“Thank you, God,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
Wind from the rotors whipped her hair into a frenzy. Dust stung her eyes as the chopper hovered. She didn’t care about any of those things as long as her son was safe on board. She squinted upward, saw Buzz at the hatch, checking his harness. All the while her heart pounded out a maniacal rhythm because she knew that in another minute she would be face-to-face with him dangling from a cable forty feet off the ground and all this would be over. She could go back to her life the way it was before any of this happened.
We’re not finished.
Buzz’s words rang in her ears. She tried not to think of them now, about what they meant in terms of how his knowing about Eddie would affect their lives.
Her thoughts were cut short when Buzz backed up to the hatch and dropped down. She watched him, terrified and fascinated and slightly in awe that he was so damn courageous. He was only ten feet down when the chopper jolted and swung hard in a counter-clockwise rotation. She stared in horror as Buzz was swung around and around, like a wildly spinning yo-yo.
“Buzz!” she screamed. “What’s happening?! Buzz!”
The chopper spun sickeningly. The engines revved. Buzz swung around, his boots actually hitting the uppermost branches of a tall pine. “Buzz! Oh, my God!”
Kelly stood motionless, unable to move, unable to tear her eyes away from the monstrous craft or the man dangling from a cable ten feet beneath it. She could see him gripping the straps of his harness. They’d put a helmet on him when he was inside the chopper. But a helmet wasn’t going to help if he hit those trees. Or if, God forbid, the chopper went down.
The engines screamed, deafening her. The craft shuddered. The tail rotors groaned. Wind and debris pelted her, blinding her. All Kelly could think was that her little boy was on board that chopper. And the man who’d risked her life to save them both was in very real danger of being killed.
And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it but stand there and watch it happen.
Buzz knew the instant the cable shuddered that he was in dire straits. Just as he knew what the chances were of his making it back through the hatch before he got slammed into those trees—or the rock face of the cliff on the other side of the stream. He maintained his equilibrium by keeping his eyes on the horizon, but by the fourth or fifth spin he was starting to get disoriented.
“Mayday! Mayday!” Tony Colorosa’s voice barked over the VHF radio. “This is Eagle. I’ve got to put her down. Lake City do you read?”
“What the hell is going on, Flyboy?” Buzz shouted into his own headgear.
“Just stay cool, Buzz.” John Maitland’s voice came over his communication gear headset. “We’re bringing you up.”
“Like hell you are!”
The cable jolted and Buzz felt himself being pulled upward toward the hatch. Cursing, forgetting about professionalism and keeping his cool, he looked down at Kelly and realized the chopper was no longer spinning, but moving away from her. He shouted an oath into his mike.
A moment later, he reached the hatch. Maitland snagged the cable and dragged him inside. Buzz turned on him like a mad, snarling dog.
“I’m not leaving her!” he shouted.
“Steady, Buzz.”
“Damn it! We can’t leave her out here all alone. You could have cut me loose. You could have left me with her!”
“That’s not procedure.”
“To hell with procedure!”
“Calm down, Buzz. Just…stay cool.”
Only then did he notice Eddie sitting on the litter a few feet away. His face was chalk-white, the tip of his nose was red from crying. Tears streaked his cheeks. He looked up at Buzz with the ravaged eyes of a child who had been terrified. Buzz felt the contact like a bone-shattering blow.
He’d seen too many terrified children in his time. Children he hadn’t been able to help. He stared, remembering, remembering so damn much, and he swore this time would be different
“Eddie.” Grappling for control, he walked over to the child and pulled him into his arms. “Everything’s going to be all right. You hear me?”
“I’m s-scared.”
“We’re going to be fine.” He didn’t know that. He could feel the instability in the way the chopper flew. Some kind of mechanical malfunction. Hydraulics, maybe. Or the swash plate. He prayed to God Flyboy could get them down.
“Are we gonna crash, Buzz?”
“No.”
“Where’s my mommy?”
“We’re going to have to go back to get her, son.”
Eddie began to cry. “We left my mommy.”
“I know. The chopper….” He grappled for a word an upset child would understand. “The chopper had some kind of mechanical problem.”
“You mean it broke?”
“That’s right. We just have to go back to base and fix it.”
“How are we going to find mommy?”
“We know her coordinates.”