by John O'Brien
Stefan’s instinctual moves kept the aircraft semi-upright as it descended below the tops of the peaks.
If I can just keep it upright, there’s a chance of calmer air below, he thought, constantly making adjustments.
The land below was still lost in darkness, but for now, this was his battle. Shudders and hard bounces rocked the jumbo jet, each one threatening to send it over the edge and into a spiraling descent toward the rugged terrain.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit…” Stefan uttered as a particularly hard series of bounces shook the aircraft.
The aircraft rolled to nearly forty-five degrees of bank before he was able to stop the turning motion and right it again. With his heart pounding, Stefan tensely waited for the next bit of turbulence.
The ridgeline, hidden within the darkened valley and suddenly appearing, came as a complete surprise. The sight of the boulders and steep, rocky cliffs, only a shade lighter than the surrounding darkness, barely registered before Stefan felt a sharp tug on the shoulder harnesses. It happened so fast that it didn’t have time to enter into consciousness. It was anticipating the next series of bounces, a startled gasp knowing that it was over, then darkness. Outside, above the glow of fires streaming down cliff walls and within steep ravines, the green lights continued their ballet across the nighttime sky.
* * * * * *
Western Pacific Ocean
Lieutenant Jenny Carlson rolled out from the turn and levelled the aircraft. Forty-two thousand feet below her F-18, the endless waters of the Pacific Ocean stretched to the horizon in every direction. A hundred miles south of her position rode the carrier task force patrolling the region between Taiwan, Guam, Japan, and the Philippines.
Glancing behind, she caught her wingman flying a loose chase position slightly off to one side. Looking to the other side, she caught a gleam from her other element a mile off her wing. They were one of the outlying patrols surrounding the task force, their job to intercept any identified airborne threat. Flying with their radars off, they relied on airborne radar platforms and the command center on station between the patrolling flights and the ships comprising the fleet.
Satisfied that the flight was still in position following the turn, they started on yet another leg of their patrol sector. Flying patrols were endless hours of drilling holes through the sky, but heck, at least she was flying. For Jenny, these flights evoked two simultaneous emotions. There was the boredom that accompanied the seemingly endless flights, but when her mind turned to what she was actually doing, there was the exhilaration that came from the realization that she was flying a fighter aircraft…her dream come true.
This was one of those moments. She looked out through the bubbled glass canopy to each side. The swept-back wings of her fighter sliced through the air, each tip mounted with a sparrow missile. Attached to hardpoints under her wings and fuselage were four AIM-120 AAMRAM missiles, and attached to the center fuselage hardpoint was an auxiliary fuel tank. She and her flight presented an incredible array of airborne firepower, should it be called on.
With one hand on the control stick and her other on the throttles, Jenny looked down at the ocean’s surface. To the east, an orangish-yellow glare reflected from the sun that had just risen above the distant horizon. The throttle positions were back in a cruise setting to conserve fuel, but she and her flight could be at mach in mere seconds if the call for an intercept arrived. She was flying a sports car, but currently driving it at neighborhood speeds.
Jenny shifted her position, trying to get comfortable within the cramped cockpit as much as the shoulder harnesses and lap belt would allow. That was one thing about flying fighters: the seats weren’t designed to be comfortable for long periods of time. Undoing the Velcro on the sleeve of her flight suit, she pulled it back and looked at her watch.
Good. Under an hour remaining. I can’t wait to crawl in my bunk.
The briefing before her flight had mentioned to be on alert for a recall due to the impending arrival of a solar storm. However, it was also briefed that the expected arrival wasn’t due until after their scheduled patrol. If they should encounter any interruptions in communications, they were to turn on their radars, finish their patrol, and depart their patrol sector at their scheduled time. If the communications were to black out, they would be directed and sequenced for landing via light signals. Refueling times were stepped up to ensure that their tanks would always be more than half full. If the GPS should malfunction, they could use their radars to locate and return to the task force.
Relaxed and feeling a little complacent as she continued drilling her holes through the air, Jenny was startled to see a quick streak of green splash across the blue sky. Thinking it was a reflection on the canopy from her instruments, or perhaps an odd reflection from the sun, she leaned forward and to one side to look at it from a different angle. Nothing showed.
Relaxing back into her seat, she saw another flash of light green high overhead. Adjusting her view again, she saw yet another faint light waver through the atmosphere. The glare from the sun made it hard to see the steaks of light, but there was no doubt that there was something. Under a radio blackout, she wagged her wings to signal her wingman to join up.
Another F-18 quickly joined her side in loose fingertip position. Glancing to the helmeted figure inside the nearby cockpit, she pointed upward. Her wingman stared at the sky for a moment, then looked in her direction, and shrugged—either from not being able to observe what she saw, or at a loss to explain it. Jenny returned the shrug and maneuvered the aircraft with quick up-and-down movements, sending her wingman back into a chase position.
Banking the aircraft to bring it to another heading, the control stick froze in her hand. Her heart also froze and then pounded as adrenaline was unleashed, sending a jolt through her body. Thinking the digital flight system (fly-by-wire) had failed, as well as the supposed automatic transition to the mechanical system, Jenny attempted to pump the stick, the emergency means of forcing hydraulics through the system. The controls remained locked. Looking inside for the bank of warning indicators that should be lit, she noticed that the entire cockpit instrumentation was dark.
Due to its sleek design, the F-18 took a moment for the nose to drop due to the engines stalling. The aircraft continued a slow roll with the nose dropping. Jenny stomped on the rudder pedal in an attempt to right the aircraft. Her boot met with the same resistance, the pedal stuck in its position. She quickly reached to the electrical switch to bring the system from the generators to battery. Expecting the instrumentation to light up and for the controls to move, she was taken aback as neither happened.
Fear rose as the aircraft began rolling toward an inverted position and took on a decidedly nose-down position. She realized that her aircraft was on the verge of going out of control. Not wanting to remain in an unrecoverable aircraft, she leaned back in her seat, tightened the straps on her helmet, raised her hands upward, fought against the increasing Gs, and pulled down on the ejection handles.
Expecting to hear the explosive bolts fire on the canopy and the roar of the rushing slipstream, then the pressure below her as the seat fired, she grew alarmed by the lack of anything happening. The only sound, beyond the face shield that enveloped her when she pulled on the handles, effectively blinding her, was the soft roar of the wind passing over and around the canopy, which was still attached. She remained in place, not wanting to be out of position should the seat decide to fire. Should the seat fire while she was leaning forward, she would be crushed.
Lateral Gs increased, letting her know that the aircraft had begun rolling faster. In what seemed like minutes, but was in fact only seconds, Jenny pushed the face shield up and out of her way. Through her HUD was the ocean, rotating ever faster and growing larger.
She manually released the canopy locks. No longer locked in place, the canopy lifted from the railing by a few inches and encountered the slipstream. The five-hundred-mile-an-hour winds took hold and wrenched the thick glass and
metal surface up and then flung it away from the disabled aircraft, the hinges shredding with the sound of twisted metal.
Undoing her lap belt, and tossing the shoulder harnesses to the side, Jenny pushed upward with her legs. The rolling Gs helped throw her out of the cockpit. Her body was immediately buffeted by high-speed winds that sent her tumbling. Her helmet visors were ripped away, her face exposed to the frigid temperatures and fierce wind. Unable to effectively see, and disoriented by the tumbling, she was only vaguely aware of something heavy sweeping rapidly toward her like a freight train, and then past. She was lucky she couldn’t see, as her heart might have stopped from the sight of a wing rolling through the air and passing within a foot of her.
Jenny, retaining some awareness, reached across and pulled the rip cord. A flutter of noise behind her was lost in the roar of the wind. Her tumbling motions came to an abrupt halt as she was yanked to a stop. The straps of her parachute harness dug deeply into the inside of her upper legs. She felt the sensation of swinging downward and opened her eyes. The pendulum motions slowed and she looked up, rewarded by the reassuring sight of the orange, white, and olive drab panels of a fully opened parachute.
She went through her checks to ensure she had a fully functioning chute, and then released her emergency survival pack. It fell and dangled by a thick cord. Looking far below, she observed the dark motion of her stricken aircraft still plummeting toward the ocean. With a semi-detached feeling, she watched it come apart under stresses it wasn’t designed to handle. The chill of the surrounding air reached through to her consciousness. The flight jacket she was wearing kept the frigid air at bay, but it was still cold and the adrenaline caused her to shiver.
The ocean below looked so far away, and made her feel very small. She checked her canopy for the hundredth time and looked around for the others in her flight. At the very least, her wingman should be circling her position, sending out a mayday call and enacting search and rescue teams. She would be in the water, floating in her raft, for an hour at most.
She was taken aback at the sight of the two other parachutes dotting the sky a distance away. At first, she didn’t know what to think. Perhaps she had been involved in a mid-air collision without having realized that it had happened. That would explain the sudden loss of power and the F-18 failing as it had. Surely, though, she would have felt the impact.
Looking upward, past the canopy of her chute, the greenish streaks she had noticed earlier had grown in number, faint against the brightness of the sun, yet very much present. Her first thought was that the solar storm had arrived early and interfered with the electronics of her aircraft. That would also explain the other parachutes she saw a mile or so away. If so, where was the fourth one? Jenny looked through every quadrant of sky, having to squint against the glare of the sun, searching for a sign of the fourth member of her flight.
The ocean was so vast and changeless that it seemed like she was hanging in the air without getting any closer to the surface. The only signs that she was, in fact, moving, were the flutter of the panels overhead, the feel of the wind past her face, and a gradual warming of the air. She couldn’t determine any lateral movement, even though she put her boots together with her heels touching. Over land or with some reference point, she would know which direction she was drifting. High over the ocean with its rolling swells, it was impossible.
Seemingly all at once, she noticed a change and the swells became more defined. Then, almost as suddenly, she was nearing the surface. Remembering her water survival training, she held off on releasing her parachute even though the surface seemed so close. The idea was to release when her feet hit the water, or a couple of feet above the surface. That was so the chute didn’t settle over the top of her or for winds to grab the chute and pull her through the water. If that happened, it was possible for the releases to become too tight to spring free, and she would be dragged, upping the odds of drowning.
She watched her survival pack hit the surface on the crest of a rolling swell. With her hands poised over the releases at her shoulder, she watched until her boots, below her slightly bent knees, hit the surface. She released the buckles and pulled on the wire rings, immediately falling free and plunging into the cold depths.
Her life vest automatically inflated and she was driven upward to the surface. The shock of the cold water nearly caused her to take a sharp breath before she broached the surface. The world, which she had drifted down through for seeming hours, had changed from the dull roar of the wind and the fluttering of the parachute panels to one of wavelets on each swell slapping into her inflated life vest. The chill of the air was replaced by the cold of the ocean.
A few feet away floated a one-person rubber raft. She searched for and found the rope attached to the remains of her parachute harness. Holding onto the rope, she paddled over to the craft and heaved herself into it. Over the side, she found an attached cord and pulled her survival gear up from the depths. Wet and shivering from the cold water, she opened the pack, deployed the sea anchor, and pulled out the radio. Turning up the volume, she quickly determined that the ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter) wasn’t functioning. She tried several radio calls on the emergency channel, but heard no replies. She set it back into the waterproof pack, intending to try again later.
In the distance, she observed a trailing stream of red fire as a flare was launched. It reached its apogee and began a slow descent, the burning light oscillating as it swung under a small parachute. Pulling her sea anchor in, she began paddling her raft over rolling swells and into deep troughs toward the flare’s position. Periodically, another flare would be launched and she would adjust her direction. As the sun settled into a position high overhead, her flight suit having dried and sweat trickling down her face, Jenny managed to catch the first glimpse of another raft several swells away as her own craft topped a crest. She eventually managed to close in on two other rafts that were tied together, each housing a member of her flight.
“Where is Ensign Everly?” Jenny asked, tying her raft off with the others.
“I’m not sure. I was a little busy at the time and didn’t see what happened,” one answered.
They shared their stories, which were nearly identical. Exhausted, her energy spent, Jenny laid back in her raft and closed her eyes. It wasn’t the comfort of her bunk, but it would do for the moment. Together, the three drifted at the mercy of the currents on the open seas.
* * * * * *
Johns Hopkins Hospital: Baltimore, Maryland
Dr. David Altman felt the gauze swipe across his forehead, wiping away the beads of sweat that had formed below the fabric of his surgical cap. Although the air conditioning system in the operating room was superb, the beams of the surgical lights and his intense concentration made it seem warmer than it was.
“Thank you,” he whispered, his words muted to by the mask covering his nose and mouth.
Leaning over the small, opened abdomen below him, the only part visible amid surgical cloth surrounding the rest of the body, Dr. Altman waited until a nurse finished dabbing a wad of gauze over the area where he was to implant the donated kidney. Inspecting the area, he was satisfied that all was well. He glanced at the anesthesiologist and received a nod indicating that the patient’s vitals were reading well. With a deep breath, he reached for a scalpel on a tray of instruments to the side.
“Let’s begin, shall we?”
Lowering magnified lenses, he began making precise cuts, waiting only for quick dabs of gauze between each slice to wipe away trickles of blood. With only a few words spoken, and equally precise movements from those assisting him, the operation was going smoothly.
Around Dr. Altman were the familiar sounds that meant all was going well—the beeps from the monitor measuring heartbeats, lines jumping in a steady rhythm, the sighs from the ventilator pumping a supply of oxygen into the patient’s lungs…all good indications. Then, all went dark.
Dr. Altman paused, waiting for the lights to come back
on. Power outages weren’t a common occurrence, but they did happen from time to time. However, the hospital’s backup generators were supposed to engage instantly to avoid a complete blackout. A moment passed, then another. The room remained completely dark and silent—the beeps in the background, the sound of the ventilator functioning—all quiet.
“Shit! Get the flashlight from the wall. And begin manual resuscitations. Someone go find out what happened and see if there’s a usable operating room available. We need to move fast, people,” Altman addressed the darkened room.
The rustle of clothing was the only indication that the assistants were responding to his commands. A loud commotion erupted from nearby as someone’s foot connected with a tray of instruments, sending both the stand and tray to the floor in a clatter.
“Fuck!” followed the collision.
“Doctor, the flashlight isn’t working,” the same voice stated a few seconds later.
“I need light, folks. We are not going to lose her. How are those ventilations coming?” Altman asked.
“Just started. Took me a second to find a mask and O2 tank,” the anesthesiologist returned.
Impatient due to his fear that he might lose the small girl lying on the table because of something as stupid as the timing of a power outage, Dr. Altman’s mind raced through options. Each thought ended quickly and he realized that he had very few. Glancing toward where he thought the door was located, he noticed on the fringe of his consciousness that even the emergency lighting of the exit sign was out. In the complete darkness of the room, he heard a “snicking” sound, and was startled as the glow of a small flame illuminated the area next to him.
Altman’s mind worked furiously as he stared at the lighter flame.