Packs of sailing clothing and supplies were waiting onboard the bird. They lifted up over Fort Meade, air space reserved for very few. It was all clear for the two of them and their young pilot.
Don looked green. Only then did Lana remember his uneasiness in the air.
“You going to lose it?” He had on American Airlines on their honeymoon flight to Saint Martin. Repeatedly. Ah, romance.
He shook his head. “I’m okay.”
She handed him an airsickness bag — just in case.
He buried his head in it — then most of his stomach — seconds later.
Lana turned from the revolting display, remembering — with a wrenching roll of her own stomach — how contagious regurgitation could get.
The flight to Andrews at dusk took them over the flooding Potomac. Water had reached the National Mall, and the reflecting pool at the Washington Memorial had disappeared into the larger vat of the rising ocean. Anacostia looked particularly hard-hit. She was glad Tanesa’s family had found refuge with them — for so many reasons.
Andrews, thankfully, was dry. They boarded the Gulfstream, an especially swift jet that should deliver them to their destination in less than eight hours. The pilot and his second would not tell them where they were going, though.
“More ‘know as you go’?” she asked the woman.
A quick nod and the pair disappeared into the cockpit.
Two hours later, unable to sleep, Lana peered into the darkest night knowing the sea was shifting radically thousands of feet below. In the complete blackness that now enveloped them, the watery world could have been reaching to swallow them and the stars.
They landed at a remote airstrip, but not in Abkhazia, or anywhere near Pitsunda. In Turkey, the pilot informed them, saying no more.
She and Don were taken to a hangar where a pair of F-15 fighter jets were waiting: his and hers, as it turned out.
“Why?” Don asked uneasily.
“We’re taking you to the U.S.S. William Jefferson Clinton.”
“An aircraft carrier? We’re landing on an aircraft carrier at night in rising seas?”
“That about nails it,” the new flight commander said.
Don hurled again, sans sickness bag. But at least he wasn’t in the fighter jet… yet.
Now he was. Lana waved good-bye. He was off. She was belted in by experienced hands.
At least Emma won’t be orphaned on this leg of the journey, she thought, because what were the odds of both pilots missing the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier and crashing?
Actually, higher than she realized, given the wildly unsettled sea.
The lights on the carrier appeared in the distance as a pinprick on a vast black screen.
That’s it? Lana thought. That’s all?
As they raced nearer, she saw raging whitecaps smashing into the side of the Clinton, sending spray across the deck, storm conditions that had to be on the very margin of safety. Or death, she thought at once.
She squeezed her hands into fists, sweating heavily.
Lana wondered if Don had made it safely aboard. Right then she saw his fighter jet approaching the carrier for a landing.
The wings of the F-15 tilted back and forth, as though the pilot were trying to mirror the wobble of the landing platform itself. Then, at the last moment, the jet’s engines flared brightly and the F-15 aborted the landing, blasting back up to the black sky, presumably for a second chance.
Her pilot said nothing. She imagined his eyes glued to the deck. She squeezed hers shut. The seconds hung with the weight of eternity.
Think about them, she told herself sternly: Galina and Alexandra Bortnik. They’re the ones in real danger.
But she had a hard time believing that because when she peeked out of the cockpit, all she saw was the carrier rolling like a barroom brawler on the waves below.
CHAPTER 22
Lana knew very little about landing an F-15 on an aircraft carrier, but she was certain each fighter jet had a hook on its tail that needed to catch on a steel wire stretched across the deck. More than one wire, if she recalled correctly.
She had no time left to worry: the F-15 hit the heaving platform, nose slightly elevated—That’s good, right? So it can catch? — and raced like a dragster down the tilting surface.
Catch, damn it.
The pilot gave his engines full throttle.
She swore, thinking they’d also missed the wires and needed to blast off to avoid ending up in the sea.
But no: turned out it was standard operating procedure in case the pilot missed one of the steel wires. He caught the hook and they came to a stop — incredibly — in less than two seconds.
If Don doesn’t lose the rest of his lunch, I’ll be amazed.
In what seemed like a blink, she was helped out of the cockpit and rushed off the deck.
She heard the jet with Don approaching, and realized how terribly torn she was between watching his landing and contacting Galina ASAP.
Then she saw seamen unfurling a huge net barricade across the deck.
“What’s that for?” she asked the taciturn pilot who had flown her to the carrier, which was pitching noticeably beneath her feet.
“He lost the nose wheel on his first attempt so he’s got to crash-land it.”
Crash-land it? With Don?
She swore again, but softly this time. Not enough, however, to escape the captain’s attention: “You can say that again,” he muttered.
Lana looked at the netting. She looked at the jets parked, wings up, along the side of the carrier. Tough to imagine the netting stopping a sailboat, much less a fighter jet traveling in excess of two hundred miles per hour.
Before she realized it, she was whisked off the deck to an observation window safely removed from the looming accident, because any way she looked at it, an accident was about to take place.
When Don’s jet hit the deck seconds later, the nose cone scraped across the surface, as if to plow it up. Then it hit the net and stopped almost as quickly as hers had.
A team of sailors carrying ladders and fire-suppression gear descended on the F-15, pulling Don and the pilot out of the cockpit.
“Always a chance of a fuel fire or explosion,” an officer who had just appeared by her side explained nonchalantly.
Don was stumbling, helped by two sailors, one on each arm.
He made it. We’re okay.
“I need the communications room,” she said to the officer.
“We can give you that for ten minutes,” he said, leading her through a doorway to a room filled with communication cubicles. She realized at once that it was no accident that he was standing next to her. “But you’ll be getting onto a boat a lot smaller and faster to get you to your destination.”
“In these seas?” she asked. He nodded. “How far?”
“A little more than fifty nautical miles.”
Nautical miles? It took her a second to remember that they were almost a thousand feet longer than a regular mile. And they had “a little more than fifty” of them to cross? In these seas? she repeated to herself.
“You’ve got to go under the radar,” the officer went on. “There’s no guarantee that will happen, but there’s less of a chance you’ll be noticed in a much smaller boat, especially with all the traffic on coastal waters these days.”
“What about this thing?” She looked about the Clinton.
“We’re in a narrow sliver of international waters to get you this close. Plus, the Abkhazians don’t exactly have much of a navy.”