“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.