Phoenix Sub Zero

Galvin tumbled for a moment, his body parting company with the ejection seat. A few moments later his parachute bloomed overhead, the harness tightening over his crotch as the chute inflated. When he opened his eyes, he saw Giraffe’s parachute open a few hundred feet below. Off toward the horizon he saw, then heard the explosion as the second F-14 lost control and crashed into the sea — from the absence of parachutes, Vinny and Sully had obviously succumbed to the Womb Concept. And then he heard something that at first confused, then enraged him. Jet engines. High overhead, a Firestar fighter, the same bastard they’d been escorting to Cyprus, turned and flew off to the west, as if nothing had happened.

Galvin cursed as the water came up and splashed into his nose as he landed. As he released his parachute, he began to hope he wasn’t bleeding and inviting a shark attack.

* * *

Ahmed felt the pod detach; he counted off the seconds waiting for it to release its energy, one eye on his central console.

For a moment he wondered if the pulse would send the Firestar in a spin to crash into the sea. At that thought the central console blinked out, the display shrinking to the size of a pencil dot, then fading altogether, the dying panel evidence of the death of the onboard computer. Ahmed waited for his aircraft to shut down but the engines purred on, their control circuits still functional. He pulled up slightly on the stick, to see if the control surfaces were still working, and the Firestar began to climb. It was only then that he noticed the Tomcats were no longer with him. He continued climbing, aware that colliding with one of the F-14s would kill him as swiftly as a missile would, and saw the jet that had been his port wingman spiral in a dive toward the sea, vibrating and oscillating as it descended. As he watched, the canopy blew off and two ejection seats flew out. The F-14 banked violently and went broadside into the airflow. The slipstream blew the wings off, broke the plane in half and ignited the fuel in an orange ball of fire that rapidly dispersed in a black cloud. Two parachutes bloomed. Ahmed leveled the jet and flew a circle, trying to find the other F-14. He searched for it, finally seeing it only as a splash and a brief. explosion as it crashed into the sea. There was no sign of the pilots of the second jet.

Ahmed glanced at the sun and turned the aircraft to the west and flew on toward the rendezvous point, hoping the submarine captain had waited for them. He had lost perhaps only five minutes, but sea captains were an impatient lot, an independent lot, and sometimes resented or even ignored their orders.

The computer systems were no longer functional, now that the console screen had died—that had remained electronic, and so had perished, but the navigation backup system remained up. It was an old-fashioned set of numbers engraved on plastic wheels and rotated by the nav backup system’s calculator from inputs from the geosynchronous navigation satellite over the Mediterranean. By the display readout on the console there was not much more to go to get to the rendezvous point.

Soon he could see the tall fin of the submarine Hegira, the ship stopped, waiting for them. Ahmed circled the ship, now at only a few hundred meters altitude, then climbed into the sky in preparation to abandon the Firestar.

“Khalib? Are you awake?”

“I am …” Sihoud sounded drugged, barely conscious.

Perhaps that was better, Ahmed thought. He had worried that the trauma of ejecting from the Firestar would be too much for the general, but there was nothing else to do.

Ahmed climbed, uncertain of his altitude, flying the aircraft by the seat of his pants now that the computer was gone. He throttled the jet down, losing his forward speed. He had to get the aircraft to be just at stall-point before ejection to lessen the force of the slipstream.

“General, in a few moments we will be ejecting. If you can, try to keep your elbows tucked in tight to your chest and your feet on the footrest. I’ll be ejecting the seat for you. All you have to do is ride the parachute down.”