Even a few feet beneath the surface, the water was lightless because of the disturbed silt, as if the ice had closed over the Firefox as soon as it sank. The noise of the undercarriage moving down the steeply-sloping bed of the lake was magnified and distorted into a prolonged groan. The Firefox dragged him by the sleeve deeper beneath the water. His body banged against the metal of the nose as he bobbed and attempted to float. His body's buoyancy tugged at the trapped sleeve of his pressure-suit, turning him almost in a cartwheel, twisting him, slamming him down on his back against the fuselage, then scraping him along the nose of the aircraft.
His lungs seemed fuller. He knew he was beginning to drown. There seemed a simple solution, but he believed it was light-headedness that suggested the idea. He was trapped. He tried to reach his left arm with his right hand. The Firefox continued to roll, and he could not tell whether it was beginning to level out and slow down. He could not reach his trapped sleeve. Without purchase, he could not apply any force to the feeble grip of his right hand on the material of the suit. His hands were numb, anyway, fingers crooked like claws, frozen.
Weariness, and the knowledge that survival and escape had been snatched from him, curtailed his ability to think, to move, to even desire anything. His chest hurt with retained air. His head swirled like the dark water. Just as around him the disturbed mud drifted back towards the bed of the lake, his body sagged down to straddle the nose of the Firefox.
The napalm of his nightmare lit the scene. Freezing and numb though he was, his body still felt hot, burning. From within the bamboo cage in which he had been imprisoned, he witnessed his rescue; the attack upon the Viet-Cong detachment and their hidden village. He saw the little girl with the sadly-wise face running, and he saw her dissolve in the gout of napalm dropped near her. He saw all the others burn like matchsticks, like trees in a forest set alight. He felt himself burn. He was one of them — he was them…
The nightmare claimed him. He struggled against it, but his body seemed to have no conception of water and drowning, only of his recurrent dream, only of the napalm. The water around him seemed redly-lit by its flare. Every one of the gooks had burned, the little girl had burned. He had remained untouched physically, safe in his abandoned bamboo cage. Ever since, horror and guilt had caused him to burn, melt, dissolve with the Vietnamese; with the little girl, in her place…
His hand embraced his left thigh. He noticed the touch, the clawlike grip. The crablike scrabbling, the tugging at a press-studded flap. His mind was detached and separate from his right hand. His left hand was feelingless, somewhere above him, against the canopy of the cockpit. His lungs were bursting.
He could see only the red burning colour of the water as his right hand closed thumb and forefinger upon the flap on his thigh. Gant did not understand. The flap pulled slowly open like a hesitant mouth. He did not know what his right hand expected. He wanted, more than anything to empty his lungs, more even than to stop the nightmare because this time he was going to die inside it. His right hand closed on something and withdrew it from the pocket. It felt hard.
The little girl's body, right at the centre of the mass of golden-red fire, dissolved… he was on the point of opening his mouth to scream… and something detached itself — straw hat or head he had never known, had never dared to look — he wanted only to scream.
His right hand brought up the hard object, close to his face. His right hand needed the evidence, the use of his eyes. But his eyes did not work, dazzled by the light of the fiames. Where his hand was, where the object was, it was dark. Thin gleam — ? He could not focus. His head swirled. The flames lessened. His right hand continued to act, reaching forward, ahead of him into the place where the numbing, icy cold seemed to be coming from, where it had already swallowed his left hand, left arm. He tried to watch, to understand -
Empty your lungs, he told himself. Look -
See-
He saw the dinghy-knife trailing its safety cord which his right hand had withdrawn from its sheath, he saw it hack at his left hand, left arm, so that he wanted it to stop. Feeling returned to his left arm as it cringed in anticipation of a wound. Then the sleeve was torn, sliced open, and he expected blood but there was none and his arm drifted down towards him, to be clenched against his stomach, its torn sleeve freed from the canopy.
Feebly, he kicked with numb feet, drained and leaden legs. His face was uplifted, but everything seemed dark. He kicked again, leaving the napalm-fire behind him now, afraid at that moment that it was already too late, that he was blacking out and would open his mouth, let the bubbles dribble out as his body slackened…
He felt his boots scrabbling on the metal of the Firefox's nose, and pushed upwards. It was only a matter of feet, but in time it seemed endless, because there were gaps of inky, swirling black between his attempts to count…
One, one-two… black… two-two-two… black… one-two…
Black -
Grey -
Black -
Then light.
He roared as he expelled the air, felt his lungs painfully deflate, then draw in cold new air which hurt and made him cough. He swallowed water. His cold arms and legs wouldn't tread water. Breathe…
Inhale — hold — exhale… inhale — hold — exhale… sweeter now. The air tasted. It was sweet, cold, pure. His body hung on the surface of the water, exhausted, as if threatening to slip back beneath it. Life… jacket…
His hands fumbled on his chest, dabbling there uselessly, it seemed, for whole minutes.
Then the life-jacket inflated, bobbing him unresistingly onto his back, holding up his hanging, useless, numb legs, pushing his arms out into a crucifix, keeping his chin out of the icy water. He breathed air gently, savouring it, pushing at the water with gentle movements.
A long time later, it seemed, his feet dragged gratingly against the pebbles of the shore. He was almost sitting in the water. He tried to stand up, could not, fell on his side — the life-jacket turning his face to the grey sky at once — and then turning wearily onto all fours and crawled the last few feet to the steep, snow-covered bank.
And rested, shuddering with cold, hands and feet and knees still in the water, reminded of warmth and function by the sharp pebbles beneath them. The dinghy-knife was still in his right hand, sticking up out of the water.
When his hands began to pain him with their freezing numbness, and his feet were dead from the cold, he clambered upright, and stood, rocking with exhaustion, gauging the height of the steep bank of the lake and his ability to ascend it. He succeeded in climbing by dragging his body behind his arms up the slope, digging the dinghy-knife deep into the frozen soil and heaving against it, digging it in again further up, heaving his body up to its level. It took him ten minutes; the bank at that point was a steep slope perhaps twelve feet high. He lay, when he had inched over the lip of the slope to the bole of the first fir tree, exhausted, panting, his eyes hardly able to focus. For one thing alone he was thankful. He had left the napalm of his nightmare down there behind him, in the lake with the MiG-31.
Later, he ate chocolate. Later still, when feeling had returned to his hands, he was able to rub life into the rest of his body. The pressure-suit was stiffening as it slowly dried. Later, he inspected the area of water at the neck of the lake, realising that his panicky guess had been near the truth. The stream that acted as the lake's outlet was indeed now frozen. But it must have gone on draining the lake before it, too, froze. The draining water had left an airpocket which had kept the ice thin, dangerous.