With air he immediately felt calmer, much more in control. Inhaling deeply, he hauled himself toward the blue light. Grabbing the sides of the door, he looked up.
A silvery mirror heaved far above. Golden rays searched down, playing over the tail boom, a ragged stump of shredded rotor. The turbine hung loose, stripped of sheathing, blasted nearly free of the airframe.
Then he halted, uncertain. A micro bottle like this wouldn’t hold much. Enough for nine or ten breaths.
But maybe he had enough time to get someone else out.
Inside the fuselage once again, he pushed and twisted like a moray in a coral head through the narrow opening leading into the cockpit.
Both pilots were still strapped in, slumped as if knocked unconscious. Curved chunks of the shattered canopy lay in their laps. The water was above their heads, around which blue-black tendrils of blood curled. Dan yanked at their restraints, then felt for the releases. A clack echoed through the water and Differey floated up. Dan shoved him toward the gap where the canopy had been, but the copilot snagged on some kind of comm wire. It took several more seconds to locate where it plugged in and disconnect it. He grabbed the lanyard on Differey’s life jacket and yanked it. The CO2 cartridge popped and he braced his back and kicked him through the windshield with both feet as the vest began inflating.
He got his hands on Wilker next. He was feeling around the pilot’s upper chest for the release, his own torso twisted awkwardly in the constricted space, when he realized each succeeding breath was coming harder.
The bailout was running empty. Time to bail, if he wanted to make it to the surface himself. Back to the exit door, or out through the windshield? Floating bodies one way. Jagged Perspex to snag on and hang him up, the other.
Wilker opened his eyes suddenly. Blood seeped from his nose and cuts on his face. One hand groped up, across his vest. The other locked into Lenson’s, gripping it with enormous force.
Dan saw what was wrong. The instrument panel had buckled onto Wilker’s legs, pinning him.
A sudden vertigo, a slippage around them. The glimmering surface receded and dimmed. The wrecked, inverted fuselage was rolling over again as it sank away. Dizzied, disoriented, Dan could no longer tell which way led up. He fought grimly with the pilot’s webbing. But it wouldn’t release. Wilker was struggling too, one hand clawing at his vest, the other trying, now, to push Dan away.
Colors flashed at the edge of his vision. Blackness flooded in behind them.
A lavender beam of light.
A double-looped π of smoke, scribed with incredible beauty against blue sea.
His newborn daughter’s blue-eyed gaze, meeting his for the first time.
He was walking beneath a shaded arbor. White flowers decorated it, hearted with bright yellow, and lush green waxy-looking leaves among which fat bees slowly buzzed. The pavement was of small, richly patterned tile in complex geometric designs of carmine and jade and cream. The path ahead led to a turning, where the arbor’s shadow lay deeper, the bees’ buzzing louder, the scent of the white flowers with their golden hearts overpoweringly stronger. With each step he neared that turning. But he couldn’t see what lay past it.
Still struggling with the belt, pinned into the slowly rotating fuselage, he sank away helplessly into the black void of the sea.
21
In the darkness, noise. The stenches of fuel and seawater and close-cramped bodies, diarrhea and vomit and bilgewater. Sweat and bean-farts and sea-stink. Wet metal weeps overhead. The clink and scrape of equipment. The deafening roar of engines. Vibration, through the thin metal that surrounds them. The rush and clatter of spray. Beneath it all, the ragged breathing of burdened men and women.
The sickening, endless heave of a massive object in an ocean swell.
Night. Hector Ramos hunches crammed in the hull of an amphibious assault vehicle, an amtrac, elbow to elbow with twenty-four other marines. They’ve been here for seven hours now, boarding after a heavy evening meal as the machine squatted in the well of an air-cushion landing craft. The plan was to launch at midnight. But something delayed that, then delayed it again. Now they have to shit, to piss, but there’s nowhere to go and no room even to move.
“It can’t be long to sunrise,” someone mutters.
A tide of grumbling rises. “What’s taking so fucking long?”
“We’re gonna be hitting the beach at fucking daylight.”
“They gotta know we’re coming,” Troy Whipkey mutters, spooned next to Hector.
There’s barely room to inflate their lungs. The red interior light flickers as gear sways on the bulkheads. Someone nearby retches again. “They gotta see us on radar,” Troy adds. “This is gonna be a fucking slaughter.”
Hector’s afraid he’s right. But no point complaining. There’s no way not to go now, so he’s eager to get it over with. To find out what he’s made of, what going to war is like.
He tries not to think of the chickens, how they suddenly went quiet as they were pulled through the hole in the wall.
Hector wears baggy digital-printed trop camo utilities, with a laser ID tape and heavy boots. His old-style dog tag is backed by a hastily modified pet chip under the skin of his neck. He wears no watch, carries no radio, since his helmet will tell him the time and link him to the intraplatoon net. He wears knee and elbow pads and black tactical gloves and heavy body armor with reactive inserts.
The new lightweight integrated combat helmet has night vision and a BattleGlass interface in the goggles that feeds him data and ranges wherever he looks. Hector hugs the M240 machine gun with laser optic and a hundred rounds of linked 7.62. His secondary weapon is a pistol in a leg holster. He carries a rigger belt, notebook, pen, gas mask, and a folding multitool. On his plate carrier he has thirty more rounds of pistol ammunition, a fragmentation grenade, water-purification tablets, a compass, an LED flashlight, a green chemlight, a midazolam/atropine autoinjector, and earplugs. In the assault pack is an issue Camelbak with a hose clipped to his shoulder strap, two hundred more rounds of linked 7.62, the machine-gun-cleaning kit, a 500-ml intravenous bag with starter kit, two MREs, a poncho and liner, another undershirt, spare batteries, a pistol-cleaning kit, the personal hygiene kit the Marines refer to as “snivel gear,” and a pair of heavy leather gloves.
In his main pack he carries half a modular sleeping bag, two undershirts, two pair of socks, a knit cap, two more canteens of water, two more MREs, and a sleeping pad. Also one 60mm mortar round, a combat lifesaving kit, and range cards for the Pig.
Hector wonders how far he’ll be able to hump 135 pounds of clothing, gear, weapons, food, water, and ammo when he weighs only 148 pounds. The marines have heard about powered metal exoskeletons. But they’ve never seen one, and even if they exist, the Corps will be the last to get them. The beast they’re riding in, that they’re powering along three feet above the water in, was built forty years before. It creaks and shrieks around them as its metal skin flexes.
It’s only thin aluminum, after all.
The brigade had been held aboard ship for weeks at sea. The officers and SNCOs went to sand-table rehearsals, but the grunts just got rumors. Until two days before, when they gathered in the hangar bay for a mass briefing by the colonel.
The operation was named Mandible.
Their target was an island.