Authors: David Vinjamuri
The sight ticked my memory—what was it? Not the river release for rafting—something else. Bridge Day! Nichols had mentioned it. The Bridge was blocked off for some sort of celebration, but I hadn’t asked the details. The festivities were obviously winding down because the line of traffic leaving Fayetteville was as thick as the line in, but moving considerably faster. I pulled ahead, swerved around a white Jetta idling in front of me and reached the roadblock. A trooper standing behind the barricade pointed at me and spoke into his radio when I ignored his warning and dodged the bike around the obstacle. Good. I dipped the KTM off the road then gunned it, evoking a very loud protest from a man in overalls who’d stepped in front of his wife, who was cradling an infant in blue swaddling.
The bridge itself was awash with pedestrians, many of them wearing matching sweatshirts with “Bridge Day” splashed on the front. I wove between them, ignoring the angry looks and pointing fingers, and took time to be grateful that the end of the day was rapidly approaching. If the bridge had been as crowded as it surely must have been at midday, I’d barely have made it across on foot, let alone on a motorcycle. I was a full third of the way across the span, slowly threading the bike by foot between angry pedestrians, when I realized I’d been outfoxed.
A half-dozen men wearing distinctive black turtlenecks and windbreakers with the National Front logo were walking toward me from the far side of the bridge. They hadn’t yet drawn weapons but I could see that they were armed. I wondered how they’d gotten ahead of me until I noticed the helicopter they’d landed just inside the barricade.
Two very angry state troopers were handcuffing the pilot, and probably thanking their lucky stars that he hadn’t injured anyone. Unfortunately, the troopers hadn’t detained the National Front security men who’d piled out, and they hadn’t attracted the attention of the other troopers and local police on the bridge. They had noticed me, though, and as I started to turn the KTM around, I spotted three officers with hands on their weapons slowly working their way through the crowd toward me. Behind them were eight more black-clad men, some with hands already disappearing into their jackets.
I realized in an instant that whether I moved forward or backwards, the National Front didn’t intend to let me get off the bridge alive. The moment they drew weapons, a bunch of cops and a lot of other innocent people were going to get hurt.
Desperately scanning the scene, I noticed a platform erected in the middle of the bridge, raised above the level of the guardrail. A small crowd gathered nearby with backpacks strapped tightly to their backs and helmets on their heads, looking like they’d prepared for an arduous climb. Just a few yards ahead of me, a woman was holding a similar orange and yellow backpack with two leg loops dangling off of it in her right hand while she chatted with a friend. Suddenly the picture snapped together in my mind. I saw a way out. It was insane, but less so than waiting for more than a dozen armed men to gun me down.
I eased the bike forward and dismounted a couple of steps short of the woman. I tapped her on the shoulder and smiled. “Could you show me how one of these goes on?” I asked.
“Ah, sure,” she said, glancing at her companion who shrugged.
I eased the backpack from her hands and she helped me put it on and adjust it. Then I thanked her and, stepping back, swung my leg back over the orange dirt bike.
“Hey wait!” she said. I ignored her and drew the Sig Sauer. She backed away from me.
“FBI—clear a path!” I yelled as I fired two rounds into the air. I holstered the Sig as the reports echoed from the hillside, then I gunned the engine of the bike for a long second. The KTM surged forward as screams erupted and the young, fit crowd scrambled out of my path like a herd of gazelles pursued by a cheetah. I prayed that the confusion would keep the three uniformed officers in my sightline from shooting me.
I aimed the bike straight at the platform, locking my eyes on the staircase. As I closed on the structure, the last couple still standing on the stairs belatedly realized I was headed straight for them and jumped off. I twisted the throttle harder, and the KTM mounted the stairs. The top of the platform was about nine feet wide and four feet deep. When I reached it, I turned sharply, pointed the orange bike straight out toward the river and twisted the throttle. The KTM shot off the side of the bridge and into the air.
That was when I experienced my first moment of doubt. As the bridge disappeared underneath me, while the bike was still soaring upwards, I suddenly wondered if I’d made a horrible, horrible mistake. Then I felt the pull of gravity and every other thought left my head.
I pushed off the KTM and watched the bike fall away from me as I spread my arms and legs out and got my body parallel to the river below me. I noted a green and purple-clad body freefalling a few hundred feet below me, a ways off to one side, and felt a moment of relief as I reached back to find the chute release for the pack I’d strapped on. I’d jumped from perfectly good aircraft in the Army, but I’d never made a base jump. I’d always thought that jumping from a fixed object a few hundred feet tall was a form of temporary insanity that didn’t complement my life of frequent involuntary risk. But the New River Bridge looked like it was a thousand feet above the river below, which gave me a little cushion.
Still, I didn’t wait. A real BASE jumper would have extended the free fall until the last safe moment, but I didn’t. I followed the descent path of the jumper below me while my hand searched for the parachute. I was hoping to find some sort of Velcro opening, but I realized that the pouch with the parachute was held closed by a pin. It took me a precious second to work out the mechanism to release it.
For a sickening moment, I felt nothing. Then the small drogue chute exploded out of the pack like a shot from a cannon. Almost instantly, the main chute caught the air and snatched me upwards. The pack stayed on my back and I had a moment of relief as my downward velocity slowed. Then I started to twist, and I realized that I was still in trouble. I looked up and checked the parachute. One corner of the rectangular chute was fouled, folded under the rest of the canopy and twisted. I’d seen it before. On a normal jump I’d have been able to clear it. But the three or four seconds it would have taken to straighten it would have put me into the river at a murderous velocity. I was descending too fast, and in a second I’d be out of control, unable to keep myself out of the trees on either side of the river. I looked down, saw the bloom of a parachute below me, and made an instant decision.
I slid the hook knife from the rig’s shoulder strap and cut the parachute away from the pack. As I dropped away from the fouled chute, I brought my arms and legs into my body, diving downwards toward the canopy below me. I needed to hit the rectangular chute as it passed underneath me, before it was out of my reach. Calculations were running through my head and I prayed that I was not about to kill two instead of one. When I was just about on top of the purple parachute, I spread-eagled to hit it flat and yelled a warning.
I collapsed the chute, but the pocket of air it held acted like an airbag, arresting my fall without killing me instantly. It felt like hitting a 300 pound nose tackle square in the belly at full speed. I guessed that we were around fifty feet from the water when I hit the chute and maybe ten or twenty feet lower when it collapsed. Then I was wrapped in the parachute, unable to see a thing, plunging toward the river, wondering how deep the water was below me, realizing that the hook knife was no longer in my hand and trying to remember if the little Spyderco knife was still in my pants pocket.
It was just at that moment I realized I was jumping into whitewater.
25
“I’ll be back soon. As soon as I can.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“How is she doing today?”
“I just left the hospital. She looks better than yesterday. She’s still not talking, but she’s much more alert. She’s eating solid food now. They took most of the tubes out of her, so there’s just a port on her arm now.”
“They intubated her?”
“I think it was just for food. There might have been oxygen going into her nose, though.”
“I don’t think Amelia wants me to come back.”
“Why does that surprise you?”
“She thinks Mom doesn’t want me there.”
“Of course she’d say that.”
“You don’t think so?”
“You remember the woman we’re talking about, right? The old battleaxe? She gets her energy from being angry. You’ll perk her right up.”
“So she
is
mad at me...”
“Don’t be a little girl, Michael. Of course she’s angry. Her house was redecorated with bullet holes last year. She watched a man hold a shotgun to her baby daughter’s neck. And even worse than those two things, those awful men scratched her hardwood floors by pushing around the furniture. She’ll never forgive you for that.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“Don’t you get it? That’s our mother. That’s how she is. If she didn’t love you, she wouldn’t be pissed off. Of course she wants to see you. She’ll just never admit it.”
“What about Amelia?”
“Who cares about Amelia? She’s got her hands full raising the Chosen One. She’s going to order you around as long as you let her. Don’t pay attention to her. What’s she going to do? Her husband worships you and she can’t physically throw you out of Mom’s room. Amelia is just like Mom. She’s always going to be angry about something. You might as well make it something worth talking about.”
“Ginny seemed pretty upset when I left.”
“Ginny doesn’t like fights. She wants everyone to get along. She was too young to remember what Dad was really like so she still has these fairytale fantasies where we’re all a happy family together and Mom is nicer and you never left.”
“That’s what it always comes back to.”
“That’s the smartest thing you ever did, Michael—getting out of here. I only got as far as Albany and it’s not far enough. If you keep reliving the old family traumas it will eat you alive. Everybody has baggage. Just drop it and make them deal with who you are now.”
“So I should come back?”
“If you’ve been listening.”
“It may take me a day or two, but I’ll get there,” I said.
“Don’t wait too long. They say a hurricane is coming. We got clobbered by Irene last year.”
“I’ll come as soon as I can.”
“You’re okay, Mikey. Just try to show a little backbone.”
“Thanks, Jamie. I...I feel like I never got to know you and now—”
“I was twelve when you left. Now’s a better time for me. See ya.”
* * *
“Trouble?” Nichols asked as she stepped into the waiting room of a private terminal at Chuck Yeager airport in Charleston, where the FBI helicopter had landed.
“Family stuff,” I replied, staring at the phone. Then I looked up, meeting Nichols’s eyes. “Wait, shouldn’t you be somewhere south of here, breaking up a music festival?”
Nichols winced and shook her head. “We couldn’t get a warrant. The National Front lawyers have been swarming federal judges, claiming they were conducting a demonstration today as part of their festival and that the gunfire and explosions we observed were all staged.”
“Didn’t you have someone else inside?”
“Apparently the National Front people kept all the guests contained in the festival area. We couldn’t show that they were lying, not conclusively.”
“What about the drone footage?” I asked, rubbing my chin.
“Drone footage?”
“We used a Boeing prototype from an abandoned DOD project they flew in from Ohio—a drone with rotors I think. My guys were supposed to supply your people with video to get the warrant.”
“I don’t know. I’m not in the loop on that.”
“The drone footage would have shown people getting shot and bleeding. And worse.”
“Releasing that kind of detailed surveillance video would open a can of worms. Are you sure your DOD friends would have shared that?”
“Maybe not,” I admitted. Even if the tech weren’t classified, Alpha wouldn’t risk a media circus.
“That’s not the only problem with a rogue special ops group playing soldier in West Virginia, either.” Nichols stopped abruptly when she took a good look at me. “What did they do to you in there, anyway?” I had a towel draped over my shoulders and I was sitting on another one. There was a puddle beneath my feet. “Water torture?”
“Actually, yes, but that’s not why I’m wet.”
“I heard you jumped a motorcycle off the New River Bridge.”
“That’s true, but there
was
a parachute involved. Or two.”
“You landed safely in the river?”
“More or less.” Actually, I’d hit the water like a stone, wondering instantly if my back had broken and gasping from the shock of cold water. I struggled with the feeling that I was about to die hopelessly entangled in the canopy of a purple parachute. I put my hands above me as if praying and pulled through the wet material until it wouldn’t yield, then grabbed the knife from my pocket with numb hands and started sawing at it. When I’d just about given up I felt myself being lifted from the water and a few seconds later, the purple blob in front of my eyes parted and I saw the sky and the face of my rescuer.
There were three other people in the small rubber motorboat and one of them was the nineteen-year-old woman I’d nearly killed. I expected her to attack me but instead she hugged me. “Dude that was awesome!” she said. “I saw your motorcycle hit the river. Did you breakaway and nearly bounce?” I just nodded and shivered.
The little rubber boat brought us to a parking lot on the shore where EMTs and local police were waiting for me with similar levels of anticipation. The FBI helicopter arrived on the scene just in time to prevent me from being either hospitalized or arrested.
“What happened to the guys who were shooting at me?”
“The troopers arrested the helicopter pilot for making an unsafe landing, public endangerment and all that. Nobody on the bridge witnessed any shooting other than the shots you fired. Apparently you were legally seconded from state to the FBI today, so there won’t be any charges. You’re very lucky nobody on the bridge was hurt. They stopped and questioned some of the guys who were following you but they had carry permits for their weapons.”