“Brace for impact,” the pilot said. But halfway through this utterance, Seamus stopped hearing his voice in the headphones, because another round seemed to have gone through the middle of the instrument panel and fucked up the electrical system.
The pilot, to his great credit, knew what to do: he manipulated the controls in such a way as to make the chopper autorotate, converting some of the energy of its fall into passive spinning of the rotors that broke the descent marginally. That, and the fact that they landed at an angle on the snowfield, saved them. Even so, the impact was so sharp that Seamus felt his teeth jumping in their sockets. Because he was biting down, they didn’t slam together and they didn’t bite his tongue off and he hoped that the same was true of the others.
The chopper planted its nose in the snow and began to skid downhill like a big out-of-control toboggan. Directly in front of them were trees. Standing in front of the trees was—just as Yuxia had been trying to tell him—Richard Forthrast. A.k.a. Dodge.
He dodged.
The trees didn’t.
THE TEN OR fifteen seconds between the appearance of the chopper in the sky above him and its coming to rest in the trees, only a few yards away from where he had thrown himself to the ground, presented Richard with an unbroken chain of never-before-experienced sensations that, in other times, he’d have spent several weeks sifting through and making sense of. There was something in the modern mind that would not stop saying, If only I had caught that on video, or This is going to make the coolest blog entry ever! Barring which, he at least wanted to just lie there for a few moments asking himself whether that had really just happened.
People were stirring behind the cracked and spalled windshield of the chopper. At a glance he guessed two. On further consideration, three: there was a small person, a woman, in the back. The pilot seemed unconscious or at least unwilling to move. The passenger next to him was a lanky man with strawberry-blond hair and a beard, and he was flailing around like a spider in a bathtub, trying to get free of several entanglements while being belabored from the rear by the backseat person, who couldn’t get out until he did. And she—the voice, speaking what he guessed was Chinese, was clearly that of a female—very much wanted to get out. The man was dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear, which suggested that he had flown up here to get in some hunting. Wrong season for it, but perhaps he was a poacher who had come to this area specifically to get away from game wardens.
Richard looked up the slope, just to see whether the jihadist with the sniper rifle had come into view yet. Either he hadn’t, or he was taking sniperlike care not to be seen. Anyway, they’d be in his sights soon enough, and Richard wanted to make the newcomers aware of that fact and get them free of the chopper. He staggered to his feet and sloshed through snow and undergrowth toward the downed machine’s right side—only to be greeted by the muzzle of a semiautomatic pistol, which had appeared by some sleight of hand in the passenger’s right hand and was now aimed right at him.
“Okay,” Richard said, letting his hands be seen, “if I’d just been through that, I’d be a little jumpy too.”
“It’s not so much that,” said the passenger. “It’s the Mossberg 500 on the tactical sling.” He nodded at said weapon, which was dangling from Richard’s shoulder.
“Fair enough,” Richard conceded.
“You’re Richard Forthrast,” said the passenger, and dropped the pistol’s muzzle. Then he was distracted by a series of vicious kicks directed against the back of his seat.
“T’Rain player?” Dodge asked.
“Yeah, actually. But there’s more going on here than just a random fan encounter. We have information about your niece. Or rather she does.” He nodded toward the back. “I have never met her, but I hear she is a fine young lady.”
“I just saw her an hour ago.”
The kicking and thrashing stopped. A face peeked out from behind the rear seat.
“She’s alive?” the young Asian woman asked.
GETTING OUT OF the chopper required some knife work, since parts of the instrument panel had been crushed upward, and sharp sheet-metal edges were catching on seat belts and on camouflage clothing. But eventually the man, who gave his name as Seamus, and the woman, Yuxia, extricated themselves and went around to the other side to look in on the pilot. He was awake now. Richard, conditioned by long exposure to Hollywood, was wondering when the chopper was going to burst into flames, but this seemed less and less likely as time went on. The fuel tank was not leaking, and there were no sources of ignition that Richard could see.
The pilot was reporting, rather calmly, that all parts of his body from his navel on down felt as though they had gone to sleep. Not in the sense of being totally numb, for he could move them and feel sensations, but in the sense of tingling like crazy. His spinal column, obviously enough, had been jammed by the force of the impact and perhaps suffered some vertebral damage that was messing with his spinal cord. He wasn’t paralyzed. But he might be if they tried to move him around “like a bunch of fucking do-gooder shit-for-brains” as Seamus put it.
Yuxia and Seamus both seemed to have come through the crash with little trauma other than a good deal of hard banging around that would leave them stiff and bruised tomorrow. Adrenaline seemed to be taking care of the rest. That, and, in Yuxia’s case, what looked like a serious endorphin rush generated by the awareness that Zula was alive—or at least had been an hour ago. While Seamus interviewed the pilot and tried to figure out what to do, Yuxia focused on Richard. “Your niece honors you very much.”
“I just figured out who you are,” Richard said. “She wrote about you on a paper towel.”
Once he had made up his mind that the chopper was not going to explode, and taken into consideration the fact that they now had two firearms between them, he had begun to feel quite optimistic—as if it were all over now except for rounding up the bad guys and buying people plane tickets home.