“How did you know I was here with my family?” Hagen slapped him hard across the face. A customer in the restaurant, a man in his thirties with a smear of blood across his dress shirt, tried to pull Hagen off the dying man. Hagen pushed him away.
“
The young Russian’s eyes rolled back slowly. Hagen balled his fist and raised it high. “Answer me!”
A booming voice erupted from near the hostess stand at the sidewalk. “Freeze! Don’t move!” The naval officer looked up and saw a New Jersey state trooper with his arms extended, pointing a pistol at Hagen’s head. This guy didn’t know what the hell was going on, only that, in a mass of dead and wounded lying around the nearly destroyed restaurant, some asshole was beating the shit out of one of the injured.
Hagen raised his hands, and in doing so, he felt the wounds in his side and arm.
His brain went fuzzy, and he rolled onto his back. Stared up at the night.
Behind him now, over the shouts and screams of shock and terror, he was certain he could hear his sister crying loudly. He could not understand this, because he thought he’d given his family the time they needed to run.
Unlike his famous father, Jack Ryan, Jr., did not have any fear of flying. In fact, he rather trusted airplanes — certainly he trusted them
His relative comfort with aviation was at the forefront of his mind now, chiefly because in mere moments he planned on throwing himself out the side door of a perfectly functioning aircraft, into the open blue sky, 1,200 feet above the Chesapeake Bay.
Jack had packed his own parachute, following the instructions and oversight of Domingo Chavez, the senior operative in his clandestine unit, and he felt certain he’d packed it exactly right. But his mind wasn’t working in his best interests now. While he needed his brain to reinforce his certainty that everything would go off without a hitch, he couldn’t get out of his head the fact that on his last trip out of town, he’d forgotten to throw his favorite pair of running socks into his carry-on.
He thought he’d done a fine job packing
His imagination seemed intent on giving him an ulcer this morning.
Jack was in the middle of skydiving training, not as part of a military or even a normal civilian-based course, but a course developed by the cadre at Jack’s employer. Jack worked for The Campus, a small but important off-the-books intelligence organization; it was populated with former military and intelligence types, a few of whom were seasoned free-fall experts.
And it was decided that Jack Ryan, Jr., needed to pick up this critical skill, because although he had begun his work at The Campus in the position of intelligence analyst, in the past few years his job had morphed into an operational role. Now he wore two hats; he might spend weeks or months at a time working in his cubicle unraveling the accounting practices of a corrupt world leader or a terrorist organization, or he might find himself kicking in a door at a target location and engaging in close-quarters combat.
Jack’s life did not go wanting for diversity.
But he didn’t have time to think about the ironic course of his life right now. No, now he began quietly reciting his checklist once he stepped out of the aircraft in exactly—
Someone at the front of the plane shouted now. “Ryan! Four minutes!”
In exactly four minutes: “Step out, head forward, arms away, body flat, knees slightly bent. Arch back, pull the rip cord, ready yourself for the snap, and check for good canopy.”
He mumbled his extraordinarily important to-do list softly as he sat in the side-facing seat that ran along the fuselage of the plane.
This wasn’t his first solo jump. He’d started out with ground school two weeks earlier, then moved outside the classroom to begin leaping off a slow-moving pickup with his gear, and tumbling onto a grass strip. After this he jumped tandems for a couple of days, riding through the sky attached to Domingo Chavez or strapped to his cousin and the third member of the Campus operational team, Dominic Caruso. Chavez and Caruso were both free-fall experts, trained in both HALO (high altitude, low opening) and HAHO (high altitude, high opening), and they put him through his paces in the beginner portion of his training.
Jack did what was asked of him, so he moved quickly on to static line jumps — Ding Chavez referred to these as “dope on a rope” — where the chute was pulled open automatically as soon as he left the aircraft.
The next stage in his skydiving course involved low-level jumps into water, where he pulled his own rip cord, but did so immediately upon exiting the aircraft — these Chavez called “hop-and-pops.”
