Scorpia

long ago left for the evening. The villa was about to close. Alex stood on his own, thinking about what he had to do. His mouth was dry and there was an unpleasant churning in his stomach. This was madness. There had to be another solution. No. He had examined all the possibilities. This was the only way.
    He knew that BASE jumping was one of the most dangerous of all extreme sports, and that every BASE jumper would know someone who had been injured or killed. BASE stands for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth. It means, essentially, parachuting without the use of an aircraft. BASE jumpers will throw themselves off skyscrapers, dams, rock faces and bridges. The jumps themselves aren’t against the law, but they’re usually done without permission, often in the middle of the night. Trespassing, being outside the system, is all part of the fun.
    They had driven all the way back to Naples to get the equipment which Jerry Harris had agreed to lend to Alex.
    Jerry had used the long journey to give Alex as much information about the techniques and the potential dangers as he could. A crash course, Tom had muttered gloomily. Just what Alex didn’t need.
    “The first and most important rule is the one that beginners find hardest,” Jerry said. “When you jump, you’ve got to wait as long as possible before you release the canopy. The longer you wait, the further you travel away from the side of the cliff. And you must keep your shoulders level. The last thing you need is a one eighty onto a hard-core object.”
    “What’s that in English?” Alex asked.
    “It’s what occurs when you get an off-heading opening. Basically, it means you go the wrong way and hit the cliff.”
    “And what happens then?”
    “Yeah. Well… you die.”
    Alex was wearing a helmet, knee pads and elbow pads. Jerry had also lent him a pair of sturdy hiking boots.

    But that was all. He would need to react instantly as he fell through the sky, and too much protective gear would only slow him down. Besides, as Jerry had pointed out, nobody had ever made a BASE jump without basic training. If something went wrong, all the protective clothes in the world wouldn’t do him one bit of good.
    And the difference between life and death?
    For Alex it boiled down to two hundred and twenty square feet of Fill nylon. Skydivers need on average one square foot of parachute for every pound of their body weight and equipment. But BASE jumpers need almost half that again. Alex’s chute had been designed for Jerry, who was heavier than he was. He would have plenty of material.
    He was carrying a seven-cell Blackjack canopy which Jerry had bought second hand for a little under one thousand American dollars. An ordinary parachute normally contains nine cells—nine separate pockets. The larger BASE canopy is thought to be more docile, easier to fly and land accurately. Alex’s own weight would drag it out of the deployment bag as he fell, and it would inflate over his head, taking the shape of an aerofoil, the ram-air design of all modern parachutes.
    Jerry stood next to him, pointing a black gadget about the size and shape of a pair of binoculars at the ground.
    He was taking a reading. “Three hundred and fifty-seven metres,” he said. He took out a laminated card—an altitude delay planner—and quickly consulted it. “You can do a four,” he said. “It’ll give you approximately fifteen seconds under canopy. A six max. But that’ll mean landing almost at once.”
    Alex understood what he was saying. He could free-fall for between four and six seconds. The less time he spent dangling underneath the parachute, the less chance he would have of being spotted from below. On the other hand, the faster he arrived, the more chance he would have of breaking most of his bones.
    “And when you get down there, remember…”
    “Flaring.”
    “Yes. If you don’t want to break both your legs, you have to slow yourself down about three or four seconds before impact.”
    “Not three or four seconds after impact,” Tom added helpfully. “That’ll be too late.”
    “Thanks!”
    Alex looked around. There was nobody in sight. He half wished a policeman or somebody from the villa would come along and put a stop to this before he could actually jump. But the gardens were empty. The white marble heads stared past him, not remotely interested.
    “You’ll go from nought to sixty miles an hour in about three seconds,” Jerry went on. “I’ve put on a mesh