“Oh yeah, we copy,” Zukowski said as he and his wingman mentally prepared to eject from their Hornets.
Scott was approaching the pilothouse when—buuuurrrrrpp—the bow of the yacht exploded in a hail of twenty-millimeter Vulcan cannon fire. Able to fire 6,000 rounds per minute, the Hornet’s six-barreled rotary cannon literally sawed off four feet of the bow. With the front of the yacht open to the sea and the powerful diesel engines churning at full throttle, Sweet Life was rapidly filling with water.
Time to punch out. Cringing from pain, Scott limped out to the edge of the sundeck and dove over the side. He quickly surfaced and frantically swam away from the thrashing screws.
Jackie saw Scott surface and immediately began slowing and descending toward him. “He’s jumped overboard — he’s safe!” she radioed. “The agent is clear of the yacht!”
“He’s off the boat and well clear,” Zukowski reported to Jax approach, then added, “the helo is closing on him.”
“Great,” the deep-voiced controller said with obvious relief. “The word is sink the ship — ASAP.”
“We’re workin’ on it,” Zukowski radioed, then talked to Swindell. “Alan, I’m going to work on the bow. You take the stern.”
“You got it, boss.”
Maneuvering the helicopter closer to Scott, Jackie skillfully brought the LongRanger to a hover near him. She would have to be extremely careful about lifting Scott out of the water.
The powerful rotor-blade downwash whipped the surface of the water into a frothy gale, sending sheets of spray in every direction as she moved closer to Scott. With absolute concentration, she lowered the landing skids into the water, then gasped.
Two large sharks were approaching Scott from his right side. Unable to remove her hands from the controls to point at the danger, she pulled up a couple of feet and hovered toward the sharks. Once she was in position, Jackie eased the LongRanger down until the belly was almost in the water.
Treading water and turning to keep Jackie in sight, Scott was stunned when he saw the dorsal fins. He faced the sharks and saw the fins disappear. I’m bleeding like a butchered hog.
Quelling his rising panic, he pulled his knees up to his chest and waited for Jackie to move toward him. With surprising power, something slammed into Scott’s lower back, then veered away. Oh, shit — this isn’t good.
Reaching for the landing skid, he saw a shark coming straight at him. Using both legs, Scott viciously kicked the predator in the snout, then threw his good leg over the skid and grabbed the brace aft of the pilot’s door. He pulled himself up and straddled the skid.
As Jackie was lifting the helo out of the water, Scott saw the two Hornets pulverize the yacht with deadly streams of cannon fire. When the pilots pulled up from their firing run, the 126-foot Broward was twelve feet shorter and rapidly turning into a submarine.
While Jackie flew toward Atlantic Beach at low altitude, Scott maintained a death grip on the brace protruding from the fuselage. He watched the yacht as it neared the slight dogleg channel leading to Mayport Basin and the Kennedy. One of the yacht’s engines was still thrashing the water into foam, but only the sundeck and the bridge were visible.
The Hornets came in for a third pass, then split when Alan Swindell’s F/A-18 flamed out. While the flight leader headed straight for Runway 31 at Jacksonville International, his wingman pointed his lifeless Hornet out to sea and waited until the last second to eject.
Sweet Life slowly came to rest at the entrance to the basin and sank in approximately forty feet of water.
Waiting until the helo slowed to a hover over a crowded stretch of beach, Scott dropped five feet to the sand. Jackie moved off to the side and gently lowered the landing skids onto the beach, then motioned Scott to get in. He hobbled around the front of the LongRanger and climbed into the left seat.
Scott’s eyes reflected his pain and fatigue. “Take off and fly straight south as fast as you can,” he gasped as he buckled his straps.
She gave him a quizzical look. “What’s wrong?”
“Go! The bomb is on the yacht, and I think it’s set to go off at any moment. Let’s get outta here!”
For a shocked instant Jackie stared toward the naval station, then applied power to lift off. At the same moment they saw a huge geyser of water shoot hundreds of feet into the air above the entrance to the naval basin. A visible shock wave preceded a blossoming mushroom cloud as the helicopter lifted off the beach.
With the LongRanger barely four feet in the air, the passage of the shock wave slammed the helicopter into the sand with such force that it ripped one of the main rotor blades off and collapsed the slender boom leading to the tail-rotor pylon. The remaining rotor blade thrashed the beach, flipping the battered helo onto its side and sending the crowd running for cover.
When they crawled from the wreckage, Scott and Jackie sat up and stared in disbelief. A low, rolling cloud of debris obscured everything in the direction of the naval base except for one thing; the mast of the carrier Kennedy. The nuclear explosion, for the most part, had been diminished by the depth of the water in the channel. The sinking of the yacht had saved thousands of lives.
“Are you okay?” Scott asked as he spit sand and blood out of his mouth.
“I think so,” she replied, dazed by the crash. She glanced at a handful of shocked beachgoers running toward them. Actually, the people were running at an odd angle, staring at the mushroom cloud with wide-open eyes.
“Well,” Scott began sadly, his spirits nearly flattened, “I sure as hell mucked that up.”
“The end result is what counts,” Jackie insisted, then looked at his bleeding leg. “I need to get you to a hospital.”
“What we need,” Scott suggested with a rueful grin, “is a nice, quiet vacation in St. Thomas.”
Jackie looked sideways at him and nodded. “As a matter of fact, you do owe me a ride on a sailboat.”
Maritza Gunzelman and Greg O’Donnell were visiting in his room when the familiar bright red logo appeared on the television. They fell silent when the surprised anchorwoman turned to the camera.
“This just in to CNN,” she said briskly. “We are receiving initial reports that Air Force One has crashed. Again, our sources are reporting that Air Force One has crashed north of Springfield, Illinois.”
She paused a long moment and looked away, then turned back to the camera. “It is believed — we’re getting unconfirmed reports — that President Macklin was onboard at the time the plane went down. These are unconfirmed reports. It is not known what caused the crash… wait, I’m getting an update.”
A stunned look crossed her face. “We have another breaking story just into our newsroom — this from the Associated Press. A nuclear explosion has taken place at the Mayport Naval Station near Jacksonville, Florida. Initial reports indicate that a nuclear bomb may have exploded aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. We are receiving conflicting reports about the accident. Our sources are saying that casualties may be very high.”
Greg lowered the volume on the television and turned to Maritza. Both were shocked and horrified.
“I hope Jackie and Scott aren’t involved in any of this,” Maritza said with a distant look in her eyes.
“So do I,” Greg replied in a tight voice. “The sponsors of terrorism have grossly miscalculated this time.”
“God, if the president is dead…” Maritza trailed off and closed her eyes. “It’s time to destroy the cowards, eradicate them like a swarm of locusts.”