“Oh sweet fucking Jesus!”
Jake leveled the wings, trimmed carefully for a climb.
The plane began to roll right. The stick was sloppy. Jake used a touch of left rudder to bring it back.
Heading almost south. He jockeyed the rudder and stick, trying to swing the plane to a westerly heading. The plane threatened to fall off on the right wing.
It was all he could do to keep the wings level using the stick and rudder. Nose still a degree or so above the horizon, so they were still climbing, slowly, passing two-thousand feet, doing 350 knots.
“Get on the radio,” Jake told Flap. “Talk to Black Eagle. Those guys must be pirates.”
He retarded the throttles experimentally, instinctively wanting to get down to about 250 knots so the emergency hydraulic pump would not have to work so hard to move the control surfaces. He trimmed a little more nose up. The nose rose a tad. Good.
“Black Eagle, Black Eagle, this is War Ace, over.”
They were in real trouble. The emergency hydraulic pump was designed to allow just enough control to exit a combat situation, just enough to allow the crew to get to a safe place to eject.
“Black Eagle, this is War Ace Five Oh Eight with a red hot emergency, over.”
And the emergency pump was carrying the full load. All four of the hydraulic pressure indicator needles pointed at the floor of the airplane, indicating no pressure at all in any of their systems.
“Black Eagle, War Ace Five Oh Eight in the blind. We cannot hear your answers. We have been shot up by pirates on this SOS contact. May have to eject shortly. We are exiting the area to the south.”
Just fucking terrific! Shot down by a bunch of fucking pirates! On the high fucking seas in 1973! On a low, slow pass in an unarmed airplane. Of all the shitty luck!
“Squawk seventy-seven hundred,” Jake said.
Flap’s hand descended to the IFF box on the consol between them and turned the mode switch to emergency. Just to be sure he dialed 7700 into the windows. Mayday.
“There’s an island twenty miles ahead,” Flap said. “Go for it. We’ll jump there.”
The only problem was controlling the plane. It kept wanting to drop one wing or the other. Jake was using full rudder to keep it upright, first right, then left. The stick was almost useless.
He reached out and flipped the spin assist switch on. This would give him more rudder authority, if the loss of hydraulic pressure hadn’t already made that switch. It must have. The spin assist didn’t help.
When the left wing didn’t want to come back with full right rudder, he added power on the left engine. Shoved the power lever forward to the stop. That brought it back, but the roll continued to the right. Full left rudder, left engine back, right engine up…and catch it wings level…
“Seventeen miles.”
“We aren’t gonna make it.”
“Keep trying. I don’t want to swim.”
“Those fuckers!”
Three thousand feet now. Now if he could just maintain that altitude when the wings rolled…
They were covering about four and a half nautical miles per minute. How many minutes until they got there? The math was too much and he gave up. And he could see the island ahead. There it was, green and covered with foliage, right there in the middle of the windscreen.
“Fifteen miles.”
The roll was left. Full right rudder, left engine up. The roll stopped but the nose came down. Full back stick didn’t help. He ran the trim nose-up as he pulled the right engine to idle.
The nose was coming up. Yes, coming, so he started the trim nose-down. The wing was slowly rising, oh so slowly, rising…
They bottomed out at fifteen hundred but the plane began a very slow roll to the right, the nose still climbing.
He reversed the engines and rudder, played with the trim.
Slowly, agonizingly, the wings responded to the pilot’s inputs. Now the nose fell to the horizon and kept going down.
Full nose-up trim! He held the button and glanced at the trim indicator on the bottom of the stick. Still nose-down! Come on!
They bottomed out this time at one thousand feet and the entire cycle began again.
“We won’t make it the next time,” Jake told Flap.
“Let’s jump at the top, when the wings and nose are level.”
“You first and I’ll be right behind you.”
Nose coming down, right wing coming down, soaring up, up, to…to twenty-three hundred feet.
“Now,” Jake shouted.
An explosion and Flap was gone. Jake automatically centered the rudder as he pulled the alternate firing handle. Instantly a tremendous force hit him in the ass. The cockpit disappeared. The acceleration lasted for only an instant, then he began to fall.
20
The parachute opened with a shock. As Jake Grafton turned slowly in the shrouds the airplane caught his eye, diving toward the ocean like a wounded gull. The nose rose and it skimmed the sea, then began to climb. It soared skyward in a climbing turn, its right wing hanging low, then the wing fell and the nose went through and it dove straight into the sea. There was a large splash. When the spray cleared only a swirl of foam marked the spot.
The pirates! Where were they?
He got his oxygen mask off and tossed it away, then craned his head. He saw the other parachute, lower and intact with Flap swinging from it, but he couldn’t see the pirate ship or its victim.
Oh, what a fool he’d been. To fly right over a drifting ship with another craft tied to it — and to never once think about the possibility of pirates! These waters were infamous…and the possibility never even crossed his mind. Son of a bitch!
The sea coming toward him brought him back to the business at hand. There was enough of a swell that the height was easy to judge — and he didn’t have much time. He reached down and pulled the handle on the right side of his seat pan. It opened. The raft fell away and inflated when it reached the end of its lanyard. He felt around for the toggles to the CO2 cartridges that would inflate his life vest. He found them and pulled. The vest puffed up reassuringly.
Good! Now to ditch this chute when I hit the water.
Amazingly, the thoughts shot through his mind without conscious effort. This was the result of training. Every time the ship left port the squadron held a safety training day, and part of that exercise involved each flight crewman hanging from a harness in the ready room while wearing full flight gear. Blindfolded, each man had to touch and identify every piece of gear he wore, then run through the proper procedure for ejections over land and sea. Consequently Jake didn’t have to devote much thought to what he needed to do: the actions were almost automatic.
The wind seemed to be blowing from the west. He was unsure of directions. The way he wanted to go was toward that island — yes, that was south — and the wind was drifting him east. Somehow he also knew this without having to puzzle it out.
The raft touched the water. He felt for the Koch fittings near his collar bones that attached his parachute harness to the shroud lines and waited. Ready, here it comes, and…He went under. Closing his mouth and eyes automatically as the surge of cold seawater engulfed him, he toggled the fittings as he bobbed toward the surface. He broke water gasping for air.
The parachute was drifting away downwind. Now, where was that line attached to the raft?
He fumbled for it and finally realized it was wrapped around his legs or something. He began pulling toward the raft with his arms and finally grabbed the line. In seconds he had the raft in front of him.
All he had to do was get in.