“Hang in there. We’ll get you home.”
Amanda could now see flames from the target they’d destroyed. Two secondary explosions confirmed ammunition had been stored in one of the buildings. By the time she nursed her malfunctioning Super Hornet around to a southerly heading, she would be very near the bombed terrorist compound.
Breathing in gasps, Amanda keyed her radio. “I’m passing near the target, almost ready to roll out,” she said in a tight voice.
“Lights,” Ricardo replied.
She flashed her exterior lights.
“No joy. I’ll flash mine.”
“Oh no!” Amanda cried out, frantically shoving the nose of her Super Hornet down to avoid slamming into her flight leader. “You went right over me. Directly over me!”
“Shit! Turn straight south. I’ll find you after we’re out of Dodge.”
She tried to get the nose up, bottoming out at two hundred feet above the ground, but as the jet began to climb a few feet, it violently rolled to the left.
Amanda reached for the Martin-Baker Series-14 ejection seat’s handle and froze as the aircraft passed the inverted position. Punching out inverted at low altitude would be fatal.
Panic-stricken, Amanda paused as the aircraft rolled upright. She yanked the throttles to idle and extended the speed brake, slowing the Super Hornet to just over three hundred knots. “Losing control. Ejecting! Ejecting!”
Amanda pulled the firing handle on the side of her seat and immediately felt the flight harness retraction unit hugging her like a bear.
A series of bolts filled with an explosive charge detonated, jettisoning the canopy from the fuselage just as small rocket thrusters attached on its forward lip pushed it out of the ejection path, vanishing in the slipstream.
The wind noise roared inside the open cockpit, hammering her eardrums even under the helmet. A series of mechanical operations took place in under a second as the Mk14 seat moved into position up the rail and the system released the top latch. An instant later, the cables attached to her boots yanked her feet back, hard.
An emergency beacon started broadcasting even before the underseat rockets fired, blasting her into the darkness.
Amanda gasped as she accelerated like a missile. More than fifteen g-forces piled up on her in a second, compressing her vertebrae. The windblast took her breath away.
She felt like she was riding a roller coaster on steroids as someone punched and tugged on her from every angle. Amanda tried to get her bearings, but she had tunnel vision because of the extreme g-forces.
Then her seat kicked her in the back like a mule. Her head flew backward as she was shot forward by the drogue parachute’s firing from the back of the seat.
And that was the first time her sight cleared enough to see the ejection seat falling away, as the main parachute snapped and blossomed above her, violently yanking her skyward and upright with a powerful jolt against her shoulders.
Jesus!
She barely had time to reorient herself before her Super Hornet crashed five seconds later in a blazing fireball that spread across the ground and shot up into the night sky.
Amanda watched in shock and denial, then it hit her that the burning wreckage sat less than a mile from the terrorist compound, just beyond a dirt road snaking its way through a series of shallow and rocky hills toward the airport and the military base. She could actually see the beacon from Zahedan International Airport roughly three miles away.
She drifted for about a minute, but regretfully the prevailing winds carried her to the foot of a rocky hill between the remains of her bird and the compound she’d just hit. Secondary explosions rumbled in the distance as fires propagated across the base, reaching weapons, explosives, and fuel depots.
The terrain rushed up to meet her, and she rolled the instant her boots hit the ground with a resounding thud, just as she had drilled, ending on her side nearly out of breath, the parachute fluttering behind her.
The sporadic splashes of red, yellow, and gold from the compound, as well as from the burning jet, lit up the darkness around her.
Get up.
Ignoring her aching back and neck, Amanda managed to sit and take stock of herself.
Her ankle throbbed a little from the Mk14 leg line yanking her feet back prior to ejection, but she was able to flex it and seemed otherwise uninjured. Pushing herself to her feet, she staggered around to gather her parachute and quickly piled some rocks on it to keep it from becoming a signal flag blowing in the breeze. She began walking away from the crash site, her mind still fuzzy, unclear.
Get it together and start thinking.
She stopped for a moment when she heard Ricardo’s jet circling. Grabbing the AN/PRC-149 naval survival radio strapped to the vest she wore over her flight suit, and circling slowly to get a look at her surroundings, Amanda set the volume on the lowest setting, keyed the switch, and whispered, “Dash-One, Dash-One, I’m okay, just a sore ankle but can walk.”
“Roger that. I’m contacting CSAR now,” Ricardo shot back, referring to combat search and rescue.
“Copy,” she whispered.
In order to help coordinate the rescue effort, Ricardo needed fuel, so he turned south, toward the closest KC-135R tanker circling over the Arabian Sea.
He spoke clearly to Amanda. “Dash-One is going to top off the tanks; back ASAP.”
“Hurry.”
“You bet; hang in,” he radioed as he shoved the throttles forward.
A sudden sense of loneliness came over Amanda as she listened to the sound of the fighter jet vanishing in the southern skies.
Get away from the crash site and to high ground as fast as possible.
Moving swiftly but quietly, she removed her helmet, torso harness, G-suit, scarf, nutrition bars, and Nomex flight gloves, keeping just her water flask, her radio, and her sidearm, a standard-issue Sig Sauer P229. The 9 mm semiautomatic was holstered across the chest of her flight vest. Remembering her survival training, Amanda spent the next fifteen minutes laying a false trail away from the hill, dropping items at random for nearly a quarter mile. She then doubled back and headed up the shallow hill flanking the dirt road, breathing heavily and working the soreness out of her ankle as she crested it. She then hid behind a clump of boulders that provided her with a reasonable vantage point over the burning wreckage.
From here, she could also see the first signs of daylight in the east: just a faint band of lavender forming between the starry sky and a distant mountain range.
That’s not good.
Something else suddenly caught her attention: headlights, coming from the direction of the airport.
And that’s worse.
She spotted five sets following the winding road, kicking up a column of dust. As their high beams crisscrossed each other in the darkness, she was able to make out three large Soviet-style military trucks and two armored half-tracks.
Crap.
During her entire military career, Amanda had known there might come a time where she could face precisely what she now faced. She had also heard stories of the fate of captured soldiers and downed pilots in the hands of jihadists. It was the stuff of nightmares.
The thought of what the bastards inside those trucks could do to a female pilot who had just bombed the hell out of them sent a chill down her—
Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.