It was over and he’d won. He could go home. A great whoosh of air escaped him, and tense pressure, pent up in every cavity of his body, drained from recesses deep within his muscles and joints as if he’d been holding his breath for days. His muscles ached, but his spirit soared. They’d won.
All that was left was landing this beast. He had to get Esther to the ground. It had been more than an hour since she was shot, and he wasn’t sure if she was still alive. The pressure from the extreme aerial maneuvering may well have caused her to bleed out or to suffer a multitude of other problems that the body can experience under the violence of uncontrolled G-forces. In the tight confines of the cockpit, he couldn’t look back to see her condition. He called out her name. No response. He had not expected a response, but it was worth a try.
A new alarm snatched his attention back to the front. It had a different pitch and tone than the alarms he had heard during the combat, an urgent high-pitched rhythmic buzz, like an eighty-decibel bumble bee warning him to stay away from the honey. On the panel, a light flashed above the gauge he had been ignoring. His fuel was about to run out.
He increased altitude, gaining more time to find a place to land. Ten seconds later, the engines coughed a sputtering roar, then the cockpit went strangely quiet but for the sound of wind rushing over the canopy and the wings.
“Man! Those gauges don’t give you a lot of time, do they? Leave it to the Russians to make such an efficient system.”
He flipped through options in the channels of his mind like the pages of a flight school textbook. Ejection was out of the question. Unable to control her body, Esther would not have a chance of surviving intact and would almost certainly be killed, either by the explosive exit from the aircraft, or from the momentum of the impact on landing. Unless he was willing to give up on her, he’d have to try to land.
Karl searched for a long, level spot at which he could attempt a crash landing. The plane was still moving along at nearly four hundred miles per hour and needed enough length to skid along the ground for a mile or more until the plane came to rest. In the distance, he spotted a long, straight, fairly smooth stretch. Of course, at this altitude, and the mostly dark morning shadows, he was probably missing some important details. But fate had dealt him no other choices. That was where he’d either land, or die.
He manually worked the controls to allow the plane to descend as slowly as possible, rather than just fall through the sky. He brought the craft down gradually. It took a massive effort to not gain any speed. The craft’s battery backup system assisted by maintaining the hydraulics for a short while after the engines had died, but how long that would continue, he didn’t know.
At fifty meters off the ground, he pulled on the increasingly stiff controls, extending the flaps until it felt like the plane would stop mid-air. The batteries put in their last bit of assistance, then gave up. Without power to pump hydraulic fluid through the craft, every movement took all of the strength he could muster. His fingers, biceps, shoulders, every muscle in his body strained like he was trying to curl a two-hundred-pound barbell being held down a five-hundred-pound sumo wrestler.
Through squinted eyes and gritting teeth, Karl lined the aircraft up on the smoothest path he could find in the crust of desert dirt and rock. He lowered the silently drifting jet to the ground, using the final reserves of muscle power he had left to keep it under control.
“Hang on, Esther!” he shouted.
Holding his breath, he grunted the seconds to impact.
“Five, four, three, two, one...”
Pressing his body against the seat, legs locked against the forewall of the cockpit, he braced for impact. The massive plane slammed into the desert surface, grinding violently against rocks and sand, thrusting his body tight against the harness straps. Streaks of light and short tongues of flame showered up from the belly of the ship, igniting the blackness with Fourth of July sparklers. Inertial force threw it hundreds of meters, skidding along in a shower of sparks and bits of metal.
In the rapidly decreasing distance, a dark mass projected from the desert floor, looming larger, appearing to swell as he barreled towards it. He braced himself for a head-on collision. The principles of Murphy’s Law were being proven by every action he had been thrown into since leaving Phoenix. If it could go wrong, it did. His ship crashing, his new friends all dying, and now, just as he succeeds in stopping a nuclear holocaust, and maybe saving the girl’s life, they’re about to be smashed to bits by the only rock in an otherwise smooth landscape. Liam had promised at the beginning that all would go well, and Karl hoped that luck of the Irish would hold out. Of course, Liam was dead.
He closed his eyes and prepared to kiss the monolith now towering over the MiG. He tensed for the impact. Instead of the loud crunch of exploding metal and glass and flesh, the ship lurched sickeningly, throwing the craft forward, then dropping, like being smothered with a thick feather pillow.
Silence.
He opened his eyes, surprised they were still in his head. In the pale shafts of the dawn’s first gray strokes, feathery wisps of smoke trailed from the partially entombed underbelly of the twenty-meter-long war machine. The remaining exposed hull of the jet jutted from the barren ground as if it had once been a living thing that had grown from the spot, or an ancient ruin from a lost civilization long gone in the desert wind. Archaeologists digging here a thousand years in the future might one day perceive it to be an unholy monument to the celebration of bloodthirsty violence planted here by an ancient race of war gods.
Karl shook the dizziness out of his head and raised the canopy. It stuck a couple inches up so that he had to unbuckle his harness and force the hinge with a painful grunt. As it creaked open, supported on the heavy pressurized pistons near the back, he leaped out onto the flat surface of the air intake, slipping and nearly falling off the wing. He regained his balance and frantically turned towards the rear seat.
“Please be alive,” he said, his voice croaking in a hoarse whisper.
He reached into the compartment and pressed two fingers against the side of Esther’s neck, her head still tightly secured to the back of the seat by his belt. As he searched desperately for a pulse, his own heart racing, he feared that it might be too late. The rhythmic pulse throbbed beneath his fingertips. She was alive! Her heart thumped a strong and steady beat. Her chest rose and fell with deep inhalations, nostrils flaring as the air rushed in. Blood smeared her clothes in wide brown stains, and dry brown flecks of it were spattered across her bruised face, but she was alive.
Karl unbuckled the restraining harness and the belt around her forehead. She slumped against the side of the cockpit, limp muscles offering no resistance to gravity. He slid his arms beneath her body and, with tender strength, lifted her out onto the wing. He laid her on the edge of the flat surface and rechecked her pulse and breathing, afraid that the movement may have damaged her in a new way. Her heart still kept to its task, but with the belt’s pressure released, it was noticeably weaker, threatening to plunge her into shock. Death was still knocking at her door.
“God help me keep her alive. Please God, I beg you, let her live.”
In a state of near-delirium, his own prayers sounded to him as if he were listening from outside his body, the most heartfelt honest supplication he had ever breathed. He had never been sure of his faith before. He had never been big on church, or reading the Bible. But he had always hoped that there was a God who heard such things. And now, from the depths of his soul, he cried out to that God.
“If you are out there, please, please, I beg you, let this woman live.”
Karl sat on his butt and slid down from the wing, landing with a thud four feet below. He quickly turned back and reached up to move Esther off the wing to a safer place underneath. He would need to protect her from the coming heat of the sun. He slid her body towards himself, pulling her closer to the edge.
A scuffling noise startled him. He pulled his arms out from under her and spun around, assuming a fighting stance. Exhausted and unarmed, he would still fight to the death to protect the girl. Be it wild animals or more Iranian soldiers or VEVAK, he was not going down easy.
“Freeze!” shouted a strong, clear voice. “Move and you’re dead!”
English. This shocked him. He stood in bewilderment for a moment, not moving, not responding, wondering if he was hallucinating. A cluster of approaching shadows looked like a gang of hideous beasts with large humped backs and fearsome-looking angular weapons.
“Put your hands on top of your head and get down on your knees!”
The English voice was firm, commanding, coming from a serious man with an American West Coast accent. A Farsi translation came immediately after the English voice this time.
The shadows continued to move towards him. They looked devilish, like Orcs that had emerged from some real-life Tolkien nightmare. Volcanoes and fire, and long-toothed, flesh-eating beasts flooded Karl’s imagination.
There were more words in English, but he didn’t understand them. They were followed by a rapid translation in Farsi, which he also didn’t understand. Karl put his hands on his head, barely keeping his feet beneath him, his knees ready to buckle.
As the speaker approached, Karl saw that these Orcs were not mythical demonic beasts. They were American military men. As the morning light broke over the horizon behind, he dimly made out a familiar emblem centered above the brim of the man’s floppy cap. An eagle standing atop the globe overlaying a ship’s anchor. The insignia of the United States Marines.
The blood drained from his upper body, leaving him with a tingling sensation that left him unable to concentrate. Flashes of light streaked across his vision. The voice of General Cliff spoke to him from the briefing room aboard the USS Belleau Wood.
“All right, Marines. Outstanding job. This day’s work, the sacrifices of the warriors who lay silent in the field, will never be noticed by anyone outside of this unit. The lives of countless civilians were saved today, though they will never realize how close they were to meeting their maker face-to-face. Regardless of that, the world nonetheless thanks you, albeit in ignorance of what you have truly done. Semper Fi, Marines, Semper Fi.”
Karl looked up to the young man pointing a rifle at him.
“Semper Fi,” he mumbled. The desert undulated like a series of ocean swells. A large wave unbalanced him, and Karl collapsed face down in the ocean of dust.