“God, it’s beautiful up here,” Governor Seifert whispered to himself. “It is so darn beautiful.”
As the helicopter approached the summit ridges, the pilot accelerated, pushing the helicopter’s rpms. Rising beneath the lip of the divide, in the lee of the mountains, was always a gamble. Sometimes the airstream just above the ridgeline was howling fast, fast enough to markedly slow a low-flying aircraft. Pilots of small fixed-wing planes were occasionally lost in these peaks simply because they didn’t count on the dramatic change in air speed encountered as they winged up over the divide and met the prevailing westerlies head on.
The man at the controls powered the copter up to ensure the machine muscled through any change in wind speed. As he often did, he skimmed along close to the mountain slopes west of Estes Park so his passengers could get the full measure of the visual slingshot effect when the craft raced over the divide ridgeline and the world dropped away suddenly on the far side.
The helicopter slipped over Milner Pass and between the summits of Specimen Peak and Mt. Richthofen, below which the infant Colorado River received its first drink of spring snowmelt. At the last moment, the pilot pulled back on the controls and pulled the nose up to whip over the highest point between the two mountains. As the copter cleared the continental backbone, whoops of glee arose from those in the cabin.
As his passengers called out hosannas, the wide smile on the aviator’s face melted away in one tick of the clock as the new horizon opened above the mountain ranges just west of the divide. Nothing in his experience in the air had the appearance of what was sweeping down the mountain corridors from the northwest. The vision resembled the forward cascading wall of an alpine avalanche, but one that stretched horizon to horizon. Towering above the turmoil, yet far away at the limits of visibility, an immense pillar of dense ugliness ascended through the distant high atmospheric haze to the heavens.
Governor Seifert grabbed the pilot’s shoulder and pointed toward the windshield.
“What in hell is that, Birdie?”
The pilot did not answer. Whatever the boiling cloud formation was, it was moving their way, hurtling at great speed. There would be no time to ascend quickly enough to rise over the approaching tumult, so Birdie wrenched the controls over and tipped the helicopter into a radically steep pitch to turn the machine toward the southeast. Centrifugal force at the trough of the turn was several Gs, pressing the passengers down deep into their seats. The helicopter came full around, headed back toward Specimen Peak. Birdie twisted the throttle to its maximum.
The helicopter closed the gap with the continental divide ridge once again. Governor Seifert craned his neck around to look behind him. The geologist in the seat behind was glued to the window, his hands pressed up against the glass. To the south, over the great turn in the continental divide ridge below Mt. Richthofen, a jet-fast wall of seething cloud turbulence rammed over the heights.
“Mother,” yelled the corporate geologist. He whipped around, unbuckled his seat belt and lunged from his seat toward the pilot when the floor dropped away from under him. The geologist slammed into the roof of the cabin and then to the rear wall. In a fraction of a second, the interior of the cabin pitched vertically. The engine vibrated violently and the sound of shearing aluminum knifed through the interior of the craft. The rotor blades tore away as the ship was caught up in a pyroclastic vortex.
“Oh, my God,” croaked the pilot, now struggling with useless controls. Nothing he could push or pull made a difference. The copter sailed tail straight down, pushed forward by immense forces. The interior cabin temperature spiked. The color of night clamped down over the windows.
White terror gripped the governor. His eyes flared as the sensation of rolling upside down and falling sank its fangs into all the occupants. “Do something,” shrieked the politician. “Do something!”
The rear passenger window beside the Colorado senator exploded inward. The glass, held together by its strong safety binder, slammed against and wrapped around him. The impact killed him instantly. Poisonous gases and superheated air filled the craft, choking off the airways of the men and broiling them where they sat.
Now the helicopter was a coffin ship, helpless in the clutches of the volcanic storm. It lost whatever residual lift and forward momentum it had and dropped quickly below the summit ridges. The lifeless machine fell 4,000 feet into the valley of the nascent Colorado River and disintegrated on the steep rocky slopes just west of the river itself.
Pieces of the craft cartwheeled down the incline. The body of the governor, fastened to his seat, exerted enough force to sheer away the bolts holding the seat to the cabin floor. The man somersaulted away from the main compartment of the craft and cascaded down the steep landscape, bouncing and rolling. At the floor of the canyon, the governor’s tortured frame splashed down in the uppermost reaches of the snow melt-filled Colorado River. The chill current tugged at the torso and carried it downstream.
Chapter Forty-Eight
“Benjamin. Benjamin!”
White Elk awoke with a start to utter darkness and the sound of steady precipitation on the roof and fallen timber. The cabin creaked and logs somewhere in the forest groaned as they settled on the horizontal. Something had awakened him, but he had no idea what.
“Benjamin.” A distant male human voice bounced through the pitch.
White Elk yelled out. “I’m here. Here!”
“Keep calling. We will find you. Just keep calling.”
White Elk stumbled from his bunk and shuffled his way to the cabin door opening. He could see nothing, but he could hear coughing and indistinct words. A white shaft of light flared, just for an instant. He raised his voice to the dark again.
Branches snapped and a flashlight beam swept through the hovel. “I see the cabin. We found it,” a voice mumbled. Louder now, “Benjamin, we see the camp. We’ll get to you.”
White Elk stood in rapt anticipation. Suddenly they were upon him, two men and a woman, each holding a flashlight. In the newfound illumination, White Elk squinted at the figures before him. Each was a gray ghost and each wore cloth over the face.
The woman materialized in the darkness and grabbed the elder’s arm. “Thank goodness you’re safe, Benjamin,” said a female voice. White Elk recognized the voice of Petah, the daughter of Blackfoot Federation doctor Sinopa.
“My Petah, I am so happy to see you. You woke me up.”
“Of course we woke you up. You have to get out of here. You must come back to the village when it’s light.”
White Elk studied the three shadowy forms in his midst. They coughed often. “Are you all right, people?” he asked.
“Yes, we are fine now,” said Petah. “It was difficult getting here. The ash is terrible.”
“Ash? What do you mean by that?”
The trio of rescuers looked at one another. One of the men offered an explanation.
“Benjamin, ash is falling from a volcano, volcanic ash.”
“Is it Yellowstone?” White Elk inquired at once.
“Yes, it may be. We hear ash is falling all over the country. It has to do with an explosion at Yellowstone.”
Petah gazed at the old man with a queer expression across her face. “How could you know it was Yellowstone?”
“Your great grandmother, she told me this would happen. She told me some days ago.”
“How could she know this?” scoffed the male.
“Never mind that,” said White Elk, dismissing the question. “How are the people in the village?”