Tim Lebbon - Kong - Skull Island

This time, Marlow knew that he was going to die. It wasn’t the first time he’d jumped out of a doomed aircraft. Indeed, this was his third time, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he was his squadron’s ace pilot, he might consider himself cursed. He accepted that always seeking the heart of the action meant that being the enemy’s main target was inevitable.

But this was the first time he’d abandoned a plane without being in control.

He fell. His descent was no graceful drift towards the ground, nursed through the air by the comforting spread of a parachute. He was plummeting. Punched from the shattered cockpit of his P-51, he’d been forced back into the plane’s holed and tattered tail, his left arm and shoulder bruised and numbed by the impact. Now he could hardly feel them at all. He’d succeeded in opening his chute but he was spinning, lines caught around his flailing limbs, air roaring past his ears, breath sucked from his lungs. At this speed the impact would kill him, if suffocation and fear didn’t finish him beforehand.

His view was disjointed, images flashing past so that his panicked mind took a while to catch up and make any sense of things:

His damaged and smoking aircraft, gliding down and away from him in a large, lazy circle towards the land mass looming far below.

The island, remote and distant whilst he’d been engaged in the dogfight, now rapidly approaching and growing to fill his vision.

And half a mile away, the second parachute.

At least I got the bastard , he thought. I’m going down, but so is he .

Marlow took some small comfort in that news. This was the seventeenth Zero he’d shot down during his time in the Pacific theatre of war. His mother used to joke that number was unlucky for her, because she was that age when she met, fell in love with, and got pregnant by Marlow’s father. Turned out that number really was unlucky for him.

Struggling to take control of the parachute lines, he experienced a brief, almost startling moment of peace and clarity that shocked him into immobility. The scream of air rushing past his ears faded away, as did the spinning view of sky and island, sea and falling aircraft. He closed his eyes and saw his beautiful wife and the baby son he had never met. Saw them, loved them, knew them.

When he opened his eyes again the parachute gave a single hard jolt against his back and shoulders, then he was drifting rather than falling. He looked up at the opened canopy and grabbed the lines, experimentally tugging on the left and right.

Whatever he’d done, it seemed to have worked.

“Today’s not the day!” he shouted. Though the relief was almost overwhelming, he couldn’t spend any time celebrating the fact that his demise no longer seemed imminent.

If he didn’t do everything right over the next few minutes, falling to his death might have been the kindest end.

Looking down, he was shocked at how close he was to the island. He could only make out a portion of it through a heavy tropical haze. The gentle curve of a wide beach might have looked inviting if it weren’t for the dense, intimidating jungle that began close to the shoreline and extended as far as he could see inland. He could discern hints of a dramatic landscape—peaks and ravines, spurs of rock crowned with trees, dark shadows where valleys might hide anything from view.

The sea beneath him was a deep azure, its beauty almost hypnotic as its colours darkened and lightened again with each surging wave. A larger shadow seemed to pass along close to the beach, moving against the flow of water. Cast by a cloud high above, perhaps. A shoal of fish. As he saw what might have been the wave of a huge fin he tried to steady himself, look closer—

Something roared from off to his right, a huge, screaming rumble that seemed to shake the air and ripple his parachute. He twisted to look, and saw the blooming flower of fire rising from the Zero where it had crashed down onto the beach. Ammunition sparked and fired arcing tracers of flame through the air. The crashing aircraft had taken out a few trees, and big palm leaves burned as they feathered down through the flames. Smoke boiled skyward.

There was no sign of the Japanese pilot, nor his parachute.

Marlow prepared for landing. He was going to hit in the surf, just where the sea washed onto the beach, and though chance had carried him that way, he couldn’t have planned it better. He hoped the sand would be softest there, and perhaps an incoming wave would also dampen the impact.

The shadow in the sea had vanished.

He bent his knees slightly, ready to perform a textbook parachute roll. If he did everything that he’d learned in training, he’d be up on his feet again within ten seconds, and ready to fight once more.

As he struck and his right foot sank into the sand, pitching him hard onto his side, and the parachute lines jerked his bruised left arm painfully upward, he heard and felt the massive impact of his own aircraft smashing down somewhere close behind him.

He waited for the surge of flaming fuel to wash over him, the flames searing away flight suit, skin, and flesh. Marlow had always sworn to himself that he’d never go out like that. He’d rather fall to his death or eat a bullet than let fire boil him away. He’d had too many friends die that way.

For a second as the wave struck him, he felt his skin blistering and boiling. Then water rushed into his mouth and he was rolling, up and down, left and right, becoming confused as the parachute lines became even more tangled around him.

The wave receded. Gasping, squinting into sudden glaring sunlight, he looked around to try and make sense of what had happened.

The P-51 had buried its nose into the sea two hundred feet from shore. Waves smashed against the aircraft, and steam billowed from places where fire might have taken hold. At least there was no explosion. Not yet.

To his right and further along the beach, the Zero burned.

Good. Hope the bastard parachuted into his own burning —

Then Marlow saw a shape beyond the burning enemy plane. Distorted by the heat and smoke, the running Japanese pilot quickly passed his downed aircraft and sprinted into view. He was screaming in fury. His katana sword swung on his belt.

Marlow struggled to release himself from the tangled chute lines, paused, changed his mind. There was no time. If he thrashed around he’d only get more tangled, then the bastard would have him pinned down, ready to cut his head off with one swipe of that blade.

He pulled his service revolver instead and knelt up, heaving against the weight of water dragging the parachute down. Aiming, he fired off six shots, certain that at least one would hit his enemy.

The Japanese pilot stopped fifty feet away, both hands pressed to his chest.

Marlow felt a cold sickness crawling in his stomach. He’d killed men before, shooting down planes and watching them spiral, crash, and burn. But he had never killed a man face to face.

The enemy pilot looked up at Marlow… and screamed, louder and more furious than before, as he started running again.

Missed! How the hell did I?

Marlow unclipped and hauled himself out of his harness just as his enemy began to shoot back. Out of bullets and with no time to reload, he ran for the trees. Bullets zipped past him like angry wasps. At any moment he expected to feel the sting.

Nothing.