Jon Merz - Raider X

Thatcher looked down and saw the crank, grabbed it, and started turning it. Or he tried to. But the crank was old and slightly rusted and didn’t seem to want to turn at all. Thatcher heaved and finally got it to start moving the turret. He was sweating now, it was hot inside the plane. He didn’t even know if Simpson was still with him or not.

The turret finally kept moving and then Thatcher could see the exit swing around as the guns faced to the side of the plane. He risked a quick glance out and saw that the ocean below was frightfully close, a huge expanse of blue that seemed to surround them. They were nowhere as close to the land as he had hoped they might be.

He punched out the exit door of the turret and felt a blast of cool air hit him in the face. He released his straps and then started climbing out before the thought hit him that he’d never jumped with a parachute before. He glanced down as the wind buffeted his face making it hard to see. He yanked down his goggles and found the rip cord dangling off of the weird suit that Steaks had put him into before they’d left the airfield.

He took a final look at the turret, grabbed his traveling bag and felt the plane suddenly lurch. They weren’t high now and the nose suddenly dipped and fell straight for the sea. Simpson had vanished and Thatcher assumed that the pilot had already jumped even though he couldn’t see the man’s parachute anywhere.

And then, he wasn’t in the plane any longer, either.

For a moment, Thatcher had the distinct sensation of floating, almost as if he hadn’t really jumped at all. But that was because the plane had simply fallen away from him and its bulk seemed to defy the laws of physics at the rate it fell at.

Then Thatcher felt the slipstream grab him and he started plummeting toward the sea as well.

How high up were they? When was he supposed to yank his cord? Simpson hadn’t told him when to do it. Thatcher fell and fell, somersaulting as he did so, over and over again.

The hell with this whole thing, he thought. He reached up for the cord and yanked on it with everything he had left.

He heard nothing and felt nothing.

As he somersaulted toward the water below, it occurred to Thatcher that it was probably going to hurt an awful lot when he smacked into the cold ocean.

Just as he thought that he was dead, Thatcher heard a rush of material escaping his weird suit and then felt an abrupt jerk in his crotch that made him want to scream. He looked above him and saw that the canopy had finally opened, braking him hard as his bruised scrotum would probably be able to testify to. Now Thatcher drifted down ever closer to the sea, his fear only slightly lessened by the fact that the chute had opened and he wasn’t going to hit the sea and immediately die.

No, he thought now, he was probably just going to drown.

His entire field of vision was occupied by the white-capped waves below him. He still felt like he was falling far too fast, but he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. What was it Steaks had told him before they’d taken off? Twenty seconds before the weight of the chute would pull him under the waves and he’d drown. As Thatcher descended, he was already trying to figure out how to wriggle out of the strange suit contraption that held his chute, looking for some type of release catch to undo.

Was that it? His fingers fumbled as the Channel waters suddenly seemed far too close. He started unbuckling it and then he hit the waves and immediately went under before surfacing again with a sputter of water and a cough. He hadn’t even blocked his nose before he’d gone in and now he was choking on water while he was desperate to grab a decent breath. The water was cold and he was shivering already but his fingers kept working the clasps on his suit.

One came free and Thatcher started on the other, willing his frozen digits to work the clasps until they too came free and then he shrugged the entire suit off as the silken chute vanished beneath the waves, its strings yanking at Thatcher already like some undead corpse reaching up from a watery grave.

One more to go and now Thatcher was being pulled under the waves. He couldn’t see anything because the salt water stung his eyes shut and he was barely able to keep from opening his mouth and letting the water rush in and finish him off. Where was the clasp? His fingers fumbled all over for it and then he finally located it.

He was sinking deeper now. How far away would the surface be if he made it that far? Come on, fingers work! The clasp wouldn’t unbuckle. There was just one more… there! Thatcher found the pin and got it free. The suit came away in an instant and Thatcher, his lungs aching to fill with air launched himself upward hoping that he was shooting toward the surface and not even deeper in to the Channel depths.

He broke the surface with a gasping shout and filled his lungs before he sank back slightly again. He clawed to the surface and again gulped fresh oxygen into his lungs.

From above, the Channel water had looked reasonably peaceful, but now waves broke over his head with startling irregularity and Thatcher found himself consuming a whole lot more ocean water than he’d ever wanted to before. He turned around in all directions but could see no sign of land and he was being tossed to and fro in the drink with no real sense of current or direction.

He steeled himself then and tried to remember where the land had been when he’d first touched down. It had been in front of him, he’d gone under and then shot to the surface so if he turned in this direction, he ought to be facing it.

Of course, if it turned out to be the wrong direction, the chances were good he’d have to swim to France. And if he missed that, then he’d drift out into the Atlantic itself.

Where was Simpson? Thatcher hadn’t seen any indication that the pilot had even managed to bail out with his chute. One moment he’d been in the plane and the next he was simply gone. Had he fallen? Or been shot? Thatcher didn’t know but he would have been grateful for any company right then. Being alone in the middle of the ocean as the sun was starting to set wasn’t the greatest feeling in the world. And the water was already growing colder with each passing minute.

He took a breath and settled on a course of travel. No sense simply bobbing about in the drink waiting to die, he reasoned. He’d been in other dicey situations in the past; this was no different even if the environment was. Thatcher steeled himself and set off. He wasn’t a strong swimmer by any means, but he knew he could stay afloat and as long as he kept moving, he would eventually reach somewhere. That as all he was concentrating on then. Just keep moving through the waves and make progress in one direction.

He swam this way for perhaps a quarter of an hour as the waves continued to break over his head and as he did his best to minimize the amount of sea water he was swallowing. He knew the dangers of drinking the salt water but trying to keep his mouth closed was tough because the clothes he wore still weighed him down even though he had freed himself from the chute.

Still, he reasoned that he was doing something productive. Hewitt’s schedule was going to hell, though, he thought with a brief bark of laughter. Part of him actually felt pretty good about disrupting it. The SOE man had made a point about getting Thatcher down to Poole in time to catch a transport and now that was all destroyed because of the German bomber run that had sidetracked them. And then of course, being shot down had put a permanent kink in the plans.

Thatcher realized that if he did manage to make it to land, he had options. Hewitt would never know if Thatcher had managed to bail out. And if he knew that he had, there was no way of possibly knowing if Thatcher had landed in the water and promptly drowned. He might have never managed to free himself from the chute and been dragged down beneath the depths to his death. SOE wasn’t about to dispatch a search party to try to scour the depths for the body of a single man just so Hewitt could rest assured that his sacrificial lamb was dead. No chance. If Thatcher could make his way to land, he could literally vanish. The hell with Hewitt’s little assignment; Thatcher could make his way north, get his aunty secluded somewhere safer for her and then disappear forever knowing that she was safe from Hewitt’s nasty vengeance.