by Julianne Lee
Her expression cleared, and she nodded.
“Ever flown in one of these before?”
She shook her head, then tossed back her hair when the wind blew it into her face. “But I’m looking forward to it, very much. I enjoyed the training they required to grant my request and allow me to ride.” Quickly she pulled a hair tie from her wrist—one of those poofy cloth ones, white with red stripes—and set her helmet between her knees. Inexplicably, the sight of her knees gripping that headgear caught his attention and held it. She took a moment to tie back her hair, then restored her helmet to the crook of her arm.
Alex’s gaze returned to her face. “Enjoyed?” He found he had to clear his throat to get the word out.
“Very much, indeed.”
Was this chick for real? He knew how strenuous that training was, just for the sake of riding in one of these planes. A smile tried to curl the corner of his mouth, and without saying anything further he gestured for her to follow, turned, and headed across the deck toward the gray fighter jet that awaited them on the forward catapult. Miss Pawlowski ran a few steps to catch up to him, her dark brown, wavy ponytail tossed in the Atlantic wind.
“What sort of plane is that, exactly?” Her voice was nearly snatched away by the wind and the various deck noises of taxiing and catapulting jets, but she was loud enough to be understood.
“It’s an F/A-l8D Hornet.” A note of pride crept into his voice though he tried to control it, and he couldn’t help adding, “My girl.”
“Don’t you ever wash your girl?”
“No, ma’am.” His was not a new aircraft, and it bore stains here and there on its skin from fuel, oil, and residue from firing the nose gun. “She’s clean where she needs to be.”
“There don’t seem to be any missiles on it.”
He threw her a bemused look. “You hot to blow something up?”
Her smile was an embarrassed one, and she shook her head no.
“Well, if it’ll make it more exciting for you, some jets of questionable character have been sighted in the area, so the nose gun is loaded. 20 mm slugs. Six thousand rounds per minute. Take just a few seconds to cut an enemy plane into little, bitty pieces. I know, ‘cause I’ve done it.” He’d meant to amuse her, but when he turned to see the effect of his jibe, her lips were pressed together. His grin left and he fell silent.
He didn’t speak while he began the preflight check, and when she attempted to engage him in conversation he held up a silencing finger. No chatter allowed during this. When he was done with his external walk-around and ready to board, he found her staring up at the fuselage, just under where his name and rank were painted in black just below the canopy. The other writing was in flowing, blue script.
“Brat?” she said.
“My call sign.”
She turned to peer at him. “Brat? Are you one, really?”
“My father is an admiral. I grew up in the Navy. I know you know that, because I saw you write it down in your little book.”
The light went on, and she nodded. “Ah. Military brat.”
“Yup.”
“I shouldn’t think having a father in the Navy would especially distinguish you among your peers.”
Alex gave a wry smile and held up four fingers. “Fourth generation.” Then he ticked off each previous generation one by one with his thumb. “Dad flew Intruders over Vietnam. Granddaddy MacNeil manned a battleship in the North Atlantic during World War II. Great granddaddy MacNeil—”
“Swabbed a wooden deck, I’m sure.”
He laughed. “No, but pretty near. I’ve also got two younger brothers in the Navy. Pete is stationed in San Diego, and Carl is a midshipman first class at the Academy.”
“Impressive.”
“Yeah, the whole family is like that. We’ve got enough MacNeil cousins in various branches of the service to start our own war. We get together for a wedding, and it looks like a Memorial Day celebration.”
Miss Pawlowski laughed at that, and Alex again admired her pretty smile.
The plane captain was waiting patiently to sign off on the walk-around inspection, so Alex gestured to the boarding ladder then helped Miss Pawlowski up. Once again his attention was grabbed as he watched her ascend above him, and in his imagination the baggy flight suit was gone, replaced by...well, nothing. He snapped back to himself only when she began letting herself down into the back seat of the cockpit. He shook his head to clear it and said to the guy at his elbow, speaking just under the deck noises, “How pathetic is it when a limey in a zoombag can fire a man’s afterburners?”
The plane captain chuckled. “To each his own, sir.”
Alex laughed, then climbed up and let himself down into the front seat to begin the cockpit checks. The plane captain climbed up behind him to secure Miss Pawlowski in the seat and help her with her helmet.
Finally Alex snapped on his face mask and said over the com, “All right, back there. Can you hear me?”
Her voice came immediately. “Yes.” The plane captain finished with her and retreated down the ladder; there were thuds as it was folded up and stowed under the wing’s leading edge extension. Alex warned her to rig her fingers in, flipped the switch to lower the canopy, and heard the woman continue. “Nice view from up here. I can’t see you, though.”
“Lucky you. Are you comfortable? We’re about fifteen hundred miles out; we’ll be in the air more than an hour.” He began punching the instrument panel keypad, entering navigation data. “Hope you brought a book to read.”
“Fifteen hundred miles an hour? Your girl is fast.”
That brought a smile. “Well, closer to about a thousand. Maybe less on this trip if we dawdle. Hour and a half in the air. probably, give or take.”
“Okay. I’m comfortable. More or less.”
“Good.”
“They certainly didn’t overdo the seat cushion back here.”
“No wasted space. See that thing sticking up between your thighs? Don’t touch it.”
“Will I go blind, then?”
Alex hee-heed into his mask. “That’s the ejector seat pull ring. You’re not supposed to be able to eject us, but fooling with it is a bad idea on principle. And especially, see all those fun-looking buttons and knobs back there?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t touch any of them.”
“Right.”
“Not even if something frightens you and you think you want to control something.”
“Did I mention I rather enjoyed the training they made me take for this trip?”
“Right.”
Alex fired up the engines, and his pulse picked up with that mild surge of adrenaline that always came before a catapult shot. Taking off from a carrier was the Navy’s E-ride, and no matter how many times he did it, there was a charge difficult to describe. Maybe because he knew, no matter how many times he accomplished it, there was always the chance of SNAFU and him ending up dead. The vibration of the plane trembling to take off shook his bones. “Okay, ma’am, get ready to pucker.” He signaled his readiness to the shooter.
“I beg your—”
The aircraft took a slight dip that felt like a lunge, and Alex’s body pressed into his seat at more than three G’s as the catapult hauled the twelve-ton aircraft down the length of the flight deck. Zero to 150 miles per hour in under three seconds, and suddenly there was no ship beneath them. Wings caught the air, and another dip then rising, the Atlantic Ocean zooming past beneath them even as it fell away. Throttles forward, stick eased back, and the jet climbing, Alex chuckled to hear Miss Pawlowski behind him exclaim to herself, “Good God!”
Then, on command of the controller, he took his heading toward Lossiemouth and sang off-key, “...and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye!”
* * *
The next hour was boring, not just by comparison but by any standard. In between silences, Miss Pawlowski occasionally asked questions about the instrumentation before her.
“May I ask what t
hat thing is in front of you, that looks like a hologram?”
Forgetting she couldn’t see him, Alex nodded at the HUD and replied, “Heads Up Display. It tells me stuff I need to know without making me scan the instrument panel.”
“It looks like something Luke Skywalker would have. What sort of information does it give you?”
“I could tell you, ma’am, but then I’d have to kill you.” She chuckled, and he wished he could see her.
For most of the trip she was quiet. Alex sometimes forgot she was back there as he carried out the routine tasks of the flight, and at other times he suspected she’d fallen asleep. After about an hour and a quarter in the air, they came to the western coast of England and their course veered slightly as they began to slow and descend through a clear sky. In only a few minutes they were over Scotland, and they approached a cluster of civilization Alex knew was Glasgow, on their way to Lossiemouth Air Base on the northeast coast. The mountains below were green, looking like crumpled florist paper dotted with brown peaks and blue lakes glistening in the sunshine. To the left the ocean shone like silver, and islands in the distance lay in it like a herd of enormous whales breaking surface.
Alex began to think about getting something to eat once they were on the ground and squared away with the authorities on the subject of armament, and idly wondered whether Miss Pawlowski might consider joining him for some lunch. He opened his mouth to inquire.
But then he shut it as all the electronic displays on his instrument panel went blank. The master caution light blinked on instead.
He grunted. “Crap.” He pushed the resets, but nothing happened. Quickly he checked his backup systems, and they were still functioning. He’d have to fly the plane by analog. Yet another pain in the ass thing to take care of on the ground. He glanced at his airspeed indicator as an odd shudder passed through the airframe.
“What’s that?” Miss Pawlowski’s voice was tinged with alarm.
Alex looked forward, through the blank HUD, and what he saw made his blood freeze. It looked like a hole in the sky, lined with tire. For a second he thought they were flying into the ball of a mushroom cloud, and against all reason it seemed the thing was looking at them with flaming, red eyes as deep as the abyss. Then they were in it. A hard thud shook the plane, and he figured an engine was gone. Still alive, they blew out the other side into a gray cloud, with the artificial horizon wobbling hard. That stabilized, but the compass was still going nuts. Flat spin. Warning lights flashed all over the instrument panel as systems went south. Both engines were dead, and to starboard he saw a reflection of fire from the clouds through which they were spinning. He punched the fire extinguishers, but they did nothing.
“Ffffffuck.” His heart thudded wildly in his ears. He knew he had bare seconds to decide what to do, and the presence of a passenger shaved those seconds even shorter. The ailerons weren’t moving, the stick frozen in his hand. The rudder pedals were stiff, also unmoving. His plane was going down, and his only choice was to punch out. One more heartbeat, and he called to his passenger, “Eject! Eject! Eject!” He yanked the ejection pull ring between his thighs, and the canopy blew off.
Chill wind engulfed him, battered and slammed him about. The rear seat went with a hard thud, then his own. The cold, Scottish wind whipped into every exposed part of him, and he was free-falling, spinning, tumbling end over end, spinning through cold clouds.
Clouds?
Attention was required elsewhere as he flew through mist. For one alarmed, disoriented moment he feared his parachute had malfunctioned or that this was a fog bank and he was about to smack into a mountain. But once the chute had deployed, his cockpit seat fallen away, and he knew he would probably live, he looked around in hopes of seeing far enough to control where he would land. He prepared to cut his shroud lines in case of plopping into a lake or the ocean, and hoped Miss Pawlowski was as prepared. Still all he could see were clouds, but after a moment he descended through to clear air. It was overcast, solid as far as he could see, and cold as a witch’s tit. Odd, for only a moment ago the day had been utterly clear. Now he looked for his passenger and spotted her chute not far, just below. She’d made it out okay, and he could see she was conscious and looking around.
Only then did he let the anger come, and he loosed a string of oaths and vulgarisms at full voice. His plane was gone, a trail of black smoke making a line from the cloud ceiling toward a big bay the other side of a range of hills. His heart sank to his boots as he thought of his father and the ragging he was going to take for the rest of his life. Dad was never going to let him live this down. The admiral had never lost a plane, let alone on a routine flight like this. Not that the old man would ever have admitted to taking any routine flights.
What the hell had happened? There was no fire in the sky now. No mushroom cloud and no evidence of one below. Alex had a brief, panicky moment as he wondered whether it had been a hallucination and he’d just trashed a very expensive piece of government hardware for nothing.
But, no. The engine had flamed. The trail of smoke in the air above was dissipating, but it was there. Something had happened to the plane; it was junk before he’d hung up the “For Sale” sign.
He looked down. They’d descended too far to see Glasgow any more, and the landscape below was remarkably empty of anything but green mountains and blue water. Trees. Lots and lots of trees. He looked for signs of habitation, but saw nothing. No roads. No houses. Just his luck not only to lose his plane but also to have to walk all day to a town after bailing. Crap.
The rest of the way down he kept track of Miss Pawlowski’s chute. God knew how much control she had over the thing, but Alex noted she was headed for a pasture so he encouraged his own chute in that direction. They landed seconds apart, and he hurried to release himself from the harness so he could check to see if she was all right.
Her canopy wanted to take off and drag her away, and he ran to help her release it so she could regain her feet. She took his hand and he helped her up.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
She removed her helmet and mae west and nodded, but he could see she was pale and shaken. Her hair tie was gone, and her dark hair flew every which way as she struggled to bring it under control. Alex pressed his mouth shut as he freed her from the parachute harness, and he could feel his ears turning red.
He said, “I don’t know what happened.”
“It was a gigantic fire.”
“You saw it, too?”
She nodded again, and looked up. “But it’s gone now.”
Alex now turned, looking for a hint of which way to walk, and removing his helmet. “Did you see any buildings or roads on the way down?” He reached into a pocket of his flight suit for the two-way survival radio and set his helmet on the ground at his feet.
“No. I thought we were just short of Glasgow; where are we really? There’s nothing here.”
He turned to peer at her. “We are just short of Glasgow.”
“Not possible. We must have passed it and gone into the Highlands.” She looked around, and grimaced. “Except that these hills aren’t high enough for us to have gone that far. This makes no sense.”
Alex turned a complete circle. “I don’t see any sign of habitation. They do have roads in Scotland, don’t they?”
“Last time I was here they did.” A smile came and she shrugged. “You never can tell with the Scots, though. Maybe they’re staging another rising and they’ve dismantled all the roads.” A wobbly chuckle, then she added, “And everything else as well.”
That made him chuckle. “You live here, don’t you?”
She looked around and sighed. “No, I live in London; I’m only here for the assignment. But I’ve been here a number of times. While we were in the air I thought I could tell where we were. We came in over the West March and crossed Galloway I think. I thought we were flying over the Garnock River. That would be it over there.” She pointed down the slope toward a narrow river. “But if
that’s the Garnock, then there should be a road beside it. And train tracks as well. And houses, and shopping centers, and schools. So that can’t be the Garnock. We must have come much farther than we thought.”
Alex turned on the radio and keyed it to inform anyone listening that he was in need of assistance. But in return he received only static. Rather lazy, weak static. He hoped the battery wasn’t about to crap out on him. Another try, and still nothing. He tried another channel. Nada. Now he wished Miss Pawlowski had been issued a survival vest so there would be another radio. He stared at the piece of junk again, frustration rising, and tried it all once more. Nothing.
“Nuts.” He looked around some more, then discerned a thin line of gray smoke coming from the depths of forest not far away. Smoke could mean anything, but there was a good chance it might be somebody burning something and that meant the presence of someone who might have a clue where they were. He returned the radio to his pocket. “Come on.” Leaving the parachutes and helmets where they lay, he led the way, and she followed across the heavily tufted pasture.
Alex found a dim track into the woods, and began to smell the wood smoke. Easy enough to locate, for the track led straight to it. No road, not even stepping stones, but there was a clear enough dirt trail.
They came upon a small thatched house, and Alex had a weird frisson up his back as he flashed on Hansel and Gretel coming upon the witch’s cottage. Bare-branched vines grew up all over it, and the thatching was dark with mold in spots. Miss Pawlowski stopped in her tracks, and Alex held up to find out what was the matter.
“That’s got to be the worst hovel I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
He nodded. “Roger that.”
She peered at him. “You can’t possibly know what that means in English.”
Alex frowned, then replied, “That’s okay, so long as you know what it means in American.” He pondered the house a moment, and said. “It looks like it’s made of dirt.”
“Peat. I saw a house like this once, but it was a museum and had a car park and walkways outside. This place is uninhabitable, but looks lived in nevertheless.”