She examined the boom. Except for the serrated edge that had been facing Russ, it looked relatively safe. The problem was its size. For a relatively slim woman, it wasn’t much of a bar getting in and out: she could, as she’d said, slide around it. For a man strapped to a stabilizing board, it posed a significant challenge. She looked up at Russ. “Then I pray for inspiration to strike. Help me down?”
He grunted, but he took the same position she had just quit, feet braced on either side of the doorway, straddling the opening. She sat with her legs dangling into the cabin, her feet lightly brushing against the side of the tail boom. He reached toward her and they grasped each other’s wrists. She edged off the door frame and let him take her weight, concentrating on getting around the boom with a minimal amount of bumping and banging. She didn’t know how stable it was, and she could easily imagine it tipping and crashing onto Waxman’s unmoving body, its razor-sharp edge piercing his flesh.
She was cheek-to-cheek with the tail boom when her foot connected with the solid angle between the floor and the bulkhead. “Okay, let me go,” she said.
Russ released her wrists. She let herself fall backward, bumping hard against the floor but keeping her footing. She ducked beneath the boom and got her first look at Waxman.
He was lying facedown across the other cabin window, looking as if he had been placed over a hermetically sealed square of soil. Russ’s homemade backboard and arm splints were still in place, and it was the aluminum supports she grabbed when she rolled him over onto his back. She winced. In addition to sporting the purple welt from his initial fall, his forehead was deeply gashed and bleeding freely. In some indefinable way, his nose looked off, and she suspected it was broken. She knew immediately that he was still alive, however, because he was whistling with each exhalation, as if someone were capping and uncapping a boiling teakettle.
“He’s alive,” she said, “but I’m afraid one of his lungs may be punctured.”
“He is one hard-to-kill son of a bitch, isn’t he? ’Scuse my French.”
She crouched over the still form. She had brought the poor man to this place. How was she going to get him out of here? She considered the idea of wrestling him upright and shoving him over the tail boom until Russ could reach him. No, that wouldn’t do. Maybe it wouldn’t kill him, but the damage she could cause to his broken bones might leave him wishing he had died. The Day-Glo orange of the safety webbing caught her eye. The tail boom, spiking through the cargo area, had evidently sliced the webbing in two, scattering bungee cords in its wake. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes with the palm of her hand. She could use the webbing…the cords…
“I have an idea,” she said.
“Let’s hear it.”
She edged her way to where the webbing sagged from its cleats and then began unfastening it. “I’m going to wrap him as tightly as I can in this cargo webbing. Then I’m going to lift him on top of the tail boom, back here where it’s narrower. I’ll push him forward until you and I can lift him through the door.”
“What if the tail section falls down?”
“It may jar him, but after what he’s already been through, it’ll hardly be a bump. As long as neither of us is under it, we’ll be fine.” She kicked Waxman’s backpack away from where it had come to rest near his legs and threw the webbing on the Plexiglas surface beneath him. She bunched half of it along his body, then lifted him onto the web, first by his immobilized shoulders, then his feet, then by kneeling and working her arms under his buttocks to get his midsection in line.
She was collecting all the bungee cords she could see, when she heard a thudding sound from above, as if Russ had abruptly stepped across part of the fuselage. “Get off of there,” she yelled. “I don’t know how sound that —”
“Holy shit!” His cry made her break off in midsentence. There was a hollow clang and then nothing.
“Russ? Russ?”
No reply. She returned to Waxman’s side and knelt, lashing bungee cords through the webbing and onto his makeshift support. “Russ?” she called again. She stood and looked up at the rectangle of daylight visible from inside the cabin. She couldn’t hear anything, which was more unnerving than any sound of breaking helicopter parts or unwelcome visitors. “Russ?” She glanced down at Waxman, who was swathed in aluminum spars and ragged orange webbing, looking like a rejected resuscitation dummy from some Coast Guard rescue-training exercise. She would have to leave him and climb out to find out what had happened to Russ.
She half-dragged, half-lifted Waxman to the rear of what was left of the cargo section, out of the way of the damaged tail section. When she was just about ready to lever herself up on the tail to see if it would hold her, she heard the banging sound of someone climbing across the helicopter. Russ appeared in the cabin doorway.
“Thank God,” she said. “Where were you?”
“Putting out a fire. You need to get out of there
“A fire!”
“Something threw a spark into a bunch of old pine needles three or four yards from here. I stomped it dead, but there could be a dozen others all around this place that we won’t see until they hit enough oxygen to bring ’em up. C’mon.” He thrust his hand down toward her. “Now.”
“We have to get Waxman out.”
“Leave him! He’s half-dead already. I’m not going to lose you trying to save somebody who’s neck-deep in Ingraham’s murder.”
She set her hands atop the tail boom and heaved herself up. With an agonized squeal, it sank beneath her like a teeter-totter, its fulcrum the hole it had blown in the rear of the helicopter. She stood up on the rounded form, her feet gripping it through her sneakers. Her head was through the doorway.
“Good. Take my hand. We’ll have you out of there in no time.”
She held up her hands, but instead of clutching his wrist, she threaded her fingers through his. “I can’t leave him behind.” She looked into his eyes, willing him to understand her. “It was my idea to bring him out with the helicopter. I was at the controls when we went down.” To her mortification, she felt her eyes begin to tear up. She squeezed them shut. “If we had done what you suggested, the Mountain Rescue people would already be on their way to get him out of the ravine.” She opened her eyes again, blinking hard against unwanted emotion. “I can’t leave him behind. I can’t.”
