"Pollock, J.C. - Payback" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pollock J.C)

his harness, a pendulum gone mad. His hands held the steering toggles
in a death grip, fighting for control as gusts up to fifty miles an hour
drove him toward the swift-flowing river five hundred feet below.

Stealing a frantic glance over his shoulder, he searched the sky for the
rest of the team. Two of his men were a few hundred feet above him,
locked in the same deadly struggle. The fourth man was nowhere in
sight, having plummeted past moments before, his parachute hopelessly
tangled. Manes had watched anxiously as the young Special Forces
sergeant, with only seconds to spare, cut away the main chute and
deployed his reserve; still out of control, he was swept downwind toward
a distant ridgeline.

The tightly knit operation plan was coming apart at the seams. It was
Murphy's Law at its worst, starting shortly after takeoff from the
mission's launch site in West Germany. An electronics malfunction
aboard the aircraft had gone undetected, causing a navigation error that
resulted in the jump master releasing the infiltration team off course,
miles from the intended drop zone. Manes realized it upon exiting the
aircraft. The rolling countryside passing beneath him did not match the
terrain features of the satellite photographs he had studied.
Deteriorating weather was further complicating matters. the winds at
the lower elevations were much stronger than the mission planners had
predicted, and a snow squall had developed during the team's descent
from thirty thousand feet.

Manes's goggles began to fog, and his vision was blurred by the driven
snow. As the ground rushed toward him he fought to maintain the
delicate balance between panic and the positive force of the adrenaline
surging through his body.

A crescent moon filtered through a thin layer of clouds, casting a pale,
eerie glow over a dense pine forest that ran to the river's edge. His
eyes strained as he scanned the snowy terrain for an opening. Any
opening. Just large enough to squeeze his stocky frame into and avoid
being blown into the trees or the dark, icy water. He saw the lights of
a village off to the north, and in his peripheral vision he spotted open
fields, upwind and hopelessly out of reach.

Three hundred feet from the ground he got a brief reprieve. A lull in
the wind provided a few precious seconds to gain a semblance of control
before another powerful gust rocked him in the direction of the river.
At two hundred feet a low, rounded hill to his left broke the force of
the wind, and then he saw it: a small clearing, no more than thirty feet
square, just short of the river. Calling on all of the experience and
technique gained in over seven hundred jumps, he steered for it.

Pulling down hard on his left toggle, he descended in a tight spiral. He
was late in flaring his canopy to decrease his rate of descent and
landed with a bone-jarring jolt that sent him tumbling across the