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Passing through ten thousand feet, he pointed his nose at the distant shoal, then reached down and unclipped the kneeboard he had strapped to his right thigh. He tucked it into his helmet bag, then shoved the bag as far back on his right side as possible. Most pilots who ejected didn’t have the luxury of preparing themselves for it, but with nothing left to do, Colt spent his last few hundred pounds of gas trying to get as close to the shoal as possible.

“Status of Pedro?”

The baritone voice of a Marine pilot answered. “Two zero one, Pedro One is twenty minutes from the shoal.”

All that mattered was that he survived long enough for the tilt rotor to home in on his beacon and pluck him from the water. If he was lucky, he might even be able to make it close enough to the shoal that he could wade ashore and walk onto the Osprey. Even Navy pilots didn’t like the idea of getting wet.

“Good to hear your voice, Pedro,” Colt said. “Right now, I’m—”

“ENGINE RIGHT… ENGINE RIGHT…”

Shit.

Colt felt a sudden loss of thrust as the fuel-starved right engine spooled down from military thrust. With his throttles all the way up, he knew he’d burn through his fuel quicker, but he needed speed and altitude, and full power was the quickest way of getting it.

Of course, now that he had lost his first engine, he second-guessed his decision not to use a more fuel-conserving power setting.

“Pedro One, I just lost my right engine,” Colt said, trying to sound as calm as possible.

“Pedro,” the Marine pilot responded.

Though a safe ejection was possible at altitudes from the surface to fifty thousand feet, Colt had targeted somewhere in the upper teens to pull the handle. He couldn’t remember the exact envelope for optimum ejection, other than that he wanted to have his wings level and be as slow as possible to reduce the risk of injury from the wind blast. Passing through fifteen thousand feet, he lowered the nose and used the remaining fuel in his feed tanks to propel him faster toward Scarborough Shoal.

“ENGINE LEFT… ENGINE LEFT…”

“There goes the left engine,” Colt said. He knew that once the engine spooled down below sixty percent, his second generator would drop offline and plunge him into darkness. His standby instruments would continue working and the flight controls would revert to mechanical linkage, but his ability to navigate would be lost.

“Pedro.”

With one more glance at the moving map display between his legs, Colt noted the distance and estimated his time remaining to the waypoint he had designated for Scarborough Shoal.

Fifteen miles. Less than three minutes.

The time would change once he lost thrust and began slowing and gliding toward the tiny speck of land in the middle of the ocean, but it gave him something to shoot for. If he kept his nose pointed in the same direction, allowed his jet to slow to less than two hundred knots, and glided back down to ten thousand feet, he could pull the yellow-and-black-striped handle in three minutes and feel confident he would come down somewhere near the shoal.

Suddenly, his cockpit was plunged into darkness. Each of the displays that had given him crucial information during the flight went blank, and he fought to quell the rising panic. He reached down to the battery switch and moved it from NORM to ORIDE, then felt along the outside of his left thigh for the green rubber ring to activate his emergency oxygen.

Two minutes.

Colt didn’t count down the seconds, but he was keenly aware of his metronomic heartbeat that kept him focused. He dropped his eyes to the standby instruments and watched the airspeed needle drop below three hundred knots. When it reached two hundred and fifty knots, he lowered the nose and began a gentle descent.

One minute.

The large hundreds hand on his standby altimeter spun quickly downward as his seventy-million-dollar fourth-generation fighter became a lawn dart.

Fourteen thousand feet… thirteen thousand feet…

Despite his best efforts to remain calm, his heart rate increased the closer he got to ejection.

Twelve thousand feet… eleven thousand feet…

With one more deep breath, Colt keyed the microphone switch one last time. “Two zero one is punching out.” Then, he released the stick and useless throttle and wrapped his fingers around the ejection handle between his legs.

Ten thousand feet… Here goes nothing.

He pulled the handle.

Like every Navy fighter pilot, Colt had been through aviation survival training more than once, and he knew what to expect during ejection. He knew to keep his heels on the floor, toes on the rudder pedals, and properly align his spine to prevent injury. He knew what the books and instructors at the aviation survival training centers had told him to expect.

But that didn’t mean he was prepared.