The MP's finger closed on the trigger as he staggered back into his partner. The slug plowed into the apparatus behind the bed.
"Get back!" Rex yelled behind me as he rushed forward and loosed a long blast from the big bear spray container. The potent chemicals guaranteed to stop a bear in its tracks wrenched out two sustained screams from both men as they staggered back into the hallway. Talmadge propped himself on one crutch as he leaned against the door. Rex helped him shove the door shut, then jammed the wood-splitting wedge under it. I rushed him the hand sledge.
"By damn that Shanker boy is all right!" Talmadge yelled. "Sum'bitch promised he'd get me outta here!"
Rex hammered the wedge tight beneath the door before the men outside threw their weight against it. Outside, new voices joined the urgent babble, one of which made me think of the old gin in Itta Bena.
"Okay, let's rock," I told Talmadge. I leaned over and picked up his bony, huskthin frame and carried him over to the window.
"Can you stand?" I asked.
"Course I can. I can walk some too."
"Cool."
The old man was surprisingly capable, probably from mainlining adrenaline. I harnessed him in.
Across the room, Rex bent over the paint-thinner can and sloshed the contents under the door. The sharp solvent smell pricked at my nose as I held out a makeshift nylon web sling to Talmadge. "Step into this."
Rex hurried over to us, pulled a road flare from a cargo pocket, ignited it, and tossed it by the door.
A loud whoomp! filled the room with brilliant yellow light.
"That should make them back off," Rex said as he helped me secure Talmadge. Moments later, the room's sprinklers started.
"Jasmine," I called into the radio. "Start your ascent."
"Roger."
Outside, the helicopter's engine revved. From beyond the room door came the whoosh of fire extinguishers, then the nasty, sharp, splintering blows of a fire ax. They'd be inside soon.
Finally, we attached bright yellow, shock-absorbing lanyards between our safety harnesses and the helicopter. The rope slack disappeared as the door buckled. Outside, the helicopter moved until our ropes led out at roughly forty-five degrees.
I stepped behind Talmadge and gave him a bear hug as the room door imploded. "Get us out!" Rex screamed into his radio. The helicopter's engine screamed; the rope snapped taut, the shock-absorbing lanyards stretched almost lazily, lifting us gently off our feet. Rex and I fended our way over the windowsill. Suddenly, the lanyards' elastic slack bottomed out and we slingshot into the gathering dawn with gunshots sounded from behind.
"Clear," I radioed.
Rex, Talmadge, and I bobbed like yo-yos at the end of our lines, awful for equilibrium but great for making us tough targets. The unmistakable report of an H amp;K MP5A at full automatic sounded from the roof as Jasmine dipped the nose of the helicopter to gather speed, jinked, then labored upward. Another volley burst from the H amp;K hit the fuel tank and spawned a mist of aviation gasoline. Then the M21 cracked loud and sharp. I prayed Tyrone's shots wouldn't ignite the high-octane fuel. Passing out of this world as a tiki-torch bungee boy had never ranked high in my pantheon of ways to die.
CHAPTER 83
David Brown burst through the hospital's roof access door in time to see the old helicopter rise gently into the approaching dawn. His heart hammered and the tobacco rawness burned at his throat as he hustled across the roof.
The helicopter dipped suddenly out of sight beneath his first volley. Brown ignored the Marlboro complaints in his chest as he sprinted for a better shot. Then the old chopper labored into his sights again. As the Heckler and Koch came alive in his hands, Brown saw a muzzle flash from the helicopter's passenger seat. In the next eternally long split instant, Brown felt a crushing impact squeezing his chest. The last thing he remembered was falling into the darkness beneath the roof.
CHAPTER 84
Jasmine jinked the wounded old chopper up, down, and sideways to throw off the shooters. The erratic movement bungeed us like a paddleball. Rex, Talmadge, and I clung together to dampen the wild gyrations.
Looking back, I caught a split glimpse of the shooter with the submachine gun falling off the roof. The shooting stopped then, but the spray of aviation gasoline grew worse. The droplets of high-octane gasoline sprayed from the right fuel tank, immediately above the dangerously hot exhaust.
Our wild oscillations evened out as we made our way across I-55 and over the Pearl River forest and flood plain.
Jasmine steered us east toward a waypoint Rex and Tyrone had set the previous afternoon. In my night-vision scope, the tops of the tallest trees passed not more than fifty feet below. I scanned the area ahead and caught sight of a set of towering high-voltage pylons. I keyed my radio.
"Do you see the high-voltage lines ahead?"
Tyrone answered, "I've got them in the sniper's scope. Our van's just beyond."
"The wires might be a moot question," Jasmine said.
Before I could ask her what she meant, the spray of aviation gasoline stopped and the engine stuttered.
Rather than throttle back as I expected, I hear her rev the engine faster and louder than ever. We climbed erratically into the predawn sky.
"We're close to the van. I can autorotate to it if we have enough altitude." The engine stuttered and roared according to no pattern, but her calm, matter-of-fact words dampened my desperation.
Rex tapped on my helmet. "There," he yelled into my ear, and pointed toward the white van he had "requisitioned" from the airport long-term parking lot and positioned among the trees beside a construction site.
Suddenly the engine choked, tried to restart, then died, leaving us with unpowered autorotation's lazy, low swooshing. Closing in ahead, the open-girdered arms and legs of the electrical pylons clutched at us like giant robots. Red flashing lights warned us away.
The low, sixty-cycle hum of electricity reached us before we spotted the wires.
"Jesus!" I yelled when I saw the light of first dawn frosting the huge cables. The helicopter might clear the wires, but not its dangling cargo. If the wires snagged us, certain death awaited everyone.
"Climb up to the skids," I yelled in Rex's ears.
We let go of each other and commenced all new erratic trajectories that unbalanced the helicopter further. Rex and I hauled up on the ropes for all we were worth as the wires grew closer.
Darryl Talmadge mumbled the Twenty-third Psalm. I remembered the words clearly from having recited them every day at the start of school in Itta Bena. Silently, I said them along with him as I strained to pull us up.
About the time we got to the part about the "valley of the shadow of death," I was fearing evil more than I ever had before. I thought of Jasmine, Camilla, and what life meant, and I climbed harder, faster.
On the other side, Rex had reached the skid and levered himself up.
Above me, Tyrone leaned out, hauling on my rope.
The wires reached for me. The hair on my body stood up from the electrical field around the wires. One spark and the avgas saturating the helicopter and my clothes would ignite.
I grabbed the skid as the loop of my rope, still draped below us, slid gently over the first wire. With Talmadge strapped to me, I could not pull myself up on the skid, and as our feet headed for the last wire, I swung our legs upward.
My cup ranneth over when we cleared the last wire.
Rex was up on the skid, but Talmadge and I were half on and off, ready to be crushed no matter how soft the landing. As the ground rushed up toward us, I slid us down the rope again. As we neared the ground, I unsnapped us from the rope, then I let go and rolled as soon as my feet touched the ground.