Phoenix Sub Zero

The missile’s only concern was successfully flying the remaining miles to the target and detonating in the proper sequence. seventy miles north of ashkhabad, turkmenistan The 200-knot slipstream punched into seal commander Jack Morris’s guts and threatened to send him tumbling in spite of his textbook-correct body position. He bounced through the turbulence, feeling the shock of the cold after the shock of the wind began to die down. He sailed in the thunderous gale winds of free fall at 115 miles per hour, terminal velocity with his flying-squirrel thermal coveralls, wondering what the wind chill was — wind of 115 miles per, starting with air at forty below zero. Whatever it was, it would be cold enough to freeze him into an iceball in another few seconds if not for his electrically heated suit. He fell toward the black desert below, trying to see the luminescent altimeter.

This jump was to be a hop-and-pop, the free-fall portion less than a minute. As expected, he felt a minor jolt as the drogue chute popped out of his back, the altimeter automatically deploying the parachutes of the entire team at the same altitude. The drogue rose overhead and pulled out the silk of the mattress-shaped parasail. Jack Morris felt a hard jerk, as if the gallows trapdoor had opened and sent him dangling, but instead of choking him the harness gave him a stern kick in the crotch.

A half second later the bungee cord attached at one end to his harness and at the other to his heavy equipment crate grew taut as the box continued to fall. Taking the weight of the crate nearly deflated the parasail for a moment; Morris waited and let the chute stall out, knowing that this was the moment that killed most sky divers. A deploying canopy could tangle itself and get in the way of the reserve chute, like Bony Robbins’s had before Christmas. His main chute had become a cigarette, an obscenely tangled streamer flapping uselessly in the wind above him. Bony had struggled to cut away the main, but the reserve’s altimeter had kicked in and pushed out his reserve, which promptly became tangled in the main chute. Bony had hit the frozen cornfield at over 100 miles an hour. But Morris’s main behaved and filled with wind while the equipment crate settled out forty feet below. Morris steered south and looked for the rest of the 100-man force. In the moonless night, he couldn’t see anyone, but he could hear the canopies around him. There was no noise from the KC-lojet. It had already dived back down to terrain-hugging altitude now that the seals were out, most likely streaking home as fast as the coffee-drinking, paper-pushing zoomies could fly.

The jump point had been seventy miles from the UIF main bunker. They had left the jet at 45,000 feet and opened the parachutes after a minimal fall. Morris had counted on flying the parasails twenty miles with the wind. By the time they hit the desert floor, they would still be fifty miles from Sihoud’s living room. With fifteen minutes to assemble the desert patrol vehicles, that gave them an hour and a half to get to the bunker perimeter with a half hour of contingency time. So far the mission had been on-target: the jet hadn’t been gunned down and, assuming the bus drivers knew where the hell they were, the jump had gone off without incident. But every mission screwed up somewhere. The only difference between a successful raid and a miserable rout was the magnitude of the unexpected foul-up. Plenty could still go wrong, he thought as he glanced at the altimeter and compass. The landing could be rough with the equipment crates, perhaps injuring some of the men. The DPVS could be damaged, and without the desert patrol vehicles they would not make the fifty-mile trip in time. They might find company waiting when they landed, or at the bunker perimeter, or anywhere in between. And even once they secured the perimeter, the god damned Javelin cruise missiles might decide to hit the seals, and it would be Jimmy Carter and Iran all over again.

Morris turned up the thermostat on his suit, the fabric filled with electrical heat resistors like an electric blanket.