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then the gigantic airplane had simply flown away, leaving him here, all alone.
    He had a huge bump on his head and a long scrape on his left arm. He’d been bobbing in the water for more than an hour now, and he was getting damned cold. He wasn’t sure how he got here; his memory was very foggy. In fact, he couldn’t even remember his name.
    But he was coherent enough to know he was in very dire circumstances. He looked in all directions and saw nothing but water. He could tell by the cloud formations there wasn’t any land mass for hundreds of miles. But what could he do?
    He couldn’t last much longer like this. He had to do something.
    So he looked up at the sun and determined which way was west.
    And then he started swimming.

Chapter 2
    I T WAS NOW LATE afternoon.
    Hawk Hunter was standing on the foredeck of the Louis St. Louis, taking in many deep breaths and slowly letting them out again. Two armed sailors were watching over him from nearby. He was sure to them he looked like someone who needed some fresh air. And a lot of it.
    He didn’t know who he was. Or where he came from. Or how he got here. His name was Hawk Hunter, that was the only thing he was sure of. After that, it was all a jumble.
    And he had no idea where he was. Sure, he was on a destroyer and he’d been picked up some 350 miles out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And the people on the ship were Americans and they seemed to be fighting a war against the Germans. And the captain of the destroyer had said it was 1997.
    But this ship—it was so strange! And the German ship; it had been even more outlandish. And the airplane which had circled above him while he was in the water: it seemed too enormous to fly. But how would he know these things? How could he know something was strange, if he couldn’t remember anything to compare it to?
    That was just it. His mind was not a total blank. Some things were coming naturally to him. He knew how to walk and talk and breathe. He knew he was American. He knew who the Germans were, what a destroyer should look like, and that the bigger the airplane, the harder it is to fly.
    But what he was doing an hour before he found himself in the water? He didn’t know…
    When the destroyer’s captain asked him if he fell right out of the sky, Hunter’s brain processed the question as if, yes, that’s exactly what had happened. He had fallen out of the sky and into the ocean. Not out of an airplane—just out of the clear blue sky. But how could that happen?
    Again, he didn’t know.
    He took another deep breath. His head felt full of stuff. Familiar things. People. Incidents. But for some reason he just couldn’t access these memories. He sniffed the sea air and prayed it would uncloud that part of his brain that was hiding all these things and the circumstances by which he found himself here, in this strange, but not-so-strange place.
    Another deep breath. More questions. Who were those other two guys in the water with him? And exactly what kind of uniform was he wearing when he was picked up? And what about…
    Stop!
    Stop. Hunter took another deep breath and let it out slowly. Too many questions were flowing into his head and if his brain got overloaded, then he would blow a neuron fuse for sure. So take another breath, he told himself. Calm down. Be cool. This will all get figured out, somehow.
    Maybe.
    The ship’s captain had said they would make port in four hours; more than three and a half had passed by now.
    It was getting dark. The little warship was whipping along the waves like it was a racing boat, so Hunter assumed they must be nearing the vessel’s home. But where was it? They were sailing northwest, at least by the moon and the stars. But Hunter couldn’t see land anywhere out on the horizon.
    Finally, though, he sensed the engines begin to slow. In seconds they were going at two-thirds speed, as if they were approaching land. But again, where the hell was it? They seemed still to be out in