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The XO only lost an arm, but no one else survived there to staunch the flow before he bled out.
The canopy had sufficient momentum remaining to break through the window on the far side of the bridge.
The rocket launch permanently compressed Gabe’s spine by two inches. He and Falisha Johnson were now the same height. This would remain true for several seconds.
In its proper sequence, the seat’s rocket motor fired. It was designed to automatically correct his angle of flight to straight up for two hundred feet before breaking away and deploying his parachute. As the seat raced aloft, it collided with the arm of the spinning element ofTheodore Roosevelt’slong-range air-search radar mounted on the tall mast atop the Tower.
Gabriel Brown survived the collision with no new injuries.
The rocket guidance corrected for the momentary deflection. But the impact had damaged a signal wire within the ejection seat’s electronics. After the lifting rockets shut down, the electronic signal sent to cut the pilot from the seat failed to reach the triggering mechanism.
With Brown still firmly harnessed to the two hundred-and-twenty-seven-pound seat, his parachute was unable to deploy. He began the long fall to the deck he hadn’t yet fully landed on.
But the last flight of LC Brown’s F-35C Number 892 was not quite complete.
In PriFly, Mini-Air Boss Lieutenant Commander Falisha Johnson and the on- and off-shift Air Bosses had been frozen in place by the spectacle.
It was now three-and-a-half seconds since LC Brown’s belated attempt to abort the landing and return to the skies.
All three of them stared helplessly at the hard-firing plane for one-point-three seconds after LC Brown had ejected. There was no protocol for this scenario. No deeply ingrained training existed regarding the next right action for an unmanned, runaway jet held midair above an aircraft carrier’s deck by its tailhook latched to an arresting wire.
At full afterburner, 892’s engine consumed fuel at a prodigious rate. The last of its reserves would burn out in another eleven seconds.
They didn’t have that long.
The strain on the Number Four arresting cable near the end of its rated service life stressed it far past its design limits.
It parted.
As the severed ends of the inch-and-a-quarter-thick cable lashed to the sides, the near side executed two of the three survivors from the collapse of Vulture’s Row. The longer side of the cable snaked to port and sliced through the alert rescue MH-60S Seahawk helicopter kept at the ready during any active flight operations.
The crew members who weren’t killed immediately were too injured to escape and drowned as the helicopter fell backward into the sea six stories below and sank beneath the waves. The USSTheodore Roosevelt’sposition placed it past where the Vietnamese continental shelf cliffed abruptly from six hundred to over four thousand meters in depth. The Seahawk helicopter rolled down the deep slope, creating a mudflow in its wake. Despite extensive search efforts, it would never be found as it and its four occupants were buried beneath two hundred and eighteen meters of silt and sand.
Freed like a Houston Oiler’s wide receiver released by the hike of a football, the F-35C Lightning II climbed aloft at last.
However, its angle of flight was no longer in alignment with the USSTheodore Roosevelt’srunway.
It flew directly into the wide windows of PriFly.
Mini-Air Boss Lieutenant Commander Falisha Johnson had a perfect view of what killed her one-point-six seconds later.
Lieutenant Commander Gabriel “Angel” Brown’s ejection seat had reached an altitude of two hundred and seven feet in nine-tenths of a second. With no parachute to arrest his fall, he outlived Falisha Johnson by seven-tenths of a second before he impacted the steel deck at seventy-eight miles per hour. His spine was shortened an additional inch-and-a-half by the impact. He and Falisha were no longer the same height.
But he had outlived her.
She’d been granted her wish and wouldn’t have to live on alone.
