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Back The Janson Directive Save as PDF
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

It took ten seconds of acceleration before he experienced a sense of lift and noticed that his dive was beginning to flatten. In a max track, a human being should be able to reach an angle of descent that was close to forty-five degrees from vertical.

In theory.

In max track, it should be possible to move as rapidly horizontally as one was moving vertically—so that every yard downward took one almost a yard forward, closer to the drop zone.

In theory.

In reality, he was an equipment-laden commando who, beneath his flight suit, had forty pounds of gear hooked to his combat vest. In reality, he was a forty-nine-year-old man whose joints were stiffening in the subzero air that blasted its way through his flight suit. A max track required him to maintain perfect form, and it was not clear how long his skeletal muscles would permit him to do so.

In reality, every glimpse he took at his altimeter and GPS unit violated that perfect form he was depending on. And yet without them he was truly flying blind.

He cleared his mind, swept from it all anxieties; for the time being, he would have to be a machine, an automaton, devoted to nothing other than the execution of a flight trajectory.

He stole another glance at his wrist-worn instruments.

He was heading off course, he saw from the blinking of the GPS device. How far off course? Four degrees, maybe five. He angled both hands in parallel, at forty-five degrees, slightly deforming the cushion of air that surrounded him, and was rewarded with a slow turn.

The GPS device stopped blinking, and he felt suffused with a heedless, unthinking sense of hope.

He was tracking, soaring through the inky skies, an air cushion conserving his altitude as he tracked toward his destination. He was black, the sky was black, he was at one with the currents. The wind was in his face, but it was also keeping him aloft, like the hand of an angel. He was alive.

A vibration at his wrist. The altimeter alarm.

A warning that he was reaching the vertical point of no return—the height below which the only sure thing was death on impact. The manuals put it in less dramatic words: they referred to the “minimum altitude for parachute deployment.” A high-altitude, lowopening jump established only the rough parameters: if the opening was too low, the ground would hit him like a tractor-trailer in the passing lane of the autobahn.