He heard Clare saying, “Hold on hold onholdon…”
Then they hit.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Metal screamed. There was an impossibly loud noise as the rotors chopped into wood and dirt and stone and broke off. One knife-edged blade sliced through the tail boom, the machine eviscerating itself in its death throes. Another blade shattered into shrapnel, peppering the fuselage with a hailstorm of metallic fire. One heaved away into the dirt, still trying to do its job, and lifted and turned the body of the helicopter so that it rolled downhill once, twice, landing gear snapping off like fragile bird bones, pieces of steel sheeting peeling off like an orange rind.
A last shudder and creak. Clare, dangling from her harness, opened her eyes to find she was surprisingly still alive. Her first thought was Thank you, God. Her second was that more people die from explosion than impact when helicopters go down.
“Russ?”
There was a groan behind her. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “We need to get out and away from the ship. Can you move?”
There was another groan.
“Russ!”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m going to need some help.”
She braced her feet on the twisted pieces of metal, glass, and plastic that had been the front of the cockpit and unclipped her safety belt. She sagged, lost her balance, and fell heavily against the passenger-side door, which was buckled and stained with green and brown from the forest floor. She twisted around and looked over the partial bulkhead.
“Holy God in heaven,” she said. The force of the impact had driven the tail boom into the cabin as they’d somersaulted downhill. The cargo area had imploded around the boom, the metal bunched like wet papier-mâché. The sawed-off end had come to rest less than a hand’s width away from where Russ was hanging in his seat; it looked like a steel-mouthed shark waiting to slice into his chest.
“Okay,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t betray her terror. “Stay put.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, then coughed.
“Can you see Waxman?”
“Yeah. He’s on the floor underneath me. Well, now it’s the floor. It used to be a big window.”
“How’s he look?”
“Not great.”
She pressed up against the door on the pilot’s side and pushed hard. It popped open like a hatch and just kept going, banging and clanging its way off the nose. She looked at the edge as she levered herself carefully through. The hinges had come clean off. She perched on the door frame and took her bearings. They had come to rest on a forested slope, wedged against several thick maples. The ship was resting on its right side, its nose angled forward. They had scraped a raw gash in the hillside when they’d landed, and the remains of what looked like several young pines were ground into the freshly exposed dirt.
She shivered in the muggy air. She felt cold, light-headed, and so overwhelmed that she just wanted to lie down and wait for someone to take this disaster off her hands. But there wasn’t anyone else. She pressed one spread-fingered hand over her eyes and breathed deeply. “God,” she said, “hold me up. I can’t do this on my own.”
“Are you praying up there?” Russ’s voice came up through the open doorway.
She got her feet under her and leaned over toward the cabin door. Its handle was battered and bent out of line. “Yes, I am,” she said.
“Lemme tell you: Admitting you can’t do something isn’t very reassuring.”
She gripped the handle and twisted. “Didn’t say that,” she said, yanking and tugging. “Said I can’t do it by myself. Ooof!” Something inside the handle mechanism gave way and the door shot back several feet before jamming.
“Good girl.”
She braced herself on hands and knees and examined the situation. The sheared-off tail section looked even worse from this angle. “Can you hold on to the edge of the door?”
He turned his head awkwardly. “I think so.” He reached toward her and she took his hand, placing it near the upper edge of the frame, where he could stabilize himself.
“Great. This is what I want you to do. You’re going to push against the roof with your other hand and against the floor with your feet. I’m going to unbuckle your seat belt. At that point, I’ll pull this arm”—she touched the hand squeezing the door frame—“and you right yourself.”
“I can’t stand up. I’ll be stepping on Waxman.”
“See the seat below you? Put your feet on its side. Once you’re upright, we’ll see if we can slide you around this thing and pull you out. Ready?”
“Wait a minute!” She paused. He didn’t say anything. Finally, he pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose with his free hand and said, “Let’s do it.”
She watched as he stretched out as best he could and lodged himself between the ceiling and floor. She snaked her hand around the corner of his seat and found the buckle of the seat belt by touch. With a click, she freed him.
His knuckles went white. He lifted one leg and let it dangle down toward the second passenger seat. She couldn’t see if his foot had connected with it yet, but she could see his arms and his other leg trembling with the effort of keeping himself from falling onto the ragged steel edge of the broken tail.
“Got it,” he said.
“Careful.”
“Oh yeah.”
She moved so that she was straddling the frame of the cabin door, one sneakered foot on either side. She squatted deeply so that she could hold him with the strength of her thighs. “Give me your hand. I’ll keep you upright.”
He laughed hoarsely.
“Shut up and give me your hand,” she said, irrationally cheered that he could still see a double entendre in what she said. He let go of the door frame and she caught him around the wrist, pulling slowly and steadily upward. She heard a smack as his other foot landed on the seat, and then his head and shoulders moved, coming upright, rotating in line.
“I feel,” he said, almost whispering, “like a chicken on a rotisserie.” Then his other arm was free, thrusting through the doorway, his hand feeling for something to hold on to.
“Are you all set?” she said.
“Yeah. I’m on my feet. You can let me go.”
She released his wrist. The top of his head was level with the doorway, and the raw end of the tail section was now in front of his stomach. He thrust both arms out and banged his hands against the fuselage. Then he curled them over the edge behind his head. “If this thing wasn’t in my way, I could probably get myself up with a backward flip,” he said. “I have pretty good upper-body strength.”
“If that thing wasn’t in your way, you could get out a lot easier than that,” she said. “As it is, you aren’t going to be able to lever yourself up. I want you to lock your hands around my neck; then I’ll pull you up.”
“What, deadlifting? Forget it, darlin’. I must outweigh you by sixty or seventy pounds.”
“I’ll get you up, Russ.” A thread of fear that he might be right made her voice sharp. “Trust me.”
“I trusted you before I got into the damned chopper, and look where it got me.” He squinted up at her and attempted a smile, which made his glasses slip farther down his nose. “Damn. Fix that, will you?” She set his glasses more firmly on his nose while swallowing back the softball-sized lump in her throat.
When she could speak without her voice cracking, she said, “I told you no incoming fire and no lightning. If you wanted no mechanical failures, you should have specified.” She bent her head very close to his. “Put your arms around my neck.”
To her surprise, he didn’t argue further, just released one hand at a time and clasped them together behind her neck. She reached behind her head and flipped her braid out of the way. “Hold on.”
“I will.”
She settled her feet more firmly, took two fistfuls of his shirt, and straightened very slowly. Good Lord, he was heavy. She gritted her teeth and hissed out air as her
thighs shook with the effort of bringing him out. She could feel him flexing his lower body to avoid the tail boom, but she couldn’t see anything except the top of his head and his shirt, which was peeling off his torso. Damn! She jammed her hands under the shirt, below his armpits, and dug into his clammy flesh, pressing until she could feel the bones beneath his skin. Sweat was dripping into her eyes and tickling her chest. She grunted, lifting with her arms and legs now, her muscles trembling with the strain and the fear that he was right, that she wouldn’t be able to lift him after all. Her legs, biceps, and shoulders were burning, and she was afraid she was going to let go, going to lose him.
Just then, he said, “I’m over the edge! Push me back a few inches.”
She did as instructed, and suddenly he let go of her neck. The cessation of weight and pressure made her stumble forward, and he caught her around the waist. “Steady. Easy,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of the door frame. He eased her away from the yawning cabin door, and she slid down the chopper’s half-exposed belly. When her feet hit the dirt, her legs almost collapsed beneath her.
There was a moment of silence, broken only by their labored breathing; then he said, “Thanks.”
She waved his gratitude away. She bent over and rubbed her lower back. Tomorrow, it would feel like she’d had her kidneys removed. She straightened. “We need to get Waxman out.”
“Clare, he may be dead already.”
“If he is, I want to know it. And if he isn’t, we have to do what we can to get him out.”
He sniffed in an exaggerated fashion. “Do you smell that? That’s fuel. We need to get away from here as quickly…” His voice faded away under her steady gaze. “We should at least consider that we might help him more by hurrying to get help than by trying to hoist him out of there.”
“And if something sparks and the fuel explodes?” She didn’t bother to put much heat into her argument, because she had already won. She knew Russ, and there was no way he would leave a man to burn to death, even if it was a remote possibility. She clambered up to the doorway and peered inside again. “I think I can slide in here”—she pointed to the outside edge of the door—“and slip around the side of the tail boom. I’ll go underneath it and have a look at him.”
“Then what?”
She examined the boom. Except for the serrated edge that had been facing Russ, it looked relatively safe. The problem was its size. For a relatively slim woman, it wasn’t much of a bar getting in and out: she could, as she’d said, slide around it. For a man strapped to a stabilizing board, it posed a significant challenge. She looked up at Russ. “Then I pray for inspiration to strike. Help me down?”
He grunted, but he took the same position she had just quit, feet braced on either side of the doorway, straddling the opening. She sat with her legs dangling into the cabin, her feet lightly brushing against the side of the tail boom. He reached toward her and they grasped each other’s wrists. She edged off the door frame and let him take her weight, concentrating on getting around the boom with a minimal amount of bumping and banging. She didn’t know how stable it was, and she could easily imagine it tipping and crashing onto Waxman’s unmoving body, its razor-sharp edge piercing his flesh.
She was cheek-to-cheek with the tail boom when her foot connected with the solid angle between the floor and the bulkhead. “Okay, let me go,” she said.
Russ released her wrists. She let herself fall backward, bumping hard against the floor but keeping her footing. She ducked beneath the boom and got her first look at Waxman.
He was lying facedown across the other cabin window, looking as if he had been placed over a hermetically sealed square of soil. Russ’s homemade backboard and arm splints were still in place, and it was the aluminum supports she grabbed when she rolled him over onto his back. She winced. In addition to sporting the purple welt from his initial fall, his forehead was deeply gashed and bleeding freely. In some indefinable way, his nose looked off, and she suspected it was broken. She knew immediately that he was still alive, however, because he was whistling with each exhalation, as if someone were capping and uncapping a boiling teakettle.
“He’s alive,” she said, “but I’m afraid one of his lungs may be punctured.”
“He is one hard-to-kill son of a bitch, isn’t he? ’Scuse my French.”
She crouched over the still form. She had brought the poor man to this place. How was she going to get him out of here? She considered the idea of wrestling him upright and shoving him over the tail boom until Russ could reach him. No, that wouldn’t do. Maybe it wouldn’t kill him, but the damage she could cause to his broken bones might leave him wishing he had died. The Day-Glo orange of the safety webbing caught her eye. The tail boom, spiking through the cargo area, had evidently sliced the webbing in two, scattering bungee cords in its wake. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes with the palm of her hand. She could use the webbing…the cords…
“I have an idea,” she said.
“Let’s hear it.”
She edged her way to where the webbing sagged from its cleats and then began unfastening it. “I’m going to wrap him as tightly as I can in this cargo webbing. Then I’m going to lift him on top of the tail boom, back here where it’s narrower. I’ll push him forward until you and I can lift him through the door.”
“What if the tail section falls down?”
“It may jar him, but after what he’s already been through, it’ll hardly be a bump. As long as neither of us is under it, we’ll be fine.” She kicked Waxman’s backpack away from where it had come to rest near his legs and threw the webbing on the Plexiglas surface beneath him. She bunched half of it along his body, then lifted him onto the web, first by his immobilized shoulders, then his feet, then by kneeling and working her arms under his buttocks to get his midsection in line.
She was collecting all the bungee cords she could see, when she heard a thudding sound from above, as if Russ had abruptly stepped across part of the fuselage. “Get off of there,” she yelled. “I don’t know how sound that—”
“Holy shit!” His cry made her break off in midsentence. There was a hollow clang and then nothing.
“Russ? Russ?”
No reply. She returned to Waxman’s side and knelt, lashing bungee cords through the webbing and onto his makeshift support. “Russ?” she called again. She stood and looked up at the rectangle of daylight visible from inside the cabin. She couldn’t hear anything, which was more unnerving than any sound of breaking helicopter parts or unwelcome visitors. “Russ?” She glanced down at Waxman, who was swathed in aluminum spars and ragged orange webbing, looking like a rejected resuscitation dummy from some Coast Guard rescue-training exercise. She would have to leave him and climb out to find out what had happened to Russ.
She half-dragged, half-lifted Waxman to the rear of what was left of the cargo section, out of the way of the damaged tail section. When she was just about ready to lever herself up on the tail to see if it would hold her, she heard the banging sound of someone climbing across the helicopter. Russ appeared in the cabin doorway.
“Thank God,” she said. “Where were you?”
“Putting out a fire. You need to get out of there now.”
“A fire!”
“Something threw a spark into a bunch of old pine needles three or four yards from here. I stomped it dead, but there could be a dozen others all around this place that we won’t see until they hit enough oxygen to bring ’em up. C’mon.” He thrust his hand down toward her. “Now.”
“We have to get Waxman out.”
“Leave him! He’s half-dead already. I’m not going to lose you trying to save somebody who’s neck-deep in Ingraham’s murder.”
She set her hands atop the tail boom and heaved herself up. With an agonized squeal, it sank beneath her like a teeter-totter, its fulcrum the hole it had blown in the rear of the helicopter. She stood up on the rounded form, her feet gripping it through her sneakers. Her head was through the doorway.
>
“Good. Take my hand. We’ll have you out of there in no time.”
She held up her hands, but instead of clutching his wrist, she threaded her fingers through his. “I can’t leave him behind.” She looked into his eyes, willing him to understand her. “It was my idea to bring him out with the helicopter. I was at the controls when we went down.” To her mortification, she felt her eyes begin to tear up. She squeezed them shut. “If we had done what you suggested, the Mountain Rescue people would already be on their way to get him out of the ravine.” She opened her eyes again, blinking hard against unwanted emotion. “I can’t leave him behind. I can’t.”
He let go of her hands, and for a moment she thought she had failed to persuade him. Then he took her face between his hands and rocked it back and forth. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.
It didn’t seem like a question requiring an answer. He released her. “As quickly as possible,” he said. “Every second counts.”
She nodded and slid off the tail boom. “There’s a fire extinguisher behind the pilot’s seat,” she called up.
“I’ll get it,” he said. She saw him reach through the pilot’s door and yank the extinguisher free. Then he dropped over the edge of the cabin door, hitting the now-stabilized tail boom with a thud and sliding to the floor in her wake. He glanced around at the cabin wreckage. “Wait.” He grabbed Waxman’s backpack and hurtled it through the open doorway. “Okay, let’s get him on top of this thing.”
They each squatted at one end of the unconscious man, Clare at his head and Russ at his feet. “One, two, three,” she said, and they lifted him onto the tail boom.
Russ looked at the raggedly wrapped form and shook his head. “Can you climb through the door by yourself?”
“Sure,” she said.
“I’ll hand you up the webbing and then climb out myself. Between the two of us, we can fish him out.”
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