The last litter vanished inside the helo, and the LSO beckoned. Bending into the rotor blast, the two senior officers trotted toward the aircraft. Hwang climbed in ahead of Lenson. Dan accepted a cranial and an inflatable vest from the crewman, and hauled himself up and in as the door/boarding steps rose to seal and lock behind him.
The litters covered the bare aluminum deck. A crewman was attaching IV bags to the overhead. Mute in the engine noise, he pointed Dan and Hwang to fold-down seats behind the cockpit. Strafer and the copilot, a rangy smart-ass named “Storm” Differey, waved. Wilker pointed up, hoisted his eyebrows. Dan nodded. Go, he mouthed back.
The engine rose to a whining thunder. Red Hawk lifted, fast.
Dan leaned forward and twirled his finger. Wilker nodded, and the aircraft banked away to the right. Dan struggled against the seat belt to peer down through a small, only partially transparent window. From here the cruiser looked hollowed out as a rotten tooth. Her whole midships smoked and flamed. A slick of guttering fuel surrounded her like blood spilling from a mortal wound. The floating corpse he’d glimpsed from the bridge was nowhere in sight.
He pressed his fist to his mouth, fighting nausea. Not just at the damage, but at having to leave her. It felt like deserting a dying child. Like… fleeing. Had that been contempt, in the carefully noncommital expressions of the flight deck crew? They couldn’t really think that, could they? Not if he came back for them. Not if he kept fighting, just from a different ship.
Wilker pointed… northeast?… and Dan nodded, sitting back. He buried his face in his hands, trying to muffle a choked, agonized sob, maybe more of a muted scream, as Hwang, beside him, looked away.
The helo leveled and dropped. They sped over the azure sea perhaps two hundred feet up. Dan blotted his eyes and tried to straighten. His neck was pure agony, and his throat kept threatening to close. He glanced around for oxygen, just in case, but saw only the slim cylinder of a bailout bottle clamped to the bulkhead.
Hwang bent to his ear. Shouted, “What is your intention now, Admiral?”
“Shift flag to Hampton Roads. Get someone alongside Savo, either put those fires out or take the crew aboard. Then get the hell out of Dodge.”
The Korean looked puzzled at the reference to Dodge, but he sat back. Dan wanted to ask how much farther to the other cruiser, but forced himself to relax too. They’d be there soon enough.
The helicopter swayed. Probably hitting an air current.
Then suddenly yawed violently, flinging them against the webbing. The litters slid scraping across the deck. Several bangs or thuds went off in quick succession. The sea wheeled up until they were looking straight down on it through the side window. No, not just a thermal. Dan grabbed for a handhold, but missed. Then the bank reversed, hauling over hard to the right. The litters halted their slide, reversed it, and cascaded toward him. Someone screamed as the IV lines went taut, then tore free to dangle, gleaming needles dancing on plastic tubing.
Through the frosted window he glimpsed a loop of white smoke in the air. He couldn’t see where it had come from, only the exhaust trail drawn against blue. A bright point of pure fire, describing a double-looped figure rather like a π.
The point of fire emerged from the last descending stroke near the water. Then rose again. Pointing, now, up at them.
A terrific bang and flash overhead deafened and blinded him. For a few seconds, whirling and falling in a jumbled, chaotic blur, he howled mindlessly, arms flung wide, but finding nothing to grip. Then another heavy shock jolted the fuselage.
Dazed, he found himself upside down, being rocked violently while hanging from the web restraints. The seat seemed to have collapsed around his ass. The ringing in his ears subsided, to the absence of engine noise. The silence swelled, then burst like a bubble.
He registered the chuckle and gurgle of water pouring in, and thumps and thrashings from the cockpit. He pried reluctant eyes open to dim light and a jumble of patients on litters dumped facedown. One of the wounded, conscious, was staring right at him. Even as Dan blinked, water surged to cover the man’s mouth, nose, hair. He struggled as a bloody froth rose, bubbles bursting on the still-rising water.
Dan scrabbled across his own waist, looking for the release. The straps fell away, and so did he, dropping out of the collapsed seat frame headfirst into a tumble of water and bodies on the overhead of the upside-down cabin. He rolled to his feet, legs splashing in knee-deep water, and tried to right the upended litters. Jammed together, they refused to budge, even when he braced his boots and yanked.
Okay, maybe he couldn’t help these men. Even if he could get them out, they were too badly wounded to swim. That left Hwang… Wilker… the flight crewman… Differey.
The window through which he’d glimpsed whatever had hit them bulged inward and split, releasing a gelid flood of sea. Water was flooding in from forward, too. The fuselage angled down, surging the sea to his waist. He wheeled in the near dark, and staggered back as Hwang fell out of his seat, nearly into Dan’s arms. They both lost their footing and collapsed back into the water.
Darkness, bubbles, his flailing hands hitting things floating about…
He came back up choking and spitting, to an even darker interior. Were they fucking sinking already? In the dunker egress training at Miramar, they’d been told that though most helicopters inverted after crashing, they’d have at least a few seconds before an SH-60 lost enough air to submerge. He could still hear the instructor’s voice. Locate a point of reference. Wait for violent motion to stop. Don’t inflate your vest until you’ve egressed the aircraft.
They were inverted, check. But already nose down, and water was pouring in fast through the shattered windows and windscreen. Both pilots sat slumped, helmeted heads lolling. Hwang was shouting something in Korean. Dan pointed to the pilots and splashed aft, groping for the crewman. His boots found something soft. He hauled it to the surface. Hwang’s fucking luggage. He dropped it and groped again, plunging his face into the cold sea. Caught cloth, and dragged it up.
The crewman’s head lolled. Puckered holes showed where something had penetrated one temple. Dan shook him, but got no response. His fingers, exploring the wound, came away pink with diluted blood.
The water was at his chin. Rising faster than ever. One more quick suck of breath, and it was over his head.
Underwater. Wavery blue light. A long, gangly form, silhouetted from behind. Hwang was kicking at the exit door. It resisted, then toppled open slowly. The liaison started to pull himself out, then turned back and reached in for something. A black object, with a strap.
Planting his boots in a yielding mass, hauling the limp weight of the crewman behind him, Dan pushed them both toward the light. But when he tried to lift his foot again, he couldn’t. His boot had plunged through the metal mesh of a litter. He tried to shake it free, then twist it out, but it wouldn’t move. And the litter, and what was on it, were too heavy to drag.
Discard it, then… jackknifing at the waist, he pulled the velcro tab loose and unzipped one boot, then the other. Finally free, he tried for the door again.
But he was out of breath now. The blue light seemed dimmer. Pressure leaned on his eardrums. The copter was sinking faster. He swallowed to buy a few more seconds and swam upward, lips reaching for an airspace to breathe from. But his skull boonged into aluminum without encountering one.
Everything was going black when his scrabbling fingers recognized a slim cylinder. He jerked it from its mounting. A regulator dangled on a stub of hose. He twisted the knurled knob and jammed the mouthpiece of the emergency escape bottle between his teeth. Cleared it, and tried a breath.