As the chopper made a lazy turn to the southeast, Tom saw a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye-Masago. The man had jumped up and was running for the cockpit.
Tom hurled himself at Masago, but the man twisted
free, giving him a sharp upward blow with his cuffed hands. He pulled a knife from his pantleg sheath with both hands, spun and bounded through the open cockpit door. The other men had jumped from their seats to pursue him, but the chopper suddenly yawed, throwing them into the netting, while a gargling scream came from the cockpit.
"He's crashing the chopper!" Hitt cried.
The bird took a sickening downward lurch and a deep shudder came from the rotors.
Tom staggered to his feet, gripping the netting, fighting against the dec-celeration as the chopper screamed and spiraled downward. He caught a glimpse through the cockpit door of the copilot, struggling with Masago-and the pilot lying dead on the floor awash with blood.
As the chopper pitched back, Tom used the motion to launch himself into the cockpit.
He slammed into the flight console, righted himself on a seat, threw a punch at Masago, clipping his ear. As he staggered backward the copilot seized the man's cuffed wrists and slammed them down on the console, knocking the knife from his hands. The yawing chopper threw them both to the floor and Masago grabbed the copilot, choking him while both slid around on the floor slick with blood. Tom slammed Masago's head against the floor, rolling him off
the copilot.
"Take the controls!" Tom screamed at the copilot, who needed no encouragement. The man lurched to his feet and seized the controls, the bird yawing wildly. With a sudden roar from the back rotors and a gut-wrenching deceleration, he righted the chopper.
Masago was still thrashing wildly, fighting with almost superhuman strength, but Hitt had now joined Tom and they had him pinned. Above the screaming engines, Tom could hear the copilot calling in an emergency while he fought with the controls.
Suddenly, through the windscreen, the face of a cliff came rushing past; followed by a bone-breaking jolt and a machine-gun-like series of whangs as pieces of rotor tore like shrapnel through the fuselage. The copilot was hammered to one side by the flying debris, his blood splattering against the shattered Plexiglas of the windscreen. The screeching sound of metal tearing on rock was followed by a weightless moment of free-fall, and then a massive crash.
Silence.
Tom felt like he was swimming out of darkness and it took him a moment to remember where he was-in a helicopter wreck. He tried to move and found he was jammed up in a corner on his side, debris piled over him. He could hear screaming as if coming in from a distance, the dripping of hydraulic fluid (or was it blood?), the stench of aviation fuel and burnt electronics. All motion had
ceased. He struggled to free himself. A huge gash had ripped open one side of the chopper and through it he could see they had come to rest on a steep slope of broken rock. The helicopter groaned and shifted, metal rivets popping. Smoke began filling the air.
Tom climbed over the debris and found Sally all tangled up with a heap of netting and plastic tarps. He pulled the netting aside.
"Sally!"
She stirred, opened her eyes.
"I'm getting you out." He grasped her around the shoulders and hauled her free, relieved to see she seemed to be only dazed.
"Tom!" came the voice of Wyman Ford.
He turned. Ford was crawling up the pile of debris, his face running with blood. "Fire,"
he gasped. "We're on fire." At the same time there was a whooshing sound and the tail section burst into flame, the heat like a glow in their faces.
Tom wrapped his arm around Sally and carried her toward the tear in the fuselage, the only way out. He grasped the netting and struggled up, hooked an arm over the sill and hauled her up to the hole. She grasped the ragged edge and Tom helped her outside, on top of the fuselage where it was an eight-foot drop to the ground. He could see the fire was spreading rapidly along the tail, crawling along fuel and electrical lines, engulfing the chopper.
"Can you jump?"
Sally nodded. He eased her down the side, and she dropped.
"Run!"
"What the hell are you doing staying there?" she screamed from below. "Get off!"
"Ford's in there!"
"It's going to blow-!"
But Tom had turned his attention back into the chopper, where Ford, injured, was trying to climb up the netting to the opening. One of his arms dangled uselessly.
Tom lay on his stomach, reached through the hole, grasped the man's good arm, and hauled him up. Black smoke billowed out in a great wave just as he pulled Ford free and up on top of the fuselage, then slid him to the ground.
"Tom! Get off there!" Sally screamed from below, helping Ford away from the wreck.
"There's still Hitt!"
Smoke was now pouring through the opening. Tom dropped down into it and crouched, finding a layer of fresh air underneath. He crawled toward where he had last seen Hitt, keeping low. The unconscious soldier lay on his side in the cockpit
amid a shower of debris. Waves of heat from the fire scorched his skin. He slid his arms around Hitt's torso and pulled, but the soldier was huge and he couldn't manage it.
There was a muffled thump as something burst into flame inside the fuselage. A wave of heat and smoke rolled over Tom.
"Hitt!" He slapped the man across the face. The man's eyes rolled. He slapped him again, very hard, and the eyes came into focus.
"Get moving! Get out!"
Tom wrapped his arm around the man's neck and heaved him up. Hitt struggled to his knees, shaking his head, droplets of blood dripping from his hair. "Damn . . ."
"Out! We're on fire!"
"Jesus. .."
Hitt finally seemed to be coming back to reality, ready to move under his own power.
The smoke was now so thick that Tom could barely see. He felt along the floor, Hitt crawling behind him. An eternity later they reached where the fuselage of the chopper curved upward. He turned, grabbed Hitt's arm, placed his meaty fist on the netting.
"Climb!"
There was no air and the acrid smoke felt like broken glass in his lungs.
"Climb, damn you!"
The man started climbing, almost like a zombie, the blood running down his arms. Tom followed alongside, screaming at him, dizziness filling his head. He was going to pass out, it was too late. It was over. He felt his grip weakening . . .
And then arms reached down, pulling him up and throwing him off the side of the chopper. He fell heavily in the sand, and a moment later Hitt landed heavily next to him, with a groan. Sally jumped down beside them-she had climbed back up on the chopper to haul them out.
They stumbled and crawled, trying to get as far away from the burning chopper as possible. Tom finally collapsed, gasping and coughing, able to go no more. Half crawling, half lying in the sand, he heard a dull thud and felt the sudden heat as the last of the chopper's tanks blew, engulfing the wreck in flame.
Suddenly a bizarre sight appeared: a man emerged from the fire, sheeted in flame, his
arm raised with a gun in his burning fist. With strange deliberation he stopped, aimed, fired a single wild shot-and then the figure slowly toppled like a statue back into the burning inferno and was gone.
Tom passed out.
4
NIGHT HAD FALLEN on the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the old sycamores in Museum Park, and the stone gargoyles that haunted the rooftops squatted silently against the darkening sky. Deep in the museum's basement a light burned in the Mineralogy laboratory, where Melodic Crookshank sat hunched over the stereozoom microscope, watching a lump of cells divide.
It had been going on for three and a half hours. The Venus particles had triggered an amazing spurt of growth-triggering an orgy of cell division. At first Melodic thought the particles might have somehow set off a cancerous growth, an undifferentiated bunch of malignant cells. But it wasn't long before she realized that these cells were not dividing like cancerous cells, or even normal cells in a culture.