His regulator was still leaking as he neared the bottom. Without a depth gauge Davis couldn’t be exact, but he reckoned that his earlier estimate of fifty feet was accurate. He stopped at the tail section for a closer look. There was no obvious damage to the elevator or rudder surfaces, no popped rivets or warping that would indicate stress failure due to an aerodynamic overload. Davis saw a sizable dent on the starboard leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer, but this was most likely impact damage. When an aircraft hit the ocean at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, things got bent. He glided forward along the hull of the airplane, and detoured to the port side to inspect the engine. The propeller tips were uniformly bent back, which meant the engine was likely running on impact. There was no damage to the exhaust manifold to indicate an infrared missile strike. No apparent fire damage. The flight controls on the trailing edge of the wing — the subject of the bogus logbook write-up — showed no overt evidence of failure. Davis floated over the spine of the airplane to the starboard side, and looked it over with equal diligence, found all the same things. No smoking gun.
He moved forward toward the cockpit, gliding above what looked like a perfectly good airplane that had just flown into the sea. It did happen. Pilots could get disoriented by visual illusions. They could get distracted. Davis had once studied a case in which a perfectly airworthy wide-body airliner had flown into a swamp because the crew had gotten preoccupied by a failed twenty-cent lightbulb. Unfortunately, things like that were difficult to prove without flight data and voice recorders. Even then there was no guarantee. If Davis was going to find the cause of this crash with one brief inspection, it would have to be a slam dunk, something that stuck out like a full moon in a night sky.
Ten feet ahead of the wing joint, the airplane’s fuselage had buckled, another probable result of impact forces. At the top of the spine he saw a failure in the skin, a meter-long tear that allowed a clear look into the cargo bay. The light was sufficient to confirm that there had been no cargo, but Davis did notice a rack of electronic gear that was unlike anything he’d seen on the other FBN airplanes. He figured it might have to do with this particular airplane’s past life as an avionics testbed. But even that didn’t make complete sense. Normally any deadweight was stripped from airplanes, and old, unused avionics would certainly fall into that category.
A large moray eel had taken up residence in a crevice where an antenna had been ripped out, and Davis gave the creature a wide berth as he moved forward. A look at the cockpit was his best chance to nail down a cause, so the investigator in him was eager to keep moving. The human in him, however, wasn’t in such a hurry. In a crash like this, relatively gentle and intact, he might well find two pilots still strapped into their seats. The sea is never kind to flesh, human or otherwise. Over the last weeks, bacteria and scavengers had likely made substantial headway, so whatever he was about to see would be gruesome.
Then, five feet from the cockpit, he heard it.
Clang, clang, clang.
The signal from the boat. Davis had arranged it with the old man as a precaution, not imagining what it could really be used for. He looked fifty feet over his head and saw the bottom side of the old wooden boat. It wasn’t capsized or sinking or listing on a tsunami. Davis listened closely, but didn’t hear an approaching engine from a Sudanese naval patrol boat. If there even was a Sudanese navy.
Clang, clang, clang.
Davis took a deep breath, and that highlighted his second problem. His lungs had been working harder in the last few minutes, and he realized he was pulling air from the tank, sucking in the last hundred pounds of pressure. His air supply was down to a matter of minutes — three, maybe five. He would be heading up to the boat very soon, but Davis had to get one look at the flight deck before he surfaced.
Clang, clang, clang. Quicker and more insistent. Not good. The old man wasn’t the excitable type.
Davis approached the starboard side of the cockpit, which had taken the brunt of the impact. The copilot’s window was ripped away, leaving a hole large enough to swim through. But he didn’t have to swim through. The scene inside couldn’t have been more clear. Davis stopped breathing as he tried to comprehend what he was looking at. When he finally inhaled, the old regulator stole his breath in a decidedly more literal fashion.
In one gulp, his flow of air stopped, and the Red Sea came flooding into Davis’ lungs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
He was flying an F-16 at 31,000 feet, an easy cross-country leg dodging cotton ball clouds and sightseeing. It was the annual deployment to an excercise called Red Flag, at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, and Davis was enjoying the day at five hundred knots. Fat, dumb, and happy.
He was the number four airplane in a flight of four, bringing up the rear as tail-end Charlie. That being the case, nobody was watching him very closely. Not that they would have noticed anything had they been looking. The malfunction in his oxygen diluter had likely been there a long time, a tiny valve that had failed and wasn’t metering enough pure aviator-grade oxygen to the pilot’s mask. On your typical day, on a typical mission, not a big deal. Unnoticeable, really. But the second malfunction was another story, a fatal catalyst for the first. That was how most aircraft accidents happened. Not a single catastrophe, but a chain of small misfortunes that turn into something bigger. The pressurization leak in Davis’ cockpit that day was slow and insidious. If he had looked at the cabin pressure gauge at just the right time, he’d have seen it clear as day. But nobody looks at a cabin pressure gauge. Not without a reason. So, on that day so many years ago, Jammer Davis had become hypoxic.
For a victim, hypoxia is a hard thing to recognize because your brain gets fuzzy. You might notice tingling in your fingers, or get light-headed. But more often than not, you just fall asleep. In a single-seat fighter, five miles in the air, you snooze like a baby for the last two minutes of your life while your jet dives to the hard desert floor below. Your last landing, and not your best.
On that day so many years ago, it had all happened before anybody even knew there was a problem. Least of all Jammer Davis. But he hadn’t ended up as a hole in the caliche, hadn’t ended up as a statistic, because just as he was fading, just as his brain was shutting down, he’d heard a faint voice. It wasn’t the volume that had gotten his attention, or even the familiarity of Larry Green’s tone. What registered was the urgency.
“Jammer, go emergency oxygen! Emergency now, Corvet 4! Jammer, oxygen! Do it now, God dammit!”
A four-alarm bell in his brain.
On that beautiful summer day, a long time ago, Jammer Davis had learned about the deprivation of oxygen. He had snapped out of the deadly haze just long enough to slap the three levers on his oxygen controller to the emergency position: 100 percent O2 under positive pressure. When he did that, the world came back. But in the next seconds there was a moment he would never forget, a brief interlude of fear, of helplessness. He was hanging in limbo, coherent enough to know he was on the edge of death, yet knowing he might not be able to do anything about it.