Chapter 1

Sometimes you win,

sometimes you lose,

sometimes you play the game.

Some games have no end.

Those you play until you're tired of it.

I'm tired of this one.

"Who is David Austin?" she asked.

"Who is Grace Austin?" I asked.

"So ... you're a psychologist now?" she asked.

A question answers a question with a question.

I looked at the sky and said, "I don't want to play."

There was a shimmer and a shake ... C-130's are loud

There's one thing you never forget about a C-130; the noise. There's five Air Force Crew ... two pilots, a navigator, a flight engineer and a loadmaster. The pilots do what pilots do ... in a C-130, they drive. The navigator tells the pilots where to drive, the engineer is supposed to know how to fix whatever breaks and the loadmaster tells the ground crew where things load and sees to the various tie-downs and nets.

The pilots are failed fighter jocks and they resent it.

Generally, the navigator didn't do everything right in flight training or he has some defect ... like glasses ... but he's good with spherical trig.

The flight engineer isn't a real engineer ... he doesn't build bridges or set up electrical power stations. They won't let him fuck with chemicals or stuff like that. He watches dials and readouts and the very last thing you want to hear from him is 'Oh Fuck!'

The really important guy is the loadmaster. It is one of the major mysteries of life in the Air Force that the guy responsible for the balance of the load is a Sergeant. If it's not right you will never get a second chance.

Our particular C-130 has a cave they call the cargo hold: 40 feet of comfortable luxury. It's tall, 9 feet ... in the middle. The important part about this one is the rear ramp ... the rear ramp is where crazy people leave a perfectly good airplane and trust their lives to a scrap of nylon and a few itty bitty pieces of nylon cord. Dumb people ... Airborne! ... Ooorah! No ... wait ... that's Marines ... Airborne! Hooah!

A full load of Airborne is 64 of the dumb-asses.

Even though there's only 12 of us about to take the BIG STEP, the C-130 can carry 45 thousand pounds ... we are a very light load.

The noise I mentioned ... yeah ... up there ... at the front ... comes from four Allison T56-A-15 turboprops, with 4 propellers that are 13.5 feet in diameter ... each propeller tip is exceeding the speed of sound and that is a bunch of noise at 366 miles per hour at 40 thousand feet.

Our C-130 is a 'special.' It's painted flat black, has uprated engines, carries a lot more fuel and will fly just a tick shy of 46 thousand feet ... with all the comforts of home ... if your home happens to be a foxhole.

12 out the door and Kelly. Kelly is the thirteenth man. The thirteenth man is the Jump-master. He says GO! and we do.

Since I know no one can hear me when I shout, we all have nifty throat mikes and an earpiece ... but we are in a place we weren't supposed to be so the radios were off.

I checked the man in front ... I picked him up by his harness and shook him ... hard ... the man behind checked me ... I slapped my guy on the shoulder, he turned and I gave him a thumb. The guy behind slapped me on my shoulder and gave me a thumb. All through the C130 checking and slapping and thumbing was going on. The ramp is down now ... and it's really loud ... and breezy.

No static lines ... this was to be my very last jump ... altitude and free fall. Our breathers were cute ... little oxygen containers about the size of a CO2 cartridge that screwed into the sides of a cute little nose mask. Stupid things looked like huge silver boogers.

Master Sergeant Kelly had a chute but he was tethered to the bay. Sarge wasn't going with us ... no matter how badly he wanted to go. Nope ... Master Sergeant Kelly was going straight to the Stockade for thinking he was smarter than the Army. A real waste of thirty years. I couldn't have stopped it if I wanted to. Kelly didn't know he'd been caught. The arrest would happen on landing.

It was me who caught him ... I was highly disappointed with Kelly. The Provost wasn't sure how long he'd been recycling weapons over the back fence, but it had been a long time. Millions of dollars worth of the latest weaponry had gone missing ... all of it over the fence.

Kelly plugged into my personal com, "Wish I was going with you, Colonel. We been together, what? fifteen years?"

"Pretty close, John. You babysat me through some hairy shit. Remember the time..." And so it went. We reminisced about good ones, bad ones and pure disasters. He, a Sergeant, and me, an officer.

I couldn't help but think how wasteful this was. He was a good man ... except when it came to money ... and horses. And betting on the ponies is where it started. Well ... it was over. I was retiring. Colonel was as far as I was going ... too much blood on my hands for the REMF's. I never was a politician ... not even at the Point.

Yup ... my last jump ... middle of the night ... to a country we had no business in ... doing a mission that never happened ... by personnel who were officially listed as dead ... concluded by a withdrawal to a submersible that was never built.

Chapter 2 »