A bell rang inside the hold and a yellow light began to pulse over the cabin door. All the agents except two lined up for the jump. These two took positions in the rear on either side of the massive bay door; I guessed they were in charge of deploying the crates. I wondered who was in charge of deploying Alfred Kropp.
The agents lined up by the pulsing yellow light were hooking these long metal cords dangling from their chutes to a thin pole that ran the length of the cabin. I was wondering why, when the door swung open and a tornado roared into the plane. The wind kicked my feet out from under me and I would have smacked butt-first onto the hard metal floor, but a pair of huge hands caught me before I hit.
Op Nine shouted into my ear: “Be careful, Alfred Kropp! There may not always be someone near to catch you when you fall!”
He hooked me to the pole. I shivered in the howling wind. The temperature must have dropped about ten degrees when the door swung open.
One by one the OIPEP agents vanished through the opening. One second they were standing there, the next they were gone, like they were being sucked into the maw of an angry, screaming beast. Op Nine put one hand on my shoulder as we edged closer. My knees felt very weak and my throat very dry, but I didn’t have a choice now—I couldn’t turn back or change my mind, and sometimes that’s better.
When my turn came, I put a hand on either side of the opening and stared into the dark Arabian night, unable to look up or down or unclench my cramping fingers from the cold metal. Op Nine bellowed in my ear, “Now! Let go, Alfred!”
That was it, the whole deal. I really had a problem with this letting-go thing. My mom. The truth about my dad. The loss of everybody who was close to me. I suddenly realized that sometimes the toughest thing is getting out of your own way.
I let go.
17
I spun and twisted and flipped as I fell, yowling my lungs out. The big plane appeared to shoot straight up toward the stars, and the world fragmented and refused to arrange itself into any kind of order: stars, earth, earth, stars, stars, earth, earth . . . and my mind fell apart with it. I forgot to count and by the time I remembered, I had no idea where to start—how many seconds had passed? Should I pull my cord just to be safe? Or would pulling my cord mess up the timing mechanism and tangle my chute? And, if my chute got tangled, would the desert sand break my fall? But if desert sand could break someone’s fall, why use a parachute in the first place?
I hadn’t been counting, but I figured I was way past the seven-second window, so I pulled the cord. Nothing happened. Stars, earth, earth, stars—and nothing happened. I yanked the cord again. I should know better than to jump from airplanes. In fact, with my track record, I shouldn’t even indulge in something as commonplace as jaywalking. I pulled the cord a third time.
Nothing happened. Well, one thing happened: the rip cord broke off in my hand.
A few seconds later I was yanked about fifty feet straight up as my chute deployed and my descent slowed—but didn’t seem slow enough. At least I was falling feetfirst. I could see one or two other OIPEP troopers silhouetted against the sky, dangling from their chutes like the toys I used to buy—the green army men with the plastic parachutes that you threw underhanded into the air. Half the time the kite string didn’t unravel correctly and the army man crashed to earth or got hung up in a tree branch.
I looked down between my feet and saw the desert rushing up. Bend your knees, Kropp, keep ’em loose, I told myself, but I smacked into the ground with my legs as stiff as one of those army men’s. My right ankle twisted in the sand. I pitched forward and the chute settled gently over my writhing body, the silky material wrapping tighter and tighter around me as I rolled in the sand.
Somebody pulled the chute off me and rolled me over. I looked up into Ashley’s face—her red lipstick looked purple in the starlight—and said, “I think I broke my right ankle.”
“Let’s see,” she said softly. She ran her fingers along the bones and then took my foot in both hands and gently turned it.
“Ouch!”
“I think it’s a sprain. Let’s see if you can put any weight on it.”
She unhooked me from the harness and pulled me to my feet.
“Put your foot on the ground, Alfred,” she said.
“Ouch!”
About a hundred feet away the agents were busy with the crates—or what was left of them. They had broken apart on impact; slats lay scattered in every direction.
Op Nine came up, frowning.
“Kropp is hurt?” he asked.
“Not badly,” Ashley said. “A sprain, I think.”
Op Nine said to Ashley, “Kropp rides with you.”
He trudged toward the other agents gathered around the remnants of the crates. We trailed behind, my arm draped over Ashley’s neck, my foot dragging in the sand. In every direction dunes marched like oceanic waves, disappearing into the horizon. I had thought the stars very bright on the shores of the Red Sea, but here in the desert they seared the blackness around them.
“Where exactly are we, anyway?” I asked Ashley.
“The Sahara.”
The agents had pulled twelve snowmobiles from the shattered crates and were going down some kind of checklist, getting them ready, I guess, only there wasn’t much chance of a snowstorm in the desert. One agent was handing out the CW3XDs and clip belts that they threw over their shoulders, reminding me of Mexican bandits. Abby Smith stood by herself a few feet away, holding some electronic gadget with a bluish LCD glimmering on her frowning face.
“What’s the deal with the snowmobiles?” I asked.
“They aren’t snowmobiles,” Ashley replied. “Well, they used to be. They’ve been modified. We call them sand-foils.”
Instead of the ski pads, these had thin metal blades, the sharp edge facing down. Someone handed Ashley a helmet and she passed it to me.
“Put this on, Alfred. A sand-foil’s top speed is a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Do you know what a single grain of sand can do if it hits you at that speed?”
“No, but I got hit with a baseball once that must have been going forty miles per hour; it hurt like heck.”
I shoved the helmet down over my head. I could have guessed it would be too small, and it was. One of my ears was folded down.
Abby snapped her device closed and trudged over to us.
“We’re approximately a hundred clicks due east of the target,” she said crisply. Her voice sounded very far away inside my helmet. “Remember, no wake-riding and no unauthorized firing of the 3XDs. Op Nine and I are on the point. Any questions?”