“Are you feeling airsick?” She sounded doubtful. As she should be, since the drive up the mountain road to the spa site had bounced him around a lot more than anything she had done.
“No.”
“Okay. Can you unbuckle and shift seats? I want you to look out the other cabin window. It makes for a better search if you cover both sides.”
“Okay.” He didn’t have the wherewithal to answer in anything more than single-word sentences. He unclipped and shifted to the ghostly Mac’s seat. The geologist’s description of the gorge knifing down the mountains was more clearly accurate from this height. The crevasse looked a lot narrower than it had when he’d peered over the edge. He thought of descending into that crack in the rock, wrapped in nothing but cargo netting. It’d be a miracle if he didn’t end up a smear on the rock wall.
“See anything?”
“No.”
“Are you doing okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to drop her down a bit.” The chopper sank in a series of jerks, like an elevator on the fritz. He pressed his lips tightly together and braced his hands for another look out the window. Green leaves, everywhere green pulsing in the hazy sunlight, with a gray slash through the jungle, a scar in the earth.
Jesus, he thought. Get a grip. He forced himself to focus on the crevasse, picking out boulders and scrubby plants, the tobacco brown trickle that was all that remained of the brook at summer’s height, the flash of metal—
“Wait! I think I see something.”
The chopper stopped its forward motion and hovered, twisting slightly back and forth. He saw it again, a glint of metal on a lumpy bundle rolled against a small boulder. A backpack? He hadn’t noticed one when he’d surveyed the accident scene the first time. “Can you go a little lower?”
Clare dropped the chopper another few yards. He let his eyes spiral out from the backpack, searching, searching…. He spotted the geologist’s hiking boots first.
“I’ve got him.”
“Where?”
“See where there’s a clump of birch saplings growing low on the wall?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“That’s ten o’clock. Look at two o’clock.”
There was a pause as she searched over the floor of the ravine. “Okay, I see him, too. I’m going to maneuver us so that the cargo door is above him. Good Lord, he’s still. Are you sure he’s not dead?”
“If he is, and I go through all this for nothing, I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”
There was a sound in his headset that might have been a stifled laugh. The chopper dipped and swayed into position.
“Okay, you’re on.”
He rose from his seat and, crouching, crossed back to the left side of the chopper and pushed the webbing out of the way. The thing he noticed—and he wished he had noticed it when Clare was going through how all this was going to work—was that there was nothing beside the safety webbing and the bungee cord to hold on to while he got himself inside the net. And he was going to have to unclip the bungee cord anyway.
“Clare,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“There’s nothing to hold on to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Getting into the net. There’s nothing I can hold on to.”
“We went over this. You hold on to the edges of the net while you step inside.”
“It’s in front of an open door!”
There was a pause. Then she said in the patient voice of a kindergarten teacher explaining something to a new student, “I’m holding the ship dead even. There’s nothing to cause you to lose your balance and fall.”
“What if I trip?” He realized how whiny he sounded, but he couldn’t help it.
“Russ.” The teacher was gone; the officer was back. “Get into the net.”
He took a deep breath. With his fingers clutching the safety webbing, he took the D ring in a death grip. Then he let go of the webbing and jerked the bungee cord out. It sprang back against the bulkhead with a metallic clang. He looked along the wide strap running from the ring in his fist, out the door, and up out of sight to the boom. One twitch of the helicopter and he would be dangling sixty feet above the gorge’s rocky bottom. His palm was so sweaty, the D ring was already slipping in his grasp. He pawed the edges of the net open and tumbled inside with a tailbone-bruising jolt.
“I’m in,” he said. The relief of it made him laugh.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just can’t believe I’m doing this. It reminds me of the time I tried to trim one of the old trees in our yard with a chain saw.”
