Page 24 of Gryphon

It took Ingrid a thousand meters of descent to realize they were words sounding over her helmet’s emergency radio. And then five hundred more and another full spin to understand they were directed at her.

“Hi, Liisa.”

“Hi, Ingrid. What happened?”

It was a good question. But one of many she had. She had questions for Liisa too, but couldn’t recall what they were at the moment.

Then she recalled the feel of something pushing up against her palm. It was…

“The ejection handle! It pushed up on its own.”

“That can not happen.”

Ingrid didn’t feel like giving a history lesson about the early days of the Saab Gripen. “I felt it. Pushing up against my palm. I managed to slow it down, but couldn’t stop it. There was—” What had she seen? “I saw…an aluminum arm. Attached to the handle. Square shaft. Pushing it up…”

She tried to look down, to remember.

But again her neck pain stopped her. What she did see wiped away any attempts to understand what had happened.

By squinting through the lower edge of her visor but over the facemask feeding her emergency air from the small bottle integrated into her harness, she saw a lot of blue—nothing but blue with scattered sheet ice dotting the surface. Individual waves rippled forever below her. None of the ice would be big enough to land on, but plenty big to crush her after she’d fallen into the water between them. She spun right to left, then left to right as a gust swung her abruptly about.

Frigid, winter Baltic, blue so dark it was almost black except for the whitecaps being ripped from the tops of the waves and the sunlight blinding off the white ice.

Very bad.

“I’m sorry, Liisa. I wish…” But that all seemed very far away now.

“Me, too, Ingrid. You hang on. Steer the chute.”

“My arms…” she wanted to shrug, but if it worked, she didn’t feel it.

On the next spin, she saw an island. Two more times of slowly twirling about before she understood she’d hit the island rather than the sea. A strong westerly wind drove her along.

It would be a good thing, right?

Her feet. She tried flexing her feet and felt those. Maybe she’d be okay despite the battering she’d taken.

“Hey, Liisa. If I get through this…”

“Don’t talk like that, it’s a date. Mysa, Sisu.” The Finnish F/A-18C Hornet shot by close enough for her to see Liisa looking at her though Ingrid couldn’t turn her head to track the flight.

Two words. Two languages. No easy translation to English for either but they meant the world. Swedish Mysa, to lie comfortably together snuggled up. Sisu, Finnish, to face with great bravery, as an endearment by Liisa’s tone.

“A date,” Ingrid confirmed.

“Absolutely!” Liisa offered a choked laugh of encouragement.

But the island was approaching fast.

Unable to brake the chute, Ingrid bent her knees to absorb as much of the impact as possible. It looked as if she’d clear the thick trees that covered much of the island and would land in the sandy patch along the east side.

She made ready to kick down hard against the sand to ease the impact on the rest of her body.

It wasn’t her fractured neck or paralyzed arms that killed Major Ingrid Eklund of the Swedish Air Force.

Time hadn’t yet destroyed the fuze on the World War II German Teller landmine lying beneath the soil. Designed for blowing up tanks, it required ninety kilos of pressure to trigger the five and a half kilos of TNT.

Ingrid in her full gear weighed under eighty and could safely walk over it. Time had buried it deeply enough that she and Kapten Liisa Salo—both lean and fit, totaling a hundred and fifty-three kilos—could have made reasonably energetic love atop it in equal safety as long as they left the extra weight of their gear and clothes off to the side.

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