“Aye, aye, sir, sounds good to me,” Hawke said, grinning from ear to ear. Single seat. Single engine. Supersonic.
Nowhere to go but up.
But there was a problem with the aircraft in front of him. Hawke forced himself to sit tight in his cockpit and wait for the tugs to pull the disabled fighter off the cat and put him in its place. The process seemed to take from here to eternity.
“Hawkeye, you are number one to go,” the Iron Duke said after a few long minutes.
“Roger. Number one to go. Onward and upward, sir.”
The jet blast deflector rose up from the deck behind him.
His hand went to the throttles. Oil pressure and hydraulics okay. He waggled the stick and checked the movement of the horizontal stabilizers. He could see the “shooter,” the catapult officer down in the little domed control pod that protruded just above the deck. He was getting the cat ready. Clouds of white steam were rising from the slot beneath Hawke’s airplane.
The shooter was monitoring the pressure building up in the cat cylinders. The combined pent-up force of the steam behind the catapult shuttle and the enormous thrust of his Rolls-Royce–built engine was about to hurl him into the sky. It was definitely time to fly.
Hawke wound it up, gave the salute, and waited for the launch.
One heartbeat, two heartbeats later, he felt the thunk as the shooter eased the shuttle into position with the hydraulic piston. He shoved the throttle forward and the big engine came up nicely: rpm, exhaust gas temp, fuel flow. Looks good. The cat fired. The big plane shuddered like some living thing and started to go.
Then…nothing.
He was moving down the deck all right, but there was no acceleration. Christ! He pulled the power and stood on the brakes. Somehow, he had to shut it down. Where the hell was that bloody computer when he really needed it? It was supposed to anticipate his every need. Surely it must have seen this nightmare coming!
Two seconds later, his heart pounding, he found himself teetering over the leading edge of the flight deck. The air boss was saying something very calm and soothing in his earphones but the big fighter was rocking right on the edge with every deep rolling wave, every sickening movement of the ship. He reached over to blow the canopy. He had to get the hell out, now, while he was still alive. Too late to eject? Maybe not, if—
“Stay in the cockpit, Hawkeye,” the air boss said, as if reading his thoughts. “We are going to hitch you to a tug—we, uh—”
“Uh, roger. She’s rocking and rolling pretty badly out here. You might want to…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know…shit…I’ve got several crew trying to hold your tail down now, sir. We need to, uh, need to change your aircraft’s center of gravity until we’ve got you safely hooked up to the tug.”
“Well, that’s a real good idea but—”
“Goddamnit! Stay in the cockpit!”
“Roger. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Almost got you hooked up, Hawkeye. Holy shit. Gimme a second here and—”
“Hey—bad—watch out for—”
A huge swell rocked the ship.
Over he went, the aircraft falling toward the water below.
As it fell, the F-35 rolled sideways. Hawke could now see the ship’s massive bow plowing through the water. He didn’t know which was worse…seeing the water coming up at him…or seeing the knife-edge of the carrier bow slicing through the water toward him.
Bloody hell. He should have ejected. Now he’d be strapped in and run over by the bloody ship. He felt the gorge rise in his throat. He hit the water. Hard. And saw the terrifying sight of the towering bow slicing toward his tiny aircraft. He was directly in its path.
He didn’t even have time to close his eyes.
He knew he was dead as soon as he heard the terrible sound, an awful snap. The ship’s bow severed his airplane, broke it in two. Only he wasn’t dead. He was tumbling end over end, slamming into something just above him. The bottom of the carrier. He felt like he was in a jeep going a hundred miles an hour on a washboard road.
But he was still alive. He remained sealed inside his cockpit module. It seemed intact. The bow must have hit the plane just aft of him, just forward of his wings. The water was so clear! He could see all of the carrier’s bottom as he was bounced and bobbed along. He could see and feel every bob and hit every time he slammed up against the ship’s massive bottom. Every time he hit, big chunks of his cockpit’s Plexiglas canopy were gouged out by the barnacles on the carrier’s hull.
But still it held.
Then his world flipped violently upside-down and his seat rocketed forward. He was slammed into the Plexiglas and he was sure he was going right through the canopy, going to shoot right out of the jet. Somehow, his oxygen mask got shoved aside. Shards from something cut his face, sheeting it in blood. His vision blurred. But miraculously the canopy held. His mind raced, clawing at survival. Training and temperament shifted his mind into disaster reflex, his brain trying to figure out what was happening and what to do about it. Total time compression. What seemed like a minute was a second.
The bolt that held his ejection seat to the floor had failed. That was it. That’s why, when his nose went down, his seat shot along the railing and his helmet and seatback had almost broken through the canopy. At that moment, the nose was jerked upward by unseen forces and the seat slid back down the railing to the floor. Good. Much better. He could swivel his head now. And his neck wasn’t broken.
He was thinking then that he might just make it out of this bitched-up mess alive. That feeling was short-lived. Terror struck him again when a truly horrifying sound filled his world.
The screws.
A loud, deep-pitched whine, rapidly growing closer. The sound was deafening. Overpowering.
Oh, shit.
He could see them vaguely now, hanging down below the hull, way back at the stern. There were four of them and they were coming up fast, the cruel blades all but invisible inside whirling clouds, a maelstrom of white water.
He was aware of fear then. The real thing. It was a fear that he had never even guessed at. He supposed it was just that bloody high-pitched noise triggering all those mental pictures of a particularly bad way to go. Whatever it was, it was working. Inside the hurtling cockpit, Alex Hawke was well and truly afraid.
There were four massive bronze propellers, each of them over twenty feet across and weighing thirty tons. Four whirling, knifeedged blades, biting and slicing the water. Each screw was mounted to a long shaft, which was connected to a steam turbine powered by one of two nuclear reactors. The ship’s propulsion system generated a half-million horsepower. Each screw was now turning at over two thousand rpm.
Surging toward those four meat-grinders, Hawke had at last discovered the true meaning of fear. It didn’t creep up and touch your neck with icy fingers. It exploded inside your brain. And made everything numb. He was shivering violently. He clenched his jaw shut to stop his teeth from chattering.
Alex Hawke’s battered capsule was bouncing along, slicing off spiky chunks of barnacle, heading straight toward them. He could see more clearly how he was going to die now. He visualized being chewed up and spat out in countless pieces even now as he felt a sudden surge of speed bringing him closer and closer to the churning propellers.
If the noise was intolerable, the view was terrifying. The water amidships was still amazingly clear and as he got closer to the stern he could see the huge billowing clouds of minuscule bubbles, could see the four vortexes the giant screws created, four huge vacuums sucking him aft at a tremendous rate of speed.