I didn’t want to do it. To break formation.

My AV-8B Harrier II jet streaked across the sky, leaving white contrails behind while the frothing Mediterranean Sea churned below. My squadron was off the coast of Cyprus, running a routine patrol op out of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Not a combat mission, but a display of force to let everyone know that the United States Marine Corps was there—standing by, ready to lay down fire and destruction at the drop of a hat. And we could if we needed to since each Harrier was decked out with enough munitions to level a small army.

Not that it would come to that. It never did.

This was a standard run, no thrills no frills, and since we were trucking along at Mach zero-point-eight-nine—right around six-hundred and sixty-two miles per hour—we’d be back on base in time for a full afternoon of World of Warcraft. Which was good because I had a World Boss raid at four.

Unfortunately, the unexpected storm rolling in from the west could ruin my plans. The blue sky abruptly gave way to a sudden swell of roiling dark clouds, booming thunder, and crackling streaks of lightning. I didn’t want to break formation, but heading into that shitstorm was a bad move. Might as well book a one-way ticket to Crashville, population me. Harriers were kick-ass flying machines, sure, but even they couldn’t stand toe-to-toe with Mother Nature. I eased up on the stick, banking slightly right, knowing I’d catch hell for the move.

“Gamer-Two, reporting,” I spoke into my radio. “I found a clear route through the storm. Eight-three-one-niner-niner-six. If you follow me, we can circle back around and get back to base in time for a sandwich, over.”

I didn’t much like my call-sign, Gamer-Two, but it fit me. While the other guys were always hitting the bars and hanging out with local girls, I’d be at my laptop immersed in various fantasy worlds fighting the good fight, beating up the bad guys, and collecting sweet, sweet loot. My squadron made fun of me, and that was kind of the point of my call-sign. To make it worse, I wasn’t even named Gamer-One. Nope. I was Gamer-Two because everyone teased me that I always came in second place.

“Negative Gamer-Two,” came Sugar’s reply, cool and confident. Sugar was our squadron leader, and in the air his word was gospel. “Keep to the flight plan, over.”

“Seriously, Merely,” Earl Echo Earl’s voice crackled in my ear, “you break formation and I’ll nail your ass to the wall. You’ll be pulling Barrack Duty for the rest of your tour. Swear to God, you’ll never get to play another round of War Shit, or whatever the hell it’s called, again. You copy that, over?”

I ground my teeth, anger boiling up just below the surface. Everyone ragged on me—I was the butt of just about every joke—but only Earl Echo Earl was a complete asshole about it. Sugar was cool most days, but since Earl was next up in my chain of command, he had a lot of sway in my life. Worse, it seemed like he was always looking for any possible excess to bust my balls. “Yeah, I copy that, over,” I replied, biting my tongue, and toeing the line.

A thunderous crack of lightning crashed as the last word left my mouth, the flare blinding me to the world as deafening sound resounded around me like a gong. The light disappeared a second later, but somehow during the brief moment, I’d moved even further off course. The clear patch of sky was closer now, but that meant I’d veered significantly astray from the flight plan.

“Correcting course, over,” I radioed in, but silence was my only response. “This is Gamer-Two, anyone read me, over?” I sent again, checking my gauges as I attempted to readjust.

Static filled my ears as the channel buzzed.

No one was responding—not Sugar, Butch, Cobra, Dizzy, Earl Echo Earl, Foxy, or Mini-Maverick. The lightning blast must’ve done something to my comm. I adjusted course further, keeping a small patch of clear sky in view, but something was wrong. Really wrong. My dials spun wildly, my compass offered me off the charts readings, and a spark sputtered out of my control board. The stick fought me like a demon snake, jerking this way, then that, refusing to cooperate with me. What the hell was going on?

A second later, a second thundercrack enveloped me—this one even closer than the first. It sounded like a bunker buster exploding on impact, and the smell of ozone washed through the cockpit, knocking my sense of smell into tomorrow. Sweat broke out across my forehead, and I blinked my eyes to clear away the stinging perspiration as I concentrated. Focused. It was clear, I was alone. I fought with the stick as the first faint trickle of choking smoke invaded the cockpit, which was bad news bears.

A burst of sharp static filled my ears. It was Sugar, but his words came out clipped and strangely distorted. “Earl Echo Earl, down … lost engine. Lightning … careful … evacu—”

And then his voice was lost, abruptly cut off. There wasn’t even static. Rain washed down on the canopy of my harrier like someone was pouring an ocean on me. For a second I couldn’t see, but the entire jet trembled, the seat beneath me vibrating as my Harrier hit something. An invisible wall of compressed air maybe. Except that couldn’t be right because when I burst through the far side, the storm was gone, vanished, and the rain was gone too. I felt my mouth drop open as I wheeled the plane sharp right.

Holy crap.

I was cruising through crystalline skies, but behind me was the storm in all its brutal fury. That wasn’t the weirdest part though. No, there was some sort of force field—a curved, magic shield like the edge of an enormous soap bubble—keeping the rain and lightning at bay. Before I could wrap my head around what I saw though, the shrill alarm of my engine going out pierced my ears. Maybe I was out of the storm, but I was obviously not out of trouble. The stick trembled in my hand once more, and the trickle of smoke washing into the cockpit turned into a tsunami.

I was glad for the oxygen mask providing me air, but I could hardly see between the sudden blast of sunlight and the gray smoke. My control panel continued to spark and spit, the gears and dials spinning insanely as lights flashed and buttons beeped. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. There was no way to avoid it, I was going down. Still, I fought to get my Harrier under control; I wheeled her to the side, and below me was a flash of green surrounded by azure.

There was an island down there, and if I could get my jet to cooperate, I might be able to land her on or near the white sands below.

But that couldn’t be right—there shouldn’t be an island below me. I’d flown this same route fifty times before. I knew this region upside down and inside out, including every spit of land. That was all part of mission prep. No, the island below shouldn’t exist. But there it was, a giant sprawl of green trees and white sand in a sea of blue like a giant middle finger to all reason and logic.

But if crazy magical barriers could exist, why not a giant uncharted island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea?

Or was it uncharted? Was I still on Earth? Could I have passed through a portal into another world? At this point, I wasn’t ready to count any possibility out. Though it might not matter one way or the other if I didn’t get my Harrier down safely.

So, I pushed my fear, uncertainty, and morbid curiosity to the back of my mind as my training took over. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” I shouted into the comm to be heard over the blare of the alarms. “This is First Lieutenant Jacob Merely of the United States Marine Corps. I am going down. I repeat, I am going down at the following coordinates.” I squinted at my dash and caught just enough to spit out my longitude and latitude. “Uncharted island below. Left engine is gone. Fully loaded harrier, over.”

I thought about the guns and missiles I carried. A five-barreled Gatling cannon, throwing twenty-five-millimeter bullets, mounted under-fuselage in the left pod with three hundred rounds of ammunition in the right pod. Four LAU-5003 rockets and ten air-to-air missiles including four AIM-9 Sidewinder infrared-guided missiles and six AIM 120 AMRAAMs. And a whole bunch of air-to-surface missiles. Plus, a few CBU-100 Cluster Bombs and some good old-fashioned canisters of Mark 77 napalm.

I was going to be crash-landing my jet with an arsenal of top-of-the-line armament. If that weaponry fell into the wrong hands, some bad people could cause some wicked shit. Assuming, I didn’t just blow myself up in the crash.

Again, I wondered if I was still on Earth and pondered Star Trek’s Prime Directive. What if a primitive society suddenly found themselves wielding napalm? I decided that was a problem for future Me to worry about. With my mayday call out, I then had my next item on the agenda:

Steer my smoking, spinning, beat-to-shit Harrier to a safe landing.

With a grunt and a heave, I managed to get her into a turn, scoping out the island, though smoke from my burning engine still impeded my vision. And that damn sunlight. God needed to turn it down a notch. My sweat didn’t help matters either.

The island was crescent-shaped and had two central mountains—one to the north and one to the south—with a deep valley between them. Cliffs lined most of the coast, and massive rocks protruded from the shallow waters, breaking the incoming waves around the isle. On the north side of the island, there seemed to be a clearing and some buildings made out of marble or stone. And were those columns? I squinted, brow furrowed. Yeah, definitely columns.

A big central building, which looked like the Acropolis in Athens, sat in the middle of the crumble. A wide avenue split the city in half and ended at a wall surrounded by a thick tangle of green.

What the hell?

I spun around the island; the east side had swaying fields of grass and a sandy beach. There. I could land there.

I was on the southern tip, about as high as the top of the southern mountain, when something slammed into my damaged left wing. Something big. It wasn’t a bird, but there were feathers and talons. Through the haze of gray, I saw huge claws ripping at the metal.

What the shit?

The smoke cleared for a second, and I caught a flash of the cruel face of a twisted old woman—some hag with wrinkles like cracks in rocks. The plane shuddered beneath me, hitching and bucking like a rodeo bull, and I knew in my gut I wasn’t going to be able to land the harrier. It was a lost cause, and time to eject.

I took a second to grab my emergency gear then seized the lever and ejected myself up and out of the harrier. The canopy crashed off, flinging off into the distance as humid air swamped me. Then I was tumbling through the air, flipping head over heels, wind slapping at my face. A shriek mingled with the whistling of the falling jet filled my ears, and then some piece of debris struck my head.

I had a last thought, wondering if my parachute would auto-open and then it was all darkness. Whatever was going to happen would happen. I knew nothing more for a long time.