50
TWO HOURS LATER,
still on the old jet, Kurt and Joe had moved from the cockpit back
into main section of the fuselage. They now stood in a cavern of
metal, surrounded by equipment, small containers, and tie-down
straps.
Despite a pressure
suit, gloves, boots, and fighter pilot–style helmets with
noise-canceling headphones and forced oxygen, Kurt could feel the
bite of the frigid cold at thirty-five thousand feet. He could feel
every shudder of the aircraft and hear nothing but the piercing
whine of the jet’s narrow seventies-era engines.
Such were the
accommodations in the cargo bay of a Russian
transport.
Standing beside him,
in a parka with fur lining around the face and a headset and oxygen
mask of his own, Joe Zavala appeared to be saying something, but
Kurt couldn’t make out the words.
“I didn’t copy,” Kurt
shouted.
Joe pressed his
oxygen mask and its microphone tighter on his face and repeated his
thought. “I said, you must be crazy,” he shouted back.
Kurt didn’t respond.
He was beginning to think Joe might be right. Holding firmly to a
strap that dangled from the side of the airframe like a man on a
crowded subway, Kurt turned toward the aircraft’s tail. A crack
began appearing near the rear as the ramp in the tail
opened.
As the ramp went
down, the old jet shook worse than ever, and the wind swirled
through the cargo bay, buffeting him and Joe and threatening to
knock them over.
The aircraft had been
depressurized thirty minutes before, so there was no rush of
escaping atmosphere, but the temperature instantly dropped from
just above freezing to fifteen below, and the howling of the jet’s
engines jumped four notches at the very least.
Kurt stared out the
yawing opening into the waiting blackness of the night sky. He was
sucking oxygen off a tank and wearing a specially designed
parachute. And while he’d made over two hundred jumps in his
lifetime, including twenty HALOs (High Altitude–Low Opening), what
he was about to try was something he’d never done before, something
Joe had been continuously advising him to rethink.
So far, he’d laughed
off Joe’s pessimism, calling him a “mother hen,” but now, staring
out the back of the jet, Kurt wasn’t so sure.
Letting go of the
strap, he stepped cautiously toward an object near the open tail
ramp. It looked like a cross between an Olympic bobsled and a
“photon torpedo” from the Star Trek
series. The designers called it a Single Occupant Tactical Range
Insertion Unit. The men who’d tested it out called it the LX, or
Lunatic Express.
It worked like a
one-man glider. Dropped from seven miles in the sky with a glide
ratio of twenty to one, the Lunatic Express could transport its
occupant on a one-way trip across a hundred forty miles and do it
without a sound or a heat trail or a radar signature, since the
whole thing was actually made of specialized plastic and covered
with a radar-absorbing layer that looked and felt like soft tire
rubber to Kurt.
To fly it, the
occupant climbed in, lay down face-first, and grabbed a pair of
handles that did not seem too far removed from the grips of an old
ten-speed bicycle. He then jammed his feet into what felt like ski
bindings.
The most-forward
section of the device was a clear Plexiglas windshield with a basic
heads-up display projected on it. It gave him speed, altitude,
heading, glide ratio, and rate of descent. It also offered a visual
glide-slope indicator designed to help the pilot maintain the
correct angle and reach whatever destination had been targeted. In
this case, that meant the tanker Onyx,
seventy-five miles away.
Because of her odd
position in the ocean, the Onyx had
proved hard to get to. Not only was she far away from the closest
shipping lane, there were no air routes anywhere close to her. To
fly overhead, even at thirty-five thousand feet, would have been
instantly suspicious, but there was a heavily traveled air route
seventy-five miles to the south, and on radar the IL-76 would
appear as just another passenger jet on the airborne highway. Kurt
couldn’t imagine it being worth a second look.
And even if they were
watching, no system Kurt knew of would pick up the glider and its
single occupant.
It was a simple setup
in theory. In the simulator Kurt had felt like he was playing a
video game. Somehow the real thing was slightly more
intimidating.
“Come on,” he said to
Joe. “Get me into this thing before I chicken out.”
Joe moved up to the
glider. “Do you have any idea how many things could go wrong with
your plan?”
“No,” Kurt said. “And
I don’t want you to tell me.”
“The launch could go
bad, you could get ripped up by the jet’s wake turbulence, your
oxygen could fail, which means you’ll pass out before you can even
get down to a safe altitude . . .”
Kurt looked up. “What
did I just say?”
“. . . You could
freeze to death,” Joe continued, ignoring him. “You could be unable
to release the cover or pop your chute. Your feet could get stuck.
The airfoils could fail to open correctly.”
Kurt climbed over the
rail and into the torpedo-shaped glider, giving up on stopping
Joe.
“What about you?” he
asked. “You have to stay on this contraption. Did you see the
corrosion near the wing root? Did you see that smoke pouring from
the number three engine when they all were fired up? I can’t
believe this old bird even got up into the air.”
“All part of the
Aeroflot experience,” Joe insisted. “Not that I wouldn’t rather be
flying American-made, but I think she’s safer than what you’re
about to do.”
Kurt wanted to
disagree, but he couldn’t. In truth, he believed the transport was
safe, even if it shook and rattled and whined like a banshee. But
if Joe was going to make him sweat, he was going to return the
favor.
“And don’t forget the
pilots,” Kurt added. “I think I saw them doing shots of sake
kamikaze style right before we took off.”
Joe laughed. “Yeah,
in your honor, amigo.”
A yellow light came
on. One minute to the jump site.
Kurt locked his feet
in, lay down flat, and switched on the video display. As it
initialized, he gave the thumbs-up to Joe, who snapped the thin
cowling over Kurt’s back, covering him and his specially designed
parachute.
A second yellow light
came on, and a red light began to flash. Thirty
seconds.
Joe moved back out of
Kurt’s view and toward the launch control.
A few seconds later
Kurt heard Joe counting down—“Tres . . . Dos .
. . Uno”—and then with great enthusiasm, “¡Vámonos, mi amigo!”
Kurt felt the glider
accelerate backward as a powered conveyer belt sped him toward the
back end of the plane. And then he dropped, and was slammed back
even harder as the torpedo-shaped glider hit the 500-knot
airstream.
Seconds later, a tiny
drogue chute deployed behind the glider, and the g-forces from the
deceleration hit Kurt as hard as a launch from a carrier deck, but
in the opposite way.
The restraint harness
crushed Kurt’s shoulders as he slid forward. His arms bent, and his
hands bore the rest of his weight, and all the while his eyes felt
like they might pop out of his head.
It went like that for
a good ten seconds before the deceleration slowed.
Once he got his body
stabilized, Kurt scanned the heads-up display. “Four hundred,” Kurt
called out to no one but himself. A few seconds later, “Three-fifty
. . .”
The glider slowed and
dropped, heading toward the waters of the central Atlantic like a
giant artillery shell or a manned bomb. Finally, as the speed
dropped below 210 knots, Kurt released the chute.
It broke away with a
resounding clang, and the descent went from a shaky violent ride to
an unnervingly smooth one. The whistling wind was almost completely
blocked out by his helmet, and the buffeting was all but
gone.
A moment later, as
the airspeed hit 190, a pair of stubby wings extended, forced
outward by a powered screw jack.
This was the most
dangerous moment of the flight, in Kurt’s mind. Prototypes had been
lost when the wings did not extend evenly, causing the glider to
spin out of control and break apart.
True, he still had a
parachute on if that happened, but there was no telling what it
might do to his body if the vehicle began to spin out of control or
came apart in midair at nearly 200 knots.
The wings locked into
place, accompanied by tremendous pressure on Kurt’s chest and
stomach, as the glider developed lift and transformed itself from a
manned missile on a downward-sloping trajectory to an aircraft
pulling up and then flying almost straight and level.
Once Kurt had
control, he decided to test the wings to make sure all was working
well. He banked right and then left. He put the glider back into a
dive and then leveled off, and used its momentum to enter a
climb.
All systems were go,
and despite the danger ahead and all Joe’s pessimism, Kurt could
not remember feeling such exhilaration. It was the closest thing he
could imagine to being granted the power of flight, like a great
bird.
The little glider
responded instantly to his touch, and he found he could turn it by
using his weight and leaning this way or that like a motorcyclist
racing along an open road.
All was dark around
him, save the dim illumination of the heads-up display and the
pinpoint lights of the stars.
As he maneuvered, he
almost wished it was daylight, to enhance the sensation, but to
reach the Onyx unnoticed required a
night approach. Recreation would have to wait for another
day.
Done playing around,
Kurt set himself on course, adjusted the glide slope, and settled
in. He was at twenty-seven thousand feet, losing five hundred feet
per minute, and cruising at 120 knots. According to the target
icon, the Onyx was seventy miles
away.