then another, as the huge aircraft was rocked by turbulence. Within moments, Shakuru was swallowed in a cocoon of gray. Rain lashed into the open cockpit as the gyrating aircraft drifted into the heart of the storm.
Troy remembered what a little clear air turbulence had done to Helios and gave up on his imagined escape as Shakuru touched the waves. Instead of landing in the Pacific within an aircraft that retained its aerodynamic integrity, he now expected to hit the water tangled in crumpled wreckage.
He looked out at the flapping wings with their dead engines, thankful that his soundproof cocoon spared him the sounds of snapping and tearing structural components.
The thought of dying in a plane crash occasionally crosses the mind of a pilot, but Troy had never imagined that it would be such an agonizingly slow death.
Chapter 41
All around him, the grayness grew darker. Troy felt a chill and realized that as the power systems failed, so too did the life support system that kept his space suit at room temperature.
The ordeal of being tossed helplessly amid the storm seemed to go on for hours, though it was obviously minutes or tens of minutes. The buffeting winds kept him aloft, postponing his inevitable crash.
Eventually, it was hours, but by then, Troy had lost track of time. The digital clock, like all the digital instruments, had winked out as the power failed. Only the analog compass remained, shining in the darkness with its luminescent dial, but it too seemed to have failed. It read that Shakuru was headed east, when Troy knew he was going southwest.
He no longer heard Yolanda's voice, and Jenna had said all that could be said. Had he believed in God, Troy would have prayed. Had he believed in heaven, he would have expected soon to face Hal Coughlin beyond some pearly gate — or in some fiery dungeon.
Suddenly, it all went black.
The grayness did not so much fade to black but went suddenly and abruptly black.
Above him, Troy was aware of a light.
Was this heaven?
No. It was the moon.
Shakuru had been tossed free of the clouds. He could see their writhing gray forms some distance away, but for the moment he was in clear air. In the moonlight, he could see Shakuru's wings, still gyrating, but still intact.
Had he been a believer, Troy would have thanked God, first for being free of the clouds, if not of the wind, but mostly he would have thanked God for Dr. Elisa Meyers, who had designed Shakuru to stand up to what he had been going through.
Above him, Troy could see the stars in the black sky, but in the blackness below him, he saw the same.
Was this the reflection of the stars on the placid sea? No. You can't see the reflection of stars on the ocean —
certainly not from this altitude.
Boats? Were they boats?
There sure were a lot of boats. There were at least a dozen lights down there. Maybe he had a chance of being rescued?
Troy felt the sensation of Shakuru sinking lower, of the lights below growing closer.
He felt the sensation of forward momentum that you get as an aircraft descends closer to the earth.
He came closer and closer to the cluster of lights and passed over them. He looked back and watched them recede into the distance.
Beneath him now was only darkness.
The discomfort of feeling like he had been swathed in plastic wrap and placed in a microwave oven was so great that it took Troy a moment to realize that he was alive when he should not have been.
He felt a light, cool breeze on his cheek, but the rest of his body felt like it was going to explode.
He opened his eyes to a blurry, hazy world and reached up to rub the sweat and crud from them with his hands.
Gloved hands met the cracked Plexiglas of his helmet visor.
Got to get this crap off.
He tugged and struggled at the connection rings that held his gloves to his space suit with an airtight seal. The left one was easier once he had freed his right hand from its glove.
Next came the helmet. After two minutes of frantic pushing and pulling, he got it off. The feel of the cool, clear air on his sweat-soaked head and face was the most wonderful sensation imaginable.
At last, he was able to rub his eyes and massage them back to functional reality.
Troy looked at the helmet. It was badly dented and the visor was cracked, but the damned thing had saved his life. First by absorbing the impact of whatever made the dent, and second, by getting cracked. Had that not happened, Troy would have suffocated within his airtight suit.
He looked around.
Where in the hell was he?
Last night, in the darkness, he had imagined many scenarios, all involving a hard landing at sea — but he found himself on land. All around him was vegetation. He had come down in a jungle — but where was the jungle? It must be an island somewhere in the ocean. Maybe he had landed in Hawaii? Maybe Waikiki Beach was just over the hill?
The wings of Shakuru were snarled in limbs and foliage, but they had not splintered into a lumberyard of wreckage like those of Helios. Shakuru would never fly again, but the airframe had held up far better than Troy might have expected.
He tossed the helmet from the cockpit and heard it hit the ground some twenty feet below. Unsnapping his harness, he attempted to stand but felt excruciating pain in his leg.
As he had waited for the morphine in his first-aid kit to take effect, Troy had mapped out his plan for getting out of the aircraft and descending twenty feet to the ground on one leg.
As the morphine finally did take effect, his predicament grew more and more amusing. It was a silly irony, Troy thought, to be sitting here in an aircraft calibrated to fly as high as two hundred thousand feet, an aircraft emblazoned with the HAWX insignia, with its HA an acronym for High Altitude — yet here he was, planning the nearly impossible challenge of descending the equivalent of two flights of stairs.
Somehow, he had made it. He had made it by grabbing at a large limb and by using his football player's upper-body strength to shift himself from limb to limb like a very-slow-moving chimpanzee. He certainly could not have done this without the numbness brought to his body by the narcotic.
The last thing he remembered before he passed out was how good it felt to wriggle out of his suit and to lie on the cool ground wearing only his inner suit.
The first thing he noticed when he woke up was that the pain in his leg was back.
The second thing he noticed when he woke up was the dirty faces of a half dozen kids. They were darkcomplected and had black hair. Troy assumed they were Hawaiians.
'Aloha, kids,' he said. 'Could one of you guys go ask your mom if I could borrow a cell phone?'
They looked at one another as though they hadn't understood him. Two of the girls giggled, pointing to the bulge between his legs. His inner suit, which was essentially like old-fashioned long underwear, left little to the imagination.
'Cell phone?' Troy persisted. 'Do you guys understand? They speak English in Hawaii… right?'
The kids spoke to him eagerly, but in a language he did not recognize.
'Where the hell am I?' Troy asked, knowing that there would be no answer. 'Who are you? How far did I drift in that storm last night?'
