From the helicopter base, the flight controller radioed with an update. “Radar’s showing a solid line of storm cells to the west, Hawk, stretching all the way to Nashville. Won’t blow through till tonight.”
“Well, crap,” said Hawkins. “This isn’t looking like our day. Or Dr. Garcia’s.”
For what seemed a long time, there was no sound but the steady whine of the turbine and the fluctuating lash of the weather. Then, over the radio, came a soft voice. “Please,” said Carmen Garcia, who was in the other helicopter alongside Eddie. “Please.” There was no hysteria or panic in her voice, only sorrow. “If we go now, my husband still has a chance to use these hands. If we don’t go, he loses them — he loses these hands.”
Neither pilot answered, and the silence was excruciating. The flight nurse gave me an agonized look.
“Please,” repeated Carmen. “I beseech you.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” said Hawkins finally, “we can’t take off in this. We’d be breaking federal regulations. And we’d be putting people at risk. You and your husband. Dr. Brockton. The flight crews. People on the ground, if we crashed. We can’t take off in these conditions.”
Through the background hiss on the radio came the sound of ragged breaths. “Of course. I understand. Forgive me. Forgive me for being selfish.”
Across the gurney from me, the nurse removed her helmet and mask. Bending forward, she buried her face in her hands and wept.
I heard a long, shuddering breath, then Carmen’s voice, practically a whisper, hypnotic and incantatory in its cadence. At first I couldn’t make it out, but soon I realized she was speaking in Spanish. “Ave María, llena eres de gracia…” She was praying, I realized, and I recognized the prayer: “Hail Mary, full of grace…”
Suddenly the helicopter was buffeted by a ferocious gust of wind. The aircraft shuddered and rocked, and then I felt one skid lift off the pad as the wind swirled beneath the rotor from one side and flipped upward. “Jesus Christ,” said the pilot, “hold on,” and with that we were in the air. It wasn’t that the helicopter had lifted off; it was more that it had been ripped from the pad. The aircraft lurched and bucked, and the flight nurse and I grabbed for the handrails of the gurney and the vertical bars attached to the sides of the cabin. The outside world had vanished, as thoroughly as if the windows had been draped with white blankets. The helicopter slammed and lurched and whipped like a rat being shaken by a terrier. Finally the turbulence eased and the aircraft seemed to level off, or at least to find a reasonably stable zone of cloud. I heard a loud exhalation through the headset, and the pilot’s voice — shaken but relieved — said, “Y’all okay back there?”
The nurse was tugging her helmet back onto her head. I was about to say that we were fine when an agitated voice cut in. “LifeStar One, LifeStar One, this is Flight Control, do you read?”
“Control, LifeStar One reading you loud and clear.”
“What the hell, Hawk?” The agitation in the controller’s voice had been replaced by a mixture of relief and anger — the mixture a parent’s voice tended to have when a small son or daughter narrowly but successfully dodged danger. “Damn it, Hawk, what the bloody hell are you doing taking off in these conditions? This might cost you your job. Maybe your license, too.”
“Look, here’s what happened,” began Hawkins.
“What happened,” broke in Wimberly, “was the strangest damn thing. All of a sudden this hole opened up in the ceiling.”
“Oh, bullshit,” spat the controller. “You stay out of this, Wimby.”
“No kidding, a hole,” insisted Wimberly. “Four hundred, maybe five hundred feet high. Three, four miles visibility. I can’t believe you didn’t see it.” The flight nurse and I looked at each other. She rolled her eyes and shook her head dramatically: No way. I began to catch on to what the second pilot was doing. “It was amazing,” he said. “Hawk, how’s the ride up there?”
“The ride’s good,” Hawkins said. “We’re just coming out on top at seven thousand feet. Beautiful up here.” He paused. “I don’t suppose that hole’s still open down there, is it, Wimby?”
“Say again?”
“Any chance that hole’s still open?”
I held my breath.
“I’ll be damned,” said Wimberly slowly. “Sure enough, still is. LifeStar Two’s departing.” His voice ratcheted up half an octave and a dozen decibels as he said it. “Whoa,” he added after a moment, “that was interesting.”
The flight controller radioed again, and I pictured him scanning the rulebook to see how many regulations the pilots had violated. This time, though, his voice seemed to contain concern and a touch of admiration. “Wimby, did you make it up through that…uh, hole in the sky okay?” The nurse grinned at me.
“Sure did,” he said. “Piece of cake. LifeStar Two’s climbing to seven thousand.” His voice had switched back to the polished smoothness of the professional pilot, though I thought I detected a big dose of relief and a slight hint of swagger underneath.
“Have a safe flight,” said the controller. “You guys must have friends up there.”
Let’s hope, I thought, as the second helicopter emerged from the clouds below us and both aircraft banked toward Atlanta.
I glanced at the heart monitor above Faust’s gurney. He was still with us. It was amazing he’d made it even this far. As an experimental procedure, hand transplantation wasn’t covered by the standard organ-donor consent Faust had on file. Mercifully, the rules for organ donation allowed for verbal consent. I’d recounted Faust’s last wish—“Give my hands to Garcia”—and Rankin had corroborated my story. I wasn’t sure how Rankin had managed to hear the words, since Faust couldn’t speak above a whisper, but he swore he had, and I chose to believe him. Within minutes after Faust’s brain ceased to function, UT’s organ-donation coordinator called Tennessee Donor Services, and a few hours after that, Dr. Alvarez had accepted the donation. Her original plan had been to bring Faust down by conventional ambulance, but when UT notified her that his condition was rapidly deteriorating, she’d arranged for the airlift — the airlift into the teeth of a gale.
We caught up with the storm front swiftly, just as the helicopter reached the crest of the Smoky Mountains. Pressing my head to the helicopter’s window and looking down, I glimpsed the grass-lined bowl of Cades Cove and, looming above it, Thunderhead Mountain, where I’d been caught in the cold and the darkness.
I was still weary from the ordeal in the mountains and the maelstrom of events since, and I closed my eyes and let the aircraft’s drone and vibration lull me to sleep. I was just drifting off when an urgent voice snapped me awake. “We’re losing him.” It was the flight nurse. “Guys, we’re losing him.” Her eyes were darting between the gurney and the monitor. “Pulse is irregular, blood pressure’s dropping.” The pulse line on the screen grew ragged, the peaks fluctuating in height, like a stock-market graph charting a volatile month. The heart-rate readout skittered rapidly: 88, 72, 79, 67, 59. The blood-pressure readout on the monitor edged downward: 140/80, 117/72, 88/60. Suddenly the blood-pressure numbers were replaced by dashes. The heart line went flat, and the pulse readout went blank. Even through the thick cushions of the headset, I could hear the monitor’s shrill alarm. “He’s coded; he’s coded. I’m going to defib.” She snatched a pair of defibrillator paddles from the rear wall of the compartment and pressed them to Faust’s chest. She glanced to make sure I wasn’t touching Faust or the gurney—“Clear”—and squeezed a switch in the handle of one of the paddles; as the electricity coursed through Faust’s body, it jerked against the nylon straps. She glanced at the monitor, still flashing its dashes and shrieking its alarm. “Clear.” The body jumped again, but that was the only response to the jolt of current.