Falls Like Lightning (16 page)

No response.

“Hmm . . .” She flipped a switch and leveled the plane at a new altitude. “He did, you know.”

Silas cast a curious glance.

She caught his eye. “He did tell me.”

A bright light burst.

The plane banked hard. It groaned and roared. Smoke ribbons flailed over the windshield. Elle gripped the rattling yoke one handed, grasping the throttle with her other.

Silas clutched his seat. “What’s happening?”

“We lost an engine.”

Altitude sank. Silas’s stomach jumped. The other wing engine roared at high RPMs. The horizon thunderheads appeared higher than before.

Bo barreled through the bulkhead. “We got an engine on fire.”

The ALT gauge spun counterclockwise. Silas threw a look to Elle. “How close are we to the drop zone?”

“What?”

He shouted. “How close to the drop zone?”

“Eleven, maybe twelve miles.”

Silas stood, grasping the seat back, and said to Bo, “Toss me that topo map.”

Bo fetched the rolled cylinder and handed it to him without letting go. He stood face-to-face, staring at him, and unzipped the front of his jumpsuit. From it he produced a compact square canvas pouch bound by thick straps. “Don’t lose this.”

An emergency chute? Why did Bo think he needed a backup to his existing chutes? He’d strap them on when it was time to make the jump. He’d gone through everything that morning, like he always did. But the man wouldn’t let go of the topo map until Silas acknowledged him, unzipped his own jumpsuit, and placed the chute inside.

Bo released the cylinder and stood back. “We can reel it out on the floor here.”

A panel screw rattled loose and tumbled across the floor. Silas pried open the cylinder and fished out the map. Bo smoothed it out on the floor. The lines levitated with the vibrating floor. Silas blinked them into focus and let his fingers find the airport and then traced the route he’d penciled in the night before. He had scribed estimated time signatures every five miles. Just like Warren always did.

“That puts us around . . .” Silas tapped the paper. “Here.”

“By Crystal Lake?” Elle yelled over the din.

“Yes. But Crystal Pond is more like it. Pretty tiny. Any meadows around?”

“Still a ways off. Mostly hillsides and tree stands. Here.” She stretched a hand back. “Show it to me.”

Silas folded the map to isolate their location and held it in front of her. Sweat beaded at the bridge of his nose. “Can’t you limp her back to South Lake?”

“No. One engine can’t hang at this altitude.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Set her down in that puddle.”

“Can you reach—”

The plane dropped altitude again. Silas sucked in a breath.

Elle adjusted the throttle to a buzz-skip sound from the remaining engine. “I’ll have to. Have your boys make the jump now.”

“Too forested. We’ll wait ’till you’re over—”

“No way. I’m heading in at too steep an angle as it is.” Then, under her breath, “Be lucky if I even clear the ridge.”

Silas hesitated.

“I got this, Kent. Here, show me the map again.”

He held it up.

“There.” She pointed to a patch of light green. “We’ll be over that in about forty-five seconds.”

“Too small.”

“It’s all you got.”

Caleb shouted from the bulkhead, “Let’s get off this bird.”

Silas stumbled back into the crew compartment. He grabbed Caleb by the chest harness. “Line up for the door. No time for paracargo, so everyone take a hand tool. Let’s move.”

Jumpers scrambled. Last second gear adjustments and the linking of yellow tether lines for chute deployment. They gathered by the jump door, and Silas cranked it open. An immediate blast of heated orange and choking black smoke poured in. Silas ducked low, holding his breath and hiding his face in the crook of his elbow. He crouched beneath the smoke and peered downward for the drop point. He spotted a dime-sized patch of green between the trees.

Three separate smoke columns bordered the area. Even with a successful jump, they could be hemmed in by the fire.

Sunlight glinted off a creek bed. His eyes traced it through the forest, winding like a snake down a nearby ridge from Crystal Lake. Could work as a safety zone when things got hot.

It was as good as they were going to get.

Silas waved Caleb forward and pointed out the landing zone. Caleb glanced at Silas’s chute pack still hanging from the fore bulkhead.

Silas waved. “I’ll be fine. You see the spot?”

Caleb nodded and placed his hands on the doorframe. Silas counted off with a hand in the air. One. Two. Three.

He patted Caleb’s leg. He shot like a cannonball through the smoke. Silas strained to track him through the sky. A broad white chute popped into view.

Cleese stood next in the doorway. The plane shifted, and Silas caught balance against the wall. He pointed, got the nod, and gave the three-count. Leg pat. Second jumper out.

Silas repeated the sequence until all five were off. He stood and exhaled.

He didn’t plan on joining them.

The plane angled steeper. Silas caught himself at the jump door, partway out in the slipstream. He clawed his way back in and clambered to the cockpit. “How long do we have?”

“What’re you still doing here?”

“The jumpers are off.”

“But you’re here.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

“Your duty is with them.”

“My place is with you.”

Her hands flurried between the yoke, the throttle lever, and panel switches.

Silas braced a hand on the ceiling and the other on the seatback. The groaning descent loudened. He caught a view of a large mountain ridge approaching fast.

“I’m not going to leave you again.”

She stared into his eyes. The plane dipped. “Go shut the jump door.”

“Got it.”

The cabin seesawed. Silas staggered through the bulkhead and slammed against the wall by the door. He reached out for the latch handle, nearly reaching it when the plane tipped to the opposite side.

He tumbled, smacking into the porthole windows. The remaining engine blared. Tarry smoke and flames rolled past the open door. The plane dove and tipped back to the jump-door side.

The earth spun into view. Silas’s feet flipped out from under him. He fell across the cabin and snagged the edge of the outer door handle. His legs dropped outside, raging wind pulling at his calves. He clawed, fingertips slipping from the handle. Smoke billows engulfed. The door slammed shut and the slipstream caught hold, sucking him into the sky.

CHAPTER

25

H
e tumbled like a gyroscope. The world spun in stark blues, browns, and greens. An arm flailed out, deploying like a wing that worsened the spinning. The pressure in his head intensified. A crimson veil coated his vision. Silas forced out his other arm to stabilize the spin. Time meant altitude, and he should have already had a chute deployed.

Wind roared in his ears. The red in his eyes darkened to an encroaching black. The gyrating lessened, and he fought to bring an arm back in. It slammed into his chest. He worked his fingers to the zipper on his jumpsuit and pulled it down just enough to grasp the emergency chute Bo had given him.

How had he known?

Air ballooned his jumpsuit. Silas worked his hand inside and grasped the chute straps. He brought his other arm in, tumbling more as he did so. He fought a pressure in his head that morphed into lightness.

Working his arms into the straps, the chute pouch across his chest, he threaded one of the remaining straps around his leg and fought to clip it in place on the chute pack.

The red in his vision began to whiten. An airy and ethereal feeling filled his mind. The sound of the rushing air lessened. The whizzing colors of the planet washed into the dusk of his peripheral vision. It all became very comfortable and somnolent and enticing.

All he had to do was close his eyes.

Click.
The leg strap locked in place. He blinked to focus. The forest flew toward him, flanked by bulbous smoke columns. No time for the other strap.

He yanked the ripcord handle. A flapping green snake unfurled into the sky. It wagged and whipped like a dragon kite.

Open.

Come on
 . . .
Open.

The ground blurred with scattered views of craggy mountaintops and boulders and jutting treetops.

Ope—

Wind billowed the chute, widening like an umbrella. It torqued the flimsy shoulder straps and dug deep into his leg tendons.

Streaking colors coalesced. The air quieted. Earth approached.

No creek bed in sight. No meadow. No lake.

With little to no ability to steer his chute, he’d have to thread between the fast-approaching pines below him, hoping for a clear shot to the forest floor.

Jumper 41 disappeared behind a distant mountain peak, its wing spewing pitch-colored smoke.

He turned his attention back below. With his speed of descent it was going to be a hard landing. With a decent buildup of pine-needle duff on the forest floor and a tight tuck and roll, he could do this, God-willing, without impaling himself on the way down.

The canopy drew near. Silas veered for a spot between a stand of five evergreens.

There was a showering of needles, the sound of breaking branches, and an abrupt, skull-jerking halt.

———

Elle swallowed a scream at the sight of Silas’s body tumbling through the air. He didn’t have a chute.

Please, God, no.

The hull shook and rattled, blurring the flight gauges
.
Jumper 41 dropped again, increasing speed and elevating the groan of the remaining engine. Elle fought the stick to aim toward Crystal Lake, her faint hope to manage a water landing. She needed every cubic inch of lift, no measure for mistakes.

She feathered the controls and broadcasted through her headset, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Jumper 41 going down with a critical engine failure. On trajectory toward Crystal Lake. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

Silence filled her headset. She threw it to the floor.

The choppy gray of Crystal Lake stretched into view just beyond the next ridgeline. The plane lost lift again, leaving her stomach a hundred feet higher.

The nose aimed at the ridge. If she tried to pull up farther she’d lose speed and more altitude. If she didn’t change her current course, she’d never clear it. She would smash into the craggy granite before having the chance to put down in the water.

A scene with her father flashed in her mind—in the cockpit of his Cessna, puttering engine on one wing during their vacation in Canada. She had watched his hands, his face. Seconds before touching down he pushed forward on the stick.

Forward.

Gain speed. Draw altitude from the inertia and clear the last treetops.

Elle focused on the approaching landscape, her fist gripped tight on the yoke. She judged the distance to the mountainside, jammed the throttle forward with one hand, and tipped the nose with the other. The plane dipped like a roller coaster, whining and moaning.

Wait.

The ground grew larger. Treetops like spearheads.

Wait.

Boulders and logs and pine-needle duff.

Now.

She jerked backward. The aircraft arced skyward. It climbed the air above the jutting hillside, momentum waning with increasing altitude until it crested and stalled straight above the peak.

Elle floated in her seat. Thick smoke ribbons waved over the windshield.

She feathered the stick forward and dropped toward the lake basin. A treetop struck a horizontal stabilizer on the tail section. The plane veered. Elle fought to keep the nose up, seesawing the wings. The lake rushed below. Maddie and Silas flashed through her mind, and she smashed into the surface with windshield-shattering force.

———

Silas opened his eyes, bringing into focus the verdant shadowing of the sun. A mosaic pattern of sunlight painted the forest floor far below. He breathed in scents of pine and woodsmoke and took in his immediate surroundings—the ribbed bark of the tree trunk ten feet from him, the thick evergreen branches his tangled chute dangled him from. Mountain blue jays squawked nearby. A chipmunk skittered headfirst down the tree Silas hung from. His neck ached with whiplash stiffness. He opened and closed his hands and tested his joints, which at his hips and shoulders felt as if they’d been stretched to their limits.

A limb snapped, jostling Silas lower. The branch fell fifty feet to the ground, frightening a bird from its roost. He didn’t want to hang around to see how long this setup would hold.

Silas lifted his foot to reach the zipper pouch at his ankle. It bulged with the hundred feet of half-inch letdown rope that every jumper carried for just this predicament. His small movements produced a subtle sway and subsequent sounds of creaking wood above.

He took a deep breath. This was something he’d trained for. Something he’d been through before, though not so high. Getting stuck in a tree was usually a laughable thing for a jumper. One worthy of buying pie and ice cream for the crew after the mission. But this wasn’t a situation of missing a perfectly good drop zone. And one could survive a two-story drop, but he dangled a good fifty feet off the ground.

The chute jerked a foot lower. Silas grabbed the straps. There was little chance the Swiss-cheese fabric his chute canvas had become would do much to slow his descent. If the limbs gave way, the best he could hope for was that he would get caught up in another set before smacking into the ground.

Bright side—if Bo hadn’t given him the backup chute, Silas wouldn’t even have the pleasure of dealing with his present problem.

He tied his letdown rope to the chute straps and then threaded it through an eight-plate attached to his suit for rappelling. By applying friction through twists in the rope, it would help him perform a controlled descent. He dropped the remainder of rope to the forest floor, watching it unravel like a snake. He slipped his arms from the chute harness and dangled, now suspended by the letdown line alone.