Page 23 of Gryphon

Right now, her thighs were loose to either side of the handle.

Her g-suit hadn’t inflated for a simple snap roll, a null-g maneuver.

Yet the handle kept rising like a guy’s pants when they thought they had a chance with her after too many beers at some flyer’s bar—as if.

She tapped the autopilot to life, then took her hand off the throttle and pressed down on the handle. It fought her. Pushing harder didn’t force it any lower. It continued to move upward inexorably at several millimeters per second.

Ingrid leaned forward to look down at the mechanism at the moment the actuator had raised the handle to its trigger point.

The ejection seat’s computer initiated the launch sequence—the whole of which required a mere one-point-two seconds.

First, the haul-back yanked Ingrid’s body and shoulders tight against the seat itself. Her attention remained on the self-rising ejection handle loop between her thighs, tipping her head forward. She saw the top of the raising mechanism emerge from below the seat cushion, a shiny aluminum shaft anchored to the back of the ejection loop handle.

Next, the MDC—Miniature Detonating Cord—embedded in the canopy fired. The thin explosive strip ran from front to back along the center of the main canopy, the only blemish in the sweeping view aloft from the cockpit. When it blew, it split the acrylic in two. With a hard bang, the secondary MDC placed all around the lower edge where the canopy locked onto the upper lip of the cockpit cut the canopy aloft. The two halves tumbled aside in the six-hundred-knot slipstream.

Next, the seat cannon fired to drive Ingrid and the ejection seat clear of the jet.

The barometric pressure informed the ship’s computer that they were at twenty-thousand feet. It fired with only fourteen g’s, rather than the twenty-five that would be necessary if it had triggered at or near the ground. In a low-altitude ejection, it would have to throw her far enough aloft to have a chance for the parachute to open and slow her return to Earth. Here all she had to do was clear the jet’s tail.

Ingrid had been trained to lean back in her seat, fold her arms over her chest, and brace for launch as soon as she’d pulled the handles.

However, Ingrid’s position, head tipped forward and down as she’d continued her efforts to fight the rising handle, meant she was out of position when her head’s weight jumped upward from five kilos, five-point-six with her Saab Cobra helmet. For a brief moment of hard acceleration, it weighed eighty kilos—more than her entire body, including her flight suit, boots, helmet, and sidearm.

She was tall and fit, an inch taller than Liisa Salo, but light with slenderness. Had the ejection proceeded normally, with Ingrid sitting upright, she’d have become an inch shorter than Liisa due to permanent spinal compression.

Instead it fractured her neck.

With care, trained placement on a back board, and immediate surgery, she could have eventually recovered. Not enough to ever again risk flying a military jet that she might have to eject from, but enough to have had a very enjoyable life with Kapten Liisa Salo of the Finnish Air Force. She had not misread Liisa’s signals of personal interest.

But that wasn’t what happened.

Because she’d ejected straight up, the seat assessed that no additional corrections were needed to right the seat or fire it higher. Any of which would have severed her spinal cord and made her a quadriplegic at best, or left her with no functioning heart or lungs but giving her brain enough time to understand the true terror of imminent death.

No guidance rockets fired.

Instead the computer released the seat harness. The seat dropped away and freed the drogue chute. That in turn pulled out Ingrid’s main chute.

During the sudden deceleration of the booster rocket ceasing fire, her instincts had shifted her head squarely over her neck, though not in perfect alignment. The hard snap of the opening chute pinched her spinal nerves sufficiently to debilitate her arms. Her training tried but her arms wouldn’t lift to the chute’s control toggles. Ingrid’s fall remained at the whim of the winds over the frigid Baltic Sea.

Without control of her hands or arms, the emergency survival kit stowed below the seat pad and dangling from her harness by a short tether would never be of any use.

The chute restricted her descent to thirty kilometers per hour. From six kilometers, twenty-thousand feet, she had plenty of time to observe the world around her.

She heard Liisa’s emergency call, “Pilot down. Pilot down. Under a parachute. No sign of attack. Launch CSAR.” Then their coordinates.

As the chute spun her one way, then the other, wholly out of her control, she saw her beloved half-bird / half-lion winging its way south.

Undamaged except for the loss of the canopy and pilot, the Saab JAS 39E Gripen’s automated flight attitude recovery software compensated for the shift in the center-of-gravity loading caused by the abrupt departure of seventy kilos of ejection seat, eighty-three of pilot and her gear, and ninety more of the canopy blown aside.

Once restabilized, the autopilot Ingrid had engaged to wrestle with the ejection seat handle would guide it safely for over seven hundred kilometers. Eventually, a Polish F-16C Fighting Falcon would shoot down the pilotless Gryphon, the mythical guardian of gold and kings, rather than risk it crashing into downtown Warsaw.

Even when the remaining pieces were returned to Sweden, there would be no useful information. Nothing aboard had detected the odd frequency of the signal and the entire sabotage mechanism had been ejected along with Major Ingrid Eklund’s seat, which was even now falling independently into the sea.

Liisa dove down to fly by her.

Ingrid attempted to turn her head to follow but the pain in her neck stopped her instantly.

“What happened?”

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