Josh rammed the throttles hard to the stops to firewall the engine. A red deck was closed to incoming aircraft, even those that were seconds from landing. He cut away and climbed back into the night. The plane shuddered like a live beast.
“Watch the PIO, nugget.”
Pilot-induced oscillation. “Got it. Not everybody wants to be a Blue Angel.” Josh concentrated on the climb, breaking the landing pattern. The plane shifted from side to side. “She’s yawing,” he said, flicking a glance at the instrument panel.
“The computer will correct it,” said Hatch.
“What the hell happened down there?”
“Fouled deck. Wait for instructions.”
A fouled deck could mean any number of things—an aircraft mishap, equipment left on deck, maybe personnel in the landing zone. For now, Josh could only worry about resuming the landing pattern and monitoring the fuel.
“Check your lineup.”
Even as he followed orders, Josh could see the lights of the “angel,” the carrier’s rescue helicopter, hovering like a benevolent guardian over the ship. Then the helo dipped and swept into a pattern he’d never seen before. Rescuing someone?
“Quit with the PIO, already,” Hatch repeated. Then, to the tower, he said, “Got a bit of a problem, Mother. How about you send a rescue helo out our way, just in case this nugget can’t get us down?”
“It’s not me,” Josh said. “Jesus, this plane is bent.” He wasn’t being defensive. The computer wasn’t making the proper corrections. The Prowler yawed hard to the right as though bent over a giant knee. Josh had never felt anything quite like it. The aircraft was in an uncommanded, uncontrolled, oscillating, full-rudder deflection.
He raised the gear handle and the plane pitched back to the left. That’s it, then, he thought as he took himself out of the landing pattern again and ordered the lead jet in the new pattern to get away.
“Vertical speed indicator just took a dip,” Hatch reported. Josh already knew this. The VSI was part of the ECMO’s instrument scan, but Josh was the pilot. It was all his business.
A negative dip. That was ejection criteria. The broadcast of “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday” sounded surreal.
With the radio squawking Emergency, he tried three more cycles, one after another. “I can’t control the rudders,” he reported in a voice that was icily calm. They were still climbing, and every man in the cockpit understood why, though none would speak of it aloud. If they had to eject, they would need the altitude.
Fresh adrenaline burst through him. The drop in vertical speed was only part of the emergency. Any second the nose could pitch up or the aircraft could roll, and the decision would be taken away from him. They were a heartbeat away from an unscheduled carnival ride of ejection and parachute. They’d have a bird’s-eye view of a very expensive fireball.
Shit. The damned thing was still flying. He’d managed to climb to ten thousand feet. He wasn’t out of control. He had no control. He accelerated, hoping to get some more airspeed and altitude.
He could hear Hatch briefing the controller on the situation. Captain Bud Forster, the CAG LSO, came online again. In a few minutes, the whole battle group would know about the trouble.
The plane broke ten thousand feet, and the nose pitched up. Josh wrestled with it, but it kept bucking. He dampened the yaw by working the rudders opposite the cycles, but the aircraft kept canting on its own.
Nobody said what everyone was thinking: the jet couldn’t make a safe landing.
The ECMOs worked feverishly through checklists—rudder failure, control malfunctions, alternate approaches—hoping to find the magic bullet. “Nothing. There’s nothing applicable,” Newman concluded. “Wait here. We need to pull circuit breakers until we isolate the problem. Jeez, I do this in my basement when the dishwasher quits.”
When the first two were pulled, the yaw abated. “Keep going,” Josh ordered. The third one created no noticeable difference. When the fourth was pulled, the controls turned to mush. “Put it back!” Josh yelled. “Put it back!”
Too late. The nose pitched up wildly. I did this, thought Josh, fighting back with the controls. I’m the pilot, and I did this. The air-navigation computer was haywire. He tried feverishly to remember if he’d shut it off when he’d aborted the landing. Maybe the computer had engaged automatically and was overriding him. It didn’t matter now. The Prowler was completely out of control.
In the cockpit, they all knew it. Four pairs of gloved hands wrapped around four ejection handles. These were Advanced Concept Ejection Seats, 128 pounds apiece, each equipped with a twenty-one-pound rocket catapult. Success rate was better than ninety percent, but for some reason, Josh felt no reassurance.
He looked out at the ice-bright stars and wished he’d worn warmer clothes under his G-suit. At the same time, he was thinking and moving as fast as he could—faster than he’d ever imagined he could—but everything seemed to slow down. Time dilation. It was a concept he’d studied in advanced physics. Time in the moving system will be perceived by a stationary observer to be running slower….
He was a stationary observer; the Prowler was a moving system. The traveler measures his own proper time, since he is at the beginning and end of his trip interval.
In the shadowy cockpit, the glow from the instrument panel cast its eerie illumination over the faces of the crew as each man braced for disaster. They were all alone up here, yet they were not alone. Four lives, four families whose fate would be decided by a broken piece of metal hanging in midair.
Josh thought, Lauren. Only a minute ago he’d been confused about her. Now, with the same crystal clarity with which he could see the tumbling night sky, he knew exactly what he wanted. Lauren. The beginning and the end of his trip interval.
He took a deep, bracing breath. Then he gave the order he knew he had to give.
“Eject! Eject! Eject!”
CHAPTER 3
Whidbey Island, Washington
7:30 a.m.
Lauren Stanton woke up in the same state of mind she’d gone to sleep in—thinking of Josh. He had only been at sea for a few weeks, but it felt like forever.
She grabbed his pillow and hugged it, her eyes shut and her heart about to break. “Josh,” she whispered into the feathery depths. Maybe it was just her imagination, but she believed it still held his scent.
She of all people should know better than to fall for a Navy guy.
Groaning in protest, she swam to the surface of the covers and got out of bed. It was one of those perfect spring days on Puget Sound when winter seemed nothing more than a soggy, unpleasant memory. The sliding glass doors of the bedroom framed a view of the sapphire water and distant Cascades, the fiery pink of sunrise painting the vanilla ice-cream peak of Mount Baker.
She pulled on her robe, lingering at the window to watch a blue heron at the edges of the bank, lifting each foot and setting it down with great deliberation. In its beak it held a wisp of grass; it was nesting season.
She made the bed, which was a simple matter. She slept neatly, disturbing no more than a small portion of the covers. When Josh stayed over, the morning-after bed looked like a rummage sale at closing time—sheets ripped from their moorings, twisted and damp, pillows tossed willy-nilly. Josh made love and slept like he did everything else, with his whole self, with total abandon, his energy boundless and infectious.
Even through the ache of missing him, she couldn’t help feeling a warm spasm of remembered intimacy at the thought of their lovemaking. It was as though he had reached across the Pacific Ocean and caressed her.
“You’re