His eyes were open, but they were misted with tears and stinging from water. He choked, coughing up a last cup of water, then finally drawing a deep, shaky breath.
His eyes focused. Water, waves?he looked up into the blue sky. For another few minutes, his mind refused to focus, simply satisfied with the fact that he was alive.
It came back to him slowly, in bits and pieces. An explosion?the canopy bolts firing, he realized. The Falcon?it had been inbound. The rest of the encounter flooded his mind.
The XO must have gotten them out. Suddenly, he was frantic. He scanned the ocean around him, praying for a glimpse of a flotation device or a rubber raft. He started screaming, his voice raw and hoarse from the water. He tried to propel himself higher up on the waves by flailing his arms, and found new sources of pain. His groin?another throb awoke to join the growing chorus.
Finally, his training kicked in. He fumbled open the flotation device pocket, extracted the dye marker, and broke it open. A sickly yellow stain flooded the water around him, gradually spreading out. He then took out the shark repellent packet, prayed that all the studies he’d heard on its effectiveness were true, and broke it open.
The pain in his face was now a throbbing, insistent beat. He let his flotation device buoy him for a moment, leaned back in the water, and started running his hands over his body. Wetness?he held his hand out in front of him. Not just water. Blood. Evidently shards of the canopy or the sheer force of the ejection had cut his face. He looked again at the growing yellow stain and prayed that the shark repellent was just as effective.
One by one, he ran his hands over his arms, his torso, then finally his legs. Everything seemed to work, although movement was accompanied by a dull ache that promised to blossom into something fiercer later on.
So where was SAR?
Dammit, the helo guys?just then the distinctive whop-whop of an SH-60 reached his ears.
Minutes later, a rescue diver plunged into the water a few feet away.
He swam over to Skeeter, quickly ascertained that he was conscious and not seriously injured, and helped the pilot struggle into the horse collar.
Satisfied finally, the diver lifted his hand in a thumbs-up to the crewman leaning out the open hatch of the helicopter. The downdraft from the SH-60 was explosive, generating wind speeds of up to sixty knots directly down on the water. It spread waves out in odd, flat ripples that beat a counterpart to the normal progression of waves. Skeeter fixed on that, staring at the concentric disturbances that looked like water washing out from a stone thrown in a pond, the diver situated in the middle.
Except this wasn’t a pond. It was the Mediterranean, and as soon as he was hauled aboard, he asked, “Did you find my backseater?”
One look at the aircrew’s faces gave him the answer. Skeeter exploded. “Dammit, he’s out here somewhere. We’ve got to find him. We have to-“
“Just take it easy, sir,” the corpsman said, gently trying to muscle him to the aft part of the helicopter. “We’ve done this before?just let us do our job for now. We’ll find him.”
“He was there,” Skeeter said mindlessly. “In the backseat?he must have punched us out.”
He shot the corpsman an anguished look. “Just before the Falcon got us?he punched us out. How could he-?”
“Just lean back, Lieutenant.” The corpsman’s voice was gentle but insistent. “Need to take a look at you, sir. Your backseater’s gonna be just fine.”
“Where is he?”
Skeeter struggled to his feet and tried to walk toward the open hatch. The rescue swimmer was just being hauled aboard. “I have to-“
A sharp prick in the left arm. Skeeter spun around, unsteady on his bruised and battered legs. “What did you…”
The rest of the sentence faded away as a cool fog settled over his mind.
6
“How is he?” Batman asked the doctor, his voice pitched low to avoid disturbing the unconscious pilot. “The face?just normal ejection injuries, right?”
The doctor nodded. “Some bruises, a couple of lacerations. None of them even required stitches. The only reason he’s still here instead of in his own rack was that he got a bit agitated with the helo crew when they pulled him out of the water. The corpsman had to jam him with some morphine to get him to calm down.”
Batman let out a long, troubled sigh. “His backseater.”
It wasn’t a question, more a statement of fact. It was the first thing you worried about, the last thing you thought of as you departed controlled flight on the rocket-powered ejection seat and headed for the deck. Your backseater, the other part of your team, who helped keep you both alive.
“Have they found him yet?” the doctor asked.
Batman shook his head. “No one saw his chute. The more time passes, the more difficult it will be to find him.”
The doctor nodded, understanding the unspoken implication. No chute, no sighting, and no emergency beacon from either the sea or the portable radio each aviator carried. It didn’t look good.
“But?there’s always a chance.”
Batman straightened, then looked back at the pilot sprawled out on the bed. “How long before he’s conscious?”
“That’s just normal sleep,” the doctor answered. “The morphine’s worn off. If you need to talk to him, you can wake him up.”
“I guess I should let him sleep,” Batman fretted. “But I need to know what actually happened up there. We’ve got the radar picture, the cat-and-mouse game they were playing up there. What I don’t have is a firsthand report, what the pilot on scene did and saw and thought.”
“He’ll have to find out about his RIO sooner or later,” the doctor said. It was not something he looked forward to telling the pilot, and he could sympathize with the admiral’s concerns.
“I know. I’ll do it when the time comes. But for now, what he saw up there might make a difference?might save some other man’s life.”
The doctor walked over to the bed, and placed one hand gently on the sleeping pilot’s shoulder. He tightened his hand slowly, trying not to put too much pressure on damaged muscles and tendons. He listened to the pilot’s breathing change, becoming shallower and quicker, then saw his eyelids flicker open. “Good morning,” the doctor said softly. “Do you remember where you are?”
Skeeter groaned, and rolled to one side as though trying to prop himself up on his elbows. The doctor placed his other hand gently on the opposite shoulder and forced him gently back down on the bed. “Don’t get up yet. Your body took a beating, and it’s going to hurt for a few days. You’re okay other than that, though.”
“What happened?” Skeeter shook his head, trying to clear out the fog. “Why am I-“
The sentence went unfinished as the details came back to him.
“We ejected, didn’t we? My RIO-“
Again he tried to struggle back up into a sitting position, even flung one foot off the edge of the bed as if he were going to jump out.
The doctor held him down more firmly. “Admiral Wayne is here. He’d like to ask you a few questions, if you’re up to it.”
Too weak to resist further, Skeeter lay back down on the rack. His eyes were brighter now, focusing on his surroundings. “Admiral?my RIO. How is he?”
Batman walked over to the hospital bed and laid his hand over Skeeter’s. “We haven’t found him yet.”
Skeeter moaned. “He got out?I saw him. Heard him, at least.”
