Chapter Nine

TWO WEEKS LATER

ABOVE THE COAST OF IRAN

Blake Kershaw knew that, somewhere in the foothills of Iran, a drop zone was prepared for their landing and fires were lit in oil drums. The drums were arranged in an arrow, pointing into the prevailing wind. Difficult to see from ground level until one was right on top of them, those barrels would be visible for miles to an approaching parachutist.

But Blake couldn’t see an arrow. He couldn’t see a single barrel. And he knew he wouldn’t; Shirazi and he had opened better than 14,000 feet too low.

Blake was a veteran of dozens of HAHO jumps. He’d become expert at trimming out the canopy, adjusting the trim tabs for maximum glide. He knew he could milk every last inch of distance out of the parachute.

He had no such illusions about his partner. The Iranian was barely jump-qualified; it took written orders, straight from the director, just to get the CIA flight crew to agree to put Shirazi on the airplane. The other man did not have the finesse to trim the canopy for maximum glide. And Shirazi hadn’t jettisoned his gear, so he was dropping heavy.

They’d been under canopy for less than two minutes and already Shirazi was gliding level with Blake. He could see the strobe blinking; the other man hadn’t even dropped his helmet.

Blake swallowed. All things considered, it probably wasn’t such a bad thing Shirazi still had his helmet.

“Massoud.”

“Yes, my friend.” The older man’s voice had regained some strength.

“Dead ahead. Maybe seven kilometers. See the surf line?”

There were two seconds of silence. Then, “Yes. I see it. Can we make it?”

Blake checked the altimeter: 2,340 feet. It was well within the glide range of their canopies, but that assumed an expert parachutist. Shirazi was anything but. “Remember how we showed you to use the canopy brakes?”

“Yes,” Shirazi answered. “For a short-field landing.”

“You got it,” Blake told him. “I want you to pump the brakes.”

“Pump?”

“Pull them: over and over and over.”

The strobe had definitely dropped lower than Blake.

“But that will slow me.”

“It’ll keep you aloft. Pump ’em.”

The strobe began to fall aft of Blake. But it also continued to drop beneath him.

Ninety seconds passed. Blake dropped below a thousand feet; he couldn’t see Shirazi’s strobe anymore. But he could see the surf line, a distant, waxing and waning gray-white brushstroke in the starlight.

And he could see something else. Above the surf. He just wasn’t sure what.

He looked off to the side, allowing his peripheral vision, the more light-sensitive parts of his eyes, to come into play. And now, he could see what was above the surf.

A cliff. For hundreds of kilometers along the Iranian coast, the shore was dunes sloping to a gentle beach. But they were coming straight in at the rare headland that ended in a cliff. That was something they’d never considered in the planning; the plan was never to land on the beach.

Blake turned his head: still no sign of the other man.

“Massoud! Turn! Turn hard left! Now.”

No answer.

“Left steering line! Pull! Hard!”

Now Blake was turning himself. He could dimly make out the other man’s parachute, nearly two hundred feet below him.

“I cannot.” Shirazi’s voice was barely audible above the rising crash of surf. “The water . . . All this gear.”

“Ditch it when you hit! You can do it. Turn! Turn now!”

He knew even as he said it the situation was falling apart. Blake craned his head back, over his left shoulder. Massoud’s parachute continued to glide, straight in, toward the shore.

Blake pulled hard left on his own steering line. It caused the canopy to side-slip, losing altitude, but that did not matter; the cliff-top was still better than 150 feet beneath his heels as he crossed over it. He continued the left turn, completing a one-eighty, and then brought himself level just before his boots touched down on Iranian soil. The canopy collapsed behind him in the light onshore wind and he quickly shed his harness, dug into one of his bellows pockets, and pulled out an LED flashlight.

“Massoud?”

There was no answer.

Blake ran to the edge of the cliff, dropped prone on sparse sea-grass, and aimed his flashlight beam down, toward the sea.

The beam found a fluttering sheet of black nylon and he followed it back to a twisted figure on a sloping rock shelf, about thirty feet below. It was Shirazi. And he wasn’t moving.