arrival would be from the night sky to the center of the courtyard. Whether there was a serious chance of accomplishing this, on the other hand, remained purely conjectural.
To arrive undetected, they would have to fall to the ground, silently, through the starless, moonless night that the monsoon season would provide. The satellite weather maps confirmed that at four o'clock in the morning, and extending through the next hour, the cloud cover would be total.
But they were men, not action figures. To succeed, they would have to land with extraordinary precision. To make things worse, the same weather system that provided cloud cover also provided unpredictable winds - another enemy of precision. Under ordinary circumstances, any one of these complications would have led Janson to abort a jump.
It was, in too many ways, a shot in the dark. It was also the only chance Peter Novak had.
Honwana opened the hatch at the altitude they had agreed upon: twenty thousand feet. At that altitude, the air would be frigid, perhaps thirty below zero. But exposure to those temperatures would be relatively brief. Goggles, gloves, and the tight-fitting swimming-cap-like helmets they wore would help, as would their nylon flight suits.
It was another reason they wanted to release off the water, more than a lateral mile from the Stone Palace. As they descended, they would want to be able to discard items like the rip-cord handle and their gloves, and to do so with the assurance that these items would not come raining down over their target like so many warning leaflets.
The high-altitude release would also give them more time to maneuver themselves into position - or to get themselves hopelessly out of position. Without physical rehearsal, it was impossible to know whether this was the right decision. But a decision had to be made, and Janson made it.
"OK," Janson said, standing before the open hatch. "Just remember. This isn't exactly going to be a hop-and-pop. Time to play follow-the-leader."
"No fair," Katsaris said. "You always get to go first."
"Age before beauty," Janson grunted as he made his way down the four-foot aluminum ramp.
Then he leaped out into the inky skies.
CHAPTER FIVE
Blasted by the aircraft's powerful slipstream, whipsawed by icy crosscurrents, Janson struggled to keep his limbs properly aligned. Free fall, it was called, and yet it did not feel like falling. Surrendering to gravity, he felt perfectly still - felt himself to be immobile in the face of powerful, loudly whistling winds. Moreover, free fall, in this case, would have to be anything but free. Four miles below him was a heaving ocean. If he were to achieve the necessary trajectory, almost every second of his fall would have to be carefully controlled. If the next two minutes did not go as planned, the mission would be over before it had begun.
Yet the turbulence made control difficult.
Almost immediately, he found himself buffeted by the wind, and then he began to spin, slowly at first and then faster. Dammit! He was overcome by paralyzing vertigo and a growing sense of disorientation. A deadly combination at this altitude.
Facedown, he arched hard, spreading out his arms and legs. His body stopped spinning, and the vertigo abated. But how much time had elapsed?
In ordinary free fall, terminal velocity was reached at about 110 miles per hour. Now that he had stabilized, he needed to slow the descent as much as possible. He moved into spider position, keeping his limbs spread out and rounding his spine into a C. All the while, the freezing winds, seemingly angered by his efforts to harness them, whipped at his rig, equipment, and clothing and burrowed behind his goggles and flight cap. His gloved fingers felt as if they had been injected with Novocain. Slowly, he moved his right wrist toward his face, and he peered through his goggles at the large, luminous displays of the altimeter and the GPS unit.
It was high-school math. He had to make it to the drop zone within the forty seconds that remained. An inertial fiber gyroscope would tell him if he was moving in the right direction; it would be less help in figuring out how to correct his course.
He craned his head to see where Katsaris was.
There was no sign of him. That was not a surprise. What was the visibility, anyway? Was Katsaris five hundred feet away from him? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?
It was not an idle question: two men hurtling blindly through a dark cloud could collide, fatally. The odds were