Murderous David Hickson (best thriller novels of all time TXT) 📖

passing ten thousand feet, dropping at a hundred and seventy feet a second. I had forty seconds to go, and as many more as I dared to squeeze. My chute would take three seconds to open, and if that failed, I needed another three for my emergency. The five pinpricks were drifting off to the right side now and were ahead of me. I caught a momentary flutter ahead, which was probably Chandler’s canopy collapsing to the ground as he let it fall. That was always the vulnerable moment, but he would be below the ridge and if anyone had seen anything they would search in vain. Until my canopy filled and floated through their telescopic sights, which had seemed to me an argument for me to go first. But Chandler had insisted and mumbled about the broken ankle he had sustained when we dropped with Brian into the Kivu region where the dead tourists were waiting with their booby-trapped mines. I closed my eyes for two seconds, but the thought didn’t clear. It was the kind of thing the psychologists had explained to me when they had said, “No, Corporal Gabriel, you cannot return to full service until we can be certain you are fit to do so. Those memories, Corporal Gabriel, those images you describe of your friend’s blood and fragments of bone on the face of your captain. Those are the reasons you cannot return to service.”

My count passed fifty, and I was below six thousand. ‘The home straight’ was the Israeli captain’s term. ‘Your moment is coming, don’t disappoint her by being premature’ and the scattered laughter. But he never smiled, that Israeli captain. I watched the altimeter drop and tried to match the GPS pinpricks with the patches of darkness below me. Somewhere down there was the zone we had chosen. Flat enough to walk across, not too many big boulders, a few trees around the edges, nothing high enough to snag the chute. If I’d planned it right, the wind would carry me beyond the open stretch when I opened the canopy, and I’d do a low turn back into the wind for the approach, but I still could not see the zone. A voice called sixty-five. It was mine, and my altimeter was dropping toward three thousand. If I did nothing, I would strike the ground of BB’s game farm in less than twenty seconds. I had the pull cord in my hand, and gave it an extra beat, then one more, and I pulled. The rush of wind fluttered and modulated, and I fell another five hundred feet in the three seconds that it took the canopy to unfurl. I felt the jerk of the harness and the sudden silence as the invisible cushion of air snatched me up. Just over a thousand feet to go. Chandler would be proud, I thought, and then I saw him rolling up his canopy. I was dead above the zone, and the wind was pushing me over it as I had hoped.

“You pulled late,” said Chandler as I coasted in beside him. His grey eyes flashed with anger. “What were you doing up there, for god’s sake? Daydreaming?”

“You’re jealous,” I said. “Bet your timing wasn’t so good.”

“There’s no time for your jokes, corporal. Pack your chute and let’s get going.”

“Yes, colonel,” I said, but I could see in the hard lines of his face that something had frightened him. Perhaps I was not the only one who had suffered from visions of the aftermath of my previous jump.

The armoured vehicle was in good condition. Under the tarpaulin in the back were the one hundred and twenty glistening bars we’d left there a few weeks before. We stared at them for a full two minutes without saying anything, and then Chandler sighed and replaced the tarpaulin. We got the camouflage netting off by the time the sun poked its first rays over the horizon. The matte black paint was stained and muddy, but the water from one of the Jerry cans was all we needed to clean the dust and grime off. The little solar powered battery charger had kept the spare battery at full charge, and Chandler had me pump the tyres up and put them back on while he fretted over the radio and listened in to see if anyone was coming over the ridge to see what had happened to the two parachutists. No one was coming, and so Chandler allowed me a cigarette after I’d collected Fat-Boy’s little beacons and changed into my black uniform. Then I put on a pair of mechanic’s overalls and slid under the vehicle on my back to open the fuse box. Fat-Boy had been correct about the placement of the electric fuel pump, and I confirmed the rating of the fuse. Chandler double-checked because he wasn’t leaving anything to chance and then he primed the engine and turned it a few times to lubricate it and spread the extra oil. The old battery died on the third attempt, but the spare got the engine running, and it was before oh seven hundred hours when we rolled out of the shallow ravine and clambered with all four wheels onto the flat stretch of our drop zone. From there we meandered between the rocks and trees and found our way eventually to the dusty track that would lead us back to the heart of the Breytenbach compound.

“We’ll aim for the oh eight hundred patrol,” said Chandler, and I gave him a few yessirs in agreement.

We had abandoned the jeep in the ravine to avoid the inevitable roadblocks Breytenbach would have ordered. We slipped through the net by returning on foot to the lodge through the wild bush, where we lay low for several days. The journey had been hell, almost two days with Fat-Boy griping all the way, following the meandering animal paths, carrying Robyn on an improvised stretcher, and taking frequent breaks to tend to her wound.