EndWar

Breathing in all that pure oxygen was a huge deal because hypoxia was a huge enemy. Without enough air, you could lose consciousness, fail to open your chute, and literally dig your own grave.

Vatz had seen it happen. Twice. And both times the problem had occurred when changing over from the pre-breather to the oxygen bottle. Those guys had allowed nitrogen to slip back into their bloodstreams. At least neither had felt the impact. They’d just blacked out, dropped, hit the ground.

He shuddered. A dozen other things could go wrong, too, stuff he couldn’t even imagine. They had to jump in a tight-knit formation, and one bad move by himself or a fellow operator could result in a fatal midair collision. No, Vatz had never seen anyone die from that, but he’d seen a lot of guys slam into each other.

At their stage of the game, though, those things shouldn’t be issues. But if your name was Nathan Vatz, you always thought about them in the minutes before the jump.

And there wasn’t much else to think about. If he didn’t focus on that, he’d be back to Doletskaya or Green Vox, imagining himself exacting revenge on those bastards.

Or he’d be back to that night in the chopper, watching his brothers die before his eyes—

And asking the same damned question over and over: Twelve good men went into Moscow, and only one came out. Why me?

The jumpmaster gave them the twenty-minute warning, which they all acknowledged with a great cheer: it’d been nearly four hours since they’d lifted off from Gray Army Airfield.

Then the jumpmaster went through his checklist. Helmets and oxygen mask, check. CDS switches, load marker lights, anchor cable stops, ramp ADS arms, cargo compartment lights, all good for him.

“Complete!” he boomed.

And as all safety-minded paratroopers did, they checked the gear of the men ahead of them. Again. And again. Perhaps four, five, maybe six times.

Some said the last twenty minutes before a jump were the longest of their lives. Not for Vatz.

He blinked.

And they were on their feet, the ramp open and locked, the navigator coming over the radio to say, “Ten seconds.”

They were nearly on top of the CARP — the computerized airborne release point — which accounted for all the data coming in from the aircraft’s systems and the current weather conditions. Vatz was glad neither he nor anyone else in the company had to figure out those calculations. They’d thrown some of that math at him back at Fort Bragg, and he’d spent most of the time ducking.

All right, the time had finally come.

The eight officers, seven warrant officers, and sixty-seven enlisted soldiers of Vatz’s Special Forces company were about to go for a little walk.

But then the pilot cursed, and the navigator screamed over the radio: “We got a missile locked on! Get ’em out! Get ’em all out!”

Vatz’s mouth went to cotton. He now knew those pilots had discovered they’d been probed by enemy radars a while ago, but they hadn’t said anything. No need to cause a plane full of SF guys to get unraveled. The Russians had poured so much money into new technology that they’d been routinely defeating JSF electronic countermeasures, and wasn’t it Vatz’s luck that his ride up to Canada had a bull’s-eye painted on its nose?

Nevertheless, the reaction of the men inside the cargo hold was a testament to the professionalism of Special Forces operators everywhere.

There was no frantic rush to the ramp, no mob scene of helmeted troopers stampeding to get out.

They began the jump as they ordinarily did — just ten times faster, the jumpmaster hidden behind his visor and waving them on. Vatz’s helmet was equipped with the latest, greatest, and smallest generation of night-vision goggles attached over the visor. A host of other readings, including data from his wrist-mounted altimeter and parachute automatic activation device (AAD), were fed to him via a head’s-up display in the visor itself. The unit automatically switched on as he left the ramp, among the first twenty or so to exit, along with their heavy equipment/ordnance crates.

Down below, lights shone like phosphorescent stitching on a black quilt, but those stitches were few and far between. This part of Canada was scarcely populated.

Also somewhere down there was the railroad, and the river, but he couldn’t see them just yet.

No one said a word over the intra-team radio.

They were all holding their breaths, Vatz knew.

A slight flash came from the corner of his eye, and he craned his head, just as the missile struck the C-130 in the tail, impacting right above the open ramp — even as operators were still bailing out.

He couldn’t even say Oh my God.

He was shocked into silence. The aircraft exploded in a fluctuating cloud of flames that swallowed the operators floating away from the tail.

Vatz deliberately rolled onto his back and watched as the roiling sphere of death grew even larger, pieces of flaming debris extending away from it, trailing tendrils of smoke.