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A piercing red light cut through the darkness one Friday morning, hours before daybreak, three months later. One man sat alone in the cargo bay of an RAAF Boeing C-17 Globemaster at 31,000 metres.
Operation Pivotal Velocity was in motion. They were flying over the Straits of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico and the drop zone would be over eight kilometres off the coast of Cuba, near the remote peninsula town of La Boca.
Zero-three hundred. Dressed in a high-altitude jumpsuit with an oxygen sealed helmet, Stiles was ready to jump. He had done forty minutes of breathing 100% oxygen in order to flush nitrogen from his bloodstream. He was thirty-one kilometres above the Earth’s surface, with a face temperature of minus forty-five degrees Celsius. He went over the jump procedure in his mind—
