Since it was dark, they’d be flying a trail formation. In daylight, Ritzik preferred a wedge, with the element spread out at seventy-five-foot intervals in a broad spear tip. But at night, a wedge was problematic. Jumpers could miss the wide, echelon turns and go astray. And so they’d form up single file. Since he was the slowest, given the tandem chute, he would take point. They’d be an eleven-car freight train, with Ritzik as the engine, Rowdy as the caboose, and the others in predetermined positions in between.
Ritzik blinked twice, sucked some O2, and scanned through his NV, counting the flat Ram Air chutes as they banked into a line behind him. He verified the heading on the GPS unit strapped to his wrist and checked the elapsed-time display. When he was satisfied that everyone was there he called out the element’s initial flight heading and asked for verbal confirmation. After he’d received ten wilcos, he used the Ram Air’s toggles to adjust his trim and bank gently southeast.
As soon as he’d confirmed his heading, he set the lap timer so the leg could be measured, rolled his shoulders, which were sore as hell given the weight he was carrying, then switched his comms package to the radio frequency Wei-Liu could hear. “This is your pilot, Johnny Cool, speaking from the flight deck. We’re expecting smooth sailing all the way to Las Vegas, but please keep your seat belts fastened anyway. The steward will be around with liquid refreshments in just a few minutes. Have a nice day.”
Hanging there helpless, suspended five miles above the earth, and still more than an hour away from landing, Wei-Liu wished Ritzik hadn’t just used the word
Sam Phillips groaned and blinked a puffy right eye. There wasn’t a part of him that didn’t hurt. He looked over at X-Man and Kaz’s inert forms and realized they were screwed. Pure and simple. And they’d done it to themselves. No. That was not correct.
At the time he’d rationalized his dismal performance because he was a city boy. He’d grown up in Chicago, where his father was a stockbroker and his mother stayed at home to raise him and his two sisters. He’d never done the Boy Scout thing, or asked to be taken camping, preferring Soldier’s Field and skiing trips to Aspen to neckerchiefs, poison ivy, and hobo stoves. But right now, realizing how badly he’d screwed up, he wished he’d paid more attention to the instructors at the Farm when they’d tried to inculcate the Ways of the Wild in him.
The way Sam saw things, they had two alternatives. The first was to make a break for it tonight. The Tarim Basin was basically an egg-shaped oval, 650 miles long and 275 miles wide. They hadn’t yet traversed the basin’s western border, which was a wide, well-traveled highway that ran from Kashgar, on the western edge, to Yarkant Köl, in the southwest. But they were close — Sam had spent the past hour guesstimating how far and how fast they had come in the past three days. If they could make it to the highway, he was even willing to risk contact with PLA troops. After all, their documents were in order.
Well, that might be a problem. They didn’t have any documents — Mustache Man had their passports and wallets. But Sam and his team had been duly vetted when they’d crossed the border. So they were official. They could bluff their way through. Of course, if the Chinese called the British consul general to come and get them, they’d be in the proverbial deep du-du, because Sam was pretty certain that Langley hadn’t informed the cousins, as MI-6 was known, of SIE-l’s existence.
So Plan One was to make a break for it tonight, try to flag down a PLA unit, and ask for help. But Sam knew the odds of Plan One working were slim to none. That left Plan Two. Plan Two would be to wait until they were well along the narrow, rutted trail leading across the mountains to Tajikistan and then escape. After all, there was nothing so invigorating as a fifty-mile hike through twenty-thousand-foot-high mountain passes, with a bunch of well-armed, pissed-off guerrillas in hot pursuit.
