Page 77 of Into the Fire

Boone

The tower stood inside its cones with frost on the sawdust.

I walked past it on my way to the ready room at ten to six, my breath showing the entire way. The letdown line hung off the station where we’d left it. The two halves of the cut link were in an evidence bag in my office safe, logged, photographed, and waiting for official investigators. A deputy from the county would arrive within three days.

The ready room was warm. Somebody had started the coffee. The spot forecast sat in the box by the door. The wind would be light and variable until ten, northwest at five to eight after that, no instability worth noting.

It couldn’t be a better day to jump.

I’d asked Dante for a delay and he’d refused. I didn’t ask again. There was no operational reason to delay a proficiency jump with weather like this, and the man jumping was current, cleared, and had packed his own main on the loft table the night before while I stood at the end, watching every fold.

Marty caught me between the ready room and Operations, carrying a small cardboard box.

“Shep’s part came,” he said. “Two dollars and forty cents, plus eleven dollars shipping.” He shook the box once, next to his ear. “Dwyer called. He’s coming on Monday.”

“Dwyer’s been coming on Monday for a month.”

“That’s what I told Dwyer.” He tucked the box under his arm and went back inside to his phones.

The crew gathered at the racks. Teller was due to cycle after Dante, then Ramirez, three sticks of one, a morning of housekeeping jumps into the meadow east of the base. Hollis had the clipboard. Fellhauer was spotting. With Nash in a walking boot, he was one of two men on the base qualified to spot. Nash had left him a page of notes about the meadow.

Shep loaded streamers into the Otter. He’d been quieter since the dog incident. He handed Dante his helmet at the racks and said, “Good day for it,” and nothing more.

Dante suited up four feet from me. I ran the morning through in my head instead of watching him do it. He had his jumpsuit zipped and his reserve seated. He watched me not watch him.

“You’re being very professional,” he said.

“That’s my job.”

“It’s costing you something. I can tell.”

“Get on the plane, Vega.”

He grinned and picked up his gear bag. The Otter hit the runway at seven-forty with the sun clear of the ridge and the frost gone out of the grass. Lancaster brought it up to power, and it rolled, lifted, and climbed out over the county road, banking east toward the meadow.

I drove out with Hollis to the landing area and stood at the edge of the meadow with the truck ticking behind us and the radio on my chest. We heard the plane first, then saw its shape, banking at three thousand feet above the ground.

Fellhauer dropped streamers on the first pass. Hollis and I watched them fall: a slow unspooling of color, drifting maybe a hundred and fifty yards toward the south end of the meadow before they rested in the grass. The morning wind was light. The Otter climbed up to jump altitude.

“Dante would prefer the upper end of the meadow,” Hollis said.

“Dante’s not spotting. Fellhauer is.”

The plane came around on the final pass at three thousand feet, throttled back, and steadied. I saw a shape in the door.

Dante exited clean. I watched four seconds of his body falling, arched, stable, feet and knees together. I counted with him the same as I’d counted with every jumper I’d ever put out of an airplane. The white deployment bag lifted off his back, and the canopy streamed out behind him. The lines went taut.

The canopy opened wrong.

One side filled. The other folded in on itself. Dante swung beneath it and began to turn.

“Shit.”

The turn tightened.

“Dante,” Hollis said.

His face would be up, checking the canopy. I watched him, head back, hands reaching for the risers. He’d been drilled on this in a suspended harness over a sawdust pit. Look at the problem. Name it. Then work it.