Blondie- A Jake 'Hangman' Seresin fanfiction

Chapter 16

Rather than waste time waiting for the aircraft carrier to return to port, the Dagger squadron were returning to their base at Top Gun via two helicopters. The group was divided randomly into two- Maverick and Avalanche, who had more missions to discuss, would be in the first helicopter, along with Jake, Rooster, Coyote, and several others; Georgie, Lainey, Phoenix, Bob, Payback and Fanboy were all in the second helicopter. The journey, they were informed, would last around one and a half hours, mostly over dry land since the carrier was reasonably near the coast. The trip was so routine that Georgie didn't even bother saying goodbye to Jake.

The inside of the helicopter was mostly empty space- the cockpit was separated from the main body by a door, and at the rear, the pilots sat on two glorified benches along the walls, strapped into safety harnesses. When they were in motion, it was too loud for much conversation, and most people slept, having struggled to in the cramped bunks of the aircraft carrier the previous two nights.

Around fifty minutes into the journey, Georgie was jolted awake by a loud crashing noise.

"What's going on?" Lainey asked, waking up also when the sound of an alarm filtered through from the cockpit.

What was going on became quite clear when the helicopter angled towards its nose, the force of gravity on its passengers suddenly increasing exponentially.

"I really hope we're not about to crash into the Pacific Ocean!" Phoenix yelled above the cacophony.

"We've got to be above land now, surely," Fanboy reasoned, straining his voice to be heard. "We've been up here for nearly an hour, and we weren't that far from the coast to begin with!"

Say what you want about pilots, Georgie thought, they never panic in a crisis.

Around a minute after the first sign of trouble, the helicopter began to spin horizontally, pressing the pilots into the walls. There were no windows, but it was clear that they were still accelerating due to the sheer force that they were feeling. Seconds after that, loud scraping and banging noises began and the whole chassis began to shake about, slowing down slightly.

"We must be falling through some trees!" someone pointed out, Georgie couldn't tell who, but the scraping lasted barely half a minute before that too ended, and they finally landed on the ground with a huge crash and a sound of shearing metal and smashing glass from the front.

At last, silence.

"Everybody alright?" Georgie asked warily. "Nobody hit their head?". Luckily, no one had.

"They should have come out of that cockpit by now," Lainey muttered, gingerly unstrapping herself and approaching the cockpit door.

"Oh, god," she sobbed after opening it. Payback quickly got to his feet and went to stand next to her in the doorway.

"The whole cockpit's been smashed to pieces," he reported quietly. "Must have gone down nose first into a tree."

He turned to face the others, his expression grim. "They're both dead. And there's no way we're flying this thing out of here. We're stuck until somebody comes to rescue us."

"Let's take a look outside," another pilot, Merlin, said. "We don't even know where we are."

They all stood up in agreement, and Merlin slid open the door, peering around momentarily before jumping down.

"Looks like some kind of forest," he called out, and the others followed him.

The outside air had the west coast end-of-summer heat, so Georgie knew they had to be close to home; they were surrounded by tall, ancient-looking trees and the ground was soft and mossy underfoot.

Merlin, who was one of the older pilots in their group, seemed to be taking charge, and for once, no one objected.

"Zeus, check the radio," he ordered, "although from the look of things, it's probably dead."

The entire front end of the helicopter was crumpled and twisted, the windows smashed and the pilot and co-pilot's bodies just visible inside.

"Everything's dead," Zeus reported. "No power to any of it. Hell, half the front equipment panel is missing."

"Anyone got their mobile?"

"No signal," Lainey sighed. "Typically."

"Well, looks like our only choice is to wait here until they come looking," Merlin shrugged. "It's no good walking, we could be a hundred kilometers from anywhere useful."

"They'll never find us," Zeus said.

"They will," Georgie insisted. "If it was equipment failure, they'll know roughly when they lost contact with us. They know what course we were on- we can't have strayed too far, even if we had no navigation. And we left a rather large hole in the canopy."

She pointed up to the one window of daylight among the tall trees, which had clearly been caused by the helicopter's rapid descent.

"And it'll be a while before they stop looking," Fanboy added. "Admiral Haines will be in charge of organizing searches, and he's not about to abandon a group of pilots under his command for dead easily, let alone his daughter."

"Or Mav," Phoenix added. "Can you imagine Mav letting them stop looking if he thinks we could still be alive? There's no way."

"Well, everybody make yourselves comfortable, I guess," Merlin sighed. "We might be here a while."