DICK DONNELLY
of
THE PARATROOPS
CHAPTER ONE
TOKEN RESISTANCE
The big transport plane flew out of a cloud just as the sun appeared over the flat horizon of the desert to the east. The rolling hills over which the clouds hung low smoothed out as they met and merged with the flat wasteland. A row of trees, the only ones in sight, lined one edge of a rectangle even flatter and smoother than the land near by. A long, low building near the trees, with two small airplanes in front of it, identified the rectangle as an airfield.
Before the transport reached the field, another slid out of the cloud. Suddenly swift fighter planes darted past them, swept low over the airfield with machine guns splattering their bullets over the hard earth, the two small planes, and the low hangar. They circled swiftly, just as a third transport appeared from the clouds, and roared past the field, on the far side of the line of trees. Long streaks of white smoke poured from them, falling lazily and billowing into man-made clouds as dense as those in which the planes had recently been flying. In five minutes the smoke screen was a wall twenty feet thick and a hundred feet high.
Meanwhile, the first transport had circled the field, dropping lower. Suddenly a figure plunged from the side of its fuselage, hurtled toward the ground, and then checked its descent with a jerk as a white parachute billowed out above. Another figure had dropped from the plane before the first ’chute opened, and now it too floated gently to earth behind the smoke screen. In rapid succession, eighteen men leaped from the plane, which sped back toward the hills as another came in to discharge its cargo of soldiers.
As the first man landed, he rolled over the hard earth, tugging at the lines of his parachute to spill the air from it. In a moment it had collapsed and the man had slipped from his harness. Dropping his emergency ’chute, he unfolded the stock of his sub-machine gun and ran forward, crouching, toward the smoke screen, on the other side of which lay the airfield building.
“Jerry!” a voice called from behind him, and he turned.
“Okay, Dick?” the first man called back.