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Chapters (54)
  1. Title Page
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Prologue
  4. PART ONE
  5. Chapter One
  6. Chapter Two
  7. Chapter Three
  8. Chapter Four
  9. Chapter Five
  10. Chapter Six
  11. Chapter Seven
  12. Chapter Eight
  13. PART TWO
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Chapter Fifteen
  21. Chapter Sixteen
  22. Chapter Seventeen
  23. PART THREE
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-one
  28. Chapter Twenty-two
  29. Chapter Twenty-three
  30. Chapter Twenty-four
  31. Chapter Twenty-five
  32. Chapter Twenty-six
  33. Chapter Twenty-seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-one
  38. PART FOUR
  39. Chapter Thirty-two
  40. Chapter Thirty-three
  41. Chapter Thirty-four
  42. Chapter Thirty-five
  43. Chapter Thirty-six
  44. Chapter Thirty-seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-eight
  46. Chapter Thirty-nine
  47. Chapter Forty
  48. Chapter Forty-one
  49. Chapter Forty-two
  50. Chapter Forty-three
  51. Epilogue
  52. ALSO BY ROBERT LUDLUM
  53. Critical Praise for Robert Ludlum
  54. Copyright Page

“No fair,” Katsaris said. “You always get to go first.”

“Age before beauty,” Janson grunted as he made his way down the four-foot aluminum ramp.

Then he leaped out into the inky skies.

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Blasted by the aircraft’s powerful slipstream, whipsawed by icy crosscurrents, Janson struggled to keep his limbs properly aligned. Free fall, it was called, and yet it did not feel like falling. Surrendering to gravity, he felt perfectly still—felt himself to be immobile in the face of powerful, loudly whistling winds. Moreover, free fall, in this case, would have to be anything but free. Four miles below him was a heaving ocean. If he were to achieve the necessary trajectory, almost every second of his fall would have to be carefully controlled. If the next two minutes did not go as planned, the mission would be over before it had begun.

Yet the turbulence made control difficult.

Almost immediately, he found himself buffeted by the wind, and then he began to spin, slowly at first and then faster. Dammit! He was overcome by paralyzing vertigo and a growing sense of disorientation. A deadly combination at this altitude.

Facedown, he arched hard, spreading out his arms and legs. His body stopped spinning, and the vertigo abated. But how much time had elapsed?

In ordinary free fall, terminal velocity was reached at about 110 miles per hour. Now that he had stabilized, he needed to slow the descent as much as possible. He moved into spider position, keeping his limbs spread out and rounding his spine into a C. All the while, the freezing winds, seemingly angered by his efforts to harness them, whipped at his rig, equipment, and clothing, and burrowed behind his goggles and flight cap. His gloved fingers felt as if they had been injected with Novocain. Slowly, he moved his right wrist toward his face, and he peered through his goggles at the large, luminous displays of the altimeter and the GPS unit.

It was high-school math. He had to make it to the drop zone within the forty seconds that remained. An inertial fiber gyroscope would tell him if he was moving in the right direction; it would be less help in figuring out how to correct his course.

He craned his head to see where Katsaris was.

There was no sign of him. That was not a surprise. What was the visibility, anyway? Was Katsaris five hundred feet away from him? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?

It was not an idle question: two men hurtling blindly through a dark cloud could collide, fatally. The odds were against such a collision. But then the whole operation itself was in defiance of any rational calculation of the odds.