They hit.
It was worse than he’d imagined. Once, in a training accident, Dryden had fallen three stories onto concrete. This impact on the ledge was at least that hard. He and Rachel were slammed downward into a tangled mass, his body cushioning her impact only slightly. He heard her breath rush out along with his own. He locked his arms around her before she could roll off him into open space.
She opened her eyes but took several seconds to focus on him, even though his face was nearly touching hers. She held on to consciousness for a moment, then lost it.
The dead chute fell past them, flapping uselessly against the tower in the straight-on wind. Seconds later it began shuddering violently in a different sort of wind, coming from above. Rotor wash.
Dryden looked past Rachel and saw the AH-6 directly overhead. It descended into a hover thirty feet to the side, filling all his senses. Even the taste of its exhaust reached him. It pivoted to give the sniper on its left skid a clear line. The man was close enough for Dryden to look into his eyes just before he raised his weapon.
Assuming Rachel would be the first target, and not willing to spend the last few seconds of his life soaked with her blood, Dryden cradled her against himself and turned inward. He put his back to the chopper, visually shielding her. It wouldn’t save her, but they would at least have to shoot him first. He studied her face, absorbing the details one last time. Even with her eyes closed, she was as beautiful a thing as he’d seen in his life. He kissed the top of her head. Reflected in the windowpane behind her was the chopper, and the man with the rifle. The scope lens gleamed.
Then, from high above, something screamed down out of the night on a vapor trail. It turned the chopper into an inferno, pounding it downward like a sledgehammer striking a child’s toy. Debris rained against the building, lit by the ghostly fire of the now-falling helicopter.
*
“What the fuck just happened?” Gaul shouted.
The pilot of Sparrow-Four-Two was yelling about a missile, and on the Miranda image, his chopper pulled hard to the west and sped away from the building.
The pilot of Sparrow-Four-One was not responding, probably because Sparrow-Four-One had become a flaming ball of metal. Gaul watched it hit the street with a bright puff of heat on all sides.
*
Audrey leaned as far out of the empty window frame as she could afford to, with the second FGM-148 Javelin resting in its launcher on her shoulder. The first launcher lay steaming on the carpet behind her.
No good. The other chopper was long gone; pilots were survivor types. She dropped the second launcher as well, held on to the window frame, and leaned farther out into the wind. Dryden’s parachute hung against the building far below.
Audrey retreated ten steps into the bedroom, came forward at a sprint, and leapt.
*
Dryden took his eyes off the wreckage and set his mind to the only thing that mattered now: getting into the building. The window beside him looked into a darkened office, visible only when he cupped his hand to his eye against the glass.
He had no gun, and nothing heavy with which to shatter the pane. His search for a solution was interrupted by the ruffle and snap of a parachute opening, and not his own. He turned to see a slim figure—it could only be Audrey—hanging from the lines of a second chute. It had opened less than a hundred feet above, and sixty feet out from the tower. Audrey was turning and coming around now, not fighting the wind but seizing it.
It was clear within seconds that Audrey’s control of the parachute was that of a master. While Dryden had made over two hundred jumps in his life, and could land on ground targets with the best of them, Audrey’s movements spoke of a specialized skill level, an acrobatic ability that came from years of narrowly focused training.
There’s one other reason to live here, Audrey had told him, but if you’re lucky you won’t have to find out what it is.
He understood. What other type of residence offered such a dynamic and unexpected escape route? All three of them—Audrey and Sandra, at the very least—had probably made a hundred aircraft jumps or more, in every kind of wind, until the controls of a chute were like extensions of their own bodies.
This was about to go bad.
He looked at Rachel again and found her eyes fluttering open, fixing on him. He could tell she’d read the danger in his mind.
“It’s not too late,” she whispered. “You can let me go.”
Her gaze went past him for a moment, beyond his shoulder to the wide-open drop.
Dryden pulled her face against his own, cheek to cheek, and just held on. He felt her tears spilling onto his temple, exactly where the chill always touched it.