Then Cory dug an elbow into my side. “Good, Blake?”
The question sounded casual but I knew it wasn’t. The week before, we’d been pulling an all-night march on Cole Range—acres of Georgia woods reserved for our training—and we got talking about the worst things we’d ever been through. I was so sleep-deprived, hungry, and sore, I let slip that nothing had ever felt tough since my dad had died August 2nd of the previous year. Which happened to be a year ago, that very day. I was sitting on that plane on the anniversary of his death—and Cory had remembered.
But I had it under control.
“Good, Ryland,” I replied. Then I flipped him off as a thank-you for asking.
In the center aisle, the jumpmaster started going through the jump sequence. Get ready, stand up, hook up, check static line, check equipment, sound off. I went through each check, along with the fifty guys around me. Airborne School put thousands of soldiers through this process every month and every part of it ran like a well-oiled machine.
As we approached the drop zone, the jumpmaster opened the door and cold air rushed into the plane. Sweat rolled down my back as the adrenaline buzzed through me. The feeling of toeing right up to the edge of my limits was familiar. I’d leaned pretty hard on it over the past year because it made me forget exactly what Cory had just reminded me of.
The jumpmaster gave the go command and the guys at front of the line started exiting, one after another, handing their static lines to the safety by the door and launching into the sky.
We moved quickly. In seconds it was Cory’s turn. He jumped through the door and disappeared, and then I was up. I took my last steps on the plane and threw myself out. As the air current grabbed me, I locked my feet and knees together and hit a good exit position. The plane’s engine noise receded rapidly behind me. As this was a static-line jump, my chute would autodeploy. My job was just to make sure that happened properly.
Setting my hands on my reserve chute, I counted off like I’d been trained to do. “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand.”
What the…?
Where was the tug?
I looked up, searching for an open canopy like I’d seen in my previous jumps.
It wasn’t open.
What I saw above me was a twist of pale silk. The canopy had rolled into a tight line. I instantly recognized it as a parachute malfunction—a streamer, also called a cigarette roll because of the way the parachute looked.
It offered no lift capability at all so I was still in a dead free fall. I shot past Cory, then saw him above me, suspended by his canopy and looking the way I was supposed to be looking. In the rush of the wind, I thought I heard him yell my name.
Then time went into slow motion and my training kicked in.
I ripped at the handle on the reserve chute and watched in disbelief as the reserve went straight up into the main, still streaming above me, then as the two wrapped and twisted together.
At this point, I knew I had a real mess on my hands but I stayed right with my training. It’d been drilled into me that the proper reaction to a reserve that failed to inflate was to reel it back in hand-over-hand and throw it back out, away from the main. As many times as it took. For the rest of my life. So I did that. I pulled and reeled in my reserve like I was in a tug-of-war for the ages.
I hadn’t missed a beat in my reactions, everything felt like instinct, but some part of me was stunned that I was suffering a double malfunction, every jumper’s worst nightmare. They were incredibly rare—but not rare enough for me right then. The drop zone was coming up fast. Really fast. I finally bunched my reserve into a ball in front of me. With a heave, I threw the reserve down and away as hard as I could and wham! My harness yanked against me, digging into my groin.
My reserve had finally opened. The main flapped next to it, still in a twist but no longer causing problems.
This should’ve been great news but as I looked down at the earth, coming at me like a planet-sized bullet, I knew it was too late. My velocity wouldn’t allow for a safe landing. Or even a survivable one.
I had moment’s thought about my father and the coincidence that was happening, the two of us falling to our deaths on the same day, then I reminded myself of the correct parachute landing fall position.
Feet and knees together. Tuck chin and elbows. Land on balls of feet, then roll to calf, thigh, arc body—
I hit so fast it felt like I landed everywhere at once—feet, ass, head.
The last thing I remember was hearing the crunch of bones in my arm and my legs breaking. And that was it.
I was done.
CHAPTER 4
“What happened after you fell?” Cordero asks.