Falls Like Lightning (17 page)

He loosened the tension on the rope and rappelled downward. At twenty feet he exhaled. At fifteen he grinned. At five feet he laughed.

Ground.

Silas knelt down, disconnected the rope from his jumpsuit, and grabbed two heaping fistfuls of pine-needle duff and kissed them.

———

Elle woke underwater, lungs screaming for oxygen. Giant air bubbles like jellyfish ejected out the windshield frames. She unlatched her seat harness, tore off her headset, and pushed off the captain’s chair with her feet, following the air masses through the windshield and toward a waving band of sunlight.

She crested the surface and gasped for breath, waves splashing and smacking her in the face. Smoke and fire rolled off the surface of the water.

The floating fuel spill stretched around her, flames flashing across it. She paddled hard and fast, fueled by adrenaline, away from the fire and the sinking aircraft. She didn’t let herself think about the burning in her lungs, the lightness in her head, and the fatigue in her arms. She strained against the weight of the pond pulling down on her clothing. She focused on one goal. One purpose. Escape the fire. Make the shore. Live.

Flames burst across her path, encircling her. She dropped beneath the surface, swimming down and forward, feeling the heat in the water as she submarined beneath the burning barrier.

Elle surfaced again, drawing air into her lungs. Beyond the reach of the fuel, she shifted to her back, stroking along. Just like learning to swim with her dad.
Monkey, Tree, Rocket ship.

Her foot struck a stone. Her other met the pond bottom. She turned to see the shore a dozen feet away.

She slogged forward, trudging through the shallows, and collapsed on a pebble-covered beach. Through the smoke, in the middle of the pond, the red aircraft tail with its white
41
sank out of view.

CHAPTER

26

B
o spat dirt and pine needles.

The sharp needles dug a mosaic into his palms. He lifted his hands, trembling, and turned with caution, evaluating his physiological status. Searing pain shot through his side. His hand met the hot ooze of blood soaking through his jumpsuit where a branch impaled him. He winced and ran his tongue across his salty lower lip. He touched the back of his hand to his mouth and inspected the spotted blood it came away with.

By God’s grace he was alive. He could only pray that Silas Kent and the pilot found the same fortune. Bo had managed to find and disable one of the engine explosives before takeoff. It at least gave the pilot a fighting chance. If he’d just had time to get to the other . . .

Bo twisted to check his landing path. The view behind was nothing but trees, save for a ten-foot-wide lane—a smooth Slip ’N Slide of dirt. His torso was still tethered to the lengthened parachute cords, and the torn mess of a chute was caught on the lower branches of the trees at the beginning of the slide.

He replayed the moments before touchdown in his mind. He’d come in hot and fast, hoping to be able to slow up once he was positioned over an opening in the forest, but he was too low. Just as all seemed lost, a forceful wind directed him to the best clearing available.

His chute had caught the moment before he would have struck a sequoia, and it seemed an invisible hand had directed him to the optimal landing spot.

The smell of smoke snapped his focus back. Fire wasn’t far. A spider crept over the tree trunk in front of him. A light breeze cooled the sweat on his brow. He made out the subtle rippling of a nearby creek.

Disconnecting his harness, he worked out of his jumpsuit. Every movement exacerbated the pain in his flank, each vibration causing him to shudder with a stabbing sensation. He felt like pulling out the protruding branch, but his fundamental first-aid training told him not to, to stabilize a penetrating object in place.

He slid his Pulaski axe from his pack. Bo typically jumped with his tool rather than wait for the paracargo drop. Given the situation, it could become more of a weapon than a firefighting tool.

He sucked a pained breath through his teeth. The canopy was too thick and high to see beyond. Hard to know how far the fire was from him. The creek could provide shelter if it made a run. Keeping a hand on his side, he slumped to the ground and leaned back against a tree.

If only he could have undone the sabotage. He lacked both time and full knowledge. And a part of him hadn’t been ready to believe they’d go through with their plan to blow the engines.

He believed now.

Caleb clearly wanted no survivors who weren’t in on the plan. Cleese was a thorough saboteur, even cutting Silas’s chutes in case he didn’t go down with the plane.

Caleb had made his intentions clear, and his not-so-subtle hints drove deep. “Wouldn’t want anything to happen to the twin sisters back home. Would you, Bo?”

Bo wasn’t a man who needed things spelled out. It had taken everything in him not to grab Caleb by the throat.

“It’s a dangerous job out there. I wonder how much it would take to make a guy like you never, ever, have to worry about his safety again.”

A threat and a bribe. All behind a smiling veil.

Bo shook the memory from his head. He gritted his teeth and stood. The pain in his side wasn’t going to get any better sitting there. With the emergency chute Bo had given Kent, there was still a chance he had survived.

If that was the case, Bo needed to rejoin the group before Kent did, for both their sakes.

CHAPTER

27

G
od wrote His law on every man’s heart. Caleb had slogged through catechism. Whether resulting from indoctrination or genuine personal conviction, he didn’t dispute the fact. He knelt in the small meadow by the creek bed, gathering his chute from the water, tracing with his eyes the smoke trail across the sky.

Caleb knew he was accountable for his actions. That truth wasn’t relative. And while he could not presume to see the world as others did, he found it hard to believe that Cleese, who now stood in the stream working his arms out of his chute pack, possessed the same level of conviction. To him it seemed that Cleese’s heart was so calloused and scarred that it lay immune to the twinge of guilt and the scraping pain of sin.

Maybe that made Caleb the worse of the two.

This was supposed to be about the money. About finders keepers and thumbing his nose at his father’s suit-and-tie hedge-fund enterprises. But the blood of two men had been spilled. Add to that the likely deaths of a female pilot and their new spotter. How had he become responsible for four deaths in half as many days? Remarkable how the course of one’s life could change in an instant.

He cleared his throat and spat. End result—what was done was done. He couldn’t change that.

Caleb finished gathering his chute. He stored it with his jumpsuit at the base of a tree along the edge of the clearing. A wave of thin smoke crept through the air overhead.

Cleese sloshed across the creek toward him. “I seen Sippi aiming to touch down ’bout a quarter mile ahead.”

“All right. Let’s grab what we need and tie in with him.”

“What about the spotter?” Igneous eyes sat in the deep recess of his brow.

“If he did jump, it will have been soon after us.”

Cleese grinned. “Must’ve been quite a surprise for him to find his chutes less than intact.”

Caleb exhaled. “We’ll tie in with the others and then split off in teams. Monte, Mansfield, and you will start a sweep for Kent’s body. I, Sippi, and Rapunzel will collect the cache and start positioning it for the helicopter rendezvous. Meet up with us as soon as you can.”

“You sure your pilot is good for it?”

“He can fly a Huey in heavy smoke like no one I’ve seen. He also happens to be drowning in debt. He has access to a bird and he needs the money.”

“How much does he know?”

“Not a thing. Just that he’s getting a fat chunk of change to pick up an undisclosed cargo and to keep his mouth shut about it. He won’t talk.”

Cleese cracked his neck. “Hopefully not. For his own good.”

“You’d just love for him to give you a reason, wouldn’t you?”

Cleese’s cheeks lifted, revealing a grin accentuated by widely spaced teeth. “You know me well, good Parson.”

———

Caleb found Sippi and Rapunzel about a quarter mile away, gathering up their chutes along the creek bed. They tied their jump gear to a nearby tree and fell in next to Cleese.

The smell of smoke grew stronger. Faint sounds of popping and crackling present in the near distance.

The sound of branches snapping came from behind a row of trees to the side of the creek. Bo Mansfield emerged, hand pressed against a branch protruding from his side.

Caleb walked up to him. “Canopy landing?”

“Not exactly.”

Caleb looked close. “How bad is it?”

“You the medic.”

“Let me see.”

Bo pulled up his blood-soaked shirt. Caleb examined the entry wound. A half-inch diameter branch protruded about six inches from his flank. “How far in do you think it is?”

Bo gritted his teeth and felt around the side of his abdomen. “Three or four inches, maybe.”

With only one engine explosion, they had been thrown off course—that left them miles to walk and less time to work with. Caleb needed Bo’s manpower. He exhaled. “In the city I’d just stabilize it and the hospital would run an abdominal CT before attempting to pull it.”

Bo stared, his face expressionless.

“Right,” Caleb said. “But we’re not in the city now, are we?” He looked again at the wound. “You may have lacerated your liver, perforated a bowel . . . There’s really no way to know.”

A hand stretched around Caleb and grabbed the branch.

Bo brought up his arm and shouted.

Cleese lifted a bloody stick in the air, smiling his gap-riddled grin. “Problem solved.”

Bo pressed his fingers over the hole in his side. Blood oozed between them.

Caleb fished a bandana from his shirt pocket and pushed it firmly on the wound. “Keep pressure on that. I’m going to need you upright to accomplish our mission.”

Bo grimaced and fixed his eyes on Cleese.

Cleese put his hands up and back-stepped. “Whoa, hey. Easy there, Bo. Just taking care of business. The good Parson here likes to deliberate a little long for my taste. Time’s a wasting, and we still got another guy to find.” He sidestepped, extending a hand toward the forest. “So if y’all don’t mind, let’s finish dressing our boo-boos and tie in with Monte so we can get us some gold.”

———

Silas doffed his flight suit and depressed the button on the King radio strapped in his chest pack. “Jumper crew, this is Kent. Sound off for par.”

He released the button and listened. Half a minute later he stretched his neck from side to side and then repeated the transmission.

Still no answer.

He needed to get to higher ground, evaluate his position and estimate the landing points of the crew. Radio communications might be more effective on a ridgetop anyway. He stowed his jumpsuit at the base of the tree his chute hung in and pulled from it a few useful items—an LED headlamp, a couple carabiners, fuchsia ribbon flagging, some flint, and a pair of soot-stained white leather gloves.

He headed in the direction his crew should have landed. He felt his pulse inside his head, every systolic compression drumming on the inside of his cranium. A smoky haze hovered in his path. The acrid air made his eyes water. Sunlight waned from the forest floor, replaced by shadows and flying insects and the growing din of crickets. How long had he been unconscious in that tree?

The forest ahead began to look just like the forest all around. Silas tore off a piece of flagging and tied it to a fallen log. As he cinched down the knot, something dark and wet dripped onto his hand. Overhead, the canopy stood shadowed, a thick network of branches and limbs. The drip fell again, splashing onto his skin. He stared closer at it. In the fading light he discerned a rusty red color.

Realization soaked in, slow and thick. He stumbled backward, stared again into the canopy, his head spinning with a sense of vertigo. He made out a twisted chute blocking the fading sunlight. Below it hung the twisted form of a smokejumper’s body.

“Hey!” Silas waved. “Hey! I see you. Can you hear me? Hang on. I’ll find a way to get to you.”

The body was a hundred feet up a sequoia that had a trunk as thick as an airplane hull. He had no idea how he could get up there. He searched the immediate area, as if a pair of crampons and climbing gear would suddenly appear. Maybe he could work his rope around the trunk and counterbalance off of it, slowly make his way up. . . . He stared at the tree trunk and the distance up. No way.

“If you can hear me, wave a hand or a foot.”

No movement.

No sound.

Another blood drop hit the log beside him.

Silas stretched his fingers across his brow. The path he’d followed to that point blended into black. He strapped his LED light on his head and clicked it on.

No communications. No contact with the rest of the crew. What more could he do here?

He was torn. Night was falling. Continue in the direction of those who jumped before him, or turn around and hike in the direction Jumper 41 went down.

Not counting whoever was in that tree, there were five other jumpers who should be in close proximity of each other. Elle, on the other hand, would be completely alone.

That settled it.

He wrapped the sequoia three times with the bright pink flagging and set off for Crystal Lake.

“I’ll be back for you.”

Pale blue light diffused over the ground in front of him. He tied off flagging to saplings and manzanita bushes every couple thousand feet, trail markers as he made his way.

———

Caleb cursed.

Cleese shifted his gaze from the tree canopy to Caleb, his helmet brim shadowing his face from the light strapped to the front of it. “I’d say Monte looks good as dead.” He spat. “And I reckon he didn’t flag his own tree.”