in the way that he meant. He probably thought Stratton was looking forward to the jump. He was wrong. Stratton was looking forward to being on the jungle floor, sure - but not to getting there.
‘Goin’ up!’ shouted the loadmaster, grabbing a firm hold of the side of the ramp.
Each man braced himself as the pilot powered up the engines to maximum and pulled the nose of the aircraft up into a steep climb. The view out of the back was suddenly all green. The containers shunted against their restraining blocks and everyone hung on to their handholds as gravity tried to suck them out.
Stratton could smell the exhaust from the engines, a sweet odour that tickled the back of his throat that was now dry. He looked down to see a large clearing in the jungle appear directly below. It was the drop zone and he could only pray that they were on target.
The red lights changed to green. Stratton’s nervousness suddenly peaked and then fell away sharply as the climactic moment drew near and his concentration intensified.
‘Go! Go! Go!’ shouted the loadmaster.
A crewman yanked free the first restraining block and the heavy crate rolled on, tipped off the edge of the ramp and plunged into the slipstream where it was grabbed and ripped away in an instant. The attached static line went taut and dragged from the chute pack a long stream of pink nylon that inflated into a massive mushroom shape that slammed the brakes on the container, which swung violently in response. The other crates followed in quick succession.
Stratton took a deep breath, turned around and shuffled backwards to the edge of the ramp, keeping an eye on his feet to make sure that he didn’t fall off prematurely. He looked through the gap between the ramp and the bulkhead to see they were still over the clearing and then watched as the remaining crates rolled towards the edge of the ramp. The seconds to his jump were ticking away. He could not turn back now. At that moment it felt as though his mind was processing a million thoughts, not all of them helpful. He gripped the pilot chute and looked for the jungle again. The end of the clearing came into view. That was not good. He felt a sudden rush of concern. A glance to the other side revealed the last container slipping off the tailgate platform. Stratton ignored a warning from inside his head to abort and threw the pilot chute out behind him. He braced himself for the part of the jump that he hated most.
The pilot chute sprang open as it sailed out on the end of a long bridle that wrenched a deployment bag from Stratton’s parachute pack. He braced his shoulders and pressed his chin against his chest in preparation for the inevitable whiplash as the main chute deployed. It felt like he’d been standing there for an age although in reality it had been less than a second. The chute cracked open, yanking Stratton off the ramp like a rag doll, and for a few seconds he had absolutely no control. He tried to wrap his arms tightly around himself, as if to stop his limbs from being torn off.
As the aircraft levelled out the crew shuffled to the edge of the tailgate ramp to watch the progress of their payload. Stratton’s chute was a bright green nine-cell square with a red blotch across its top which, when the chute was fully deployed, became a large fire-breathing dragon.
‘That is one crazy bastard,’ someone shouted as Stratton recovered to make a tight turn barely a couple of hundred feet above the jungle.
‘He ain’t gonna make it to the edge of that clearing,’ the loadmaster mumbled into his headset.
‘Don’t matter,’ said a big man in civilian clothes and with a thick head of white hair who was standing behind him. He was wearing his own headphones. It was Maxwell Steel, a colonel in the US Marine Corps. ‘He’s just the pizza boy. As long as they get the pizzas.’
The loadmaster looked around at the man who was running the show. The crewman did not try to conceal his contempt as he walked away to operate the machine that pulled the flapping static-line cables and deployment bags back into the aircraft’s hold.
As the aircraft banked steeply away Steel took a last look at the man he had hired to deliver the load. He couldn’t understand what all the hoo-ha was