CARRIER 10: ARSENAL By: Keith Douglass

to the carrier! We’re being illuminated by ” The two aircraft were

separated by barely fifty feet when he saw the missile.

Too low, too slow! I can’t maneuver, I’ve got no airspeed.

There’s no choice. Thor reached for the ejection seat handle.

“Striker, punch out. Now!” As his fingers closed around the yellow

and black ejection bar, the tanker disintegrated into a fiery,

expanding ball. Metal shrapnel tore into his Hornet as he yanked down

on the bar.

A massive force slammed into his ass. Thor blacked out milliseconds

later as he cleared the shattered canopy.

Monday, 24 June 0600 Local (+5 GMT) 50 Miles North of Cuba I’m

drowning. Thor’s body realized it before he was fully conscious. He

emerged from a warm, dark unconsciousness to the feel of water searing

his throat, the taste of salt filling his senses. Instinctively, he

began flailing his arms and legs, pushing himself toward the surface

twenty feet above. The same survival instinct clamped his mouth shut

and made his lungs strive to extract every last molecule of oxygen from

the air still trapped inside.

Hours later, it seemed, he broke the surface. He drew in a deep,

shuddering gasp, as he only then started to realize how close he’d come

to buying it.

With sudden clarity, the details of the accident came flooding back.

The tanker, jinking violently to avoid a missile. His own response,

the hard diving turn of his Hornet, the water glistening below, looking

soft and inviting. He remembered the flameout vaguely, just enough to

wonder how he’d managed to pull the ejection seat before the massive G

forces had drained the blood from his brain and thrown him into

oxygen-starved unconsciousness.

The life jacket. Why wasn’t it inflated? Thor swore, coughing up

seawater. He quickened the rhythm with which his feet beat at the

water as he felt for the manual inflation tube. There it was, on the

left side of the life jacket. He screwed the retaining valve apart,

put his lips around the hard plastic tube, and blew.

Immediately, he felt the swell of expanding plastic around him. With

each breath, the life jacket started contributing to his buoyancy

rather than weighing him down. Finally, when it was fully inflated, he

turned his attention back to his surroundings. Sea state three, maybe

four, with whitecapped waves obscuring his line of sight. He caught a

glimpse of an unnatural fluorescent yellow fifty, maybe seventy-five

feet away, and started stroking doggedly toward it. It bobbed into

view, then disappeared behind the growing swells. The wind was in his

face, blowing spray and wavelets up his nose.

From the summit of the next wave, he caught sight of it again. If

anything, it was farther away than it had been when he’d started

swimming toward it. At this rate, there was no way he could get to

it.

He paused, treading water, the full impact of his situation starting to

sink in.

The rough water around him was blood temperature, and survival time

without slipping into hypothermia was almost unlimited. But warm water

brought hazards of its own, the ones that downed aviators feared more

than almost anything else. This part of the ocean was host to a wide

variety of sharks, all of which were more at home in the water than

Thor. Their senses of smell and their acoustic ranging abilities

rivaled that of any submarine.

He touched his face with a hand, then held the limb in front of him.

Thin streaks of blood trickled down from his fingertips to his

wrists.

Thor groaned. Even more than the rhythmic motion of a panicked

swimmer, blood attracted sharks. The scent traveled for miles,

enticing every natural predator with the prospect of an easy meal.

Wounded prey the sharks would know it immediately.

Despite his years of training, panic crowded the back of his throat.

He forced it down, concentrating on remembering countless survival

lectures and ample practice in open ocean.

Thor stripped off his flight suit, knotted the legs, and flung the

garment over his head while holding the legs to inflate the rest of it

with air. He tied the neck portion shut, along with the arms. The