He knew what that meant. The Commander of the Air Wing, CAG himself, had directed him to depart station and return to CAP.
“Stand by, Banger,” he replied.
He might as well have said “Fuck off, Banger,” since that’s what he really meant. He didn’t become a fighter pilot to tuck his tail and run, but he was a guest pilot and didn’t want to rock the boat either. If he pissed off CAG, his commanding officer back at the US Navy Fighter Weapons School in Fallon would get an earful. And that meant he would get an earful. That combination usually didn’t bode well for future career aspirations.
Dammit.
He keyed the microphone to acknowledge the order but stopped himself when the eight-by-twenty-inch PCD flickered in front of him. It lasted less than half a second before returning to normal, but he felt his face flush. He had more hours in the F-35C than almost any other pilot in the Navy, and nothing that unnerving had ever happened to him before. His skin prickling with anxiety, he wondered if it was the first indication of an impending electrical failure — the absolute last thing he wanted to deal with at night over the water.
“Banger,” the controller replied.
Colt again keyed the microphone to let the controller know he intended to comply when the portal on the right side of the PCD shuffled through multiple pages on its own. He reached up to navigate back to the air-to-surface radar page just as the adjacent sub-portal maximized and replaced his flight controls display with an air-to-surface weapons page.
“What the hell is going on?”
He glanced over his left shoulder as he passed abeam the cruiser and cut across its bow, still bewildered by the mysterious lights circling it. He wanted to stay and provide whatever support he could to the tin can sailors, but the electrical anomalies were starting to worry him.
Again, he tried replying to the Hawkeye controller, but his words caught in his throat when the jet suddenly overbanked, almost as if rolling in to begin a bombing run. He tried countering the roll by slamming against the sidestick, but it continued until he was inverted and hanging in his straps.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…
As his nose fell through the horizon, he abandoned his attempt to reverse the roll and added left pressure instead. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. But his wings remained level with the greasy side up and shiny side down.
Ten degrees, he thought, watching his nose track lower into a dive.
Colt stared through his visor at the ship racing up at him, hardly noticing the glowing halos around the orbs shrinking.
Twenty degrees.
He yanked his throttle to idle, trying everything he could think of to slow his closure with the water. But the engine refused to respond, and his airspeed ticked upward rapidly. The gnawing fear he felt just under the surface threatened to erupt into full-blown panic, and he stabbed at buttons and switches, seemingly at random, hoping to stumble upon a solution. Nothing in his training had prepared him for this, and his efforts seemed futile.
Thirty degrees.
Suddenly, the jet rolled upright but continued diving directly at the Mobile Bay. The whoop-whoop of his radar altimeter warned him that he was racing through five thousand feet and only seconds from impacting the ship, or, if he was lucky, the black abyss of the Pacific Ocean. He pulled harder on the sidestick, wishing the JSF had a physical connection to the flight controls he could muscle into submission.
Four thousand feet.
“Come on!”
Colt dug his forearm into the armrest and tried to increase his leverage on the immobile stick. Sweat poured from underneath his helmet and down the front of his face and stung his eyes. He blinked it away and ignored the aching in his forearm as he stared in horror at the increasing airspeed and decreasing altitude.
Three thousand feet.
He took his hand off the throttle and positioned it between his legs, wondering at what point he would decide to abandon his attempt to save the jet in favor of saving himself. Over his thousands of hours at the controls of a Navy fighter, he had never considered pulling the ejection handle. Not once.
Two thousand feet.
The fingers of his left hand wrapped around the knurled black-and-yellow ejection handle, but his right wasn’t willing to give in and continued pulling back on the sidestick to try to level off before it was too late.
“PULL UP… PULL UP…”
The Ground Collision Avoidance System aural warning and flashing red X’s across his displays shook him free from his paralysis. He took his hand off the stick and mated it with the one already on the ejection handle, prepared to do what he never thought he would. He pressed his helmet back against the headrest and braced himself for the ejection, only partially aware that his PCD had flickered again.
This can’t be happening…
As Colt tensed his shoulders and prepared to pull the handle, the engine wound down to flight idle, and he felt the G-forces increase as his nose began slowly tracking up to the invisible horizon. He hesitated, knowing the envelope for ejection was shrinking. He needed to either commit to making a last-ditch effort to save the jet or get out. Indecision was a killer, and it was time to shit or get off the pot.
One thousand feet.
He took his hands off the ejection handle and snatched at the sidestick, overriding the G-limiter to increase the pull and stop his descent before it was too late. His vision narrowed to the size of a soda straw that was filled almost entirely with the guided-missile cruiser.
“PULL UP… PULL UP…”
He wanted to scream at the jet but grunted instead as his narrow tunnel of vision disappeared. The last thing he saw was the ship’s superstructure and main mast reaching up to knock him from the sky.
3
Beth fought against her instinct to dive away from the kamikaze jet, but in the end, the overpowering sense of self-preservation prevailed. In a flurry of panic, she flung herself to the deck and collided with several of her sailors, cursing under her breath at the audacity of the pilot to imperil her crew. Her heart raced as she waited for the collision, but as the seconds ticked by and the sound of the jet faded into the distance, she jumped to her feet full of piss and vinegar.
“Who the fuck does that guy think he is?” she roared.
Master Chief Ivy rose next to her and gripped her arm gently. “Ma’am, are you okay?”
“I want his wings!” She ripped her arm free, livid at the jet jockey. “Get me their CAG! I’ll have his ass for this stunt!”
“Ma’am!” the Officer of the Deck shouted again.
Still fuming, she spun toward the window and looked up in time to see one of the glowing orbs disappear. Her racing heart slowed, and she leaned forward into the glass to look at another, just as it too disappeared in the fog. One by one, the lights extinguished until darkness again ensconced the ship.
“All stop!”
“All stop, aye, ma’am,” the lee helmsman replied, standing up the throttles to silence the cruiser’s motors.
Beth spun away from the window and darted through the door onto the open-air bridge wing. She looked up into the sky, barely able to make out a few of the brighter stars through the thick fog, but the orbs that had harassed them for the last half hour were notably absent.
She unclipped the radio from her belt and brought it to her mouth. “TAO, Captain. What’s the air picture?”