The Seal of Solomon (Alfred Kropp #2)(21)

Ashley touched me on the elbow. “You need some help with yours?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Turn around.”

I turned my back to her and she slipped the harness over my shoulders. I turned again and she proceeded to snap the silver buckles closed. The top of her head was below my chin as she worked on the buckle at my waist, and her blond hair shimmered in the cabin lighting. I smelled lilacs. She gave each buckle a sharp tug before stepping back.

“The chute should automatically deploy after seven seconds,” she told me. She touched a cord hanging over my left shoulder. “Pull the backup if it doesn’t.”

“What if the backup doesn’t work?”

“It’ll work.”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

“Then you hit the ground at five hundred miles per hour.”

She turned away and rummaged in the overhead. Four agents fussed with the big crates in the middle of the hold, unhooking the heavy chains and checking the mattress-sized parachutes tied to them.

“When you say seven seconds, is that seconds like ‘one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi’ or ‘one thousand one, one thousand two’?” I asked.

She turned, holding a gun and holster. She wrapped it around her slim waist and pulled it tight.

“It’ll be all right, Alfred,” she said. “Just don’t stiffen up on the landing. Remember to bend your knees on touchdown; you’ll be okay.”

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.