He no longer heard Yolanda's voice, and Jenna had said all that could be said. Had he believed in God, Troy would have prayed. Had he believed in heaven, he would have expected soon to face Hal Coughlin beyond some pearly gate — or in some fiery dungeon.
Suddenly, it all went black.
The grayness did not so much fade to black but went suddenly and abruptly black.
Above him, Troy was aware of a light.
Was this heaven?
No. It was the moon.
Shakuru had been tossed free of the clouds. He could see their writhing gray forms some distance away, but for the moment he was in clear air. In the moonlight, he could see Shakuru's wings, still gyrating, but still intact.
Had he been a believer, Troy would have thanked God, first for being free of the clouds, if not of the wind, but mostly he would have thanked God for Dr. Elisa Meyers, who had designed Shakuru to stand up to what he had been going through.
Above him, Troy could see the stars in the black sky, but in the blackness below him, he saw the same.
Was this the reflection of the stars on the placid sea? No. You can't see the reflection of stars on the ocean—
certainly not from this altitude.
Boats? Were they boats?
There sure were a lot of boats. There were at least a dozen lights down there. Maybe he had a chance of being rescued?
Troy felt the sensation of Shakuru sinking lower, of the lights below growing closer.
He felt the sensation of forward momentum that you get as an aircraft descends closer to the earth.
He came closer and closer to the cluster of lights and passed over them. He looked back and watched them recede into the distance.
Beneath him now was only darkness.
The discomfort of feeling like he had been swathed in plastic wrap and placed in a microwave oven was so great that it took Troy a moment to realize that he was alive when he should not have been.
He felt a light, cool breeze on his cheek, but the rest of his body felt like it was going to explode.
He opened his eyes to a blurry, hazy world and reached up to rub the sweat and crud from them with his hands.
Gloved hands met the cracked Plexiglas of his helmet visor.
Got to get this crap off.
He tugged and struggled at the connection rings that held his gloves to his space suit with an airtight seal. The left one was easier once he had freed his right hand from its glove.
Next came the helmet. After two minutes of frantic pushing and pulling, he got it off. The feel of the cool, clear air on his sweat-soaked head and face was the most wonderful sensation imaginable.
At last, he was able to rub his eyes and massage them back to functional reality.
Troy looked at the helmet. It was badly dented and the visor was cracked, but the damned thing had saved his life. First by absorbing the impact of whatever made the dent, and second, by getting cracked. Had that not happened, Troy would have suffocated within his airtight suit.
He looked around.
Where in the hell was he?
Last night, in the darkness, he had imagined many scenarios, all involving a hard landing at sea — but he found himself on land. All around him was vegetation. He had come down in a jungle — but where was the jungle? It must be an island somewhere in the ocean. Maybe he had landed in Hawaii? Maybe Waikiki Beach was just over the hill?
The wings of Shakuru were snarled in limbs and foliage, but they had not splintered into a lumberyard of wreckage like those of Helios. Shakuru would never fly again, but the airframe had held up far better than Troy might have expected.
He tossed the helmet from the cockpit and heard it hit the ground some twenty feet below. Unsnapping his harness, he attempted to stand but felt excruciating pain in his leg.
As he had waited for the morphine in his first-aid kit to take effect, Troy had mapped out his plan for getting out of the aircraft and descending twenty feet to the ground on one leg.
As the morphine finally did take effect, his predicament grew more and more amusing. It was a silly irony, Troy thought, to be sitting here in an aircraft calibrated to fly as high as two hundred thousand feet, an aircraft emblazoned with the HAWX insignia, with its HA an acronym for High Altitude — yet here he was, planning the nearly impossible challenge of descending the equivalent of two flights of stairs.
Somehow, he had made it. He had made it by grabbing at a large limb and by using his football player's upper-body strength to shift himself from limb to limb like a very-slow-moving chimpanzee. He certainly could not have done this without the numbness brought to his body by the narcotic.
The last thing he remembered before he passed out was how good it felt to wriggle out of his suit and to lie on the cool ground wearing only his inner suit.
The first thing he noticed when he woke up was that the pain in his leg was back.
The second thing he noticed when he woke up was the dirty faces of a half dozen kids. They were darkcomplected and had black hair. Troy assumed they were Hawaiians.
"Aloha, kids," he said. "Could one of you guys go ask your mom if I could borrow a cell phone?"
They looked at one another as though they hadn't understood him. Two of the girls giggled, pointing to the bulge between his legs. His inner suit, which was essentially like old-fashioned long underwear, left little to the imagination.
"Cell phone?" Troy persisted. "Do you guys understand? They speak English in Hawaii… right?"
The kids spoke to him eagerly, but in a language he did not recognize.
"Where the hell am I?" Troy asked, knowing that there would be no answer. "Who are you? How far did I drift in that storm last night?"
Chapter 42
The kids had eventually brought adults, but no cell phone.
The adults did, however, fashion a stretcher from a blanket and a couple of long poles, and they had taken Troy from the Shakuru crash site to their village. They had fed him, and an old man had examined Troy's leg. It was broken in two places, but the old man had secured it to splints and had given Troy some bitter-tasting tea to drink. This had seemed to ease the pain.
They were a poor people, but they were generous. They gave him food, and they gave him a shirt and an old pair of jeans to wear. Their village was little more than a camp on a hillside. The buildings were open to the air, albeit with mosquito netting, but the nights were cool, the days pleasant. With a makeshift crutch, he was at least able to access the latrine.
From the labels on the few items of packaged food that he saw, Troy surmised that he was somewhere in Latin America, but that these people spoke an incomprehensible indigenous language rather than Spanish. The storm, borne by the strong prevailing wind over the Pacific, had blown him all the way back to the continent.
Because of its low radar-observable characteristics, Shakuru had disappeared from the scopes, and a search for the aircraft over the Pacific had long since been abandoned. As Raymond Harris had hoped, Troy and Shakuru had essentially disappeared without a trace.
Except for his being immobile, Troy could not have imagined disappearing without a trace into a more idyllic place. He was the object of great curiosity for the children, and the people treated him as a sort of celebrity. He was probably the most unusual character that they had seen fall into their jungle. They appreciated his helping out a little with food preparation, and they had taken happily to his making little gadgets for the kids out of bits of wood and wire.