BELGRADE
Early on, Gretchen Casey had a bad habit of telling Hutton how incredible he was. It probably opened the door for everything else that had followed between them. What she meant to say was that the team of people the Unit had access to was incredible. She learned to be much more careful with her words.
Nevertheless, as she stared at the aircraft sitting on the tarmac of the small airport outside Belgrade, she was tempted to once again credit its appearance, as well as all the gear inside, to how incredible Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hutton was. She was going to have to work on that impulse. It was unhealthy.
Waiting for her and Julie Ericsson were two Icarus Extreme FX 69 parachute rigs. They were compact, highly steerable, and provided for fast flight. The max weight of a jumper loaded down with gear-guns, radio, NVGs, harness, reserve chute, and so on-that the FX 69 could handle was 152 pounds. This meant that few, if any, of the male Delta operators could use them. Many Athena Team members did, and those who did loved them.
Like their fellow team members, they had learned their parachuting skills in the Special Forces HALO program and then picked up their advanced skills in specialized Delta training. On top of that, Gretchen and Julie were recreational jumpers. One of their favorite events was the annual para-ski competition at Snowbird, Utah, where they had to parachute out of an aircraft, hit a target, and then ski the rest of the way down the mountain.
The only real competition Casey and Ericsson ever encountered was each other. Via the military, they trained throughout the year. A good Delta team could land together in a ten-foot circle.
Tonight, though, it wouldn’t be a whole team landing. It would just be Gretchen and Julie. But they’d be landing in a very tight area. In fact, the plan was for them to land on Branko Kojic’s roof.
Alex and Megan pulled the gear meant for their part of the operation off the plane and tucked it into the trunk of the car they had rented. While they didn’t mind jumping, they weren’t as gung-ho about it as their teammates and were happy to leave that part of the assignment to Casey and Ericsson.
Once the women had gone over the plan one last time, they said their good-byes. Cooper and Rhodes drove off, and Casey and Ericsson got down to the business of checking and rechecking every piece of equipment that had been sent for them to use.
They didn’t need to ask where the plane and all the gear had come from. The Strategic Support Branch, also known as SSB, had been established so that clandestine DoD operatives wouldn’t need to depend on the CIA for support.
It was after 11:00 P.M. by the time Megan Rhodes radioed that she and Alex Cooper were in place outside Kojic’s building. Their responsibility was to provide visual security and coordinate the exfiltration at the end of the assignment. If things went badly, then they were to get their guns into the fight right away.
They would also be providing atmospheric data for the jumpers. Via a Brunton handheld atmospheric data center, they radioed the humidity, heat index, air density, barometric pressure, temperature, wind speed, and wind direction to Casey and Ericsson. Once that was complete they wished them good luck. Ten minutes later, the Let L-410 Turbojet aircraft was in the air.
Belgrade’s elevation was ninety meters, so it had been decided the jump would happen at ten thousand feet AGL, or above ground level. This would give the women plenty of time to fly to Kojic’s building in freefall.
When the pilot gave the warning, they put their helmets on, stood up, and approached the door. After checking each other’s jumpsuits and equipment, Casey opened the door. She checked the wind deflector and then conducted an outside air safety check.
The pilot announced, “One minute.”
Thirty seconds later came the warning, “Thirty seconds.”
Casey looked outside once more to make sure everything was clear for their jump. She then leaned back inside the aircraft and flashed Ericsson the thumbs-up. When Ericsson returned the signal, Casey counted to ten and they exited the aircraft together.
The temperature was cold as they raced through the night sky at over 120 miles per hour. Flying in formation, they stayed together until they reached their “open” altitude of two thousand feet.
At that point, Casey waved Ericsson off and they separated. Once a safe distance apart, they deployed their chutes. Gretchen led the way down toward the building with Julie tracking a safe distance behind.
As they descended, Megan continued to feed atmospheric data over the radio.
Using a windsock on a nearby building to help compute her glide angle, Casey placed herself about three hundred feet upwind from the building and corkscrewed down.
Watching as her teammate neared the seventeen-story rooftop, Ericsson did a half-brake of her chute, slowed her descent, and allowed Casey a clear approach.
Despite what the sock said, the wind was tricky and Gretchen hit the roof hard. Even with knees bent, it was a rough landing, but she didn’t have time to think about it. She had to collapse her chute before the wind caught it and dragged her over the edge of the building. She also needed to get out of the way because Julie would be coming in right behind her.
Casey gathered up her chute and looked up just in time to see Ericsson coming in to land. There was just one problem. The wind had moved her off-target. She was going to overshoot the roof.
She watched as Julie tried hard to correct, but that only made it worse. “Abort! Abort!” she said over the radio. Ericsson either didn’t hear, or didn’t want to hear.
When she landed, she landed hard, harder than Casey. She also missed the center of the roof completely and came down at the very edge of the roof. With momentum driving her forward, there was no place for her to go but right over the edge. And as her chute collapsed in a skydiver’s nightmare, that’s exactly what happened.