And yet he was farther away from the DZ than he’d planned to be at this point. He had imagined that he would be in the immediate vicinity of the compound when he opened the chute. For one thing, the difficulties in maneuvering amid shifting currents were immensely greater with an open canopy. For another, slowly drifting downward over the Stone Palace brought with it a greater danger of detection. A man plummeting at 160 miles per hour was harder to see than a man slowly drifting beneath a large rectangular parachute.

There were risks either way. He had to make a decision. Now.

He craned his head around, trying to see something, anything, in the thick blackness. What he felt was, in free flight, an entirely unaccustomed sensation: claustrophobia.

And that decided him: there would be fog. He and his black canopy would not stand out against the starless night. He arched himself into a vertical position, reached for the rip-cord handle, and tugged. There was a brief flutter as the tightly packed chute spread itself in the air and the lines stretched out fully. He felt the familiar jolt, the sense of being gripped at his shoulders and seat. And the noise of the wind ceased, as if a MUTE button had been pressed.

He tossed the rip-cord handle away and peered up to make sure the black nylon canopy was properly flared. He himself had a difficult time making out its outlines in the night sky, just fifteen feet above him. On another occasion, that might have been unsettling; tonight it was reassuring.

Abruptly, he felt himself pushed sideways by another gusting crosscurrent, and there was something almost corporeal about the sensation, as though he were being tackled. He would have to control the rig carefully; if he oversteered, it would be nearly impossible to return to the DZ. He was also acutely conscious of the trade-off between steering and speed: the canopy was at its top forward speed when the steering lines were up all the way and undeployed.

Now his GPS indicator showed that he had drifted significantly off course.

Oh Christ, no!

Even as he floundered in the turbulent air, he as well as Katsaris knew that what lay ahead would be even more difficult: they would have to make a silent, unobserved landing in an enclosed courtyard. An error made by either of them would imperil them both. And even if they executed their task flawlessly, any one of a thousand unpredictable complications could be lethal. If a soldier happened to be in the vicinity of the central courtyard—and no law ordained otherwise—they would be dead. The mission would be aborted. And, in all likelihood, the object of the mission would be summarily killed. That much was standard operating procedure for their terrorist friends. One responded to an in-progress rescue mission by destroying the object of rescue—posthaste.