Sam peeked around the corner.
The Z-9 was hovering thirty feet above the plateau.
“Come on, turn,” Sam muttered. “Just a little bit.”
The Z-9 pivoted slightly, bringing the door gunner around so he could cover the soldiers’ descent. Two thick black ropes uncoiled from the door and hit the ice. The first pair of soldiers stepped up to the door. Sam could just make out the pilot’s seat diagonally behind them.
Sam took a breath, set his teeth. He clipped the fire selector to Single Shot, then ducked out. In a crouch, he brought the machine gun to his shoulder and took aim at the Z-9’s open doorway, then shifted left, placing the sight over the door gunner’s helmet. He fired. The gunner crumbled. Sam switched the fire selector to Three Round, adjusted his aim again, and fired a burst into the doorway. Hit, one of the soldiers stumbled backward; the other ducked and dropped to his belly. Sam now had a clear view of the pilot’s seat-but that would last only a second or two, he knew. Even as he readjusted his aim he could see the pilot’s arm’s moving, adjusting controls, trying to make sense of the chaos around him.
Sam focused on the seat back. He took a breath, let it out, then pulled the trigger. A trio of bullets peppered the Z-9’s interior. Sam pulled the trigger again, then once more. The machine gun let off an empty click; the magazine was empty.
The Z-9 pitched sideways, nose spiraling down and toward the plateau. Through the open cabin door the lifeless body of the door gunner slid out, followed by a second soldier. Arms flailing for handholds, two more soldiers tumbled through the door. One managed to snag the Z-9’s landing skid, but the other plummeted to the ground. Now fully out of control, the pilotless Z-9 hit the plateau, crushing the hanging soldier beneath it.
Sam tore his eyes free, ducked behind the gondola, and sprinted to where Remi was lying. “More shrapnel coming!” he shouted, and dove on top of her.
Two of the Z-9’s rotors struck the ice first, shearing off and hurling away a quarter second before the fuselage struck. Pressed flat in the snow, Sam and Remi waited for a fiery explosion but none came. They heard a high- pitched grinding sound followed by a trio of grenade-like whumps.
On impulse, Sam stood up and glanced over the gondola.
It took a full two seconds for his brain to register what he was seeing: the Z-9, skidding, hurtling toward him, the mangled fuselage, half sliding, half lurching, as the remaining rotor blades splintered on the ice and propelled it forward. It looked like a crippled bug in the throes of death.
Sam felt a hand clamp onto his. With surprising strength, Remi jerked him back to the ground. “Sam, what do you think you’re-”
The Z-9 slammed into the gondola, shoving it backward into Sam and Remi, who began backpedaling, feet scrabbling over the ice.
The gondola stopped moving. The grinding thud-thud-thud of the helicopter’s skid continued for a few seconds, then suddenly died save the stuttering coughs of the engine turbine.
That too stopped, and Sam and Remi found themselves in perfect silence. They got to their feet and peeked over the gondola.
“Well, that’s not something you see every day,” Sam said drily.
32
It took ten seconds for Sam and Remi to piece together the scene that lay before them.
After bouncing off the gondola, the crippled Z-9 had reversed course and skidded toward the runnel that cut through the plateau, where, like a pinball caught in a groove, it had slid to the edge of the plateau, then over-or partially over. The Z-9’s tail, a few inches narrower than the runnel itself, had become lodged in the trough.
The helicopter’s cabin sat suspended over the edge, water cascading over the fuselage and through the open cabin door.
“We should see if anyone’s left alive,” Remi prompted.
Wary of the still-hot engine, they picked their way over to the Z-9. Sam knelt down beside the runnel and crawled on hands and knees to the edge. The fuselage was crushed to half its height, and the windshield was missing. He could see nothing through the doorway, so thick was the cascading water.
“Anyone in there?” he shouted. “Hello!”
Sam and Remi listened but heard nothing.
Twice more Sam called out, but still there was no response.
Sam stood up and rejoined Remi. He said, “Lone survivors.”
“That sounds both wonderful and terrifying. What now?”
“First, we can’t climb out of here. And even if we managed to without getting injured, we’re thirty miles from the nearest village. Between the subzero temperatures at night and no shelter, we’d have little chance. For that matter, we need to start thinking about surviving tonight.”
“Cheery,” Remi said. “Go on.”
“We have no idea how long before Karna declares us overdue and a search party is mounted. And even more important, we have to assume the Z-9 was in contact with its base after Hosni opened fire. When they don’t make contact again and don’t return, the base will send another helicopter, probably two.”
“Any guesses on how soon?”
“Worst case, a matter of hours.”
“Best case?”
“Tomorrow morning. If it’s the former, we may have an advantage: nightfall’s coming. It’ll make it easier for us to hide. I need to get inside that thing.”
“What, the Z-9?” Remi said. “Sam, that’s-”
“A really bad idea, I know, but it’s got supplies we need, and, if we’re very lucky, the radio may still work.”
Remi considered this for a few moments, then nodded. “Okay. But first let’s see what we can scrounge from the Bell’s wreckage.”
This took but a few minutes. There was little of value left, mostly charred bits and pieces from their packs, including a half-shredded section of climbing rope, a smattering of items from a first-aid kit, and a few tools from the Bell’s tool kit. Sam and Remi picked up anything that could be of use, whether recognizable or not.
“How’s the rope look?” Sam asked.
Kneeling beside their pile of supplies, Remi examined the rope. “It’ll need some splicing, but I think we’ve got eighteen or twenty feet of usable line here. You’re thinking a belay for the Z-9?”
Sam smiled, nodded. “I may be a bit thick at times, but there’s no way I’m crawling onto that death trap without a safety line. We’re going to need something piton-like.”
“I may have just the thing.”
Testing the ground as she went, Remi moved off across the plateau and soon returned. In one hand she was holding a shard of helicopter rotor, in the other a fist-sized rock. She handed them to Sam and said, “I’ll start on the rope.”
Sam used the rock to first smooth the edges of the shard’s upper half, then to taper and sharpen the lower half. Once done, he found a particularly thick patch of ice a couple paces from the edge of the plateau just to the right of the Z-9. Next, he began the painstaking process of hammering the makeshift piton into the ice. When he finished, the shard was buried a foot and a half in the ice and angled backward at forty-five degrees.
Remi walked over, and they used their combined weight to wrench and pull the belay until confident it would hold. Remi uncoiled the spliced rope-into which she’d tied knots at two-foot intervals-and secured one end to the piton with a bowline knot. After shedding his jacket, gloves, and cap, Sam used the loose end to fashion a rope seat, with the knot tight against his lower back.
“If this thing starts going over the edge, get clear,” Sam said.
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Concentrate on you.”
