Dick Donnelly was swinging slowly and gently at the ends of his shroud lines. He looked below at the rocky and uneven ground covered with little clumps of short, scrubby trees. He reached up over his right shoulder and tugged at the lines a bit so that his body shifted to the left slightly. He was picking his spot for a landing.
Then he stole a glance upward and behind him, smiling with pleasure as he saw the sky filled with scores of white parachutes.
“Looks like a snowstorm,” he muttered to himself. “They sure did pile plenty of us out in a hurry over a small area.”
The planes had already swung westward as they climbed away from the first ineffective bursts of antiaircraft shells from German batteries to the south. There was no German airfield in the Wadizam Pass—it was too narrow and rocky—but they would be radioing for fighters to the field at the rear, over the hill.
“The transports will get away, though,” Dick mused. “They’re just about out of ack-ack range now, and the fighters will be too late.”
He looked down at the ground again, which suddenly seemed to be coming up at him more rapidly. When the parachute first stopped his descent, it seemed almost as if he were floating in the air, settling downward, ever so slowly. But as he neared the earth, he had a better estimate of the speed at which he was traveling. With a last glance upward at the many white ’chutes interspersed with a few colored ones bearing machine guns, mortars, radio, and ammunition, he slipped his ’chute lines once more and got ready for the rolling fall.
“Going to miss that big boulder all right,” he told himself. Then his feet touched the earth and jolted him as he tumbled sideways and slightly forward, yanking vigorously against the shroud lines on one side.
But he did not have to worry about the escape from his parachute, for it caught against the boulder he had missed, and collapsed. Quickly he jumped to his feet, slipped out of the harness, ditched his emergency ’chute, and looked up toward the crest.
