The Ocean Between Us

“Yeah,” said Josh. “But if you’re lucky, you don’t need to be good.”

“Be lucky on someone else’s watch.”

The ship was down there in the dark somewhere, too distant to see yet. He checked the horizon and the climb indicator to make sure he was level. Altitude eight thousand feet. Speed four-hundred-thirty knots. He made a series of other checks around the cockpit. He touched the Velcro fastening of a pocket on his G-suit—that was where he kept Lauren’s ring, for luck. Anything loose in the cockpit turned into a runaway missile during landing.

The approach controller gave him his new final bearing. The Prowler thundered down through three thousand feet. Josh’s gaze swept the instrument panel. According to the TACAN, the ship was steaming west-northwest at thirty knots. He came to idle, and the aircraft hung for a moment in an eerie, vaguely magical silence. Then he broke hard left to level the Prowler downwind of the ship. It was too dark to see the wake, but his instruments did the work, showing him lined up with the angled deck.

A couple of minutes passed. “Dirty up,” said the approach controller.

Josh pulled back on the throttle, lowered the handle, moved a lever down, hanging out his flaps, slats, gear and droops. Air screamed over the ailerons. Then he released the tail hook and scanned the panel again before calling in his landing checklist.

He was on full alert now, breathing hard, aware of everything with a strange clarity of sensation. He could feel the nylon webbing of the straps binding him to the ejection seat, the spongy pads of his earpieces, the jockstrap rim of the mask over his nose and mouth. He darted his gaze in a set pattern, his own way of checking the instrument readings.

“Prowler six-two-three, at five miles, lock on, call your needles.”

Josh compared his readings to the controller’s. His hands twitched over the stick and throttles. The tiny toy aircraft on the gyro listed to the right. He made a correction. “Boards out,” he said. “Landing check complete.” Adrenaline roared through him. He ought to be flying better. It was a bad time for doubts to poke at him, but he couldn’t help it.

He looked past the instrument panel. All he saw of the carrier was a misty yellow light. Not a damned thing more. He was three-quarters of a mile out and had to shift from scanning blessedly precise, crystal-clear instruments in the cockpit to focusing on the glowing meatball far below, the centerline of the deck and the angle of attack. It was like putting on the glasses of someone who was nearly blind.

“You’re okay. Easy as passing a camel through the eye of a needle. Make your ball call.”

“Six-two-three Prowler, roger ball, state five point five Lamont,” he said, telling the landing signal officer he’d seen the vertical light indicating the descent path, and that his aircraft had 5,500 pounds of fuel.

In order to land on the moving deck, he had to strictly control his glideslope, speed and centerline. The floating city of five thousand inhabitants, lit like a child’s Lite-Brite in the black sea, looked impossibly small. The fact that it was steaming away from him at thirty knots only made the ride more interesting.

Sweat tracked down between his shoulder blades, and he wondered if experienced pilots ever got used to this. Too high and he’d miss the wire and bolt off into the night again with barely enough fuel to make another pass. The slightest tip to one side risked a collision with a jet parked on the deck. A drift to the other side meant an unscheduled swim and the loss of a fifty-two-million-dollar aircraft. The LSO might wave him off two seconds before landing. If he came in too low, he’d hit the ramp and turn the plane and its crew into a fireball.

This is so cool, he thought.

His legs twitched and trembled uncontrollably on the rudder pedals. His lineup was good, or so he thought until the expressionless voice of the LSO came in through his headset. “You’re low, six-two-three. Power.”

Josh shoved his hand forward, overcompensating. The uncooperative nose of the aircraft reminded him that he was a rookie with fewer than fifty traps under his belt, not even a dozen at night.

“Take it easy,” said the soothing voice in his ear.

Then the emergency signal sounded. The LSO’s next order was not so soothing: “Red deck! Red deck! Power!” The vertical wave-off lights lit like a Christmas tree.

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