Gentry shot Perini in the head with his M4. His body went limp, his arms and legs danced with the weightlessness of the plane’s rapid descent.
For the next ten seconds the four men still alive in the cabin spun through the air like socks in a dryer. The team leader, Dulin, was below the others. He had managed to grab hold of some webbing on the forward bulkhead and hook his arm securely through it, and now he tried to aim his submachine gun at Gentry thirty feet above him. But Markham and Barnes bumped into Gentry as they all swirled through the air, completely out of control. Buttstocks, boots, and fists flew each time a target moved too close to engage with a rifle.
Though the men had a sense of weightlessness, they were, in fact, hurtling towards earth, dropping through the sky at maximum velocity. Only there was an airplane surroundingthem and dropping as well, so they could see no reference points to prove to them that they were falling like stones.
In the chaos, the screaming and the confusion of losing hold of terra firma, Court spun backwards again, and his hand slipped from the grip of his rifle, and its sling slipped over his head. The weapon twisted out of reach. He drew his Glock-19 pistol, raised to fire without sighting, but he felt the sting of a bullet as it tore into his right thigh. The impact kicked his leg back like a hammer’s blow. He ignored the injury, and his feet found purchase again on the rear ramp. He looked up, which was now straight down, and found Dulin in his sights. The extraction team’s leader had one arm wrapped in the bulkhead webbing, and he held his submachine gun over his head with the other, pointed up towards the Gray Man. Court fired six quick rounds and saw the operator’s body react as the bullets slammed into Dulin’s groin and lower torso.
Gentry next turned to get a bead on Barnes and Markham, his final two targets, but McVee’s dead body sailed across his field of fire. Just then the pilot apparently decided he’d seen enough sand in his windscreen, and he pulled quickly out of his dive. All passengers in the back, the dead and the living alike, now dropped through the air, slammed hard into the steel flooring of the transport, and rolled like bowling balls towards the front bulkhead of the aircraft. Court’s pistol flew free of his hand on impact, and he bounced forward, the sting from the gunshot wound in his thigh burning with each jolt.
Court rolled towards the netting on the front bulkhead as the plane leveled, almost got a handhold, but the pilot put theL-100 back into a climb. Gentry’s momentum pushed him forward for a while, but as the cargo floor became a steep incline, passing forty-five degrees now, he lost the last of his inertia, and his fingertips just barely managed to tickle the nylon webbing next to Dulin’s motionless form.
Then the Gray Man went backwards. He rocked back on his heels first and fell down, then slid, then rolled, and finally Court went airborne halfway down the length of the cabin. The pain in his thigh was compounded when he landed on his hip at the rear of the plane, but this pain paled in comparison to the excruciating crush of Markham’s body as he slammed into Court’s chest. Markham faced the other direction and was even more stunned than Gentry by the violent impact, so the Gray Man easily got his arms around the operator’s head. With a merciless twist, Markham’s neck snapped, wrecking his spinal cord and killing him instantly.
The dead operator wore his rifle around his neck on a one-point sling, essentially a necklace with an automatic assault weapon dangling as its charm. Court tried to remove it, but the sling was caught on the operator’s load-bearing vest. Court pulled the gun up to the dead man’s shoulder, tried to quickly sight on the last remaining extraction team member, who was using the legs of the long bench as a ladder to climb up the cabin to the forward bulkhead loadmaster’s galley.
Court pulled the trigger, but the weapon clicked empty. He fumbled around Markham’s chest rig for another magazine and slammed it into the MP5’s magazine well. He readied to fire at his target just as the man disappeared into the galley. The plane leveled off again, and Court’s gravity returned tonormal. He stayed low behind the pallet towards the rear hatch, waiting for Barnes to peek back around the door.
Without warning, Gentry heard a loud noise and felt the rear cargo ramp behind him move. The wind roared.
Barnes had activated the ramp from the front of the cabin. A second later, the aircraft began another steep climb.
As Court scrambled to grab on to the netting over the pallet on the floor in front of him, Barnes appeared near the bulkhead. The dark-clad operator had slung a parachute rig onto his back. Apparently he figured this plane had taken all the damage it could, or perhaps he worried the pilots were dead from stray gunfire. Barnes held the bulkhead webbing with all his might and fired burst after burst in Gentry’s direction, one-handed, with his M4 as the ramp opened fully behind the Gray Man.
Court reached behind him with his free hand and stripped the gun off Markham’s neck just before the dead man rolled out of the plane and into the darkness. The pilot continued his climb, and soon McVee’s body slid past Gentry and out into the night. Perini’s body was lashed into his seat, and Dulin’s corpse was still secured in the bulkhead webbing.
Gentry and Barnes were the only two left alive.
Court held on to the submachine gun with his right hand, and his left hand squeezed the net on the pallet. His glove had twisted on his fingers, and he knew he could not hold on much longer. His boots kicked at the deck of the plane to try to find purchase as the climb angle grew steeper and steeper.
He was seconds away from falling backwards down the ramp.
But Gentry had one last chance. He lifted Markham’s rifleand fired a long burst over the pallet at Barnes, hitting him squarely on his chest plate, slamming his head back against the bulkhead hard enough to knock him out cold. The aircraft’s incline was forty-five degrees now, and the wounded Barnes lost his hold of the webbing, dropped to his knees, and rolled down the length of the plane towards the rear hatch.
This was Gentry’s ride off the damaged aircraft and he did not want to miss it. As the incapacitated operator bounded past, Court let go of the pallet and pushed off the floor with his boots and kneepads. Gentry leapt to his right and grabbed hold of the unconscious man by the parachute harness, and they sailed together out the open hatch and into the night sky.
—
Gentry hooked his arms around Barnes and crossed his legs behind his back. The L-100 disappeared above them, and soon the roar of the engines was replaced by the howl of the wind.
Court grunted and screamed with the effort of holding on as tightly as possible. He did not dare reach for the ripcord of the chute. If he lost his tenuous hold, he would never find it again in the black night sky. He was reasonably sure this rig would have a CYPRES automatic activation device that would pop the reserve at seven hundred fifty feet if its occupant was still in free fall.
Gentry and his would-be killer tumbled end over end through the cold blackness.
One of Court’s hands found a good hold on the parachute’s shoulder strap, so he released the other hand to finda similar grip. Just as he let go, he heard a one-tone beep that lasted less than a second.
Then the reserve chute deployed.
Court held on with one hand. This parachute was not meant for two people, one of whom was kicking and yanking, desperate to get a firmer grip, so the men fell too fast and spun around like a whirligig.
This continued for just a few seconds before Gentry began to vomit from the vertigo. He did not have far to fall, but his nausea had already turned to dry heaves before they slammed together on the ground.
Court’s impact was muted by landing squarely on the man in the chute. He checked on the other operator. He’d landed hard, face-first, with Gentry on his back. Court found no pulse.
Once on terra firma, Gentry got control of his heaving stomach, grabbed his thigh and writhed in pain for a moment, and then recovered enough to sit up. The first hues of morning were glowing to his left, showing him the way east.
Now that he had his bearings, he took stock of his surroundings. He was on flat ground, at the bottom of a gentle valley. There was a brook close enough to hear and goats bleating in the distance. The dead operator lay broken, the reserve chute flapping behind him in a cool, predawn breeze. Court searched the man’s gear and found a medical blow-out bag on Barnes’s hip.
He sat down on the grass and did his best to treat his wound in the dark. He assumed he had a long walk to reach the border and wanted to patch his injured leg so it couldstand the trek. It was a clean wound, in and out, no major vascular or orthopedic damage, nothing much to worry about if you treated it early and well and did not mind days or weeks of throbbing discomfort. Gentry puked bile once more, his body and his mind just catching up to the chaos of the past five minutes.
