Fallen Angels: Chapter 2-Opening, Part 2
A/N: Thanks for all the reviews to the first chapter! I'm really happy to be back writing for you guys, and I hope you enjoy this story as much as you've enjoyed the past stories.
Captain Harlan "Angel" McNamee was stretched out on the rack in the tiny quarters she had been given on the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush for the duration of the squadron's two week carrier training exercise, her laptop on the bed with her and a DVD playing, her usual insomniac routine. She knew she could join the boys in the flight lounge for the usual shenanigans—they were Hornet pilots; shenanigans were all they did—but she just wasn't feeling it that night.
It was nothing against the squadron; for some strange reason, she loved the entire bunch of them, even though they were all twelve-year-old boys stuck in the bodies of fully-grown pilots. She was just tired after nine days without a sleep schedule between the flight ops and trying to figure out how to sleep on that excuse of a bed.
She groaned at the sudden pounding on her door, pausing the movie before reluctantly lifting her five-foot, two-inch frame off the rack. She glanced down to make sure she was decent—they almost changed her call sign to "Secret" after she once opened the door wearing nothing but a bra and tiny pair of shorts—and nodded her satisfaction at her Johns Hopkins Swimming and Diving shirt and matching shorts before unlocking and opening the door.
And immediately found herself the victim of a drive-by SuperSoaker shooting.
"Goddamn it, Guido," she swore at the most junior pilot of the squadron, 1stLt Marco Antonellis, as she looked down at her water-soaked shirt. Well, at least they didn't use beer this time. "What are you doing here?"
"We missed you in the lounge," the Italian-American Marine said with a grin.
"Did you ever consider that this is the reason why I wasn't there?" she asked, gesturing at her shirt. And because she knew it was the reaction he was going for, she stripped off the shirt with him still standing there, leaving her in the sports bra she usually ended up in on training missions as she searched for a replacement.
"Aww, a sports bra?" Guido whined. "I hoped for better than that." She didn't bother vocalizing a response as she flipped him off before shrugging on the dry tee-shirt. "What are you doing?"
"Despicable Me," she said, gesturing at the computer. Her fellow pilot snorted.
"That's mature," he scoffed.
"It's fucking hilarious. And that's coming from someone who's running around an aircraft carrier with a water gun?"
He grinned before putting on a thoughtful expression, and she fought to keep from sighing, knowing what was coming. "So, you wanna fuck?"
"What a gentleman," she replied, her faint Southern accent becoming thick in her sarcastic reply. "Let me just take off these here knickers and we can go get that goin'." She rolled her eyes at him. It had been seven months since he joined the squadron; the suggestive comments had come after about five minutes and hadn't let up at all. He wasn't unattractive, was actually a pretty good friend and more-than-decent pilot, and was one of the few pilots in the squadron who wasn't married, although you sometimes wouldn't know it by their actions while away from home. "If you wanted any of this," she said, gesturing vaguely at her body, "you shouldn't have slept with every single cute blond communications officer in Japan."
"Well, they're not here now—"
"And I am?" she finished for him, rolling her eyes again as she gathered her thick brunette curls into a sloppy bun. "Guido, I don't fish in the company pond. Besides, do you remember what the guys told you when you joined the squadron?"
"'Angel's not at an amusement park, don't ask her if she wants a ride,'" he parroted.
"And?"
"That you're a good pilot and I don't need to offer to teach you how to work my joystick."
"And?"
"The answer to 'what's the destination?' isn't 'in my pants'."
"And?"
Guido frowned. "There're more?"
"They're Hornet pilots, Guido. Do you honestly think they do anything but think of crude jokes?" Sometimes it was hard to be the squadron's first—and only—female pilot, with all the immaturity that was universal among Hornet pilots—and Marines—and the jokes that went along with it. There was always that reminder that she was different from the rest of them, and there wasn't anything she could do to change that.
But then she got in the cockpit and showed them just what a cute little girl from Atlanta could do. And as she liked to remind the boys, it wasn't as if the bad guys could see that she had breasts and long hair before she shot them down or bombed the hell out of them.
"What're you doing here, anyway?" she finally asked. "Since I've already established I'm not sleeping with you, shouldn't you be off shooting someone else with that?" She nodded toward the SuperSoaker still in his hands.
"Yeah, probably," he replied, shrugging. "But John Deere's on the phone with his wife, Geo and Merlin are off doing their nerdy thing, like playing World of Dorkcraft or whatever it is—." Before he could continue and recite the activities of everyone in the squadron, they heard the alarm to call them to their planes.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Angel sighed. "Didn't we just get in?"
"I thought you were a pilot," Guido teased. "Don't you like flying?"
"At this point, I like sleeping more. I feel like I'm about to drop."
"That's what we got go-pills for," the lieutenant replied, waiting for her so they could head to the flight deck together.
"I hate taking drugs."
"It's go-pills and no-go-pills," Guido argued. "They're not drugs."
"What part of stimulants and sleeping pills aren't drugs, moron?" she asked as she finally found one of the prescription bottles. She checked to make sure it was the stimulants and not the sleeping pills before popping one and washing it down with a swig from her water bottle. "Okay. Let's go fly some planes," she said as they left her quarters and made their way to the pilot's staging area.
Angel went to the bathroom before changing into her flight suit, which by this point in her career was the most familiar—and therefore, the most comfortable—thing she owned. And probably the most expensive.
She really needed to go on a date. Or at least buy a dress.
She nodded a greeting to LtCol Perry—"Everest"—the squadron's CO, before continuing to her plane, right in the middle of the line of F-18 Hornets on the flight deck. "Hey, Angel," Capt Brad "John Deere" Leeman greeted, glancing up from his pre-flight check as she stepped into the cockpit of her plane. "Ready to go again?"
"Just waiting for to the go-pills to set in," she replied. "How's Naomi?" John Deere's wife, an architect back in Beaufort, where they were supposedly stationed, was one of the two squadron wives Angel actually got along with, probably because John Deere and Elder were the only two who didn't cheat on their wives.
It was hard enough to smile politely at barbeques when you knew that the man who had his arm around his wife or was playing with his kid had just slept with a Filipino prostitute three days before. She couldn't even imagine having to play nice or pretending to care about their gossip or taking a trip to the mall as well.
"She's up in Ohio, visiting her sister and brother-in-law," John Deere replied. "She says hi, by the way."
Angel nodded absently at that, her attention already focused on the controls and gauges in the cockpit, making sure her fuel tank was full and that she had enough oxygen, that the radio was working and the altimeter was zeroed and countless other routine things she had on her checklist. After making her way through the list, she was confident that her plane was safe and secured her helmet and turned on the radio. "This is ED-5, ready for take-off, over."
"Roger, ED-5. Standby for take-off." Practically the next thing she knew, she was barreling down the short runway toward the catapult, and then she was in the air, and nothing else mattered.
When she was flying, she was there all the way, she was in her element. This is where she was at her best, and she would gladly give up everything else for it. There was a feeling of power, of being above the rest of the world and looking down, of being in a situation that in seconds could turn to life-or-death, that she could never really explain to people who had never experienced it. "You with us, Angel?" Geo asked, cutting into her reverie.
"Roger," she replied to the flight surgeon, the one sailor in their Marine squadron. "Just waiting for everyone else to catch up."
There was laughter over the radio at her bravado and the challenge behind her words. "Let's just stick to the exercise," Everest cautioned her.
"C'mon, Everest. Let's see if a girl actually knows how to fly one of these things," Guido teased.
"You can't see it, but I'm flipping you off right now," Angel replied, and indeed she was, one gloved finger raised in the direction of his plane.
They were about halfway through the exercise when everything very abruptly changed, Angel's entire plane going dark. "Mayday, mayday," she said frantically into the radio, getting only silence in response. "I'm experiencing a total electrical failure, over," she said, hoping that somehow, someone could hear her and could respond.
No such luck.
She had always enjoyed the fact that she was alone in the plane while flying the Hornet, with no backseater. She had the plane to herself, had complete control of the situation and her world while she was in the air.
This was a little bit too lonely.
She couldn't radio the tower asking permission to land, couldn't risk an emergency landing in the middle of the night over the ocean without electricity, couldn't see her altitude, speed, fuel supply. The only thing she had to keep herself grounded—so to speak—and oriented to up and down were the few stars she saw peeking through the cloudy sky and the lights of the other planes.
If she wanted to get back to solid ground with all of her extremities intact, she had to figure out a way to communicate through one of the other pilots. Everest, the squadron leader and the most experienced pilot, would obviously be the ideal, but he was at the head of the formation and she couldn't risk flying up to him without the ability to communicate with the others to let them know what was going on. Guido was the closest, but also the most junior; if she tried some sort of stunt to get into a position where she could use Morse code to get him a message, he'd probably freak out and cause both of them to crash. John Deere was the only realistic option, and she could only hope that he was able to figure out what she was doing.
Using only her eyes and the memories of which plane was which, she accelerated and pulled up, heading right for his plane and the airspace above it. When she was sure of her position, she pulled a move straight out of Top Gun, inverting her plane and lowering herself closer to his cockpit.
An incredibly stupid move, considering she had no altimeter.
She couldn't see John Deere's expression through the mask of his helmet, but she knew it was one of alarm at the way his head turned frantically toward the glass top of his cockpit, trying to figure out what she was doing. She already had her flashlight in hand, shooting him a quick message: three short, three long, three short, a universally understood signal for distress.
She knew when he shined his flashlight back that he got the message.
No power, she quickly signaled, getting another long flash in response. Again, she couldn't see what he was doing, but if he wasn't radioing the rest of the squadron to let them know what was going on, she was going to kill him.
Assuming she lived through this.
Told Everest, John Deere signaled back to her, immediately before he dropped altitude and changed direction with most of the rest of the squadron, obviously heading back to the carrier to land after the exercise was aborted. Slightly disoriented by hanging upside down when she didn't have a horizon to use as a reference, she righted herself, continuing to fly in the same direction she had been going in until she received direction from Everest.
At this point, she had no idea what he was going to have her do.
The squadron leader pulled up right alongside her, his flashlight out and at the ready as began instructions. "Land on the carrier?" she asked herself in disbelief. She quickly flashed out a request for him to repeat that, hoping that she had misread something in the Morse code. Landing on an aircraft carrier and trying to hook the wire was a difficult skill under normal circumstances. In the dark, with no altimeter or radio, she didn't think it could be done.
Sure enough, he signaled the same thing, telling her to return to the carrier for landing, and she began shaking her head, forgetting that he probably couldn't see her. No comm with tower, she reminded him. No carrier landing.
There was a pause before his flashlight started again, this time asking if she had fuel to get to Kuwait. No idea, she replied. She should, based on her speed and altitude before she lost power, but she had no clue what had gone on with her plane since then.
We'll head for Kuwait, Everest finally declared. Meet up with the squadron later.
She exhaled forcefully and indicated her agreement, even as she wondered how this was going to go. It wasn't going to be a pretty landing, that was for sure, but there was no way it could be uglier than an attempted carrier landing. Or a crash into the Indian Ocean.
They were about fifteen minutes into their flight toward Kuwait, Everest staying just ahead and at her wing to keep her oriented, when she noticed another set of lights heading right for them. "What the fuck?" she muttered to herself, her head turning toward Everest to see if he knew what was going on.
His entire plane was dark.
She took a deep breath as she returned her attention forward, knowing for sure that she was on her own, that Everest was just as disconnected as she was. She couldn't count of her squadron leader to get her out of this, not this time.
First priority: avoid the fighter jet currently on a collision course. She pulled back on the joystick, the nose of her plane climbing steeply. Without gauges, she had no idea how high she was climbing, but when she felt it was a safe distance, leveled off, inverting to see if she could find this mystery plane.
It was still heading straight for Everest.
She had no idea what she was thinking; running without lights and without any sort of sensors, she was at a huge disadvantage, but she knew she had to watch out for her commanding officer. With a hard bank, she angled her plane down, spiraling down, cutting right into the new plane's flight path, coming right between him and Everest in a move she probably would have gotten in trouble for attempting in broad daylight with a completely squared away plane, a move that was practically suicide in those conditions.
But she pulled it off. Right up to the point that the bastard banked, the tip of his wing tapping the tip of hers. "Mayday, mayday!" she shouted again, even though she knew there was no one to hear her cries.
Even as she was struggling to regain control of the plane now spiraling uncontrollably, she knew it was hopeless; she was mostly trying to get herself in a position where she could eject without getting in the way of the other two planes. Of course, without electronics and without being able to see the other planes, she had no idea where to go to avoid them. And without an altimeter, she had no idea how far she had to go before her plane, with her in it, plunged into the Indian Ocean.
"Preparing to eject!" she said to no one in particular, right before she pulled on the ejection handle, hard enough that she gave a short scream at the feeling of her shoulder dislocating, a sensation she was unfortunately familiar with after spending most of her childhood preparing for one gymnastics competition or another.
The parachute opened without any problems, and as she began her descent, she caught just enough of the markings of the plane she had hit. It was a Hornet, but more specifically, it was Guido's Hornet. "Guido!" she shouted, knowing that her words weren't carrying more than a few feet and not caring. "Guido! What the fuck is going on?"
She hit her head on something, probably the back of her ejection seat, as she entered the water, and it was hard enough to knock her out. Her last conscious thought was that she still didn't know where her friend was or what had just happened in the skies.