Goliath

Rocky grabs the pipes, sucks in a desperate breath, and ducks, as the swell buries her, pounding her chest as it hurtles down the passage. She opens her eyes, shivering from the cold, then climbs faster, the daylight winking at her, teasing her from a dismaying thirty feet up.

A minute later she emerges from the open hatch, the gray sky rolling away as the deck heaves backward, threatening to send her spilling back into the corridor. She leaps sideways, then screams, dropping to her belly as an F/A-18E Super Hornet slides sideways across the tilting tarmac, its mangled bulk threatening to crush her. She covers her head, squeezing her eyes shut as the wreckage passes over her and crashes into the flight deck’s tower, now pitching backward as the carrier’s failing buoyancy yields its weight to the sea.

Rocky crawls out from under some trailing debris, her fingers creating indentations in the soft top layer of the torn deck as she moves toward the rising portside rail. Dodging yet another avalanche of debris, she grabs onto one of the carrier’s now-loose retractable antennas as the deck climbs to an angle too steep even to kneel upon.

Reaching up, she pulls herself to the rail and peers over the edge.

Oh, God …

The pitching sea is eight stories below but nowhere to be seen, concealed beneath the carrier’s keel, which is rising from the sea like a glistening steel whale poised to swallow her.

Unable to jump, she holds on, praying for the ship to stop rolling. Shaking uncontrollably, she closes her eyes to shut out the vertigo and the wail of tortured metal, her trembling hand reflexively wiping the blood crusted on her half-frozen brow.

The carrier stops rotating—and suddenly drops like an elevator. Rocky holds on, as water splashes across her face and the sea rushes up from below.

Now! She climbs upon the listing rail and leaps.

The cold wind rushes past her ears until she plunges feetfirst into the roaring ocean, sinking like an anchor. As she hits the water she inflates the vest, and its buoyancy halts her descent at twenty feet. Kicking and paddling, she fights her way back to the surface, the frothy layer appearing so close, yet always an arm’s distance away.

Finally, her head pops free, somehow slipping into a valley between swells. The rolling ocean lifts and drops her, the nausea overwhelming her stomach and head. A current tugs at her from behind. Turning, she is horrified to witness the Ronald Reagan’s superstructure slip beneath the waves, expelling its last dying belch as it disappears into the vortex created by its own descent into the unforgiving sea.

A steel-cold current of choking brine reaches out and grabs her. Panicking, she starts swimming, but the vortex is too strong, sucking her backward as it inhales her within its fury. Ocean swells become mountainous barriers, rising higher as she spins faster.

Too strong …

Rocky sucks in a last desperate breath as the cavitation of the displaced mass of the carrier snatches her about the waist and drags her below.

She kicks and paddles in protest, wasting precious air as she fights to swim upstream against the maelstrom, the unfathomable suction spinning above the now-submerged wreckage.

Forty feet … her diving watch displays, unheeded.

Her pulse pounds in her ears.

Sixty feet . . . sinister pressure assaults her eardrums as her limbs turn to lead.

Eighty feet, forty seconds, thirty-one years … and still she is plummeting, ever downward.

How deep can a human go and survive on a single breath of air? She remembers seeing specials on free-diving and wills herself not to waste precious energy by fighting.

The haunting sounds of the depths envelop her. Rocky pinches her nose and blows, attempting to rid the pain from her ears. She looks down, falling feetfirst into the deep blue sea. Far below, the Ronald Reagan groans back at her as the once-mighty vessel disappears into murky shadows, approaching its final resting place.

Please let me go …

One minute … the pressure dragging her below easing only slightly, the pinch in her ears now daggers.

One hundred twenty feet … still falling, strength and resolve diminishing with every foot.

One fifty, her throat and chest on fire.

At one hundred fifty-eight feet, the carrier releases her.

The air space in Rocky’s flotation device has been compressed flat beneath six atmospheres of pressure. No longer buoyant, she continues falling, flailing in slow motion, a marionette dancing for Death’s amusement before He takes her.