“You sure you don’t want to go as well?” Aaron uttered. “I don’t know how the hell we’re going to explain this when we land.”
Safiya shook her head slowly, glancing at the helicopter’s lights flashing in the darkness off their starboard wing.
“We will tell the authorities that nobody boarded at Bar Yehuda, that it is all a mistake.”
“You think they’ll believe that?” Aaron snorted.
“They’re more likely to believe that than the truth.”
Ethan grabbed the guidance cords of his parachute, yanking them sideways as he aimed for a yawning chasm of pitch blackness near a tight knot of apartment buildings. A single, flickering streetlight intermittently illuminated what might once have been a school nearby, now obscured by rubble and litter and hemmed in by two buildings bearing the scars of artillery strikes. On the night air wafted the salty odor of the nearby ocean, tainted with the acrid stench of sewage that ran openly along the gutters of Gaza’s streets as dark, thick, and dangerous as the shadows that concealed it.
The inky blackness loomed up swiftly and Ethan braced himself for the impact, pulling down on the cords at the last moment to slow his descent as he belatedly considered the possibility that he could end up breaking either his legs or pelvis. The unforgiving concrete rushed past as his feet slammed into the ground. He managed to run a few paces and then rolled, hitting the ground hard amid a cloud of dust that clogged his throat.
The parachute fluttered down beside him as he struggled to his feet, unclipping his harness and hauling it in. He turned and looked up into the sky. The second parachute was drifting down toward him but clearly wasn’t going to hit the same spot. He could detect slight movements as the jumper tried desperately to control their descent.
Voices sounded in the darkness, a flourish of urgent Arabic closing in on him from nearby. Shouts echoed from the main road on the other side of the derelict buildings as a car screeched to a halt and its doors slammed. Heavy feet pounded the earth.
Ethan turned and dashed into the first alley he could see that would take him in the same direction as the parachute above him, his own still bundled under his arm. He plunged into the shadows, tossing the parachute through a shattered doorway as he ran through the darkness, praying he wouldn’t break a leg on some unseen obstacle. Something crashed into his shin and he cursed through gritted teeth, staggering onward through the darkness.
The end of the alley broke out into another, larger passage running between two skeletal buildings emaciated by the rigors of war. Ethan checked both ways before sprinting between them. The parachute passed directly overhead, visible barely a hundred feet up in the narrow strip of night sky above, swerving left and right as it plummeted downward.
Ethan ran hard and burst out onto the edge of a dusty wasteland of unused foundations filled with jagged chunks of masonry, razor wire, and abandoned, burned-out vehicles.
The parachute was twenty feet above the center of the clearing, and Ethan knew for sure that Rachel was the jumper. Without real control she would almost certainly break bones if she hit the rocks.
“Rachel! Pull hard on both handles, now!”
He could just make out Rachel’s head turn to look at him, her expression of surprise, and then she yanked down on both of the handles. The parachute slowed rapidly and Ethan heard a thump that made him wince as Rachel hit the ground. Behind him, a fresh chorus of angry Arabic erupted from the darkness.
They had heard him.
Ethan dodged between the ragged boulders of concrete, careful not to catch himself on dense webs of rusting steel braces poking out like lances in the darkness. Ahead, he saw Rachel’s parachute rippling to the ground and a body lying inert in the darkness.
Ethan sprinted the last few meters and skittered down alongside Rachel’s body. To his relief she lay sprawled in the center of a large patch of coarse-grain sand and gravel. She sat upright as Ethan yanked off her harness.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I think so,” she murmured as though waking from a dream, and she stared at the soft sand beneath her. “That was lucky, wasn’t it?”
The shouts behind them became louder, and Ethan glimpsed swiftly moving figures obscuring the streetlight filtering through the alleys nearby.
“I wouldn’t call this lucky,” he said urgently. “Can you walk?”