Pirate

Chapter Thirty-two

The Indian Ocean

HAWKE HAD HAD HIS FIGHTER PILOT’S BREAKFAST—TWO ASPIRIN, a cup of coffee, and a puke—and headed for his airplane. Engines spooling up. Green jackets, purple jackets, yellow jackets, the color-coded crewmen ranging over the broad flight deck. The swarm of F/A18 Super Hornets, just arrived from the Nimitz, loaded and lethal, still, looking prematurely antiquated by the presence of the sleek, sculpted, single-seat F-35 in their hive.

And, too, there were the young aviators gawking lovingly at his plane. Kids who never ever wanted to do a damn thing in this world but fly airplanes. See if they had the stuff, ace.

Turn inside the other guy, turn your damn plane inside out if you had to, pulling nine or ten g’s and close as billy-be-damned to a suicidal red-out, all the blood rushing from your brain to your extremities. Get on some faceless boy’s six, unleash a Sidewinder and blow his punk ass out of the sky.

Yeah. Rain death and destruction down on invisible strangers and then fly home to a warm bunk on a big boat with a few thousand other guys. Get drunk and fight with your fists and sleep it off in the brig. Shed friends, shed wives, shed family. Even shed a few tears maybe when it was all over, when even the great shooting match in the sky was finally over.

All for what, hotshot? Hawke thought.

Honor? Danger? Death? Glory?

Who the hell knew?

It was a stupid question, anyway, Hawke told himself as he reached forward to adjust his suddenly squawking radio. Because the only pilots who would ever really know the one, true answer were dead.

“That really you down there, Hawkeye?” Alex heard a familiar voice say in his headset.

“Roger, sir, it’s me all right,” Hawke replied, tightening his harness. Girding my loins, he thought, and smiled.

“Well, I’ll be damned, it shore as hell is him! Look at this, boys, Captain Hawke’s flying himself a real bona-fide airplane this time!”

It was the Lincoln’s new air boss. A crusty old bird named Joe Daly. Lately arrived from the Kennedy, where the American jocks called him the Iron Duke. Hawke recognized Daly’s droll twang from his own brief sojourn aboard the American carrier Big John. Alex had caused a bit of consternation on board when he’d landed his little seaplane on the carrier three years ago. This was at a critical moment during what he’d come to call his personal Cuban crisis. Irritation was more like it. For some reason, he and the Iron Duke just hadn’t clicked. Checking his fuel, he heard a crackle in his phones and the Duke was back.

“Last time I saw you, Hawkeye, you were flying that little toy airplane of yours. Built it yourself out of tinfoil and rubber bands. Took you four or five passes to get that dang Tinkertoy down on my deck. What’d you call that thing?”

“Kittyhawke, sir. Finest airplane in the sky.”

“You’re bleeping nuts, boy. Get your ass off my deck.”

Hawke laughed. He followed the taxi director’s hand signals and moved the plane the last few feet into the catapult shuttle of cat number 1. Flaps and slats to takeoff, he merely sat and watched. A green-jacketed crewman instantly knelt on the deck and attached the towbar connecting his nose gear to the shuttle in the slot. Get ready for the cat-shot.

“It was actually only two passes, as I recall, sir,” Hawke said, craning his head around for one last look at the Lincoln. “Third time’s the charm. I see you got yourself a new boat.”

“Yeah, well, the cream rises to the top in this man’s navy, Hawkeye. You sure you know how to fly that damn thing?”

“We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.” Hawke noticed that the hand on the control stick was shaking a bit. Adrenaline. Had to be. C’mon, boys, hook me up. He wasn’t scared of the monster, he told himself. He was just excited about what a carrier launch would be like in this thing. Right. He was just shaking a little because he was ready to light the candle.

C’mon, Momma, now light the candle ’cause you know your poppa is too hot to handle…

“Okay, Hawkeye, you are number two for launch,” the Iron Duke said in his phones. “You, uh, you might want to let that Super Hornet there in front of you get airborne before you push any unfamiliar buttons. Sound good to you?”

“Aye, aye, sir, sounds good to me,” Hawke said, grinning from ear to ear. Single seat. Single engine. Supersonic.

Nowhere to go but up.

But there was a problem with the aircraft in front of him. Hawke forced himself to sit tight in his cockpit and wait for the tugs to pull the disabled fighter off the cat and put him in its place. The process seemed to take from here to eternity.

“Hawkeye, you are number one to go,” the Iron Duke said after a few long minutes.

“Roger. Number one to go. Onward and upward, sir.”

The jet blast deflector rose up from the deck behind him.

His hand went to the throttles. Oil pressure and hydraulics okay. He waggled the stick and checked the movement of the horizontal stabilizers. He could see the “shooter,” the catapult officer down in the little domed control pod that protruded just above the deck. He was getting the cat ready. Clouds of white steam were rising from the slot beneath Hawke’s airplane.

The shooter was monitoring the pressure building up in the cat cylinders. The combined pent-up force of the steam behind the catapult shuttle and the enormous thrust of his Rolls-Royce–built engine was about to hurl him into the sky. It was definitely time to fly.

Hawke wound it up, gave the salute, and waited for the launch.

One heartbeat, two heartbeats later, he felt the thunk as the shooter eased the shuttle into position with the hydraulic piston. He shoved the throttle forward and the big engine came up nicely: rpm, exhaust gas temp, fuel flow. Looks good. The cat fired. The big plane shuddered like some living thing and started to go.

Then…nothing.

He was moving down the deck all right, but there was no acceleration. Christ! He pulled the power and stood on the brakes. Somehow, he had to shut it down. Where the hell was that bloody computer when he really needed it? It was supposed to anticipate his every need. Surely it must have seen this nightmare coming!

Two seconds later, his heart pounding, he found himself teetering over the leading edge of the flight deck. The air boss was saying something very calm and soothing in his earphones but the big fighter was rocking right on the edge with every deep rolling wave, every sickening movement of the ship. He reached over to blow the canopy. He had to get the hell out, now, while he was still alive. Too late to eject? Maybe not, if—

“Stay in the cockpit, Hawkeye,” the air boss said, as if reading his thoughts. “We are going to hitch you to a tug—we, uh—”

“Uh, roger. She’s rocking and rolling pretty badly out here. You might want to…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know…shit…I’ve got several crew trying to hold your tail down now, sir. We need to, uh, need to change your aircraft’s center of gravity until we’ve got you safely hooked up to the tug.”

“Well, that’s a real good idea but—”

“Goddamnit! Stay in the cockpit!”

“Roger. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Almost got you hooked up, Hawkeye. Holy shit. Gimme a second here and—”

“Hey—bad—watch out for—”

A huge swell rocked the ship.

Over he went, the aircraft falling toward the water below.

As it fell, the F-35 rolled sideways. Hawke could now see the ship’s massive bow plowing through the water. He didn’t know which was worse…seeing the water coming up at him…or seeing the knife-edge of the carrier bow slicing through the water toward him.

Bloody hell. He should have ejected. Now he’d be strapped in and run over by the bloody ship. He felt the gorge rise in his throat. He hit the water. Hard. And saw the terrifying sight of the towering bow slicing toward his tiny aircraft. He was directly in its path.

He didn’t even have time to close his eyes.

He knew he was dead as soon as he heard the terrible sound, an awful snap. The ship’s bow severed his airplane, broke it in two. Only he wasn’t dead. He was tumbling end over end, slamming into something just above him. The bottom of the carrier. He felt like he was in a jeep going a hundred miles an hour on a washboard road.

But he was still alive. He remained sealed inside his cockpit module. It seemed intact. The bow must have hit the plane just aft of him, just forward of his wings. The water was so clear! He could see all of the carrier’s bottom as he was bounced and bobbed along. He could see and feel every bob and hit every time he slammed up against the ship’s massive bottom. Every time he hit, big chunks of his cockpit’s Plexiglas canopy were gouged out by the barnacles on the carrier’s hull.

But still it held.

Then his world flipped violently upside-down and his seat rocketed forward. He was slammed into the Plexiglas and he was sure he was going right through the canopy, going to shoot right out of the jet. Somehow, his oxygen mask got shoved aside. Shards from something cut his face, sheeting it in blood. His vision blurred. But miraculously the canopy held. His mind raced, clawing at survival. Training and temperament shifted his mind into disaster reflex, his brain trying to figure out what was happening and what to do about it. Total time compression. What seemed like a minute was a second.

The bolt that held his ejection seat to the floor had failed. That was it. That’s why, when his nose went down, his seat shot along the railing and his helmet and seatback had almost broken through the canopy. At that moment, the nose was jerked upward by unseen forces and the seat slid back down the railing to the floor. Good. Much better. He could swivel his head now. And his neck wasn’t broken.

He was thinking then that he might just make it out of this bitched-up mess alive. That feeling was short-lived. Terror struck him again when a truly horrifying sound filled his world.

The screws.

A loud, deep-pitched whine, rapidly growing closer. The sound was deafening. Overpowering.

Oh, shit.

He could see them vaguely now, hanging down below the hull, way back at the stern. There were four of them and they were coming up fast, the cruel blades all but invisible inside whirling clouds, a maelstrom of white water.

He was aware of fear then. The real thing. It was a fear that he had never even guessed at. He supposed it was just that bloody high-pitched noise triggering all those mental pictures of a particularly bad way to go. Whatever it was, it was working. Inside the hurtling cockpit, Alex Hawke was well and truly afraid.

There were four massive bronze propellers, each of them over twenty feet across and weighing thirty tons. Four whirling, knifeedged blades, biting and slicing the water. Each screw was mounted to a long shaft, which was connected to a steam turbine powered by one of two nuclear reactors. The ship’s propulsion system generated a half-million horsepower. Each screw was now turning at over two thousand rpm.

Surging toward those four meat-grinders, Hawke had at last discovered the true meaning of fear. It didn’t creep up and touch your neck with icy fingers. It exploded inside your brain. And made everything numb. He was shivering violently. He clenched his jaw shut to stop his teeth from chattering.

Alex Hawke’s battered capsule was bouncing along, slicing off spiky chunks of barnacle, heading straight toward them. He could see more clearly how he was going to die now. He visualized being chewed up and spat out in countless pieces even now as he felt a sudden surge of speed bringing him closer and closer to the churning propellers.

If the noise was intolerable, the view was terrifying. The water amidships was still amazingly clear and as he got closer to the stern he could see the huge billowing clouds of minuscule bubbles, could see the four vortexes the giant screws created, four huge vacuums sucking him aft at a tremendous rate of speed.

And he was still accelerating.

He wanted his eyes open now for this last bit. Wanted to see everything. He wanted to stare down the fear as he sped toward his very certain death. He could see the wicked curved blades of each screw in perfect detail as he hurtled headlong into the vortex.

He forced his eyes to stay wide open.

He was in the relentless grip of the outboard screw. It was happening. He was entering the roiling pipeline to death. He started spinning now, now that he was in the tube. The vibration and the noise blotted out everything but the looming knife-edges of the whirling blades. The screw seemed to have slowed a fraction, but perhaps it was just his imagination. All in slow motion now.

He strained against the harness, trying to see it coming. The gaps between the blades were much larger from this angle. But not wide enough with the pod at this forty-five-degree attitude. What if he could get weight suddenly forward? Hope surged. He might even slip through if he could somehow get his nose down—wait—the seat pin was out—the weight of the ejection seat slamming forward again just might be enough to—he grabbed the handles on either side of the cockpit and yanked himself forward with as much force as he could generate.

It was one last utterly desperate gamble and he might just kill himself doing it. But if the nose was angling downward as he passed between two of the blades, perhaps gravity and hydrodynamics would be on his side. He was no physicist, no expert on wave mechanics, but what the bloody hell, he—

The seat shot ahead on the rails and he slammed once more into the leading edge of the canopy. His helmet took the brunt of the impact again. He heard a loud pop, the sound of the helmet splitting or maybe the canopy. No water, though. Just fresh sheets of warm blood that drenched his face. He couldn’t see. He thought he felt the nose dip a fraction before merciful blackness descended and surrounded him.

Disoriented and rolling violently in the screw’s wake, he regained consciousness and suddenly saw the orange sun bouncing on the horizon.

Somehow, he was still alive.

He wiped some blood from his eyes and noticed that he was bobbing violently on the ocean’s surface. The forces tossing him about came from the backwash of the Lincoln’s four giant meat grinders. He could see the looming stern of the carrier moving away from him. His heart was pounding against his ribs with such force he felt the bloody organ might rip away from his chest wall. He knew he had to do something to get out of the capsule but he couldn’t control his shaking hands. He tried several times to blow the canopy but he just didn’t seem to have the necessary coordination to do it. Until his third try.

He blew the canopy.

And realized very quickly he’d made a very serious mistake. The cockpit capsule immediately began flooding with water. Seawater rose instantly above his knees. It kept rising, slopping around, quickly filling the cockpit. Since the nose had the most air to displace, the capsule nosed over. It submerged and immediately began to sink. He was going straight down fast. He tugged furiously at his harness, clawed at it, shredding his fingertips.

At about thirty or forty feet beneath the surface, his fingers ripped at the buckles one last time and he managed to wrench himself free. He wriggled out of the harness, kicked away from what little remained of his lost aircraft, and started clawing his way to the surface.

Breaking the water, he heard a loud thumping noise above and saw a big Sea King helicopter blotting out the sky overhead. One rescue swimmer, already in the water, was paddling furiously toward him. Another stood poised in the open hatch. The downdraft was making the waves worse and Hawke went under, swallowing a pint or two of seawater. He felt the crewman yanking upward on his flight suit. A few seconds later, he was sputtering on the surface again, only to be blindsided by another crashing wave.

“Christ, sir,” the swimmer shouted at him above the chopper’s roar, somehow looping a line over his head and getting it down over his shoulders. “We almost lost you when she swamped!”

“Yeah, I know!”

“Are you crazy, sir? Why the hell did you blow your canopy?”

Hawke spat out the last saltwater he could summon up from his burning pipes, then wrenched his head around and smiled. His savior was just a kid, couldn’t be much more than twenty years old. The cinch tightened over Hawke’s chest and he was jerked upward, slowly at first, toward the hovering Sea King.

“Never blow the canopy!” the kid shouted again.

“Next time this happens,” Hawke shouted down to the kid, “I’ll try to remember not to do that!”