“Are you coming or going?” she yelled.
He opened his hands, indicating he didn’t understand the question.
“Are you flying with us to Albany? I’d like the help, but I’m not going to make you.”
He stopped, his hand on the edge of the cargo door. He hadn’t thought about just heading back to his truck and driving away. He could do that. It wasn’t as if he could do anything more for Waxman than he already had. He could head back to the station, get the paperwork started on this incident, track down Peggy, and get her statement. He looked up at Clare, who was waiting for him to make up his mind. “I’m coming with you,” he said and hauled himself up into the cargo area.
She didn’t say anything, merely winched the net back up and yanked the cargo door shut, but he could see her smiling to herself. She fiddled with her headset and tapped one of his headphones. He switched his back on. “Help me move him closer over there,” she said, gesturing past the safety web. She picked the web up and draped it over her back to keep it out of the way; then, hunched over, they half-dragged, half-lifted Waxman’s still form into place within arm’s reach of the passenger seats. She nodded, stepped into his seat, and climbed over the partial bulkhead into the pilot’s chair. “Strap in and let’s get going,” she said.
His butt was barely in the seat when the chopper rose. This he remembered, too, the scramble to get off the ground, the wounded on the floor, the trees bending and shaking as the slicks rose out of the grass. Clare was at it again. “Fee-fee-fi-fi-fo-fo-fum, Lookin’ mighty nice, now here she comes,” his headphones sang. He rested his elbows on his knees and laughed. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. All she had to do was throw in some Doors and she’d have the complete sound track to his youth. He looked at Waxman’s pale face and was suddenly consumed with the urge for a cigarette, something he had given up in1985.
Up they went. Up and up, angling slightly to the east as Clare sang “Devil with a Blue Dress” into the headphones and the rotors thundered to her rhythm. “Wearing her perfume, Chanel Number Five, got to be the—what the heck?”
He sat up again and looked out the window, immediately wishing he hadn’t. They were up. Way up. As high as an airplane. The mountaintops stretched out beneath them in rough and rounded shades of dark green and smoky blue. Clare had gone silent. In his experience, it was never good when a pilot went silent.
“What is it?”
She didn’t answer him. He craned around. She was leaning over, working a control he couldn’t see. “Clare, what is it?”
“The radio,” she said. “I can’t use it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that instead of leaving the last station on, whoever was flying this spun the dial. It’s on dead air now. And that’s not all.” She reached over her head. “Look at this.” She had a small black plastic cylinder in her hand. He took it from her. “That’s the control knob. It came off in my hand. Take a look.”
Inside the cylinder was a small hollow tube, meant to fasten tightly over whatever metal stud actually connected to the radio’s workings. The tube was splintered apart, as if someone had jammed a screwdriver or awl into it.
He tried to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach. “What’s this mean? Are we in trouble? Do we go back down?”
“It means I can’t rely on the local air-control stations to lead me to Albany. I’ll have to do it by sight. I’m going to bring her up a little higher so I can get my bearings. The visibility is lousy today because of the humidity.”
She sounded very calm and authoritative, which didn’t reassure him one bit. Pilots always sounded the most calm when they were in the deepest trouble. The chopper whined, but now the engine had a shrill note that made his back teeth ache.
“What’s that? Is the engine supposed to sound like that?”
“It’s having to work a little harder, that’s all. The humid air means there’s not as much lift under the rotors as there would be if it were cool and dry.”
“How far up are we going?”
“Four thousand feet.”
“Four thousand feet! I thought choppers only went five hundred, a thousand feet high.”
She actually laughed. “We’re only going to be about two thousand feet above the ground. Where we started from was almost two thousand feet above sea level to begin with. Okay, help me out here. I’m not very familiar with the geography around here. I see two fairly big rivers, a handful of smaller tributaries, a medium-sized lake. I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
As before, he braced his hands against the metal frame and looked out the window. He tried to pretend he was safely stowed away in a small airplane, but the laborious chop-chop-chop of the rotors made it impossible. “Which way are we pointing?”
“North.”
“Okay.” He took a breath. “The lake must be Lake Luzerne. The river to the west is the Sacandaga. It heads west, to the Great Sacandaga Lake. The river to the east has to be the Hudson.”
“Are you sure? It looks kind of small.”
“It is small this far north. It broadens out past West Point.”
“And Albany is on the Hudson?”
He leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes. “It was the last time I was there.”
“Okay. I’ve got my bearing on the compass. I’m going to take us back down to five hundred feet and head east.”
He shoved the useless control knob into his pocket and tried to ignore the queasy sensation their descent was giving him. Clare was still silent. He wished she would start singing again. He looked at Waxman, whose face was damp and pale beneath his trendy goatee, and thought how young he was. And that even at that, the men he had seen dying on helicopter floors had been younger still. Boys. Waxman would have been an old man in ’Nam.
The chopper bumped abruptly, emitting a sound like a leaky cough. He lurched in his seat belt, reaching down to keep the unconscious geologist from sliding. Waxman’s backpack rolled across the floor. Clare was talking to herself under her breath, something about airflow.
Waxman’s backpack. Which had been lying several feet away from the man. He had been fighting with Peggy before he fell. How had his backpack gotten down there? He unbuckled his seat belt and started toward where the backpack rested against the orange cargo webbing.
That was when he heard the sound, the spluttering, coughing, choking sound that sounded like some great beast dying.
“What is it?” he asked. “Clare?”
“Fuel,” she said, her voice tight. “Get into your seat and strap down.”
He could feel the question howling behind his clenched teeth: What do you mean? Didn’t you check it? He kept it there. Of course she’d checked it. She was snapping off words like items on a list in a subaudible whisper. He heard a brief roar, then another choke.
“Strap yourself in and get into the crash position!”
He dived for his seat and yanked the restraint across himself. The helicopter tilted abruptly, and his inner ear sloshed sickeningly out of balance. Through the windows, he saw nothing but colorless sky, but his stomach and head felt as if they were spinning down in a spiral. Another roar. They jerked up so violently, Waxman lifted off the floor a few inches at the apogee, then slammed back down. The machine seemed to wheeze. “Come on, come on,” Clare was urging.
“Clare? How bad is this?”
“Bad.” Her voice was short, clipped, professional. “Something’s keeping the gas from getting to the engine.” She hissed, then resumed speaking in the same matter-of-fact way. “I’m going to do something called an autorotation. I’m going to plunge the ship nose down while cutting power to the rotors. They’ll spin on their own, giving us lift and slowing our descent. It’ll be a controlled crash.”
Thirty years on, and he was still going to die in a helicopter crash. Linda, his mom, and his sister flashed through his mind, but it was Mac he fixed on, Mac laughing and smoking and drumming out a rhythm on a helmet with his hands. God, he thought, just kill me quick. Don’t hang me up and make me linger.