Unbroken_ A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand [58]
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For Louie, there were only jagged, soundless sensations: his body catapulted forward, the plane breaking open, something wrapping itself around him, the cold slap of water, and then its weight over him. Green Hornet, its nose and left wing hitting first at high speed, stabbed into the ocean and blew apart.
As the plane disintegrated around him, Louie felt himself being pulled deep underwater. Then, abruptly, the downward motion stopped and Louie was flung upward. The force of the plane’s plunge had spent itself, and the fuselage, momentarily buoyed by the air trapped inside, leapt to the surface. Louie opened his mouth and gasped. The air hissed from the plane, and the water rushed up over Louie again. The plane slipped under and sank toward the ocean floor as if yanked downward.
Louie tried to orient himself. The tail was no longer behind him, the wings no longer ahead. The men who’d been around him were gone. The impact had rammed him into the waist gun mount and wedged him under it, facedown, with the raft below him. The gun mount pressed against his neck, and countless strands of something were coiled around his body, binding him to the gun mount and the raft. He felt them and thought: Spaghetti. It was a snarl of wires, Green Hornet’s nervous system. When the tail had broken off, the wires had snapped and whipped around him. He thrashed against them but couldn’t get free. He felt frantic to breathe, but couldn’t.
In the remains of the cockpit, Phil was fighting to get out. When the plane hit, he was thrown forward, his head striking something. A wave of water punched through the cockpit, and the plane carried him under. From the darkness, he knew that he was far below the surface, sinking deeper by the second. He apparently saw Cuppernell push his big body out of the plane. Phil found what he thought was the cockpit window frame, its glass missing. He put his foot on something hard and pushed himself through the opening and out of the cockpit. He swam toward the surface, the light coming up around him.
He emerged in a puzzle of debris. His head was gushing blood and his ankle and one finger were broken. He found a floating hunk of wreckage, perhaps four feet square, and clung to it. It began to sink. There were two life rafts far away. No one was in them. Cuppernell was nowhere to be seen.
Far below, Louie was still ensnared in the plane, writhing in the wires. He looked up and saw a body, drifting passively. The plane coursed down, and the world fled away above. Louie felt his ears pop, and vaguely recollected that at the swimming pool at Redondo Beach, his ears would pop at twenty feet. Darkness enfolded him, and the water pressure bore in with greater and greater intensity. He struggled uselessly. He thought: Hopeless.
He felt a sudden, excruciating bolt of pain in his forehead. There was an oncoming stupor, a fading, as he tore at the wires and clenched his throat against the need to breathe. He had the soft realization that this was the last of everything. He passed out.
He woke in total darkness. He thought: This is death. Then he felt the water still on him, the heavy dropping weight of the plane around him. Inexplicably, the wires were gone, as was the raft. He was floating inside the fuselage, which was bearing him toward the ocean floor, some seventeen hundred feet down. He could see nothing. His Mae West was uninflated, but its buoyancy was pulling him into the ceiling of the plane. The air was gone from his lungs, and he was now gulping reflexively, swallowing salt water. He tasted blood, gasoline, and oil. He was drowning.
Louie flung out his arms, trying to find a way out. His right hand struck something, and his USC ring snagged on it. His hand was caught. He reached toward it with his left hand and felt a long, smooth length of metal. The sensation oriented him: He was at the open right waist window. He swam into the window, put his feet on