from him in scattered ranks into the sea, but surface winds were swinging some of them back around.

Mustering the last of his energy reserves, he leaned into the water and swam away, his long, smooth strokes conditioned by the hundreds of miles he’d put in over the years in the Oregon’s swimming pool. He didn’t stop until he felt clear of the probable landing zone some hundred yards from where he began. Once stopped, he caught his breath again and then stripped off his boots, utterly exhausted.

Juan lay on his back to gather more energy. Water erupted in distant thundering splashes in his peripheral vision as pallets hit the water. But his eyes were focused on the trailing cloud of black smoke pointing a crooked finger to where the airplane had exploded.

Cabrillo was certain the Oregon wouldn’t have shot it down without his express orders. So who did?

He knew he’d have at least thirty minutes to think about it as he waited for his ship to arrive.

Juan’s practiced fingers found the compartment in his combat leg and he reached for his smartphone to contact the Oregon, but the phone wasn’t there. Then he remembered he’d pocketed it and he pulled it out. Not surprisingly, the fall from the sky or the seawater—or both—had killed it.

Cabrillo treaded water. No telling if his bleeding had stopped or if it was sending out a “Hot Donuts Now!” signal to every patrolling shark in the region. He was too tired to care.

After surviving the elevator ride from hell he decided he’d had enough aerobic conditioning for one day.

He stretched out his aching limbs, floated on his back, and fixed his eyes on the sky. His heart rate slowed with the sound of his own labored breathing ringing in his ears as his mind embraced the terrifying reality of the last few minutes.

What would he tell his crew? Would they even believe it?

Did he?

Cabrillo roared with laughter.

He closed his eyes and felt the heat of the sun on his face and the warm embrace of the sea. The caressing waves upheld him as if God himself bore him in the palm of his hand, a gesture of grace against the terrors he had just suffered.

Cabrillo was grateful for the respite, however long it might last.