Snakehead

day. Alex hoped it wouldn’t be needed.
    The twelve of them took their places. There was a long row of seats facing each other on either side of the fuselage. Although they were made of canvas stretched over metal, they reminded Alex a little of dining room chairs. Normally, the Chinook carries thirty-three men, so at least there was plenty of room. Alex sat next to Ben. It was clear that everyone expected them to stick together—although how they would manage that, parachuting out into the night, was something they hadn’t discussed. Scooter leaned over and clipped Alex’s rip cord to a silver rail running all the way to the cockpit. The pilot pressed a switch and slowly the rear door closed. A red light flashed on, the helicopter lurched off the ground, and moments later, they were on their way.
    It was already dark, and there was nothing to see out of the windows, which were too small anyway to provide much of a view. Alex could only tell their height from the feeling in his stomach and the pressure in his ears. The SAS men were sitting silently, some of them checking their weapons—machine guns, pistols with silencers attached, and a wide variety of vicious-looking combat knives. Next to him, Ben Daniels had nodded off to sleep. Alex guessed he’d be well practiced at taking a catnap whenever he needed it, conserving his strength.
    But Alex couldn’t sleep. He was in a Chinook helicopter with the Australian SAS, on his way to attack an oil rig and defuse a bomb before it caused a tsunami. And as usual, he was the only one who hadn’t been given a gun. How had he managed to get himself into this? For a moment, he remembered walking with Jack Starbright on the Rocks in Sydney. It seemed a long, long time ago.
    Below them the Timor Sea was black and still. They were rapidly approaching Indonesian airspace. The helicopter droned on through the night.

    The light turned orange.
    Smoothly, one inch at a time, the great door at the back of the helicopter dropped open, revealing the black rush of the night behind. Although it was true there was no moon, the sea seemed to be shining, as if with some natural phosphorescence—Alex could see it glinting far below.
    He hadn’t even thought about the parachute jump until now, but as the reality hit him, his stomach lurched. The simple truth was that he wasn’t some sort of daredevil who enjoyed the prospect of hurling himself from eight thousand feet in the dark. Right now he would give anything to be back in London with Jack.
    Well, all he had to do was survive the next hour. One way or another, in just sixty minutes this would all be over.
    The door had gone down as far as it could and clicked into position. It was jutting out of the back of the helicopter. A short walk into nothing. “I’ll be watching you,” Ben shouted. With the roar of the wind, only Alex heard. “Don’t worry! I’ll stick close…”
    “Thanks!” Alex shouted back the single word.
    Then the light went green.
    No time to think. Because of his position, Alex was going to be the first out. Maybe they had planned it that way. He didn’t even hesitate. If he stopped to think what he was doing, he might lose the resolve. Three steps, trailing the cord from his parachute behind him. Suddenly the blades were right over his head, thrashing the air. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Ben. He jumped.
    There was a moment of complete disorientation—he remembered it from the last time—when he couldn’t quite believe what he’d done and had no idea what would happen next. He was falling so fast that he couldn’t breathe. He was completely out of control. Then the parachute opened automatically in the slipstream. He felt the jolt as his descent slowed. And then the peace. He was floating, dangling underneath an invisible silk canopy, black against the black night sky.
    He looked down and saw the oil rig. He could only make out its vague shape—two geometric islands with a narrow corridor in between. There were about twenty lights, flickering and still tiny on the twin platforms. By joining them in his imagination, Alex was able to draw a mental image of Dragon Nine.
    He twisted around and saw the helicopter, already far away, and beneath it the eleven black flowers that were the other parachutes. It seemed to him that the Chinook was surprisingly quiet. If he could barely hear it at this altitude, perhaps Major Yu would have heard nothing below. Just as Scooter had promised, there was no wind.