Tombstone folded his wife’s small hand between his. “If it would get me out from behind a desk, I’d go to Antarctica.”
Lobo awoke with a sense of terrible pressure in her lungs, and darkness burning in her eyes. Immediately she knew where she was, and why, and she struggled not to panic. Instead she kicked steadily, patiently holding her breath.
She burst through the surface of the sea and coughed up seawater for so long she thought she would turn inside out.
The sea was smooth and warm. This was not the Aleutians. She was not going to be picked up and gang raped here. Not with her own people ruling the air, and SAR already on the way.
Don’t even think about what happened in the Aleutians. One thing at a time. She checked to see that her saltwater-activated beacon was flashing. Yes. Presumably the radio beacon was, too.
She looked around for her RIO, or for his chute. Far to the east she saw a fiercely flashing strobe, the wrong color, though — but beneath it was the darting beam of a searchlight. A helo! Perhaps SAR had already found Handyman and was even now plucking him from the water.
Between her and the helo moved a surprising number of lights, cruising slowly. Boats. Of course — she’d seen them from the air. All kinds of boats; trawlers, pleasure craft, junks. Should she signal one of them? Or just wait?
At that moment, not fifty yards away and very low to the water, a bright strobe appeared. Her heart leaped with joy. Handyman! He must have been turned away from her until now. She tried to call his name, but her throat was caked with salt, and all she could do was croak. She paddled toward him instead, moving clumsily through the piss-warm water. Tears flowed down her cheeks. His strobe swayed back and forth, vanished, then reappeared. Handyman must be swimming, too.
Then she saw his helmet, his splayed arms. She thrashed closer, reached out and grabbed his harness. “Handyman!” she rasped. “Handy, are you — ”
His head rolled back, eyes open, staring over her shoulder. Blood stained his lips. Yet his body moved with jerking, trembling vitality in her grasp. A seizure? He —
With a violent shudder, he pulled away from her hands and sank a couple of feet beneath the surface. Rose again, eyes still wide open.
That was when Lobo realized the water beneath him was full of sharks.
She had no way of knowing how much time passed before she realized she was screaming, thrashing, doing all the things you weren’t supposed to do around sharks. Handyman was twenty yards away now, still marked by his strobe as it swayed and dipped. Lobo made herself stop kicking, stop slapping the water, and grab for her shark repellent instead. She popped it into the water and stared at the sky. Where was that SAR helo? Where was —
She heard the soft throb of a diesel engine, smelled its fumes. Spinning in the water, she saw the black bulk of a boat creeping toward her. Then a fierce spotlight beam struck her in the face.
“Help!” she croaked, squinting, waving her arms. Would a spotlight attract sharks? Were sharks moving in on her at this very moment? “Help! Please, hurry!”
The tone of the engine rose a third, and beneath it she heard the hiss of a curling bow wave. She raised a hand to block the glare of the spotlight. Now, as the boat came closer, she could read the printing on its bow:
COASTAL DEFENSE FORCE HONG KONG.
Jefferson at night was a chaotic Christmas tree of lights suspended in darkness. But right now Hot Rock was interested in only two clusters of lights. The first was the meatball, the stack of big, colored lenses that indicated when he was deviating from his preferred glide path to the deck. The second was the strip of lamps that descended vertically over the stern. The so-called “landing area line-up lights” provided an essential third dimension of visibility at night; before they had been created, aviators coming in for night traps faced the appalling illusion that the landing deck was not coming closer, but rising straight up, like an elevator. The results had frequently been fatal.
As Hot Rock came in on final, he listened to the murmured comments of the Landing Signals Officer, or LSO, standing on his platform adjacent to the meatball and coaching the Tomcat’s approach. Listened, but didn’t really pay attention. He knew his approach was perfect; he could feel it.
The ass end of the carrier slipped under his wing, and he brought the Tomcat down decisively, simultaneously shoving the throttles to full military power in case of a bolter, but knowing it was pointless. He’d snagged the three-wire; he always snagged the three-wire. How many perfect traps in a row was that for him? If the navy had an Olympics for aviators, this would be his gold-medal event.
“Nice trap, slick,” his RIO said as the Tomcat jolted to a halt and Hot Rock killed the engines. “Especially since we came back with such a heavy load under the wing.”
“Bird Dog, what’s your situation?” the air boss said over the radio. Hot Rock had just landed. Bird Dog was still limping toward the carrier.
“Good to go,” Bird Dog said. “Get me a green deck and I’ll get onboard.”
“I understand you’ve lost some control function,” the air boss said in a careful voice.
“Just enough to take me out of the dogfight,” Bird Dog snarled. “Not enough to keep me from putting this bird on the carrier.”
“Commander, don’t make me order you to eject.” Now the air boss sounded almost kind, although there was steel behind the tone. He was in absolute control of everything that happened on the flight deck, and responsible for it all as well. “I can’t let you jeopardize this boat just to keep from dumping that Tomcat in the drink. Is that understood?”
Bird Dog forced his voice to stay calm. “Listen, my RIO is unconscious. I don’t know… she might be hit, might have a broken neck… I don’t know. I can’t fire her out of this bird, not if I’ve got a chance of landing on the carrier. Which I do. So with your permission I’m coming in.”
There was a long pause. Ahead and to his left, Jefferson was a glowing blur in the darkness. Amazing how huge a carrier seemed when you were on it… and how tiny it looked from here.
“Roger that,” the air boss said. “Green deck. Tell me what you need.”
Bird Dog let out a breath. “You might have Jeff brought a few degrees to port. That’s the only way my Tomcat wants to turn, so I’d feel better having a little push on that side.”
“You got it. Stay in the stack until I let you know it’s time.”
Bird Dog clicked his mike twice, then concentrated on keeping the Tomcat wings-level as he flew in the marshall stack. In a way, the difficulty of handling his crippled bird, the effort required to keep it airborne at all — never mind trying to land it on a moving postage stamp — was good for him. It kept him from thinking about other things.