“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.
And he was still accelerating.
He wanted his eyes open now for this last bit. Wanted to see everything. He wanted to stare down the fear as he sped toward his very certain death. He could see the wicked curved blades of each screw in perfect detail as he hurtled headlong into the vortex.
He forced his eyes to stay wide open.
He was in the relentless grip of the outboard screw. It was happening. He was entering the roiling pipeline to death. He started spinning now, now that he was in the tube. The vibration and the noise blotted out everything but the looming knife-edges of the whirling blades. The screw seemed to have slowed a fraction, but perhaps it was just his imagination. All in slow motion now.
He strained against the harness, trying to see it coming. The gaps between the blades were much larger from this angle. But not wide enough with the pod at this forty-five-degree attitude. What if he could get weight suddenly forward? Hope surged. He might even slip through if he could somehow get his nose down—wait—the seat pin was out—the weight of the ejection seat slamming forward again just might be enough to—he grabbed the handles on either side of the cockpit and yanked himself forward with as much force as he could generate.
It was one last utterly desperate gamble and he might just kill himself doing it. But if the nose was angling downward as he passed between two of the blades, perhaps gravity and hydrodynamics would be on his side. He was no physicist, no expert on wave mechanics, but what the bloody hell, he—
The seat shot ahead on the rails and he slammed once more into the leading edge of the canopy. His helmet took the brunt of the impact again. He heard a loud pop, the sound of the helmet splitting or maybe the canopy. No water, though. Just fresh sheets of warm blood that drenched his face. He couldn’t see. He thought he felt the nose dip a fraction before merciful blackness descended and surrounded him.
Disoriented and rolling violently in the screw’s wake, he regained consciousness and suddenly saw the orange sun bouncing on the horizon.
Somehow, he was still alive.
He wiped some blood from his eyes and noticed that he was bobbing violently on the ocean’s surface. The forces tossing him about came from the backwash of the Lincoln’s four giant meat grinders. He could see the looming stern of the carrier moving away from him. His heart was pounding against his ribs with such force he felt the bloody organ might rip away from his chest wall. He knew he had to do something to get out of the capsule but he couldn’t control his shaking hands. He tried several times to blow the canopy but he just didn’t seem to have the necessary coordination to do it. Until his third try.
He blew the canopy.
And realized very quickly he’d made a very serious mistake. The cockpit capsule immediately began flooding with water. Seawater rose instantly above his knees. It kept rising, slopping around, quickly filling the cockpit. Since the nose had the most air to displace, the capsule nosed over. It submerged and immediately began to sink. He was going straight down fast. He tugged furiously at his harness, clawed at it, shredding his fingertips.
At about thirty or forty feet beneath the surface, his fingers ripped at the buckles one last time and he managed to wrench himself free. He wriggled out of the harness, kicked away from what little remained of his lost
