“See the seat below you? Put your feet on its side. Once you’re upright, we’ll see if we can slide you around this thing and pull you out. Ready?”
“Wait a minute!” She paused. He didn’t say anything. Finally, he pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose with his free hand and said, “Let’s do it.”
She watched as he stretched out as best he could and lodged himself between the ceiling and floor. She snaked her hand around the corner of his seat and found the buckle of the seat belt by touch. With a click, she freed him.
His knuckles went white. He lifted one leg and let it dangle down toward the second passenger seat. She couldn’t see if his foot had connected with it yet, but she could see his arms and his other leg trembling with the effort of keeping himself from falling onto the ragged steel edge of the broken tail.
“Got it,” he said.
“Careful.”
“Oh yeah.”
She moved so that she was straddling the frame of the cabin door, one sneakered foot on either side. She squatted deeply so that she could hold him with the strength of her thighs. “Give me your hand. I’ll keep you upright.”
He laughed hoarsely.
“Shut up and give me your hand,” she said, irrationally cheered that he could still see a double entendre in what she said. He let go of the door frame and she caught him around the wrist, pulling slowly and steadily upward. She heard a smack as his other foot landed on the seat, and then his head and shoulders moved, coming upright, rotating in line.
“I feel,” he said, almost whispering, “like a chicken on a rotisserie.” Then his other arm was free, thrusting through the doorway, his hand feeling for something to hold on to.
“Are you all set?” she said.
“Yeah. I’m on my feet. You can let me go.”
She released his wrist. The top of his head was level with the doorway, and the raw end of the tail section was now in front of his stomach. He thrust both arms out and banged his hands against the fuselage. Then he curled them over the edge behind his head. “If this thing wasn’t in my way, I could probably get myself up with a backward flip,” he said. “I have pretty good upper-body strength.”
“If that thing wasn’t in your way, you could get out a lot easier than that,” she said. “As it is, you aren’t going to be able to lever yourself up. I want you to lock your hands around my neck; then I’ll pull you up.”
“What, deadlifting? Forget it, darlin’. I must outweigh you by sixty or seventy pounds.”
“I’ll get you up, Russ.” A thread of fear that he might be right made her voice sharp. “Trust me.”
“I trusted you before I got into the damned chopper, and look where it got me.” He squinted up at her and attempted a smile, which made his glasses slip farther down his nose. “Damn. Fix that, will you?” She set his glasses more firmly on his nose while swallowing back the softball-sized lump in her throat.
When she could speak without her voice cracking, she said, “I told you no incoming fire and no lightning. If you wanted no mechanical failures, you should have specified.” She bent her head very close to his. “Put your arms around my neck.”
To her surprise, he didn’t argue further, just released one hand at a time and clasped them together behind her neck. She reached behind her head and flipped her braid out of the way. “Hold on.”
“I will.”
She settled her feet more firmly, took two fistfuls of his shirt, and straightened very slowly. Good Lord, he was heavy. She gritted her teeth and hissed out air as her thighs shook with the effort of bringing him out. She could feel him flexing his lower body to avoid the tail boom, but she couldn’t see anything except the top of his head and his shirt, which was peeling off his torso. Damn! She jammed her hands under the shirt, below his armpits, and dug into his clammy flesh, pressing until she could feel the bones beneath his skin. Sweat was dripping into her eyes and tickling her chest. She grunted, lifting with her arms and legs now, her muscles trembling with the strain and the fear that he was right, that she wouldn’t be able to lift him after all. Her legs, biceps, and shoulders were burning, and she was afraid she was going to let go, going to lose him.
Just then, he said, “I’m over the edge! Push me back a few inches.”
She did as instructed, and suddenly he let go of her neck. The cessation of weight and pressure made her stumble forward, and he caught her around the waist. “Steady. Easy,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of the door frame. He eased her away from the yawning cabin door, and she slid down the chopper’s half-exposed belly. When her feet hit the dirt, her legs almost collapsed beneath her.
There was a moment of silence, broken only by their labored breathing; then he said, “Thanks.”
She waved his gratitude away. She bent over and rubbed her lower back. Tomorrow, it would feel like she’d had her kidneys removed. She straightened. “We need to get Waxman out.”
“Clare, he may be dead already.”
“If he is, I want to know it. And if he isn’t, we have to do what we can to get him out.”
He sniffed in an exaggerated fashion. “Do you smell that? That’s fuel. We need to get away from here as quickly…” His voice faded away under her steady gaze. “We should at least consider that we might help him more by hurrying to get help than by trying to hoist him out of there.”
“And if something sparks and the fuel explodes?” She didn’t bother to put much heat into her argument, because she had already won. She knew Russ, and there was no way he would leave a man to burn to death, even if it was a remote possibility. She clambered up to the doorway and peered inside again. “I think I can slide in here”—she pointed to the outside edge of the door—“and slip around the side of the tail boom. I’ll go underneath it and have a look at him.”
“Then what?”
