The day after: An apocalyptic morning (158 page)

              "Yes," he said. "I'll be coming down in just a minute, as soon as Sherrie gets me bandaged up. Don't worry."

              "I am worried," she said. "And you didn't answer me. How bad is it? Can you move your leg? Are you bleeding to death? What? You're hiding something."

              He sighed, not having the energy to go on with the charade any longer. "It's pretty bad," he said. "I got shot through the left knee. I'm having trouble moving it and I'm in a lot of pain. It's gonna be kind of difficult to work the anti-torque pedals like this so there's going to be some trouble when my speed drops below twenty knots."

              There was an extended silence on the airwaves. "I copy," Paula finally said. "So will you be able to get down, or won't you?"

              "I will," he said. "One way or another, I'll get us down and I'll get the wounded to El Dorado Hills. I'm a fighter."

              "Yes you are," she said. "We'll be waiting for you down here."

              "I know you will. Skip out."

              Sherrie had finally managed to assemble the bandaging supplies and she pushed her way between the two of them to dress his leg. She was forced to lean way over the front of him in order to do this, partially obstructing his vision with her body. He sat quietly as she did her work, his hands continuing to work the flight controls. Had the circumstances been a little different, he more than likely would have enjoyed the sensation of her body pushing against his, particularly the feel of her soft breasts against his shoulder. But the pain she was inflicting by lifting, pressing, and wrapping his wound was so intense, so powerful, that all he could think of was trying not to scream.

              When she was finished he had a fairly respectable pressure bandage pressed over both of the wounds and wrapped tightly with tape. Sherrie's hands were now dripping with his blood but she hardly seemed to notice.

              "Will that be okay?" she asked nervously, looking at her work.

              "It's perfect," he told her, taking his hand of the control long enough to wipe the sheen of sweat from his forehead. "It looks like you got the bleeding to stop."

              "Will you... will you be able to... you know... use that leg now?" she asked.

              He smiled at her. "I'm gonna have to try," he said. "Now go get yourself secured back there. I'm gonna see if I can hover while we're up here in the safe zone."

              "Right," she said, edging her way back to the rope coil.

              He looked over at Jack. "How are those gauges looking? Any holes in the bird?"

              "It doesn't look like it," he said. "Everything's holding steady, right on the line."

              "Good," he said, nodding. He took a deep breath. "All right, let's give it a shot. I'm going to try to pull a hover up here. You ready?"

              "I'm ready."

              "Then hang on. Things might get a little interesting."

              Skip took one more deep breath of the humid air and then straightened up the shallow bank he had been in, putting them back into straight and level flight. Slowly he reduced the airspeed, watching as the gauge dropped from 70 to 60 to 50.

              "How we doing?" Jack asked, watching nervously.

              "So far, so good," he answered, wincing as he tightened his leg on the pedal. "But the hard part hasn't happened yet."

              He slowed further. The gauge dropped to 40 and then slowly to 30. As it dipped below 30 knots the back end began to swing to the right as torque, which had been dampened by the speed, suddenly regained a grip on the machine.

              Skip braced himself for the pain and tried to push down on the left pedal, which would increase the amount of air being blown out of the NOTAR system and therefore stabilize the rear-end swing. Pain unlike anything he had ever felt before exploded in his knee like a bomb. He screamed it was so intense.

              "Skip!" Jack yelled, his hands grabbing for his seat as the swing became worse. Behind them, Sherrie screamed.

              "Ahhhhhhhh!" Skip cried, trying to ignore it and having no luck. Fresh sweat broke out, not just on his face but all over his entire body. He felt himself going faint as his body, in a reflexive reaction, slowed his heart rate down to a dangerously low level. The rear end continued to swing, now spinning them around so that they were facing the opposite direction. Outside the window the landscape rotated sickeningly. And still his leg would not push the pedal down. It couldn't.

              "Skip!" Jack yelled again, terrified now. The chopper was on the verge of spinning out of control.

              Skip let out his breath in a great gasp and, using his hands on the controls, brought their speed back up. The gauge climbed, passing back over 30 again and moving towards 40. Slowly the back end stopped spinning and straightened back out. A moment later they were straight and level again.

              Skip was panting, drops of sweat running down his face, the pain slowly fading back to a level approaching normal torture. The dizziness began to pass and his heart rate sped back up to normal.

              "Are you okay?" Jack asked hesitantly, looking at him in alarm.

              He looked over at him. "Yeah," he said. "I'm still here. But it seems that we have ourselves a little more of a problem than I originally thought. My leg won't move that pedal at all."

              Part 20

              "What are we going to do?" Sherrie asked, trying not to let panic overcome him. "Is there any way to land this thing without those pedal thingies?"

              "Well, there's an auto-rotational landing," Skip said, "but that's not really the ideal solution."

              "What's an auto-rotational landing?" Sherrie wanted to know, locking onto that in desperation. "If it'll get us down, let's do it."

              "That means he cuts the power and lets us fall to the ground," Jack said. "At the last moment, he pulls up and arrests the fall."

              Sherrie looked at the two of them as if they were mad. "Cut the power?" she said. "Fall? Are you insane?"

              "Not at all," Skip said, putting the aircraft back in the wide bank that it had been in a few moments before. "That's how you get down if you have an engine failure. The problem here is that it'll be kind of hard to bring us down in a specific place. We might end up in a tree, or on top of a building. And you come down rather hard too. I had to do it once in a Kiowa in Texas. It wasn't pretty. My observer fucked up his back pretty good and the helicopter never flew again. This chopper would almost certainly be permanently disabled if we did that and there's still a better than even chance that we'd all be killed anyway over this kind of terrain."

              "Great," Sherrie said, barking out a semi-hysterical laugh. "So we're talking a fifty-fifty chance?"

              "If we try that," Skip said, wiping the sweat off his face again. Christ his knee was hurting. "There might be another way though."

              "Like what?" Sherrie asked.

              "Like letting me fly," Jack said.

              "Letting you fly?" Sherrie said, her eyes wide. "You don't know how to fly this thing!"

              "I know how to fly it," Jack corrected. "I've just never done it before."

              "And this isn't the time to take over the controls," Skip said. "Sorry Jase, but I don't think it would be possible to maintain control if we tried to switch in mid-air, otherwise I might give it a shot."

              "Then what do we do?" Jack and Sherrie asked together.

              "You can't fly it," Skip told Jack. "But maybe you can be my left foot."

              "Push the pedal for you?"

              "You got it," Skip said. "Unbuckle and lean over here. If you put your foot on the pedal and push it when I tell you to and release it when I tell you to... maybe it just might be enough to keep us under control. I can still work the right pedal, the collective, and the cyclic. Sherrie?"

              "Yeah?" she said doubtfully.

              "We'll need your help too. I need you to come over here and hold onto my left leg to keep it from moving. When Jack pushes the pedal down, don't let my lower leg go down with it. Got it?"

              "I think so," she said, nodding, glad to have something to do.

              "All right," Skip said. "Let's give it a shot. We'll try to pull a hover up here again to get the feel for it. If we can do that, there's a good chance we'll be able to land."

              Sherrie and Jack both got into position. Jack released his harness and edged halfway out of his left side seat. He stretched his right foot out and over and slid it up against Skip's left boot. Skip winced a little at the contact. Sherrie resumed her position between the two seats. It took a little experimentation but finally, by kneeling down at an uncomfortable angle, she was able to get her hands around his upper calf, just below the wound, and hold it in place without obstructing either his vision, his hand on the collective, or Jack's leg on the pedal. The fit of the three of them however, was more than a little awkward.

              "Okay," Skip told Jack once they were ready, "the important thing to remember is not to push down hard on the thing. When I say to push it, just ease it down a little tiny bit at a time, very slowly. When I say let up, do the same. Got it?"

              "I got it," Jack said.

              "All right, let's give it a shot." He took a few deep breaths and leveled out their bank once again. "Slowing up."

              He eased up on the airspeed once again, making the indicator slowly wind down. He watched it carefully as it dipped closer and closer to the point where the torque became a force to be seriously reckoned with. As before, it was just under thirty knots when Skip felt the tail starting to turn. "Push down just a bit," he told Jack.

              Jack applied a very small amount of pressure to the pedal. It sank down a half an inch and than another half an inch. The swing of the tail smoothed out. Skip's foot remained just above the pedal, held there by Sherrie's bloody hands.

              "Good job," Skip said, starting to think that this just might work after all. Though having his leg suspended was increasing the pain considerably, it was nowhere near the white-hot agony of his first attempt at slowing. "Get ready to do it more. The more I adjust the collective, the worse the torque is going to be. It's a constant adjustment as we slow."

              "Right," Jack said, shifting a little in his seat.

              Skip continued to reduce airspeed and Jack continued to gently push down on the pedal to compensate for it. The needle dropped below twenty and then below ten. There were a couple of moments when they swung back and forth, when Skip had to push a little on the right and Jack had to ease up on the left, but these swings, although jerking, were almost gentle, nothing like the violent spinning of before. Skip barked out commands - up or down - as they were needed. Finally the needle dropped to zero knots of forward speed. The back end tried desperately to swing and actually was able to in small increments, but the up and down of the pedals with two different feet upon them were able to counter it. They hovered in space, 2000 feet above the ground.

              "We did it!" Jack yelled excitedly. "Goddamn, Skip, we did it! We're hovering!"

              "Thank God," Skip said, smiling in spite of the pain.

              "Does this mean that we're going to live?" Sherrie asked from her kneeling position. Her hands were cramping from the effort of holding Skip's leg.

              "It means our odds got a little better," Skip said. "Now lets bring it back up to forty knots or so and then we'll head on down. Get ready to push again, Jase."

              Slowly Skip built up airspeed once more until they were past the critical point. Jack kept the proper amount of pressure applied to the pedal. Once they were relatively stable Skip let everyone back away from him in order to stretch their fatigued muscles before the big event. Skip also had Jack contact Paul on the radio to tell him what they were doing and to have him clear the parking lot.

              "We're going to land on the far side of the lot," Jack explained, "but be sure everyone stays well clear until the skids hit the ground. There is a chance that we might... you know... have a loss of control and we wouldn't want anyone else to get hurt."

              "Copy," Paul said slowly. "We'll be standing by. Good luck to you."

              "Thanks," Jack said. "We'll need it."

              Skip banked the helicopter back around in a wide circle, bringing them around so that he could approach from the north, which would lessen the chances of them accidentally hitting the community center building if they lost control at the last second. This course put them out over the canyon, which was still about a third full of raging floodwaters rushing down from higher in the mountains. As he passed over the northern rim Skip began to descend and slowed his airspeed to thirty-five knots.