Page 41 of Clive Cussler Ghost Soldier

The cargo jet erupted in a massive ball of flame, throwing pieces of the fuselage, wings, and tail section tumbling toward the sea, and shooting shrapnel across the sky.

A giant piece of red-hot aluminum sliced through Juan’s fragile canopy like a drunken samurai’s katana through a rice-paper wall, shredding his chute.

And plummeting Cabrillo to his doom.

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Juan’s canopy collapsed as quickly as it had filled. His subconscious lizard brain told him there was nowhere to go from here but down.

Way down.

Cabrillo had long ago learned the art of detachment, especially when facing fatal catastrophes. Improvisation was one of his superpowers, but detachment was his impenetrable shield against the fiery darts of chaos. Emotions clouded the mind in a crisis, hampering decision-making. But panic was a mind-killer—and always fatal.

His Caltech-trained brain began running calculations. He knew the typical parachutist fell at an average speed of 120 miles per hour. That meant he had already covered over a thousand feet, give or take. The math all pointed to a simple question:

How long was it going to take him to die?

There was no way he could survive a fall of fourteen thousand feet without a working parachute.

Since down was the only direction he was capable of at the moment, he turned his gaze in that direction. With no small delight he spotted the blooming black mushroom caps of at least seven pallets far below him, falling away in stair steps, with more opening as the seconds passed. If he had to guess, the altitude sensors had been set to automatically deploy at five thousand feet.

The only problem was that pallets with deployed chutes were now falling at a leisurely rate of around fifteen feet per second, while he was knifing through the air at closer to one hundred seventy feet per second. He needed to make some adjustments—fast.

One of the advantages of fighting and surviving innumerable gunfights was that Cabrillo had developed superlative muscle memory in regard to quick reaction, aiming, and eye-hand coordination. Instinctively he spread his limbs wide to create as much drag as possible to slow his descent, and used his arms and legs to control his direction.

He was falling too fast to catch the nearest deployed parachute. He blew past it like a Ferrari on a straightaway, so he aimed for the next one.

Juan braced for the impact, uncertain as to what to expect. The fully deployed canopy was stretched to its max by the massive weight of its cargo below, its inflated fabric taut as a backyard trampoline.

Thanks to Newton, Cabrillo knew that force was a function of mass times acceleration. At the moment he was two hundred pounds of meat hurtling ever faster through the air at thirty-two feet per second.

With that kind of force he would either hit the canopy and bounce off it like a golf ball hitting the sidewalk—or punch through it like a Buick through a pool cover.

Cabrillo crashed into the crown of the big canopy. To his surprise he neither bounced nor penetrated.

Instead, the force with which Juan hit the chute collapsed it.

The chute folded in on itself, and closed in around Cabrillo like a bug in a Venus flytrap. He twisted his body as if rolling off the world’s flimsiest mattress and escaped the chute’s feathery death grip before his own lines got tangled with the others.

Out of the frying pan, Juan thought as he found himself once again plummeting toward the unforgiving sea.

What he felt, however, was that his rate of speed had slowed considerably thanks to the collision with the chute. He took aim at the next parachute some five hundred feet below him and twenty feet tothe right, his twisting body and limbs mimicking the ailerons and flaps of the world’s least aerodynamic plane.

His exertions paid off and he found himself crashing into the next canopy at half the speed with which he’d hit the previous one. With any luck he’d be able to ride this one down without collapsing it.

But as an engineer, he knew that neither physics nor aerodynamics had anything to do with luck.

The chute fluttered for several seconds before collapsing in on itself. But that gave Juan enough time to pick his next target—and change his tactics.

Unfortunately, he had sped past nearly all of the other floating pallets. The last ones available to him were the first three pallets pushed out the cargo bay door. As near as he could tell they were about three thousand feet above the sea—and less than three minutes away from impact.

Picking his next and last target, Juan didn’t aim for the one nearest him, floating almost directly below. Instead he picked the lowest of the bunch, which was also some distance away on the horizontal. It was the pallet he had the greatest chance of missing.

And it was also his best shot at survival.

Cabrillo stretched himself out to create as much drag as possible and slow his descent, stiffening his limbs against the upward force to keep from tumbling keister over teakettle. Once stabilized, he angled his arms and legs to alter his aerodynamic profile and targeted the last chute. But this time, instead of shooting for the canopy, he aimed for the pallet.

Juan crashed smack-dab into the center of the stack—and hit it like a speeding hockey forward cross-checking a parked Zamboni. Every bone in his body rattled.