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“Yeah,” said Josh. “But if you’re lucky, you don’t need to be good.”
“Be lucky on someone else’s watch.”
The ship was down there in the dark somewhere, too distant to see yet. He checked the horizon and the climb indicator to make sure he was level. Altitude eight thousand feet. Speed four-hundred-thirty knots. He made a series of other checks around the cockpit. He touched the Velcro fastening of a pocket on his G-suit—that was where he kept Lauren’s ring, for luck. Anything loose in the cockpit turned into a runaway missile during landing.
The approach controller gave him his new final bearing. The Prowler thundered down through three thousand feet. Josh’s gaze swept the instrument panel. According to the TACAN, the ship was steaming west-northwest at thirty knots. He came to idle, and the aircraft hung for a moment in an eerie, vaguely magical silence. Then he broke hard left to level the Prowler downwind of the ship. It was too dark to see the wake, but his instruments did the work, showing him lined up with the angled deck.
A couple of minutes passed. “Dirty up,” said the approach controller.
Josh pulled back on the throttle, lowered the handle, moved a lever down, hanging out his flaps, slats, gear and droops. Air screamed over the ailerons. Then he released the tail hook and scanned the panel again before calling in his landing checklist.
He was on full alert now, breathing hard, aware of everything with a strange clarity of sensation. He could feel the nylon webbing of the straps binding him to the ejection seat, the spongy pads of his earpieces, the jockstrap rim of the mask over his nose and mouth. He darted his gaze in a set pattern, his own way of checking the instrument readings.
“Prowler six-two-three, at five miles, lock on, call your needles.”
Josh compared his readings to the controller’s. His hands twitched over the stick and throttles. The tiny toy aircraft on the gyro listed to the right. He made a correction. “Boards out,” he said. “Landing check complete.” Adrenaline roared through him. He ought to be flying better. It was a bad time for doubts to poke at him, but he couldn’t help it.
He looked past the instrument panel. All he saw of the carrier was a misty yellow light. Not a damned thing more. He was three-quarters of a mile out and had to shift from scanning blessedly precise, crystal-clear instruments in the cockpit to focusing on the glowing meatball far below, the centerline of the deck and the angle of attack. It was like putting on the glasses of someone who was nearly blind.
“You’re okay. Easy as passing a camel through the eye of a needle. Make your ball call.”
“Six-two-three Prowler, roger ball, state five point five Lamont,” he said, telling the landing signal officer he’d seen the vertical light indicating the descent path, and that his aircraft had 5,500 pounds of fuel.
In order to land on the moving deck, he had to strictly control his glideslope, speed and centerline. The floating city of five thousand inhabitants, lit like a child’s Lite-Brite in the black sea, looked impossibly small. The fact that it was steaming away from him at thirty knots only made the ride more interesting.
Sweat tracked down between his shoulder blades, and he wondered if experienced pilots ever got used to this. Too high and he’d miss the wire and bolt off into the night again with barely enough fuel to make another pass. The slightest tip to one side risked a collision with a jet parked on the deck. A drift to the other side meant an unscheduled swim and the loss of a fifty-two-million-dollar aircraft. The LSO might wave him off two seconds before landing. If he came in too low, he’d hit the ramp and turn the plane and its crew into a fireball.
This is so cool, he thought.
His legs twitched and trembled uncontrollably on the rudder pedals. His lineup was good, or so he thought until the expressionless voice of the LSO came in through his headset. “You’re low, six-two-three. Power.”
Josh shoved his hand forward, overcompensating. The uncooperative nose of the aircraft reminded him that he was a rookie with fewer than fifty traps under his belt, not even a dozen at night.
“Take it easy,” said the soothing voice in his ear.
Then the emergency signal sounded. The LSO’s next order was not so soothing: “Red deck! Red deck! Power!” The vertical wave-off lights lit like a Christmas tree.
Josh rammed the throttles hard to the stops to firewall the engine. A red deck was closed to incoming aircraft, even those that were seconds from landing. He cut away and climbed back into the night. The plane shuddered like a live beast.
“Watch the PIO, nugget.”
Pilot-induced oscillation. “Got it. Not everybody wants to be a Blue Angel.” Josh concentrated on the climb, breaking the landing pattern. The plane shifted from side to side. “She’s yawing,” he said, flicking a glance at the instrument panel.
“The computer will correct it,” said Hatch.
“What the hell happened down there?”
“Fouled deck. Wait for instructions.”
A fouled deck could mean any number of things—an aircraft mishap, equipment left on deck, maybe personnel in the landing zone. For now, Josh could only worry about resuming the landing pattern and monitoring the fuel.
“Check your lineup.”
Even as he followed orders, Josh could see the lights of the “angel,” the carrier’s rescue helicopter, hovering like a benevolent guardian over the ship. Then the helo dipped and swept into a pattern he’d never seen before. Rescuing someone?
“Quit with the PIO, already,” Hatch repeated. Then, to the tower, he said, “Got a bit of a problem, Mother. How about you send a rescue helo out our way, just in case this nugget can’t get us down?”
“It’s not me,” Josh said. “Jesus, this plane is bent.” He wasn’t being defensive. The computer wasn’t making the proper corrections. The Prowler yawed hard to the right as though bent over a giant knee. Josh had never felt anything quite like it. The aircraft was in an uncommanded, uncontrolled, oscillating, full-rudder deflection.
He raised the gear handle and the plane pitched back to the left. That’s it, then, he thought as he took himself out of the landing pattern again and ordered the lead jet in the new pattern to get away.
“Vertical speed indicator just took a dip,” Hatch reported. Josh already knew this. The VSI was part of the ECMO’s instrument scan, but Josh was the pilot. It was all his business.
A negative dip. That was ejection criteria. The broadcast of “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday” sounded surreal.
With the radio squawking Emergency, he tried three more cycles, one after another. “I can’t control the rudders,” he reported in a voice that was icily calm. They were still climbing, and every man in the cockpit understood why, though none would speak of it aloud. If they had to eject, they would need the altitude.
Fresh adrenaline burst through him. The drop in vertical speed was only part of the emergency. Any second the nose could pitch up or the aircraft could roll, and the decision would be taken away from him. They were a heartbeat away from an unscheduled carnival ride of ejection and parachute. They’d have a bird’s-eye view of a very expensive fireball.
Shit. The damned thing was still flying. He’d managed to climb to ten thousand feet. He wasn’t out of control. He had no control. He accelerated, hoping to get some more airspeed and altitude.
He could hear Hatch briefing the controller on the situation. Captain Bud Forster, the CAG LSO, came online again. In a few minutes, the whole battle group would know about the trouble.
The plane broke ten thousand feet, and the nose pitched up. Josh wrestled with it, but it kept bucking. He dampened the yaw by working the rudders opposite the cycles, but the aircraft kept canting on its own.
Nobody said what everyone was thinking: the jet couldn’t make a safe landing.
The ECMOs worked feverishly through checklists—rudder failure, control malfunctions, alternate approaches—hoping to find the magic bullet. “Nothing. There’s nothing applicable,” Newman concluded. “Wait here. We need to pull circuit breakers until we isolate the problem. Jeez, I do this in my basement when the dishwasher quits.”
When the first two were pulled, the yaw abated. “Keep going,” Josh ordered. The third one created no noticeable difference. When the fourth was pulled, the controls turned to mush. “Put it back!” Josh yelled. “Put it back!”
Too late. The nose pitched up wildly. I did this, thought Josh, fighting back with the controls. I’m the pilot, and I did this. The air-navigation computer was haywire. He tried feverishly to remember if he’d shut it off when he’d aborted the landing. Maybe the computer had engaged automatically and was overriding him. It didn’t matter now. The Prowler was completely out of control.
In the cockpit, they all knew it. Four pairs of gloved hands wrapped around four ejection handles. These were Advanced Concept Ejection Seats, 128 pounds apiece, each equipped with a twenty-one-pound rocket catapult. Success rate was better than ninety percent, but for some reason, Josh felt no reassurance.
He looked out at the ice-bright stars and wished he’d worn warmer clothes under his G-suit. At the same time, he was thinking and moving as fast as he could—faster than he’d ever imagined he could—but everything seemed to slow down. Time dilation. It was a concept he’d studied in advanced physics. Time in the moving system will be perceived by a stationary observer to be running slower….
He was a stationary observer; the Prowler was a moving system. The traveler measures his own proper time, since he is at the beginning and end of his trip interval.
In the shadowy cockpit, the glow from the instrument panel cast its eerie illumination over the faces of the crew as each man braced for disaster. They were all alone up here, yet they were not alone. Four lives, four families whose fate would be decided by a broken piece of metal hanging in midair.
Josh thought, Lauren. Only a minute ago he’d been confused about her. Now, with the same crystal clarity with which he could see the tumbling night sky, he knew exactly what he wanted. Lauren. The beginning and the end of his trip interval.
He took a deep, bracing breath. Then he gave the order he knew he had to give.
“Eject! Eject! Eject!”
CHAPTER 3
Whidbey Island, Washington
7:30 a.m.
Lauren Stanton woke up in the same state of mind she’d gone to sleep in—thinking of Josh. He had only been at sea for a few weeks, but it felt like forever.
She grabbed his pillow and hugged it, her eyes shut and her heart about to break. “Josh,” she whispered into the feathery depths. Maybe it was just her imagination, but she believed it still held his scent.
She of all people should know better than to fall for a Navy guy.
Groaning in protest, she swam to the surface of the covers and got out of bed. It was one of those perfect spring days on Puget Sound when winter seemed nothing more than a soggy, unpleasant memory. The sliding glass doors of the bedroom framed a view of the sapphire water and distant Cascades, the fiery pink of sunrise painting the vanilla ice-cream peak of Mount Baker.
She pulled on her robe, lingering at the window to watch a blue heron at the edges of the bank, lifting each foot and setting it down with great deliberation. In its beak it held a wisp of grass; it was nesting season.
She made the bed, which was a simple matter. She slept neatly, disturbing no more than a small portion of the covers. When Josh stayed over, the morning-after bed looked like a rummage sale at closing time—sheets ripped from their moorings, twisted and damp, pillows tossed willy-nilly. Josh made love and slept like he did everything else, with his whole self, with total abandon, his energy boundless and infectious.
Even through the ache of missing him, she couldn’t help feeling a warm spasm of remembered intimacy at the thought of their lovemaking. It was as though he had reached across the Pacific Ocean and caressed her.
“You’re a sick woman,” she muttered, heading into the bathroom. Josh’s toothbrush was still in the holder. He’d planted it there, as though staking a claim, the first time they made love in her bed. His absolute, unwavering self-assurance had both annoyed and thrilled her. “Just so you know,” he’d said. “I’ll be back.”
She dressed quickly for class—no shower for her until afterward—in black spandex shorts and a turquoise top. Then she checked her gym bag to make sure she had music, shoes, towel, water bottle. Everything in order. She had grown so cautious, so deliberate after Gil died. So excruciatingly neat and unobtrusive about everything she did, from sleeping without disturbing the covers to weighing the portion of organic granola she ate with yogurt every morning for breakfast. If Josh were here, he would tease her about it, threaten her with bacon and eggs, and she would start the day laughing at herself.
Ah, Josh. Whether he was in bed with her, on top of her, inside her or thousands of miles away, he dominated her life. He was the blazing sun to her moon. Even when she eclipsed him, moving in to cover his center, he was still so much bigger and brighter; he burned around the edges.
She put out fresh food for the stray cat who showed every sign of turning into a permanent resident. Then she did the breakfast dishes, such as they were—one bowl, one spoon, one juice glass—reflecting on how small her life seemed since Josh left. When he was here, breakfast tended to be an explosion of creativity and hilarity. He might carve through half a watermelon trying to make a model of a fighter plane, or use up a whole box of pancake mix, laughing at her misgivings about the calorie count.
As she wiped the kitchen counter, Lauren burst into tears.
This shouldn’t be happening to her. She’d finally gotten her life on track, her emotions under control after a three-year struggle with depression after Gil died. Now along came Josh, with his burning ambition, lofty dreams and his huge, insatiable appetite for everything in life—most especially her.
“Idiot,” she said, defiantly using two Kleenex to blot her cheeks. “Quit making everything into a tragedy.” She marched outside, filling her lungs with the special flavor of springtime on the island. A hint of raw salt air, new grass and the light, fragrant promise of budding lilacs.
Later it would rain, she knew. The forecast promised a change in the weather, and clouds were moving in on the morning sun.
She picked up her paper, shaking the dew off the cellophane bag, and waved to Mr. Carruthers, her across-the-street neighbor who came out to get his paper the same time she did each morning. To stare at her in her spandex, Josh had pointed out.
The night before he left, he’d asked her to marry him. It was all she thought about, consuming her like a giddy fever that kept her in its relentless grip. She hadn’t given him an answer to his proposal. The issue was not nearly as simple as she wished it could be.
He was not a man to settle for half measures. He wanted everything from her. She wasn’t sure she could live with his intensity, with his rocket-powered ambition. She didn’t know if his dreams could somehow mesh with her own.
In the wake of unbearable grief, she had fashioned a life for herself here. A small and tidy existence she happened to like very much. She had none of Josh’s sceneryeating hunger for adventure, for everything. She wondered why that was—because she couldn’t handle having her dreams come true, or because she was leery of wanting something too much? She couldn’t decide what scared her more, marrying Josh or losing him forever.
He was everything she wasn’t supposed to want, a Navy man who spent half his life at sea and the other half moving like a gypsy from place to place. He was a heartache waiting to happen.
The cheerful brrring of a bicycle bell sounded. She looked down the street to see Patricia Rivera peddling toward her. She was exactly what people meant when they said pregnant women bloomed. Patricia’s cheeks were flushed the color of a rose. Her slick dark hair shone. Her legs were ropy with muscle as she glided to the end of the driveway and squeezed the hand brakes. Even the bruise-colored starburst of varicose veins behind her knee looked as though it belonged there, every bit as appropriate as her protruding stomach.
Lauren held the plastic-wrapped paper away from her to let it drip on the ground. “You’re looking chipper this morning.”
Patricia smiled and smoothed a hand down her belly, draped in a polyester top that screamed Wal-Mart but only managed to play up her fragile beauty. “I have news.”
“Let me guess. You’re pregnant.” Lauren spoke lightly, but deep in a hidden place inside her, a terrible envy howled.
“Very funny.” Patricia opened the top of her water bottle and took a swig. “Congratulate me. It’s a boy. He was finally turned in the right direction during the ultrasound.”
The knife twisted. Still, Lauren found a smile of genuine happiness for her friend. “Congratulations, Patricia. That’s great.”
“Thanks.” Patricia put her water away. “The doctor says I can keep coming to fitness class so long as I take it slow. No restrictions other than common sense.”
Lauren congratulated her again and watched her friend ride away. Patricia had a husband she adored and a baby on the way. She looked like Catherine Zeta-Jones, but she was impossible to dislike. She was kind and bright, and she’d been one of Lauren’s favorite people since the day she’d walked into the fitness studio last fall. And she was not without her sadnesses, either. Her husband was half a world away on the same carrier as Josh, and she was bursting with the news about their baby.
Lauren looked down, startled to see that she held both hands lovingly on her stomach. She shook her head and went back inside. The phone rang as soon as she stepped into the kitchen.
She glanced at the clock over the stove. It was the middle of the night in Josh’s part of the world. She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Mrs. Stanton?” A vaguely familiar female voice used her married name, which she heard so seldom that the sound of it startled her.
“That’s me.”
“I have Dr. Hendler on the line for you.”
The receiver in her hand was suddenly drenched in sweat. It nearly slipped from her grasp. This was the call she had been awaiting with terrifying hope and dread.
She was aware of everything around her with razor-edged clarity: the pink-toothed profile of the mountains against the morning sky; the perfect flight of wheeling gulls patrolling the beach; the sound of radio music drifting from the bedroom.
“Yes?” she asked in a strange and distant voice she didn’t recognize.
“Your test results are back,” said the doctor.
She tried desperately to read his tone. Was it good news or bad? She stopped breathing. She wanted to stop the world. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid it’s not what we’d hoped for,” he said. Softly, gravely. “Lauren, I’m so sorry….”
CHAPTER 4
Whidbey Island, Washington
2:30 p.m.
Grace Bennett drove off the ferry from Seattle and merged onto the country highway that formed the long, crooked spine of Whidbey Island. Fat raindrops ran backward on the window, like tears blown sideways on a face pushed into the wind. It felt as though the storm was driving her home.
As she sped up the main road, the wind and rain gradually abated. By the time she pulled to the shoulder and paused to get the mail from the box, tentative slices of sunshine shone through the clouds. She turned into the driveway and sat in the car for a moment, gazing at her house. In all her years as a Navy wife, she’d lived in a lot of places, but this was the only one she’d ever loved. It was a little bungalow on a bluff with an arbor of old roses and a view of the Sound. Some would call it dated, tacky. But Grace didn’t care. It was hers.
She couldn’t believe she’d bought it without Steve. But lately, she’d done a lot of surprising things—and the person she surprised most of all was herself.
Especially today. With a pleasant shiver, she picked up her purse and the stack of mail from the seat beside her and slid out of the car. She ducked her head to avoid drops from the ancient cedar trees that arched over the drive and skirted puddles to keep from ruining her new shoes, then let herself in through the front gate. She had just bought the ensemble of expensive skirt and blazer, and a pair of kitten-heeled pumps. The only outfit that had cost her more was her wedding dress.
On the porch, she stopped to sift through the mail, finding an assortment of bills, letters to the kids from prospective colleges…the usual overabundance of junk mail.
In the past, she used to sift through the mail with fevered eagerness, looking for a familygram or precious letter from Steve. These days, no one sent letters anymore, just e-mail. What was gained in speed and frequency with the Internet came at the sacrifice of the cozy, ineffable intimacy of a handwritten letter.
