“Magic Two-Two is ejecting!”
Trash quickly removed his NVGs from their bracket on his helmet and threw them to the side, then reached between his knees, grabbed the ejection control handle with both hands, and pulled up. This fired two gas impulse cartridges below him, and the gas shot through pipes throughout the cockpit and performed a variety of automatic functions. It turned on thermal batteries in the ejection seat, it pushed a piston to disconnect the emergency restraint system, it flipped internal switches to initiate the canopy jettison system, and it caused another impulse canister to fire, which pulled Trash’s shoulder harness tight against his seat, holding him into the proper position to eject safely.
The last function of the gas was to spray through the inlet of the catapult manifold valve to fire the.75- second-delay cartridge-actuated initiator housed there.
This delay cartridge released its gas, which was piped to the ejection gun initiator.
The initiator fired the ballistic latches on the canopy and the catapult, and it pushed the seat up guide rails. The movement upward caused another impulse cartridge to be exposed, and this was fired by the head of the ejection gun initiator gas.
As Trash and his seat shot up the rails, his emergency oxygen turned on, his emergency beacon switched on, and leg restraints clamped down around his shins.
Till now, Trash had been propelled up by gases, but as his seat reached the top of the guide rails the rocket motor below him fired, shooting him out of his cockpit and launching him upward more than one hundred fifty feet.
A drogue chute deployed, pulling out the main canopy, which whipped in the cool air as Trash and his seat reached maximum altitude, hung there for a moment, and began to fall.
Trash spun through the air with his eyes clenched shut; a scream left his lips because he felt only falling, falling, and he knew he was too low to fall much farther. If his chute did not deploy in the next second he would slam into the hard earth at one hundred miles an hour.
He squeezed every muscle in his body tight to prepare for an impact that, his rational brain knew, would kill him instantly.
The jolt of the harness arresting his fall grabbed at his balls and his chest and his back. He went from free- fall spin to swinging ramrod straight under his chute in the space of two seconds, and the shock of it blew the air from his lungs.
Before he’d even had time to suck a fresh breath of air into his lungs he crashed sidelong onto a metal building. It was a small tin-roofed fishing shack at the waterline, and the entire structure moved along with the force of his impact.
The momentum of his body and the pull of the chute yanked him across and then off the roof and he fell three meters to asphalt. He landed on his right side and heard the sickening sound of cracking bones in his forearm and wrist.
Trash screamed in pain.
A breeze pulled his chute taught, and he fought with it, his right arm hanging low by his side.
The chute pulled him onto a reedy bank, he rose to his knees, and a gust of wind pulled him forward, off his knees, and into the water. Once sensors in his harness detected water, the harness separated from his body, a lifesaving feature that had been built into his chute, but it did not free him in time to prevent him from being swept away by the river current.
As he plunged into the cold water, he heard the sound of sirens.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Adam Yao and Jack Ryan had been racing south through the city when they saw the Hornet hit by a SAM. They watched the plane fly on to the south, leaving the electric glowing haze over Guangzhou and entering the darkness over the Pearl River Delta, then it pitched down, and then they just barely caught a glimpse of the ejection at a distance of one mile before the pilot disappeared below the buildings between them and the aircraft.
Adam increased speed on Nansha Gang, desperate to get to the downed flier before the police or military, who would certainly be on their way. There were a few vehicles out at this time, but not many. Adam liked the wide-open road for purposes of making good time, but he worried that his little two-door stuck out like a sore thumb on the nearly empty streets.
This was a fool’s errand and they both knew it, but they agreed they could not just leave without knowing the man’s fate.
The PLA was out all over the city, as well as the local police, and this made the two Americans nervous, although there were no roadblocks or other barriers to travel. The attack was over now, and it was an attack the city had clearly been surprised by, so the military and police did little more than drive around, looking for the pilot or hassling pedestrians who came out into the streets to see what was going on.
But Adam and Jack had a head start on the civilians; they were out of the city now.
Big transport helicopters passed them, raced on to the south, and disappeared in the night.
“They’re going the same place we’re going,” Jack said.
“Guarantee it,” agreed Yao.
Twenty minutes after the jet crashed and the pilot ejected, Yao and Ryan rolled past the location of the crash, a field that ran along a tributary of the Pearl River. The helicopters had landed there, and troops had fanned out into a large copse of trees to the east. Ryan saw flashlight beams all through the trees.
Adam drove on by the crash site. He said, “If the pilot is in those trees, they’ve got him. There’s nothing we can do. If he made it to the river, though, he would have floated downstream. We can check it out at least.”
Adam turned at the river, passed row after row of storage sheds where the locals kept grains and fertilizer and other equipment for the nearby rice fields, and then they drove onto a narrow dirt road. Yao looked at his watch, saw it was just after three in the morning, and he knew it would be a miracle if they saw anyone or anything down here at all.
After ten minutes of driving very slowly along the water, the men noticed flashlights shining from a bridge just a few hundred meters on. Jack pulled Adam’s binoculars out of his pack and looked at the scene, and saw there were four civilian cars on the bridge, and a group of men in civilian clothing were scanning intently into the water.
“Those guys had the same idea we did,” Jack said. “If the pilot is in the river, he’s going to pass right under them.”
Adam stayed on the gravel road until he made it to a parking lot next to a warehouse near the bridge; then he pulled in and parked.
“This place is going to be crawling with PLA or local cops. I want you to stay right here, low in the back of the car. I’m going to head up to the bridge to see if I can see anything.”
Jack said, “Okay, but call me if you do.”
Yao left the car, and he left Jack there in the pitch blackness.
Yao found himself in a group of a dozen civilians and two PLA soldiers on the bridge. They were cursing the damn pilot. Someone said they were Taiwanese aircraft that attacked the city, but others thought that man was a fool, because Taiwan would attack China only if it wanted to commit mass suicide.
They peered into the water, certain that the parachute was seen landing in the river, but Adam could not find anyone in the group who either saw the chute himself or spoke firsthand to a person who did.
It seemed like an exercise in angry groupthink, each man talking about what he would do to the pilot if he were the one to fish him out of the water. The soldiers had rifles, of course, but many of the other men on the bridge held rakes, pitchforks, lengths of pipe, or tire irons.
Yao knew that the pilot, if he had indeed survived the ejection and if he had indeed managed to avoid getting captured closer to the crash site, would be luckier to get caught by regular Army troops than to fall into this or any
