Mercenary (4 page)

A flash illuminated the room through the window and a second later an enormous crack of thunder sounded as if it had detonated just outside the door. Water began to drip through the reed roof onto the floor. ‘What was Stratton’s part in the rebellion?’ Harris asked.

‘He got caught up in things he never expected to . . . He was not an ordinary man. He did not try to lead but men wanted to follow him anyway. He did not try to impress others but others wanted to be like him.’

‘My report describes him as a trained killer. Is that how you yourself would describe him?’

‘Would you describe a gentle breeze as a killer? But a tornado is also just a wind . . . Stratton was like a welcome breeze most of the time. But he could also become a tornado.’

‘How did he come into it?’

Victor grinned. ‘In a spectacular fashion,’ he said, taking a final drag from his cheroot before tossing it into the fire. ‘He arrived the same way he left . . . Like an eagle . . .’

A Hercules transport aircraft thundered low over the jungle, gracefully following the contours of the rolling peaks and troughs of the forest canopy as dawn broke over the distant horizon. The plane’s sand-coloured fuselage, free of any identifying markings, was not as old as the paint job made it look. The propellers purred robustly as it banked easily onto a new heading and levelled off towards the rising sun.

As the tailgate motors whined the two large doors separated, the upper one folding into the fuselage, the bottom one lowering to form a level platform.

Stratton, wearing camouflage clothing, with a holstered pistol on his belt and a parachute on his back, stepped from inside the dark interior onto the ramp. The wind tousled his unkempt dark hair and he looked down at the jungle speeding past several hundred feet below. The dense forest spread beneath him like a vast undulating carpet, with distant rocky hills on one side and a series of table-top plateaus on the other. He tried to clear his mind and enjoy the spectacular view but he couldn’t. There was too much to think about.

He hooked the butt of a short black M4 carbine to a clip at his shoulder so that the barrel pointed down and secured it to his waist with a bungee. Meanwhile the crew extended a section of parallel rollers that looked like a large ladder from inside the cabin to the end of the ramp and quickly clamped it to the floor. The loadmaster, wearing headphones, strode out to Stratton and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘One minute!’ he shouted.

A crewman handed Stratton a helmet while another placed a heavy camouflaged backpack at his feet. Stratton buckled on the helmet, turned the pack upside down, stepped through the shoulder straps, pulled the pack up in front of him and clipped it to his belt harness. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to help ease his growing tension. It was always the same, he thought. The only time he remembered ever being totally indifferent about a jump had been when he was doing half a dozen a day, and only then by around day three of the jump schedules. Otherwise every time he’d pulled on a chute and stood on a ramp ready to go he had experienced butterflies to some degree. Stratton wasn’t the daredevil type but then again, if the odds of survival were in his favour and, most particularly, if the reason for jumping was good enough, he would go for it. But he had every excuse to feel a tad uneasy about this jump. It was a LALO - low altitude, low opening - and it was above jungle. That would never become routine.

A heavy crate one metre wide by two metres long emerged from the hold on the rollers and was brought to a stop on the edge of the ramp where a block prevented it from falling off. Strapped to its top was a large chute with a static line attached. Half a dozen similar containers were rolled out behind it.

‘We gotta standby!’ shouted the loadmaster, his voice echoing over speakers throughout the hold.

Crewmen took up their positions alongside the crates. A plastic bag shot out from somewhere inside the cabin and spiralled away in the slipstream.

‘Secure that trash!’ shouted the loadmaster.

A series of bright red lights flashed on around the ramp. The crewman on the end of a safety line crouching by the lead container, his clothes flapping furiously in the turbulence, gripped the restraining block.

One of the men leaned close to Stratton. ‘You’re one crazy son of a bitch!’ he yelled.

Stratton ignored him. He fitted his goggles and braced himself for what was coming next. The guy was perfectly correct but not in the way that he meant. He probably thought Stratton was looking forward to the jump. He was wrong. Stratton was looking forward to being on the jungle floor, sure - but not to getting there.

‘Goin’ up!’ shouted the loadmaster, grabbing a firm hold of the side of the ramp.

Each man braced himself as the pilot powered up the engines to maximum and pulled the nose of the aircraft up into a steep climb. The view out of the back was suddenly all green. The containers shunted against their restraining blocks and everyone hung on to their handholds as gravity tried to suck them out.

Stratton could smell the exhaust from the engines, a sweet odour that tickled the back of his throat that was now dry. He looked down to see a large clearing in the jungle appear directly below. It was the drop zone and he could only pray that they were on target.

The red lights changed to green. Stratton’s nervousness suddenly peaked and then fell away sharply as the climactic moment drew near and his concentration intensified.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ shouted the loadmaster.

A crewman yanked free the first restraining block and the heavy crate rolled on, tipped off the edge of the ramp and plunged into the slipstream where it was grabbed and ripped away in an instant. The attached static line went taut and dragged from the chute pack a long stream of pink nylon that inflated into a massive mushroom shape that slammed the brakes on the container, which swung violently in response. The other crates followed in quick succession.

Stratton took a deep breath, turned around and shuffled backwards to the edge of the ramp, keeping an eye on his feet to make sure that he didn’t fall off prematurely. He looked through the gap between the ramp and the bulkhead to see they were still over the clearing and then watched as the remaining crates rolled towards the edge of the ramp. The seconds to his jump were ticking away. He could not turn back now. At that moment it felt as though his mind was processing a million thoughts, not all of them helpful. He gripped the pilot chute and looked for the jungle again. The end of the clearing came into view. That was not good. He felt a sudden rush of concern. A glance to the other side revealed the last container slipping off the tailgate platform. Stratton ignored a warning from inside his head to abort and threw the pilot chute out behind him. He braced himself for the part of the jump that he hated most.

The pilot chute sprang open as it sailed out on the end of a long bridle that wrenched a deployment bag from Stratton’s parachute pack. He braced his shoulders and pressed his chin against his chest in preparation for the inevitable whiplash as the main chute deployed. It felt like he’d been standing there for an age although in reality it had been less than a second. The chute cracked open, yanking Stratton off the ramp like a rag doll, and for a few seconds he had absolutely no control. He tried to wrap his arms tightly around himself, as if to stop his limbs from being torn off.

As the aircraft levelled out the crew shuffled to the edge of the tailgate ramp to watch the progress of their payload. Stratton’s chute was a bright green nine-cell square with a red blotch across its top which, when the chute was fully deployed, became a large fire-breathing dragon.

‘That is one crazy bastard,’ someone shouted as Stratton recovered to make a tight turn barely a couple of hundred feet above the jungle.

‘He ain’t gonna make it to the edge of that clearing,’ the loadmaster mumbled into his headset.

‘Don’t matter,’ said a big man in civilian clothes and with a thick head of white hair who was standing behind him. He was wearing his own headphones. It was Maxwell Steel, a colonel in the US Marine Corps. ‘He’s just the pizza boy. As long as they get the pizzas.’

The loadmaster looked around at the man who was running the show. The crewman did not try to conceal his contempt as he walked away to operate the machine that pulled the flapping static-line cables and deployment bags back into the aircraft’s hold.

As the aircraft banked steeply away Steel took a last look at the man he had hired to deliver the load. He couldn’t understand what all the hoo-ha was about. If you made it you made it, if you didn’t you didn’t. That was his philosophy.

 

It took only a second for Stratton to confirm his fear that he was not going to make the clearing. If he’d been as certain of it when he’d been on the ramp he would have cancelled the jump and asked to go around again even though that would have pissed off everyone, especially Steel. The drop had started three seconds too late. That meant hundreds of metres in this business. Most of the bundles had landed inside the clearing but not all of them. He saw one strike the outer edge of the surrounding trees, the parachute ripping into the branches as the heavy bundle dropped between them. Not that he gave a monkey’s. He had his own problems.

Stratton’s square had a seventeen-foot horizontal gain to a one-foot drop. The wind was light and not a huge factor. Hitting the trees was. That could mean broken bones and getting hung up in a branch, and, depending on the extent of the injury, that might be the end of it. He had to find a way through - and quickly. A swift turn presented a choice of several gaps big enough to slip through. There was no way of knowing the obstacles he’d encounter inside the darkness, of course. He would find that out the hard way. His immediate task - one of many - was to sort out the angle of approach.

Stratton selected a hole directly beneath him. He soared out for some distance before turning back around. His experience told him that the trees were very tall and umbrella-like, and most of their branches would be near the top. If he could get past those then below would be mainly tree trunks - not that easy to steer through either.

Stratton concentrated on the dark opening, deftly pulling and releasing the toggles to adjust the chute’s glide path. He had to drop in perfectly or he would overshoot and that would be that.

The closer he got the deeper inside the hole he could see, but there was still no clear route through. At the crucial moment he pulled down on both toggles to remove much of the chute’s lift. As he plunged inside the gap it went dark and his eyes took a moment to adjust. He dropped rapidly and released the toggles to regain some lift. But as he did so a dense array of tangled branches appeared and he yanked down fiercely on one side to turn away, using what little control he had left. The chute’s fabric scraped against branches as Stratton swung in a tight arc. His legs struck them hard and they clung to him like grabbing hands. The reduction of weight took the air out of the cells and the parachute threatened to collapse. A violent and desperate kick released him but not before the chute had almost dropped level with him. He fell and for a moment was unsupported, but as he swung beneath the canopy his weight snapped the risers taut once more, the cells reinflated and he sailed on inside the jungle.

He was through the worst part of the descent but the dangers were not over. The tree trunks stood like vast pillars in a cathedral, the spaces between them barely wide enough to turn in. Littered across the jungle floor lay the decaying remains of past generations of trees. He pulled and released the chute’s toggles, using all his concentration and skill to weave between the massive columns.

The parachute flapped noisily as Stratton kept the speed as low as he dared without stalling, making the turns like a slalom skier, sometimes grazing a tree trunk.

The ground rushed towards him and as a small clearing appeared he lined it up. He released the toggles in order to eject his backpack, which he kicked off while he grabbed for the controls again. The pack dropped several feet before it jerked to a halt at the end of a line that was secured to Stratton’s harness. He took the lift out of the chute to stall it. The backpack hit the ground as his forward momentum ceased, and he dropped onto his toes beside it as if he was stepping down from a chair.

The parachute collapsed and once Stratton had unclipped it he slumped down to recover. One near-disaster after another within seconds was more than he had bargained for. He looked up at the hole in the almost solid roof of jungle, wondering how the hell he had managed to get through. If he’d ever needed a reminder that he’d been born lucky, the last few minutes had been it.

The sheer beauty of the forest was captivating. For as far as Stratton could see the trees stood majestically, higher than telegraph poles. In places the sun’s rays broke through to light up patches of the jungle floor. The air smelled sweet and tangy and he could practically taste the moisture in it. It was eerily quiet too but that was only to be expected. Every creature in the area would have scattered when he crashed through the jungle canopy and they were probably now silently watching him from cover.

Stratton would have been content to sit where he was for a while and even make himself a brew but he didn’t have the time. This was hostile country and a multi-bundle drop could have been seen for miles around. On top of that the intended recipients would show up at some stage, he hoped. The rendezvous procedure he’d been given was terrible. ‘You’ll know ’em when you see ’em,’ Steel had said. When Stratton had asked for a little more info, the American had replied sarcastically, ‘On one side are soldiers and on the other side are rebels. Don’t give ’em to the soldiers. And if you do, make sure they pay for ’em.’ He’d amused himself, at least. It had heightened Stratton’s suspicion that this was a cowboy operation. So had missing the drop zone by several hundred metres. The good news was that as soon as the rebels showed up he would have one small task to do and then he could get out of there.