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could pitch up or the aircraft could roll, and the decision would be taken away from him. They were a heartbeat away from an unscheduled carnival ride of ejection and parachute. They’d have a bird’s-eye view of a very expensive fireball.
    Shit. The damned thing was still flying. He’d managed to climb to ten thousand feet. He wasn’t out of control. He had no control. He accelerated, hoping to get some more airspeed and altitude.
    He could hear Hatch briefing the controller on the situation. Captain Bud Forster, the CAG LSO, came online again. In a few minutes, the whole battle group would know about the trouble.
    The plane broke ten thousand feet, and the nose pitched up. Josh wrestled with it, but it kept bucking. He dampened the yaw by working the rudders opposite the cycles, but the aircraft kept canting on its own.
    Nobody said what everyone was thinking: the jet couldn’t make a safe landing.
    The ECMOs worked feverishly through checklists—rudder failure, control malfunctions, alternate approaches—hoping to find the magic bullet. “Nothing. There’s nothing applicable,” Newman concluded. “Wait here. We need to pull circuit breakers until we isolate the problem. Jeez, I do this in my basement when the dishwasher quits.”
    When the first two were pulled, the yaw abated. “Keep going,” Josh ordered. The third one created no noticeable difference. When the fourth was pulled, the controls turned to mush. “Put it back!” Josh yelled. “Put it back!”
    Too late. The nose pitched up wildly. I did this, thought Josh, fighting back with the controls. I’m the pilot, and I did this. The air-navigation computer was haywire. He tried feverishly to remember if he’d shut it off when he’d aborted the landing.Maybe the computer had engaged automatically and was overriding him. It didn’t matter now. The Prowler was completely out of control.
    In the cockpit, they all knew it. Four pairs of gloved hands wrapped around four ejection handles. These were Advanced Concept Ejection Seats, 128 pounds apiece, each equipped with a twenty-one-pound rocket catapult. Success rate was better than ninety percent, but for some reason, Josh felt no reassurance.
    He looked out at the ice-bright stars and wished he’d worn warmer clothes under his G-suit. At the same time, he was thinking and moving as fast as he could—faster than he’d ever imagined he could—but everything seemed to slow down. Time dilation. It was a concept he’d studied in advanced physics. Time in the moving system will be perceived by a stationary observer to be running slower….
    He was a stationary observer; the Prowler was a moving system. The traveler measures his own proper time, since he is at the beginning and end of his trip interval .
    In the shadowy cockpit, the glow from the instrument panel cast its eerie illumination over the faces of the crew as each man braced for disaster. They were all alone up here, yet they were not alone. Four lives, four families whose fate would be decided by a broken piece of metal hanging in midair.
    Josh thought, Lauren. Only a minute ago he’d been confused about her. Now, with the same crystal clarity with which he could see the tumbling night sky, he knew exactly what he wanted. Lauren. The beginning and the end of his trip interval.
    He took a deep, bracing breath. Then he gave the order he knew he had to give.
    “Eject! Eject! Eject!”

CHAPTER THREE
    Whidbey Island, Washington
7:30 a.m.
    Lauren Stanton woke up in the same state of mind she’d gone to sleep in—thinking of Josh. He had only been at sea for a few weeks, but it felt like forever.
    She grabbed his pillow and hugged it, her eyes shut and her heart about to break. “Josh,” she whispered into the feathery depths. Maybe it was just her imagination, but she believed it still held his scent.
    She of all people should know better than to fall for a Navy guy.
    Groaning in protest, she swam to the surface of the covers and got out of