Читать книгу Beyond Survival - Gerald Coffee - Страница 9

1

I Surrender

Suddenly what I thought could only happen to the other guy became my reality. No matter how confident we are, none of us is exempt from trauma, from loss, from our world changing instantly without provocation or warning. Even while we cling to the hope that life as we have known it will sustain us, we can begin to find a depth of ourselves we didn’t know existed. Imperceptibly at first, the emptiness and panic begin to be soothed by the stranger within. That stranger is our closest friend.

“Hi-dee-ho and away we go! Speedboat rides from the end of the Santa Cruz pier. Thrills and chills! Go skimming across the surface of beautiful Monterey Bay. Hi-dee-ho and away . . . .”

The loudspeaker droned on from the end of the pier as it did every hour or so, the mechanical spiel hardly varying. It blended with the more distant din of the boardwalk: the calliope tones of the old carousel, the roar-scream-roar-scream rhythm of the Big Dipper, which itself sometimes drowned out the belly laughs of the teetering mechanical clown over the Fun House door. The August sun was hot and the air was warm with the smell of ocean and taffy and baby-oiled bodies languishing on the beach beyond. So familiar.

The scorching heat of the San Joaquin Valley and the demands of summer jobs were so distant, as the tiny tongues of water lapped gently around my face. We floated limply side by side just beyond the break of friendly summer waves. Our breathing had eased after we’d wrestled and rolled playfully beneath the water’s sun-flecked surface. My eyes were closed; I just let the sound and taste and feel of it all sink in. I smiled contentedly as I thought of her there near me.

Suddenly, as if that thought had distracted her from her own contentment, she rolled toward me, and with a playful chirp thrust my face beneath the water. I twisted away from the pressure of her hand and exhaled hard through my nose. There beneath me in the crystalline water was her lithe body swimming strongly down and then away. She was a water creature, this sweetheart of mine, and the silvery bubbles streamed up and behind from her dark hair like tiny pearls that had just been born there.

I gulped air and dove. I kicked hard after her through the colder, bluer water. Ahead of me she merged with and parted from the shifting prisms of sunlight as if she and the sun and the sea were one, then separate, then one again. Suddenly, in one swift motion, she stopped and turned and challenged, suspended motionless for an instant in her element. A few shining pearls were still breaking free, and she was smiling as I collided with her middle, wrapped my arms around her waist and thighs, and rolled her backward. Then again, as we had done in countless rivers and lakes and salty summer bays, we tumbled and rolled together; wriggling free from one grip, parrying another, holding tightly to an ankle or arm for a moment, then thrusting away defensively. The shivery blue of the deeper water, the swirling bubbles and sparkling rays of light, the firmness of her twisting body—all a sensual kaleidoscope of color and touch as in our sham struggle we inched toward the water’s surface and the breaths we knew we would soon need.

I burst through the surface before she did and held her tightly with my legs for an extra second or two. She went limp; a sympathy tactic. As I released the pressure, her retaliation was explosive. The water she slapped into my face stung my eyes. “Rat!” she yelped, and again she dove, the bare parts of her tanned body glistening from the sun. She had an armlock on my foot now and was kicking hard straight down, trying to pull me under. I doubled forward to pry my foot from her grasp. But my right arm wouldn’t move. And then she was gone.

The water beneath me was still deep blue, with fragments of sunlight dancing aimlessly from above. But she was gone. The pressure on my foot continued, however . . . from the nylon shroud lines tangled around my boot. My boot . . . ? Shroud lines . . . ? They were stark in their whiteness as they trailed off into the deep where, I was now aware, the dim shape of my parachute drifted downward. The nylon tentacles and undulating skirts of the canopy reminded me of a monster jellyfish trying to envelop me. What fantasy! This whole thing is fantasy! Where is Bea? Where did she swim to?

I lifted my stinging face from the water. The surface was gentle, the sun still high, but the rest . . . The calmness around me was eerie. What the hell was going on here? I floated higher now and vertically, but the pull on my foot continued to threaten, even with the flotation gear that encircled my torso.

Again I doubled forward, face in the water. God, it stung like fire now. I strained toward the tangle around my foot. Still my right arm wouldn’t move. No pain. It simply dangled limp, ignoring my command to help out my other hand in freeing my foot. What’s going on? My arm’s broken, my face stings. What happened? Where am I?

Concentrating very hard, I finally freed my foot from the sinking chute. Several shroud lines had drifted loosely around my other leg by now, but in the space of one more breath, I was able to extricate myself from the deadly weight that had done in many an exhausted Navy pilot after all else had gone well.

Slowly I realized I was floating in the water with my parachute. Had I ejected from my plane? I couldn’t remember. It was all so fuzzy. Green, sloping hills met the water ahead of me and behind me at some distance. I seemed to be in a very calm bay. It was absolutely silent at first, but then I was aware of the low rumble of a jet aircraft rocketing across and away from me, somewhere far in the distance. High overhead a thin trail of white smoke curved from the direction of the hills and ended in a darker cloud, all drifting slowly, benignly, out to sea.

No speedboat rides! No Fun-House clown or summer smells! Bea! Where had she gone? A tepid little breeze ruffled the water around me. Still; quiet.

My mind felt numb. Then vague reminiscences of the Sunday comics passed through it: Dick Tracy or Lois Lane coming to after being knocked out by the bad guy. What happened? Where am I? My arm floated limply before me. My face and neck were stinging like mad. I squeezed my eyes shut, straining to remember. Here I was in the water, in my flight gear and helmet. That was my parachute drifting in the depths below me. The first few shards of recall stabbed painfully as I focused harder, desperately seeking comprehension of my plight. A reconnaissance mission planned and approved. It was coming back now . . . .

Bob and I had manned our aircraft for the last launch of the day. We had found our way across the flight deck of the USS Kitty Hawk, stepping around tie-down chains and ducking under wings, jibing lightly about how much the other would spend on shopping in Hong Kong. The Hawk would be heading that way immediately after our 1600 recovery. Soon that same flight deck had been engulfed in an awesome symphony of sound and motion: an attack carrier’s launch and recovery cycle. The jet engines from four dozen fighter and attack planes—all closely bunched toward the stern—screamed discordantly, gulping in tons of humid air even in idle. The hot exhaust from their tail pipes shot out across the catwalks at deck’s edge. Their collective force alone could have powered the leviathan runway through the water at several knots. My own J-79 engines had checked out fine, their eagerness reflected in the quivering gauges before me. Pretaxi check had been complete, wings “spread and lock” to go. Bob readied the navigation and reconnaissance systems in his own cockpit aft of mine. This, too, had all been so familiar: countless evolutions from the carrier decks in the Atlantic and Pacific, Caribbean and Mediterranean; the same choreography— yellow-shirted plane directors; green—and red-shirted maintenance and ordnance personnel; sophisticated warbirds, wings still folded vertically to conserve deck space, lumbering close aboard into position behind the sturdy jet-blast deflectors aft of each catapult, then straddling the steaming cats themselves.

Suddenly the goggled face of my plane captain had disappeared from the side of my cockpit and was replaced by that of my squadron mate, Lieutenant Bob Renner. I knew he had just landed two cycles ago and had been debriefing his film with the Air Intelligence guys from the attack squadrons. “Beef” (he was husky) put his face close to my left ear and shouted above the din, “Jerry, the A-6 guys need to do some target planning while we’re in port. They need coverage of these areas just northwest of Vinh City.” He had thrust a folded map in front of me, several areas squared off and bisected by a dog-leg flight line—all drawn hastily with a green marking pen. “Your flight is the last chance to get what they need. Can you do it?” My own mission was to get verticals and obliques of the seemingly indestructible Than Hoa Bridge, and more verticals of military and supply areas up the river to the west. Plenty of extra time and fuel.

Instinctively I flashed him a “thumbs-up.” “No sweat, Beef. Tell ’em it’s as good as got!” As I clipped the map beneath my own on the kneeboard strapped to my right thigh, I recalled—just for an instant— the map of that same area northwest of Vinh that I’d seen down in the briefing room. It was peppered with little red and white pins, red designating confirmed triple-A (antiaircraft artillery) sites, white the sites where they were only suspected. Okay, Coffee, I said to myself. Fly higher, faster, and “jink”—a lot. Make it hard for ’em to track you with their guns.

I had been looking forward to the flight in any case, but now, with this new challenge, my anticipation was heightened all the more. This would be only my second flight over North Vietnam. Having joined the squadron in early January, I had flown all of my previous missions over South Vietnam or Laos. President Johnson had extended the holiday cease-fire of late ’65 through January as a gesture of goodwill to entice the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, a recurring tactic that through the next several years would prove to be self-defeating. But on the first of February, there having been no conciliatory response from the Communists, we started hammering parts of the North again.

My missions over South Vietnam had been productive but uneventful. I had seen flak only twice but never felt threatened. At the prospect of actually meeting resistance on this mission, my adrenal glands were already pumping a little more than usual. I noted this while carefully taxiing the big sleek Vigilante onto the starboard bow catapult, making my last few checks, and saluting my readiness to the animated Catapult Officer on the deck below me. I thrilled again at the near instantaneous surge and sharp kick of the cat shot propelling my thirty tons of warplane to 170 miles per hour in less than three seconds. It was never “routine.”

“We’re on our way, Robert,” I had said to Bob rather rhetorically. I eased the nose up into a gradually climbing turn as the early afternoon sun slowly swept its patchwork of shadow and light from one side of the cockpit to the other.

“Roger, Boss! Take up heading three five zero. Our rendezvous with Lion Eleven is at three four zero degrees, twenty miles, angels eighteen.”

God, it was a sparkler of a day. The deep shining blue of the Tonkin Gulf seemed to intensify the more ethereal blue of the Southeast Asian sky. At the western horizon, where the blues would otherwise have met, ran the variegated green and brown ribbon of the North Vietnam coast. With the exception of a few low puffy clouds far to the north near China, the sky was absolutely clear. It stretched on forever. Had the earth been flat, I mused, I could have seen beyond that seemingly benign coastline to Laos, Thailand, Burma, India, perhaps across the Middle Eastern countries to the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, where I had flown three or four years before on similar crystalline days and conjectured on my ability to see the Tonkin Gulf to the east . . . if the earth were flat.

I had established a left-turn, three-mile orbit at our rendezvous point. Scanning back over my shoulder toward the ship, I picked up our escort plane visually. The F-4 Phantom jet had been launched just after us and was now climbing toward the rendezvous point. All reconnaissance planes were escorted by an armed fighter in case it should be attacked from the air. (It was also operationally prudent to fly over enemy territory in flights of two or more so that one pilot could account for the fate of the other should trouble arise.)

Since the Phantom’s wings were level, I knew the pilot was still heading for the prearranged electronic point in the sky.

“Lion Eleven, Green River Two. We’re at your ten o’clock, slightly higher.”

“Roger, Greenie Two . . . I’ve got you.”

The instant the pilot of Lion Eleven made visual contact, he altered his course to turn inside my turn but adjusting his angle of bank to just a little less than my own standard thirty degrees of bank for rendezvous. This would make his turn radius slightly greater than mine, causing him to move closer and closer to me on the inside of the circle while adjusting his throttle in tiny increments to match his own airspeed to mine.

“Okay, Bob, he’s as good as aboard. Let’s check in on Strike Freq.”

“Rog!”

The VHF radio clicked through several bands of static, a fraction of another airborne conversation, and then stabilized on the check-in report of a flight of A-6 Intruders from the Hawk’s all-weather attack squadron. When they were finished, Bob checked us in.

“Master Strike, this is Green River Two with escort at rendezvous. Over!”

“Roger, Green River Two. Contact! You’re cleared on course. Strangle!”

“Roger. Out!”

I noted on my instrument panel the termination of the tiny blinking red light denoting the pulse of our IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) radar beacon as Bob “strangled our parrot,” a code phrase for securing the beacon. No use giving the Vietnamese search radar monitors a bigger and more defined blip on their scopes than necessary.

By now Lion Eleven had slid smoothly out of his own radius of turn, hesitated briefly just off my port wing, and crossed under to my starboard side. There he took up a comfortable cruise position on the outside of the turn and slightly aft.

As my compass pointer swung to a heading of two nine zero degrees, I eased my wings level. Lion Eleven matched me. Ahead, the tranquil coast stretched out on either side. At the Than Hoa River delta, the overall S-curve of the entire Vietnam coast ran close to true north and south. There, just a small course correction to my left and now at a slant range of about twenty-five miles lay our first reconnaissance target. I repositioned the folded map on my kneeboard to put west at the top, matching the scheme of the world ahead of me.

I noted the flight line drawn on the other map clipped below this one. There had been no time to brief my escort pilot on the additional requirement. Mission security and radio discipline precluded informing him now. I knew he would wonder what the hell was going on when I deviated from our prebriefed flight plan, but he’d stick with me. That was his mission. I’d explain later over a cup of coffee in the Ready Room. Hell, I had thought magnanimously, I’ll buy him a drink at the Peninsula’s bar our first afternoon in Hong Kong.

The mission went like clockwork. Since there had been hardly any cloud cover over the lower half of North Vietnam, I had bracketed the husky steel and concrete bridge the way I had taught so many others as a recce training instructor in Florida. The actual targets for the attack boys had been less distinct, but I had flown the line and was sure of the coverage from my panoramic horizon-to-horizon camera. Although I had seen no flak, I had jinked frequently during the entire time I was over land, changing directions slightly with high G-turns often enough to keep any gunners from tracking me. Then, heading back toward the coast, my F-4 Phantom fighter escort spewing black smoke as he tried to catch up, I felt it. WHUMP! Hit!

It happened so fast—no flak or tracers, no warning! After the hit somewhere back in the aft part of the plane, I had felt a light vibration followed by the illumination of my master warning light. Uh-oh! Red hydraulic #1 light ON. Red hydraulic #2 light ON. Red hydraulic utility light ON. I pushed the throttles forward now to afterburner to get maximum speed toward the relative safety of the Gulf. Thu-thump. The burners lit off and, with a light fuel load remaining, the effect of their thrust was multiplied, pushing me back against the contour of my ejection seat as the Vigilante shot forward and slightly upward.

“Hit! I think we just took a hit!” I knew damn well we’d taken a hit, but years of being Top Gun-cool had tempered the alarm in my voice. Bob had heard my radio transmission and would be giving me a heading back toward the ship. The vibration had become heavier and the control stick sluggish. Still accelerating, the plane suddenly rolled to the left. Control stick stiff—no effect. Jammed right rudder pedal. Left roll stopped but then immediate right roll. Left rudder—no effect.

Instinctively I reached for the yellow T-handle protruding from the side panel of the console near my right knee. I yanked it out sharply and felt the clunk of the two-in-one emergency generator and hydraulic pump extending into the wind stream from the starboard side of the fuselage. The wind-driven turbine pump should have regained the hydraulic pressure to my essential flight controls. Still no effect. Whatever had hit us must have severed both flight-control hydraulic lines, spilling all the precious fluid. Even with the emergency pump extended, with no fluid, there was no pressure. Still rolling, I tried to muscle the control stick into effectiveness.

Nothing! No control! Sky—land—sky—land—ocean. The nose had dropped now and we had picked up more speed. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Rolling rapidly! Speed 680! Red lights flashing! No more sky ahead, only the shimmering blue gulf spinning in front like a propeller. Christ! “Eject, Bob! Eject! Eject! Eject!”

I noticed that the water all around me was green now, bright chartreuse green. My dye-marker had come loose from its pocket on my torso harness. That should certainly make my position more visible from the air? The air! I scanned the ocean horizon to my right and there, as if materialized by my thought of rescue from the air, was an old UF Albatross sea-rescue plane. He was heading north just a couple of miles out to sea. Hey, fella, I know you must be looking for me! Here I am! Here I am!

Instinctively, I pulled my day/night signal flare from its pocket. The ring on the “day” end of the flare had to be snapped down hard over the edge of the tubular flare itself. This would break the seal so the ring could be pulled smartly away, igniting the flare and causing thick, bright orange smoke to billow forth. It could be seen for miles. The lumbering Albatross, my rescuer, droned on.

I struggled with the ring on the flare. I couldn’t hold onto the flare and also snap the ring down with only one hand. My right arm and hand just refused to participate. The seaplane continued northward, expanding the distance between us. Frantically, I tried to smack the ring of the flare against the hard surface of my helmet but just couldn’t get the right angle. “Turn around!” I shouted. “Over here!” He was barely a speck above the horizon now. With a final desperate bash against my helmet, the flare flipped from my hand, plopped into the water, and sank.

The loss of the flare caught me off guard. I had ignited flares a dozen times in training exercises, and once for real after ejecting from a crippled jet on a training mission over southern Georgia. Yet, throw in one variable—my disabled arm—and it was a whole new ballgame. Fixing upon the spot in the sky where the Albatross had disappeared, I suppressed my rising panic. I inventoried my remaining options, touching the pocket of my torso harness where each flare was stowed. I had my signal mirror and my spring-activated pencil flare gun, either of which could be operated with one hand the instant I caught sight of the next rescue craft. Somehow, even in this confused state of mind, I immediately realized that just because my primary and most natural course of action had been thwarted, I had resisted the paralysis of anger or shock and moved on to other possibilities. This was a principle inculcated by training and one that would serve me well in the immediate future.

The eerie stillness of both water and air enhanced the dreamlike aspects of my predicament. Indeed, as if echoing back out of some sheet-soaking nightmare came my urgent call—ordering yet also imploring: “Eject, Bob! Eject! Eject!”

Had he made it out of our doomed Vigilante too? Had the interconnect system between my ejection seat and his worked? I visualized the initiation of my own ejection activating the process of each little cartridge firing properly in series sending hot gases through the winding, bending lines to ignite the next cartridge, and the next. One caused the entire seat to pre-position for ejection, another activated the complex arm and leg restraining system, another activated a larger charge that blew the heavy cockpit canopy open and away, and finally the cartridge that activated the biggy—the seat rocket itself—propelling seat and parachute and Bob up and out of the plane, all a split-second before the same ingenious sequence had propelled my own seat out. A similar pyromechanical system would then deploy the drogue chute, braking seat and man to a speed allowing safe opening of the main chute without shredding, then a charge to instantly inflate the rubber bladders in the seat back, thereby popping the airman out and away from the seat to avoid entanglement between seat and chute. Finally, a barometrically activated cartridge deploying the main chute drogue and then the main itself.

All of this I reviewed in a few seconds almost as a backdrop for my immediate concern: Where was Bob?

SPWAT-TING! Something smacked the water a few yards away. SPLOCK! Off to the seaward. SPLAT! SPLAT! ZINNNG! The rippled surface exploded in two tall geysers ahead of me, and zinging sounds trailed off to my right. Instinctively, I twisted myself to the left, toward the shore. The puffs of blue-gray smoke hovered in the still air above the approaching boat. Now more flashes and smoke off to the right: another boat. THWACK! THWAP! THWAP! The spray flew around me. TZNNNG! TZINNNG! More flashes from the left: still another boat. Bullets whined above my head and fell into the water all around me, some skipping off the surface and going farther out to sea. Four boats were coming toward me, all very low in the water, each with a crowd of semiuniformed gunners. My instant picture was of rag-tag khaki and greenish clothing, some steel helmets, some pith helmets with camouflage material; they were probably mostly militia.

The muzzles of their rifles and automatic weapons were ablaze and the smoke was incredibly thick. The air and water around me erupted with the deadly barrage so I could hardly tell the difference between the two. I couldn’t believe that I, too, wasn’t already riddled with bullets. I could feel their impact in the water, vibrating through my body. I had a sudden image of my own red blood swirling together with the bright green of the dye around me in wavy, concentric patterns.

In another agonizing instant, the reality of my situation crystallized: This wasn’t a fuzzy dream. My aircraft had been hit. I had ejected but I was still alive, miraculously alive. Yet, how could I be? My plane had been plummeting into the Tonkin Gulf at just less than the speed of sound. Although more than eight years of military flying had prepared me to face a myriad of “what ifs” such as actually ejecting from a tumbling aircraft, my post-ejection actions must have been as much intuitive as trained.

Finally, I caught a glimpse of Bob floating low in the water between me and the boats. He was surprisingly close by, only a hundred yards or so away. He seemed to be inflating his tiny rubber raft as plumes of white water bracketed his position as well. Even if he had been conscious the whole time, he appeared to be too far away to have assisted me.

Yes, it had to have been almost instinctive: Somehow I had removed my oxygen mask and thereby hadn’t suffocated. I had released the clips on my parachute harness, thereby—except for the entangled shroud lines that had almost done me in—allowing it to sink harmlessly away. And I had pulled the toggles on the CO₂ cartridges that had inflated my flotation gear. All the training and practice had left indelible patterns in my subconscious, and had assured my survival—even while unconscious and incapacitated. The survival instinct!

Now, could I evade? Could I keep from being captured? Could I resist? It was clear that to resist would be crazy. Obviously I couldn’t outswim the boats even though they appeared to be no more than crude dug-outs, powered by single oarsmen sculling astern. With my arm apparently broken, weighted by the survival gear in the pockets of my torso harness and cutaway G-suit, and with the bulky flotation gear up under my arms, I could barely thrash away from them.

I was strangely oblivious to the threat of being torn to shreds by the continuing hail of lead. Just the thought of resisting drew my hands to the .38 pistol holstered firmly to the left breast of my harness. Grandpa had carried it for years as a deputy sheriff and had solemnly presented it to me before I left. “I’ve never once had to use this, son [he was very proud of that], and I hope and pray you won’t have to either.” He and I had been especially close when I was just little.

Every summer he’d put me to work with his migrant work crew in the peach orchards of the San Joaquin Valley. Sometimes I rode with him on his “ditch tender” rounds, scheduling irrigation water for the neighboring farmers. He’d talk politics with his cronies at each stop, and usually end up with “I tell ya the gov’ment’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket and we’re gonna rue the day! You and I might not live to see it, but I feel sorry for this little kid here” as he poked the chewed-up end of his cigar in my direction. Is this what you had in mind, Grandpa? As if preprogrammed but still with a pang of regret, I slipped the steel-blue weapon from its leather holster and released it into the water. Better the deep than them, Grandpa. I watched it swirl down and down; it seemed to take forever. I still had that final image in my fuzzy consciousness as I realized the shooting had stopped.

The enveloping sound of the shooting had been replaced by the cacophony of words and shrieks in a language I realized I’d never heard before but might soon come to know well.

Regaining consciousness to find myself injured, confused, and so totally out of my element had been bad enough. But now, confronted by this hostile flotilla of natives, I felt like I’d been transported into some sinister world from which I might never return. Had I been able to think clearly, I would undoubtedly have felt the first pangs of fear, maybe even terror.

I was startled to realize how quickly they had drawn so near; they were only a few yards away now. Still they shouted excitedly, either to one another or at me; I couldn’t tell which, and it would have mattered little even if I could. I just stared back into a couple of dozen pairs of eyes, all glaring widely above the muzzles of their rifles and machine guns.

For the first time now, I confronted my enemy face to face, an enemy that until now had been an abstract collage of Viet Cong, headlines of war, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, green jungle tops, road junctions on maps, and toy sampans on counterpane mirrors below. Now he had come alive and was real. These were men and boys of flesh and blood making hostile animal noises and gestures at me.

I felt more confused than ever. War was supposed to be clean— mechanical and technical, soldier versus soldier, rocket against tank, missile against plane, all crisp and decisive. Instead, I felt like some helpless cornered prey about to be pounced upon by a pack of savage animals as soon as they had sniffed out my fear.

Suddenly they were as hushed as the air itself as they contemplated their enemy. Had I until now been as abstract to them as they had been to me?

In how many movies, books, and dramas had I seen this first-time confrontation between foes, one with the drop on the other? How many times had I seen the intensity of their calculation: To kill or to spare? Revenge or forgiveness? Cruel bravado or compassion? What were the factors in their process now? The expression on my face? The emotion in my eyes? Would civility overcome the darkest animal instincts in us all, the hatred that I could see clearly in their eyes? But it was not hatred alone. Their eyes also reflected the same excited curiosity, and even some of the fear that I knew must be clearly evident in my own. Would I look into those eyes and kill if I had the upper hand? Could I?

In that instant of transfixion, we seemed to distill—they and I—all the centuries of human conflict of which we were now a part.

In a flash the deadly muzzle of an AK-47 automatic rifle erupted in blue flame and the water exploded in my face. This time the impact through my body was heavy and breathtaking. I was sure I had been shot. Two more shots in rapid succession. I felt the stunning CRACK! on my helmet as my head was knocked backward and a huge piercing strobe light seemed to bleach my brain. The image of the swirling blood and dye flashed hot across my mind. There she was again swimming down through the water, down and away, eluding the crimson and green swirls, down, down into the deeper blue—lending her own flowing grace to the thinning specks of sunlight and the spiral of silvery bubbles from her hair. The tiny silvery bubbles spiraling up around me were all that remained. Oh, God, Baby, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!

When I opened my eyes my left arm was extended out of the water and over my head. “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”