Roger reached over and tapped on the fuel gauges. Both auxiliary fuel tanks had long been drained, and the needle indicating their internal fuel quantity had been pegged at zero for the last several minutes. Neither said anything, but both pilots knew the helicopter’s engines were operating from only what was left in their fuel lines.

“Five feet,” Roger said, looking down through the forward window at the approaching water.

Most pilots said that any landing you walk away from is a good landing, but that didn’t mean Charlie was about to mail it in. He eased off on the torque and let the Hip gradually descend to what he hoped was less than a foot of water.

“Four… three… two…”

Their wheels touched down, and Charlie took a long, slow breath before lowering the collective and committing them to the landing. Just as the Russian helicopter came to rest, the twin turboshaft engines above their heads coughed and sputtered as the last of the fuel was atomized and burned out. As if the machine was a dying man giving its last gasp, the engines wound down and the helicopter went dark.

“Holy shit,” Charlie said.

“That was close,” Roger agreed.

North of Scarborough Shoal

Colt plunged into the water and waited a second too long before releasing himself from his parachute. He shot to the surface underneath a web of parachute lines and multicolored silk, but he quickly fell back on his training and reached over his head to pull fistfuls of parachute in front of him. He didn’t kick his legs for fear they might become tangled in the lines and instead allowed his flotation device to keep his head above water.

Nice and steady, he thought.

After several minutes of patient and deliberate movement, he had successfully disentangled himself from the fabric and slowly sculled backward away from the floating mess. With that first order of business complete, he allowed himself a brief respite and leaned his helmet back against the flotation collar and looked up into the night sky. He knew Rucas was up there somewhere engaging Chinese fighters, a Marine Osprey was coming to look for him, and a host of surveillance aircraft were watching it all unfold.

“You’re on camera, Colt. Let’s go.”

He lifted his head and looked around, trying to spot… anything. A raft, a boat, the reef, an airplane. Anything would have made him feel significantly better about his situation. The last thing he had expected when he woke up earlier that day was that he would find himself bobbing alone in the South China Sea.

“Can’t change that,” he said, verbalizing his ongoing battle to overcome his fears.

He swept his hands around his body, searching for the nylon tether that connected his raft to his seat pan. When he found it, he pulled the line in front of his face to locate the snap hook, then clipped it to his survival vest’s D-ring. Then he reached underneath him to detach it from the seat pan.

It was another lesson they had ingrained in them from the very beginning of water survival training — never let go of a piece of equipment unless it’s attached to you. Satisfied, he unbuckled his lower lap belts and felt the seat pan fall away beneath him. Without the extra weight pulling him down, Colt bobbed higher in the water.

Though it was relatively calm, the waves were significantly larger than what he had experienced in the indoor pools they used for survival training. It made it difficult to reel in his raft and pull himself inside. But by the time he had, he could hear the approaching Osprey and knew his time in the raft would be short-lived.

The loud thrumming of the Marine tilt rotor grew louder, and he looked up just as a spotlight turned on. Blinded by its brilliance, he followed the Osprey’s approach until it hovered directly over him. Colt had never been plucked from the water by an MV-22 before — heck, he had never been plucked from the water by anything before — but they had taught him to let the hook drop all the way to the water to discharge the static electricity before trying to reach for it.

Squinting against the light and the spraying water, he spotted a steel cable with a rescue strop and heavy-duty hook attached at the end. He waited until both reached the water, then rolled out of the raft he had struggled to climb into and swam the short distance to where the strop floated on the surface. He unclipped the raft’s tether from his survival vest, then rolled into the strop and clipped the end to the hook so that when they reeled him up, the padded sling would lift him by his armpits.

Again, acting on muscle memory from hours spent in the pool, Colt waved a hand over his helmet from back to front, making sure the cable wasn’t looped around his neck, then held a thumb out to the side like he was hitching a ride, so the person operating the hoist could see he was ready. Within seconds, he felt the cable tug upward and pull him clear of the water.

48

Yulin Naval Base

Hainan Island, China