Miles to Go Sneak Peak

Chapter Four

Shuroabad, Tajikistan

Rennie Vogel stood at the open door of the plane. This was how she always wanted life to be–every nerve alive with sensation, thrumming along at 300 miles an hour. She looked for this in every corner of her life. She didn’t always find it, but she did today. And she could hardly wait to jump into the abyss.

Goode raised a thickly gloved finger indicating the one-minute warning.

The team stood hip to hip. Lincoln Goode, Brad Baldwin, Jonah Levin, Rennie Vogel and John Smythe. Their thick helmets blocked out the deafening noise of the plane cutting through the atmosphere. Rennie could feel Levin next to her quivering slightly–from the intense cold as well as from the deep distress of a mind confronted with the idea of jumping into thin air at 25,000 feet. She gave him a thumbs up. She knew he would get it together when he needed to. He always did.

Goode raised his hand again. Ten seconds. Rennie looked at Brad Baldwin who stood at her left–she could see his eyes but couldn’t read his expression through his helmet. Goode gave the final signal and they stepped off the ledge. The cold hit her like a brick. This was something you never got used to. It was like a transformation, as if her skin and muscles were being forged into something stronger and harder. And it was a relief to be airborne after shouldering the weight of her equipment. Each of them was three hundred and sixty pounds of flesh and bone and gear, the maximum allowed for a jump at this height. Rennie, as the only woman and lighter than the rest of the team by at least seventy-five pounds, carried the most.

They plummeted through the frigid air at one hundred and twenty-six miles per hour, but to Rennie it always felt infinitely faster. At this rate, it took only two minutes to drop over twenty thousand feet to reach the mark where they pulled their ripcords. And that two minutes felt like a lifetime. This was when she got to enjoy herself, glancing at her altimeter periodically to make sure she didn’t drown in the sensation. Her body always responded to this kind of intensity, like diving deep into a first kiss... CONTINUE HERE