“Colonel, this is General McCord. This may sound a little odd, but I want you to dispatch, immediately, one of your best medical officers. I am in the U.S. Embassy, and I have a young sergeant with me who, if my diagnosis is correct, has been rolling around in poison oak.” There was a pause. “No, Colonel, he cannot come there. I don’t want to argue about this. I expect to see either you or one of your doctors here within twenty minutes.”
He hung the phone up, and turned to smile at Jack.
“They give you a shot,” he said. “It clears it up in a couple of hours. I had it in survival school in Utah a couple of years ago.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” Jack said.
“Don’t get your hopes up about anything else, Sergeant,” General McCord said. “I know they won’t let you jump on Stanleyville.”
“Yes, sir,” Jack said.
“So tell me what else I should know about the airport in Stanleyville, ” General McCord said.
[ THREE ]
Stanleyville, Republic of the Congo
0600 25 November 1964
As a tradition, the men of the First Battalion, the Paracommando Regiment, Royal Belgian Army, continued to use the English-language jump commands the battalion had learned in England in World War II.
“Outboard sticks, stand UP!” the jumpmaster ordered.
The two outside files of men inside the USAF C-130, called “Chalk One” in the OPPLAN, stood up and folded up their nylon and aluminum pole seats back against the fuselage wall.
“Inboard sticks, stand UP!”
The two inside files rose to their feet and folded their seats.
“Hook UP!”
Everybody fastened the hook at the end of their static line to a steel cable.
“Check static lines! Check equipment!”
Everybody tugged at his own static line, to make sure it was securely hooked to the cable, and then they checked the harness and other equipment of the man standing in front of them—that is to say, in the lines that now faced rear, and led to the exit doors on either side of the aircraft.
Now the jumpmaster switched to French: “Un minute!” and then back to English: “Stand in the door!”
Chalk One was down to 700 feet or so, and all dirtied up, flaps down, throttles retarded, close (at 125 mph) to stall speed.
“Go!”
Sergeant Jack Portet, wearing the uniform of a Belgian paratrooper, was the sixth man in the port-side stick. The Belgians had been sympathetic to someone who wanted to jump on Stanleyville because his mother and sister were there.
And if he got into trouble with the U.S. Army, c’est la vie.
Jack felt the slight tug of the static line almost immediately after exiting the aircraft, and a moment later, felt his main chute slithering out of the case. And then the canopy filled, and he had a sensation of being jerked upward.
There was not enough time to orient himself beyond seeing the airfield beneath and slightly to the left of him, and to pick out the twelve-story, white Immoquateur apartment building downtown before the ground seemed to suddenly rush up at him.
He knew where he was now. He landed on the tee of the third hole of the Stanleyville golf course. He landed on his feet, but when he started to pull on the lines, to dump a little air from the nearly emptied canopy, there was a sudden gust of air and the canopy filled and pulled him off his feet.
He hit the quick release and was out of the harness a moment later. He rolled over and saw that the sky was full of chutes from Chalk Two and Chalk Three.
And then there were peculiar whistling noises, and peculiar cracking noises, and after a moment Jack realized that he was under fire.
And there didn’t seem to be anybody to shoot back at.
And then, all of a sudden, there was: There were Simbas firing from, of all places, the control tower.
He dropped to the ground, worked the action of the FN assault rifle, and took aim at the tower. As he lined his sights up, the tower disappeared in a cloud of dust. In a moment, he had the explanation. Two paratroopers had gotten their machine guns in action.
Jack got to his feet and ran toward a trio of Belgian officers. When there was transportation, either something captured here, or the jeeps or the odd-looking three-wheelers on the C-130s that were supposed to land, the officers would get first crack at it. And he wanted to be there when it arrived. He had to