It’s Not the Fall That Kills You…
The Middle East (exact location redacted)
six months ago at 4.19 pm local time
The old DC-3 flew at six thousand feet under the radar, bucking through turbulent air. Inside Callum Cooper was holding onto the netting covering the wooden crate he was sitting on. He was forty-three-years-old, six foot tall with short, brown hair and a runner’s build.
Three men dressed in fake American army uniforms sat on crates opposite him. Two of them had big guns and low IQs, always a bad combination, he didn’t know what their names were, but the middle one who was a lot smaller and considerably brighter, was Jackson Smith, an ex-CIA agent whom Cooper knew from his previous career. Smith was a stocky man of average height in his early fifties with spiky blonde hair and a ginger beard.
The four of them were sitting on over ninety-million dollars’ worth of “ghost money” which is what the CIA calls cash used to bribe regimes and insurgents, sometimes both sides at the same time, Smith and Cooper were planning to split the proceeds fifty-fifty when they got to a country with less than stringent banking regulations.
The confidence trick Cooper had devised had gone smoothly and according to plan earlier that day, when they’d impersonated an armed escort picking up the money from the US consulate to take to a local warlord.
They delayed the real escort until after they were long gone by paying mercenaries to puncturing their tires with sniper fire and block their radio transmissions as they entered the middle of nowhere.
He yawned and shivered with the cold as he zipped up his fur-lined, leather jacket over his US army Colonel’s uniform, resting the back of his head against the bulkhead. The steady thrumming of the twin propeller aircraft lulling him to sleep as it entered calm air.
He had the same recurring dream (which was really a memory) he’d had, on and off, for the five years since they’d thrown him out of the army.
It always started in the operations centre, a sizeable room filled with dozens of desks staffed by soldiers busily working on computers and talking on phones. Giant, wall-mounted screens showed satellite imagery of various trouble spots around the globe overlaid with scrolling data.
In the dream he was still a lieutenant in British Military Intelligence, he was standing holding a cup of green tea and talking to an eager, young private who thought she’d identified a credible threat, “Good work,” he said, “kick it up the chain and CC me in on the email.”
As he walked back to his office, a squad of military police entered the room, tall, stern-faced men with their red-peaked caps pulled so far down they had to stand bolt upright just to look straight ahead, they were fanning out to cover all the exits and every instinct he had screamed that they had come for him, an eventuality he’d spent a long time preparing for.
He took his phone from his pocket and triggered the electromagnetic pulse generators in both of his homes (the one the army knew about and the one they didn’t) to erase the hard drives in all his computers and tablets, then he started a wipe running on his phone and took a sip of tea as his commanding officer, two military policemen and a major he’d never seen before, hurried over to arrest him.
A tap on the shoulder startled him awake and when the sleep cleared from his eyes, he saw Smith pointing a Beretta M9 pistol at him, “Sorry to wake you up, Coops,” he said, “but I didn’t want you to miss your stop.”
He sat bolt upright, suddenly wide awake, “We’re landing already?”
“No, but you are getting off, so let’s concentrate on the big picture rather than thinking about the niggling details,” he stepped back keeping the gun aimed for a heart shot, “put that on,” he said, nodding to a parachute in the middle of the floor.
Cooper looked about warily as he fastened the straps around his waist, “I should’ve known better than to work with you, sociopaths are too hard to read,” he said.
“Oh, and I should mention that the parachute doesn’t work, and you know how they say you can’t take it with you? Well, I’m giving you a million dollars to see if you can prove them wrong,” Smith said nodding to the smaller of the two thugs, who handcuffed a silver attaché case to Cooper’s left wrist as he kept out of the line of fire.
“Now be a good host, Mr Outhouse and show Coops to the door,” Smith said to the bigger of the two thugs, as he took his seat again, the man was five feet wide and seven feet tall.
“His last name’s Outhouse, what’s his first one, Brick?” He said sarcastically, as the giant stood up and grabbed his left arm, steel-like fingers crushing his bicep, pushing him towards the hatch that the other man was sliding open. He unleashed a flurry of punches and kicks, but whether it was because of Outhouse’s muscles or body armour, the blows had no effect.
As he was being pushed towards his certain death, the world around him seemed to slow down and his senses heightened as adrenaline flooded through his system. In those few seconds he heard everything: the howling of the wind through the open hatch, his own breath rapid, rasping with effort and fear, in contrast to Mr Outhouse’s normal, calm breathing. Then the ringing of a mobile phone cut through it all, which, with no reception that high up, was impossible… unless it was over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and he knew that could only mean one thing.
He spun around as fast as he could, burying his face in the startled Mr Outhouse’s chest, thrusting his arms into the large man's bullet-proof vest and pulled his feet up so the body armour shielded him just as an explosion ripped the side out of the plane.
The rear fuel tank erupted, a gout of flame and black smoke belching out of the aircraft as it broke in two, the tail section tumbling towards the forest below as the front went into a nosedive.
The blast blew them clear as he clung desperately onto Mr Outhouse; the flames licking around them as the wind howled deafeningly in his ears. He nearly vomited when he saw that the back of the corpse’s head was missing, the expression on the face strangely serene. He lay flat, pressing his head into the chest and used his arms and legs to force the body into as much of a spreadeagled, skydiving pose as he could manage. The forest below was coming into sharp relief, a wide, fast-flowing river turning and twisting its way through thick woodland.
The attaché case was swinging about wildly, slamming bone-crunchingly into his side over and over again as the handcuff rubbed all the skin off of his wrist. He buried his face in the corpse’s chest as they hit the trees at over a hundred miles an hour, the breaking branches slowed their descent with twigs flying like shrapnel. A piece of splintered wood hit the corpse and slowed considerably, but still smashed into him hard enough to break the few ribs on that side the case had missed.
They crashed into the undergrowth with a terrible snapping of bones (from both him and the body) and skidded down a steep, muddy slope, sharp rocks gouging chucks out of any part of the corpse that wasn’t covered in armour.
As they shot over the edge of a steep ravine towards a fast-flowing river below he tore himself free of the body just in time as it rolled over, threatening to crushed him. He bounced down the rocky gorge head first on his back, dislodging rocks and boulders along the way, becoming the centre of a small landslide.
Four times the case’s chain snagged on a bush, and four times he screamed in agony. The first time it happened it wrenched him upright, dislocating his left arm at the shoulder. Each time it happened the bush was ripped free of its grip of the steep gorge, slowing him down more and more, as he wished he could black out from the pain.
As he landed in the thick mud of the river bank, limbs at a crazy angle, the attaché case whipped round and smashed into the side of his head. He just had time to decide that the universe was definitely taking the piss before he passed out.