miles away. His mind, tossed by the wind and jarred by the collision with the plane, suddenly cleared. He began shifting his weight and steering the chute toward his wife, flying the parachute in her direction.
A skilled parachutist would have had little trouble getting to her. But he had not done a lot of practice jumps before the aircraft accident that left him paralyzed, and in the time since, done only four, all qualifying jumps under much easier conditions.
Still, he had managed to get within a few hundred yards of Breanna before they hit the water.
The water felt like concrete. Zen hit at an angle, not quite sideways but not erect either. There wasn’t much of a wind, and he had no trouble getting out of the harness. As a paraplegic, his everyday existence had come to depend on a great deal of upper body strength, and he was an excellent swimmer, so he had no trouble squaring himself away. The small raft that was part of his survival gear bobbed up nearby, but rather than getting in, he’d let it trail as he swam in the direction of Breanna.
She wasn’t where he’d thought she would be. Her chute had been released but he couldn’t see her. He felt as if he’d been hit in the stomach with an iron bar.
As calmly as he could manage, he had turned around and around, looking, then began swimming against the slight current and wind, figuring the chute would have been pulled toward him quicker than Breanna had.
Finally, he’d seen something bobbing up and down about twenty yards to his right. It was Breanna’s raft. But she wasn’t in it.
She was floating nearby, held upright by her horseshoe lifesaver, upright, breathing, but out of it. He’d gotten her into her raft, but then was so exhausted that he pulled himself up on the narrow rubber gunwale and rested. He heard a thunderous roar that gave way to music — an old song by Spinal Tap, he thought — and then he slipped into a place where time had no meaning. The next thing he knew, he found himself here, alone in the water.
How long ago had that been?
His watch had been crushed during the fall from the plane. He stared at the digits, stuck on the time he’d hit the airplane: 7:15 a.m.
The sun was now almost directly overhead, which meant it was either a little before or a little after noon — he wasn’t sure which, since he didn’t know which way was east or west.
Five hours in the water. Pretty long, even in the relatively warm Indian Ocean.
He reached to his vest for his emergency radio. It wasn’t there. Had he taken it out earlier? He had the vaguest memory of doing so — but was it a genuine memory or a dream?
A nightmare.
Was this real?
Breanna would have one. Bree—
Where was she? He didn’t see her.
Where
His voice sounded shallow and hoarse in his ears.
“Yo, Bree! Where are ya, hon?”
He waited, expecting to hear her snap back with something like,
But she didn’t.
He thought he heard her behind him and spun around.
Nothing.
Not only was his radio gone — so was his life raft. He didn’t remember detaching it. His head was pounding. He felt dizzy.
Zen turned slowly in the water, positive he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye. He finally spotted something in the distance: land or a ship, or even a bank of clouds; he was too far off to tell. He began paddling toward it.
After about fifteen minutes he realized it was land. He also realized the current would help him get to it.
“Bree!” he shouted, looking around. “Bree!”
He paddled harder. After an hour or so his arms began to seize. He no longer had the strength to swim, and simply floated with the tide. His voice had become too weak to do more than whisper. He barely had enough strength, in fact, to resist the creeping sense of despair lapping at his shoulders.
Dog watched the tanker set down on Diego Garcia’s long runway, turning slowly in the air above the island as he waited for his turn to land. It had taken his damaged plane just under eight hours to reach Diego Garcia, more than twice what it had taken to fly north.
His body felt as if it were a statue or maybe a rusted robot that he haunted rather than lived in. His mind could control all of his body’s movements, but didn’t feel quite comfortable doing so. He was a foreigner in his own skin.
Eyes burned dry, throat filled with sand, Dog acknowledged the tower’s clearance and eased the
Owned by the British, Diego Garcia was a desert island in the middle of nowhere, a sliver of paradise turned into a long runway, fueling station, and listening post. It was an odd mix of three distinct time periods — modern, British colonial, and primordial — all existing uneasily together.
The rush of air around him seemed to subside as he dropped toward the concrete. The wheels screeched loudly when he touched down, and the sound of the wind and the engines seemed to double. Dog had practiced manual-controlled landings many times in the simulator, and had had a few real ones besides. Even so, his hands shook as the Megafortress continued across the runway, seemingly moving much faster on the ground than she had been in the air. He had his brakes set, power down, and reverse thrusters deployed — he knew he should be stopping, but he wasn’t. He deployed the drag chute at the rear of the aircraft and held on.
The world roared around him, a loud train running in his head. And then finally the aircraft stopped — not gradually, it seemed, but all of a sudden.
The
After he caught his breath, he undid his restraints and pulled himself upright. Embarrassed, he flipped on the mike for his radio.
“Dreamland
“Affirmative,
“Get these guys out of my way and I’ll tootle over to the hangar,” he said, trying to make his voice sound light.
“Negative,
“Welcome back, Colonel,” said a familiar gravelly voice over the circuit.
“Chief Parsons?”
“I hope you didn’t break my plane too bad, Colonel,” said Chief Master Sergeant Clyde Alan “Greasy Hands” Parsons. Parsons was the head enlisted man in the Dreamland detachment, and the de facto air plane czar. He knew more about the Megafortress than its designer did. “I have only a skeleton crew to work with here.”
“I’ll take your skeleton over Angelina Jolie’s body any day,” Dog told him.
“Jeez, I don’t know, Colonel,” answered Parsons. “If that’s the lady I’m thinking of, I’m afraid I’d have to go with her.”
Lieutenant Michael Englehardt hopped from the GMC Jimmy and trotted toward the big black aircraft sitting on the runway in front of him. The right wing and a good part of the fuselage were scarred; bits and pieces of carbon fiber and metal protruded from the jagged holes and scrapes. The engine cowling on the far right engine looked as if someone had written over it with white graffiti.
The ramp ladder was lowered from the forward section. Colonel Bastian’s legs appeared, followed by the colonel himself. His face was drawn back; he looked a hundred years old.
