The note of cold glee in his voice surprised even him.
Five thousand feetfour thousand feetSkeeter asked the XO to sing out the altitudes as the Falcon gained on them. Skeeter eased slowly back on the throttle, decreasing his speed of ascent while avoiding even the edge of the stall envelope. It was a tightrope calculation, walking the thin line between appearing to maintain a continual ascent and stalling.
“Five hundred feetSkeeter, let’s-“
Skeeter pulled hard toward the Falcon and yanked the throttle back to idle. At the same time, he disengaged the automatic control that configured the Tomcat’s wings for the most efficient airspeed, driving the wings forward into their low-speed configuration. As he felt the aircraft start to turn, he kicked in the afterburners to avoid stalling.
Like a gray streak, the Falcon shot by him. Skeeter thought he saw the pilot’s face, hoped there was as much fear and confusion in it as Skeeter had experienced on La Salle.
“Take that, you bastard,” the pilot muttered. No, it wasn’t a kill, but if he had been free to shoot it would have been. He held position on the Falcon, in perfect guns position. If he hadn’t been so close, a Sidewinder up the tailpipe would also have been an ideal shot.
“Skeeterhe’s turning out of it.”
The lighter, more maneuverable aircraft turned sharply to the right, intentionally stalling as the pilot repeated Skeeter’s maneuver. It swung over to point down at him, nose first.
“Lockup,” the XO screamed. “There’s no time for-“
Skeeter was just closing his thumb over the weapons-selector switch to select guns when his world exploded.
He woke up when he tried to breathe. The metallic tang of salt water filled his mouth, his nose, and jolted his survival instincts into action.
Skeeter coughed violently, spewing out seawater before his eyes were even open. He flailed his arms, the motion driving him the last few feet up to the surface.
The paroxysm of coughing occupied his entire world for a few seconds.
His eyes were open, but they were misted with tears and stinging from water. He choked, coughing up a last cup of water, then finally drawing a deep, shaky breath.
His eyes focused. Water, waveshe looked up into the blue sky. For another few minutes, his mind refused to focus, simply satisfied with the fact that he was alive.
It came back to him slowly, in bits and pieces. An explosionthe canopy bolts firing, he realized. The Falconit had been inbound. The rest of the encounter flooded his mind.
The XO must have gotten them out. Suddenly, he was frantic. He scanned the ocean around him, praying for a glimpse of a flotation device or a rubber raft. He started screaming, his voice raw and hoarse from the water. He tried to propel himself higher up on the waves by flailing his arms, and found new sources of pain. His groinanother throb awoke to join the growing chorus.
Finally, his training kicked in. He fumbled open the flotation device pocket, extracted the dye marker, and broke it open. A sickly yellow stain flooded the water around him, gradually spreading out. He then took out the shark repellent packet, prayed that all the studies he’d heard on its effectiveness were true, and broke it open.
The pain in his face was now a throbbing, insistent beat. He let his flotation device buoy him for a moment, leaned back in the water, and started running his hands over his body. Wetnesshe held his hand out in front of him. Not just water. Blood. Evidently shards of the canopy or the sheer force of the ejection had cut his face. He looked again at the growing yellow stain and prayed that the shark repellent was just as effective.
One by one, he ran his hands over his arms, his torso, then finally his legs. Everything seemed to work, although movement was accompanied by a dull ache that promised to blossom into something fiercer later on.
So where was SAR?
Dammit, the helo guysjust then the distinctive whop-whop of an SH-60 reached his ears.
Minutes later, a rescue diver plunged into the water a few feet away.
He swam over to Skeeter, quickly ascertained that he was conscious and not seriously injured, and helped the pilot struggle into the horse collar.
Satisfied finally, the diver lifted his hand in a thumbs-up to the crewman leaning out the open hatch of the helicopter. The downdraft from the SH-60 was explosive, generating wind speeds of up to sixty knots directly down on the water. It spread waves out in odd, flat ripples that beat a counterpart to the normal progression of waves. Skeeter fixed on that, staring at the concentric disturbances that looked like water washing out from a stone thrown in a pond, the diver situated in the middle.
Except this wasn’t a pond. It was the Mediterranean, and as soon as he was hauled aboard, he asked, “Did you find my backseater?”
One look at the aircrew’s faces gave him the answer. Skeeter exploded. “Dammit, he’s out here somewhere. We’ve got to find him. We have to-“
“Just take it easy, sir,” the corpsman said, gently trying to muscle him to the aft part of the helicopter. “We’ve done this beforejust let us do our job for now. We’ll find him.”
“He was there,” Skeeter said mindlessly. “In the backseathe must have punched us out.”
He shot the corpsman an anguished look. “Just before the Falcon got ushe punched us out. How could he-?”
“Just lean back, Lieutenant.” The corpsman’s voice was gentle but insistent. “Need to take a look at you, sir. Your backseater’s gonna be just fine.”
“Where is he?”
Skeeter struggled to his feet and tried to walk toward the open hatch. The rescue swimmer was just being hauled aboard. “I have to-“
A sharp prick in the left arm. Skeeter spun around, unsteady on his bruised and battered legs. “What did you…”
The rest of the sentence faded away as a cool fog settled over his mind.
6
“How is he?” Batman asked the doctor, his voice pitched low to avoid disturbing the unconscious pilot. “The facejust normal ejection injuries, right?”
The doctor nodded. “Some bruises, a couple of lacerations. None of them even required stitches. The only reason he’s still here instead of in his own rack was that he got a bit agitated with the helo crew when they pulled him out of the water. The corpsman had to jam him with some morphine to get him to calm down.”
Batman let out a long, troubled sigh. “His backseater.”
It wasn’t a question, more a statement of fact. It was the first thing you worried about, the last thing you thought of as you departed controlled flight on the rocket-powered ejection seat and headed for the deck. Your backseater, the other part of your team, who helped keep you both alive.
“Have they found him yet?” the doctor asked.
Batman shook his head. “No one saw his chute. The more time passes, the more difficult it will be to find him.”
The doctor nodded, understanding the unspoken implication. No chute, no sighting, and no emergency beacon from either the sea or the portable radio each aviator carried. It didn’t look good.
“Butthere’s always a chance.”
Batman straightened, then looked back at the pilot sprawled out on the bed. “How long before he’s conscious?”
“That’s just normal sleep,” the doctor answered. “The morphine’s worn off. If you need to talk to him, you can wake him up.”
“I guess I should let him sleep,” Batman fretted. “But I need to know what actually happened up there. We’ve got the radar picture, the cat-and-mouse game they were playing up there. What I don’t have is a firsthand report, what the pilot on scene did and saw and thought.”