“There?” she asked, twisting and pointing at the window in the cockpit door.
“Shouldn’t you keep your eyes on the instruments?”
“The army gives us special training on how to look out the window and fly at the same time.”
He could tell she was having a good old time. He leaned forward and closed his eyes again. The rotors whined and the chopper tilted forward slightly as she brought it around and headed toward the crevasse.
“Okay, I’ve got it in sight,” she said. “Russ—where are you?”
He sat up again. He could see the curve of her jaw beneath her helmet as she twisted back, craning to see him.
“Are you feeling airsick?” She sounded doubtful. As she should be, since the drive up the mountain road to the spa site had bounced him around a lot more than anything she had done.
“No.”
“Okay. Can you unbuckle and shift seats? I want you to look out the other cabin window. It makes for a better search if you cover both sides.”
“Okay.” He didn’t have the wherewithal to answer in anything more than single-word sentences. He unclipped and shifted to the ghostly Mac’s seat. The geologist’s description of the gorge knifing down the mountains was more clearly accurate from this height. The crevasse looked a lot narrower than it had when he’d peered over the edge. He thought of descending into that crack in the rock, wrapped in nothing but cargo netting. It’d be a miracle if he didn’t end up a smear on the rock wall.
“See anything?”
“No.”
“Are you doing okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to drop her down a bit.” The chopper sank in a series of jerks, like an elevator on the fritz. He pressed his lips tightly together and braced his hands for another look out the window. Green leaves, everywhere green pulsing in the hazy sunlight, with a gray slash through the jungle, a scar in the earth.
Jesus, he thought. Get a grip. He forced himself to focus on the crevasse, picking out boulders and scrubby plants, the tobacco brown trickle that was all that remained of the brook at summer’s height, the flash of metal—
“Wait! I think I see something.”
The chopper stopped its forward motion and hovered, twisting slightly back and forth. He saw it again, a glint of metal on a lumpy bundle rolled against a small boulder. A backpack? He hadn’t noticed one when he’d surveyed the accident scene the first time. “Can you go a little lower?”
Clare dropped the chopper another few yards. He let his eyes spiral out from the backpack, searching, searching…. He spotted the geologist’s hiking boots first.
“I’ve got him.”
“Where?”
“See where there’s a clump of birch saplings growing low on the wall?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“That’s ten o’clock. Look at two o’clock.”
There was a pause as she searched over the floor of the ravine. “Okay, I see him, too. I’m going to maneuver us so that the cargo door is above him. Good Lord, he’s still. Are you sure he’s not dead?”
“If he is, and I go through all this for nothing, I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”
There was a sound in his headset that might have been a stifled laugh. The chopper dipped and swayed into position.
“Okay, you’re on.”
He rose from his seat and, crouching, crossed back to the left side of the chopper and pushed the webbing out of the way. The thing he noticed—and he wished he had noticed it when Clare was going through how all this was going to work—was that there was nothing beside the safety webbing and the bungee cord to hold on to while he got himself inside the net. And he was going to have to unclip the bungee cord anyway.
“Clare,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“There’s nothing to hold on to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Getting into the net. There’s nothing I can hold on to.”
“We went over this. You hold on to the edges of the net while you step inside.”
“It’s in front of an open door!”
There was a pause. Then she said in the patient voice of a kindergarten teacher explaining something to a new student, “I’m holding the ship dead even. There’s nothing to cause you to lose your balance and fall.”
“What if I trip?” He realized how whiny he sounded, but he couldn’t help it.
“Russ.” The teacher was gone; the officer was back. “Get into the net.”
He took a deep breath. With his fingers clutching the safety webbing, he took the D ring in a death grip. Then he let go of the webbing and jerked the bungee cord out. It sprang back against the bulkhead with a metallic clang. He looked along the wide strap running from the ring in his fist, out the door, and up out of sight to the boom. One twitch of the helicopter and he would be dangling sixty feet above the gorge’s rocky bottom. His palm was so sweaty, the D ring was already slipping in his grasp. He pawed the edges of the net open and tumbled inside with a tailbone-bruising jolt.
“I’m in,” he said. The relief of it made him laugh.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just can’t believe I’m doing this. It reminds me of the time I tried to trim one of the old trees in our yard with a chain saw.”
“That sounds pretty normal to me.”
“I was twenty feet up on a limb at the time. Without a safety harness.”
“What happened?”
“I fell.” He laughed again, this time with the realization that he now had to scoot over to the door so she could reel in the net and lift him out. He tugged the folded lawn chairs half over his knees and kicked against the floor, pushing with his thighs. He and the netting skidded a foot. “It was just two years ago, and I remember thinking that at my age, it was the last really stupid thing I’d ever do. I’m glad to see that I still have it in me.”
He kicked again and moved along another foot. The lawn chairs bumped into his head. The cargo door yawned open behind him like the gateway to the next world. His back was to it, deliberately, so he wouldn’t have to see the tops of the trees shaking madly in the chopper’s wash below. He kicked a third time, but his butt jammed up against a line of smooth-headed rivets sunk into the cargo floor. He shifted his weight and tried again. Nothing.
“What are you doing back there?”
“I’m just getting myself closer to the door. I’m hung up on some rivets.”
“Don’t bother,” she said as he wiggled himself over the obstacle. Then just as she said, “I’m going to pull in the strap from there,” he kicked out hard with his legs. There was a rush and a grinding sound and a scrape as his rear end went over the edge, and then he was falling and yelling until he came up hard with a jerk and a snap.
The lawn chairs slammed flat against his face as the cording of the net tightened around him, cutting into his skin. The helicopter tilted hard. He swung wide, away from and then toward the landing gear. Clare was snarling something into the earphones, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. The jolt as the strap caught had cut him off mid-yell, and the spasms in his lungs and ribs made him cough violently. The downwash from the rotors made his eyes water. He fought to clear his face of green webbing and aluminum, shoving and twisting until the chairs were at his side instead of pressing against his nose and chest. The net swung in ever-decreasing arcs as the helicopter circled tightly, slowly tipping back into a stable position.
“I didn’t ask you to jump out the door!” He heard that one. “Okay, I’m leveled out. I’m going to lower you now. For God’s sake, don’t try any more stunts.”
“No,” he wheezed.
There was a vibration along the strap. The net quivered and then began to descend. He glanced up, but the blur of rotors and the fat tadpole-shaped body of the chopper made him queasy, so he looked down instead. The bottom of the crevasse was rushing up at him, its boulders and shale suddenly a lot larger and more alarming than they had been from the air. He was between the trees, then below the lip of the gorge, then descending between its narrow walls, every striation in the rock and every plant clinging to a minute cleft burning itself into his vision with a kind of hyperclarity. The part of his brain that wasn’t numbed over marveled at Clare’s precision. He went down, down, down—and stopped with a jerk.