“Grab the rope! For God’s sake, Clara, grab the rope!” Clara blinked, shaking her head to clear the hair from in front of her eyes so that she could see. McClain was still hanging on, she saw, but barely, clinging to the raft with one arm as the rest of him dangled out of sight in the water. “Damn it, Clara, grab the rope! You stupid bitch!” Those words shocked a little fighting spirit back into Clara. She lifted her head to glare at him and then saw the rope that dangled just a few feet from her nose. Following it upward with her eyes she saw that it hung from an army green helicopter that hovered some thirty feet over their heads. The roar of the falls drowned out the roar of the helicopter. It was just there, silently suspended, an angel sent from heaven to save her, all of them … Her eyes traveled back down the lifeline that hung from the helicopter’s open door. The end of the rope had been made into a loop. It jumped and twitched as the helicopter’s pilot fought to keep it within reach of the spinning raft. Without warning, the raft went under again. When it surfaced, bringing her with it, spluttering and gasping for air, she leaped for the dangling loop like the drowning woman she was. It didn’t take McClain’s shouted instructions to make her pull it over her head and fasten it beneath her arms.
Then with a jerk she was lifted into the air. Her body dangled limply as she was pulled up through the bright blue
autumn sky. The rope was cutting into the skin beneath her arms through her clothes, and she felt like she was literally freezing to death as the brisk wind hit her soaked body. But it was such a wonderful relief to be out of reach of the suffocating water! She sucked in great gulps of air and thanked God that she was alive.
Another looped rope dropped past her as she ascended. For McClain, of course. He would be saved, too. Thank you, God, she thought again before exhaustion blanked her mind. Her body swung in an arc like a pendulum as she was hauled upward. Her hands were too numb to allow her to even grip the rope to ease some of the pain beneath her arms. All her life she had had a morbid fear of heights. The disasters that had befallen her in the last forty-eight hours had immunized her against that particular fear, she discovered as she looked down on the tops of bushy pines. Or else her mind was as numb as her body. In any case, she was able to watch with a curious detachment as the raft, swirling and bucking in the murderous basin at the foot of the falls, was sucked under and then shot high into the air. At the very top of its flight, McClain seemed to launch himself through the air from nowhere, grabbing the dangling rope one-handed. He swung from its end, his body still half submerged in water. Apparently he was having trouble getting the loop around his body. Then Clara saw what he had done: instead of saving himself, he had put the loop around the sopping gray bundle that was Puff. Puff was saved! Clara laughed hysterically, men cried as she watched Puff, swatting wildly at the air and spitting for all he was worth, being hauled upward in her wake.
But what about McClain? Even as she thought that, her head hit the bottom of the helicopter with a crack that made
her see stars. Then, before she had quite recovered her senses, she was being hauled up and over the side.
“Don’t move!” ordered a no-nonsense voice even as hands dragged her forward to sprawl on the floor of the cabin. “You are under arrest! You have the right to remain silent; if you give up that right, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. …”
Half drowned, more than half frozen, still seeing stars from hitting her head, Clara looked up through this spiel to see two uniformed National Guardsmen crouching over her, guns pointed at her head.
“Oh my God!” She subsided with a groan, tying limply in the puddle she had made on the floor, too tired to even think. Out of the river straight into Bigfoot’s arms… Suddenly drowning didn’t seem like such a bad way to die.
“Look out, he’s—” The shout was followed by a scream. Everything happened so fast that Clara received only a jumble of impressions: a wet black head appearing over the side, silhouetted against the dreamy blue sky, a pair of gleaming green eyes meeting hers for the merest instant, a lean brown hand snaking out and hooking into the belt of the nearest guardsman, and then a scream as the man went flying through the air to disappear out the open door. The other one jumped to his feet just as McClain launched himself through the opening like a missile, head butting the guardsman in the stomach as a bullet sang out harmlessly over McClain’s diving form. Then, while Clara gaped from her position flat on the floor, the second man was flying through the opening to disappear with a scream. The helicopter jerked as the pilot turned around, fumbling with the gun at his belt.
“Don’t be an ass, buddy,” McClain said, pointing the rifle he had jerked from the hold of the second guardsman at
the pilot’s whitening face. The man subsided back into his seat while McClain stood behind him, dripping with water, hair plastered to his skull so that his ears stuck out more than ever while he grinned his satyr’s grin and held the rifle tight against the base of the pilot’s skull. “Just keep this thing steady and you’ll see your next birthday.”
Now that bullets had stopped flying, Clara managed to get up on her knees. Her wits were still a little slow, not having quite recovered from her near drowning, near freezing and the bump on her head, but she had no doubt that she had just seen McClain save their lives—and in the process throw two men to their deaths. She shuddered. Did they still electrocute people in Virginia? she wondered. Of course, it was a moot point. Bigfoot would undoubtedly put a period to them first.
The radio crackled. “C-193, this is C-204. Chuck, can you read me? What the hell’s going on up there? Chuck—”
The pilot moved his hand sharply. The helicopter heeled at a ninety degree angle. Clara was almost thrown out the door. Gasping with terror, she grabbed the legs of the co-pilot’s seat and hung on for dear life. Her legs were dangling over empty space. Clara threw a scared look down at the wildly twirling kaleidoscope below her, then shut her eyes. She could feel her blood vessels pop as she clung to the metal legs of the seat. The copter righted itself abruptly, then dove the other way. Clara was jerked violently up into the air, her body tumbled back inside the cabin. Still she hung on. McClain had been thrown against the other door, she saw. Thankfully it had stayed closed. Now he was pulling himself upright, groping for the rifle which he had lost.
“Jerry, I’m in trouble here,” she heard the pilot say
desperately into the radio. “Tony and Keith ate gone. This guy—”
He grunted in pained surprise, then stopped talking abruptly. McClain, holding onto the back of the pilot’s seat, had jammed the rifle hard into the small of his back.
“Chuck! Chuck, can you read me?” the radio cackled.
“Say another goddamn word and I’ll blow you straight to hell,” McClain growled. Even Clara shivered. From his tone she had no doubt that he meant what he said.
“Get over here, Clara.”
The words were an order. Clara didn’t argue with them. She crawled over next to his feet, then pulled herself up by the pilot’s seat, taking care not to let go. She had learned her lesson about that.
“Fly back over the river. At about twenty feet.”
The pilot turned the craft. Clara didn’t blame him. She wouldn’t have dared defy McClain either when he used that tone of voice.
“Clara, you sit over in the co-pilot’s seat. See that thing he has his hand on? That’s the collective pitch lever. I want you to keep it just like it is for just a moment. And keep both pedals pushed about halfway down. See, just like he has them. Now do it!”
“You want me to fly this thing?” Her voice rose until the last word was a squeak. Her eyes were horrified as she stared at him. There was no way she could—
“Not fly it. Just hold it steady for a minute or two. For Christ’s sake, all you have to do is hold onto one lever and keep your feet on two pedals. Even you should be able to do that.”
“But, Jack, I—”
“Do it!”
Clara gave up. If they were going to die, the exact
manner of it didn’t much matter, she told herself numbly, and did as he directed. The pilot’s hand felt cold beneath hers as she took the controls from him; she was sure hers was even colder. She was scared silly. Beneath her hand, the lever vibrated with angry power. The helicopter, now that she was in charge of it, pulsed with malevolent life.
McClain dragged the pilot from his seat, his hand hooked in the man’s collar, the rifle pressed to his spine. Clara, frightened at what he meant to do, could not forbear watching. The helicopter bucked; McClain and the pilot nearly went out the door.
“Goddamn it, Clara, keep your mind on your business!” McClain yelled. Clara turned her back on the men silhouetted against the sky. She had to concentrate on keeping the whatever-he-had-called-it lever steady, and not moving her feet on the pedals.
“Jump,” she heard McClain say. Her heart pounded. Seconds later her soaking wet spy was sliding into the seat beside her, taking over the controls.
“What did you do to that poor man?” Her voice was shaky as she slumped back in the seat.
“He was trying to kill us, in case you haven’t figured it out.” McClain worked some sort of voodoo with the lever and peddles that had them turning around and rising at the same time. “But if you want to see what I did to him, look out the door. And haul that damned furball up while you’re at it. There’s a button overhead that works the pulley.”
Clara gasped. She had forgotten about Puff. Poor cat, hanging suspended beneath a jerking, plunging helicopter. She pushed the button, heard the wheezing crank of the gears, and then hurried to the side, taking care to hold on as she looked out. Sure enough Puff was coming up fast. He was fighting the air for all he was worth, swinging wildly in
a wide arc as he clawed furiously at space. Beneath and behind them, rapidly receding into the distance, Clara saw the river. Just below the falls floated their raft. It was in peaceful waters now. Another raft was on the river. This one had men in it, and as she watched they fished something over the side: another man. They wrapped him in a blanket as he sat on the raft’s bottom and began to paddle downstream.
“You threw them into the river,” she said, understanding suddenly.
“I don’t murder people in cold blood,” McClain returned, concentrating on flying. “Unless, of course, I’m left with no choice.”
Clara was left to ponder those chilling words as she hauled a spitting, fighting, furious wet cat into the cabin.
XV
“Jack.”
“Hmmm?”
“Thank you. For saving Puff. That was the bravest, most unselfish thing I’ve ever seen. He would have drowned. Most men would have let him. And you—you’re allergic to cats.”
“I’m not allergic to cats. I hate them.”
Clara smiled slightly. She was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, a soggy Puff huddled on her lap. He was shivering and her teeth were chattering despite the fact that McClain had turned the helicopter’s heater up as high as it would go as soon as he had taken over the controls.
“That makes it all the more heroic,” she said, and impulsively reached over to plant a soft kiss on his unshaven cheek. Considering his soaked state, his skin felt surprisingly warm against her mouth. His musky smell brought back unexpectedly vivid memories of what they had done together that morning … Clara sank back in her seat, feeling her face heat. McClain gave her a quick, glinting look but said
nothing. Clara got the impression that tenderness was something of which he was wary.
“You’d better get out of those wet clothes.”
His voice was matter-of-fact. Clara smiled at him. His eyes narrowed.
“Just because I didn’t let the damned cat drown doesn’t make me some kind of hero, you know,” he said. His voice was vaguely defensive.
“I know,” she agreed, and smiled at him again. He scowled, and switched his attention back out the windshield. Clara stood up to remove her soaked clothes. Unbuttoning her saturated blouse and peeling off her dripping jeans were becoming familiar chores. Clara did them automatically, wringing them out with quick twists of her wrists while she stood shivering in the sopping white silk teddy.
“Why don’t you wear a bra and panties like most women?” He sounded disgruntled. Clara cast him a startled look. She had not expected him to be watching her. Despite the thorough introduction he had already had to her body, she felt ridiculously embarrassed about being seen in the nearly transparent teddy. With her hair tangled around her head in a wild wet bush and her white skin splotched with mud and ridged with goosebumps, she doubted that she was the most appealing thing he had ever seen. And she wanted to appeal to him … That sudden flare of self-knowledge was as unwelcome as it was shocking.
“I usually do. This is what I wear to sleep in. Usually. But with all the excitement, I forgot to pack my underwear when I ran away from Rostov.”
She tried hard to sound matter-of-fact, but she couldn’t stop herself from blushing. Automatically, her hands came up in the most casual way possible to hold the wet jeans
and blouse between her body and his too-knowing green eyes. Those eyes suddenly lifted to meet hers, glimmered briefly, then were switched to the instruments in front of him.
“You have a great body.”
“What?” Clara couldn’t believe she’d heard the gruff mutter correctly. His eyes flicked back in her direction. Her hands holding the jeans, which had lowered with his lack of attention, came up again. He switched his eyes forward once more.
“I said you have a great body. You should be proud of it, not hiding it all the time.”
Clara stared at the back of his black bead. If she remembered correctly, this was the man who’d told her she could stand to lose some weight.
“You said I needed to lose about ten pounds!”
He shook his head. “I hadn’t had a real close look at that point. I take it back.”
Clara blushed scarlet at the memory of exactly how close that look had been. He cast a quick, glimmering grin over his shoulder at her.
“I’ve always been a sucker for big tits and a nice round ass,” continued the flatterer. Clara recovered from her embarrassment in time to glare at him.
“You sweet talker, you,” she said with bite. Though she could see only about a quarter of his face, there was no missing his sudden grin. He was teasing her, she realized, and realized also that she had a lot to learn about men. At least his breed of man. He was all male, and she had no experience with the species at all. Except for Mark, whom she had inherited from Lena in high school, and John Williamson, an earnest law student with whom she had had a rather tepid love affair while she was at Wesleyan and be
was at the University of Virginia (they had even been engaged for a while, much to her mother’s joy, until John had eloped with another student in his torts class), she had lived in a world of women. Her father had died when she was five; her mother had had lots of husbands since then, but none that she had allowed to get too close to her only daughter As a result, Clara had always been shy of men. Now she found that she was getting to know this all-male male in a totally new way, as a person, like herself.
“There should be a blanket in the rescue kit in the locker over there.”
In fact there were two. Clara pulled one out, wrapped it around herself squaw fashion and, using it as a shield from shifting eyes, wriggled out of her teddy. Then, clutching the blanket close, she draped her wet clothes from the hydraulic lines overhead and returned to the co-pilot’s seat. Puff hissed as she picked him up. Poor cat, he’d had a traumatic day. As had they all. And it was barely afternoon yet.
“Think you can hold her steady again while I strip off?”
“I’ll give it my best shot.” Try as she might to banish the image from her mind, her pulse speeded up at the idea of seeing him in those clingy maroon underpants again. Despite everything, she found him more attractive than any man she had ever met. And when she remembered what he had done to her that morning, how he had made her feel, she felt her toes curl. And then her face turn red. What a fool she had made of herself; he must have women falling all over him.
“Don’t crash us,” he said. Then her hands and feet were on the controls and he was sliding out of his seat. She
heard the thump of his wet sweatshirt hitting the floor, the sound of his zipper being lowered, and had to fight an impulse to look over her shoulder. But beyond the embarrassment she would feel at being caught in such an action, the helicopter demanded all her attention. Even holding it at a steady altitude and pace required all her concentration. For which she was grateful. It kept her from thinking of the man taking off his clothes less than two feet behind her.
In just a few minutes he was sliding back into the pilot’s seat, wrapped in a blanket, tossing something into her lap as he took over the controls.
“What…?”
“Peanuts,” he said, already ripping open his own bag with his teeth.
“Peanuts!” A steak dinner wouldn’t have been more welcome at that point. Clara tore into her own bag, devouring them in a few handfuls.
“Greedy, aren’t you?” But McClain had done the same thing to his, so Clara stuck her tongue out at him without rancor. On her lap, Puff sat up and meowed, voice plaintive. Clara looked down at him guiltily.
“Sorry, Puff, but cats can’t eat peanuts,” she explained.
Meow!
“Oh, no,” Clara said, knowing from experience that the mildly demanding meows would soon escalate into a cacophony of yowls, howls, and more yowls.
“No worries, mate,” McClain said in a broad parody of a popular Australian phrase. “Here.”
And he tossed a packet of dried beef strips into her lap.
“Are there more?” Clara was already tearing open the package and handing one of the strips to Puff, who accepted
it with alacrity. For the first time since being hauled aboard the helicopter he left her lap, leaping to the floor, prize in his jaws.
“A few packages of peanuts, a couple of packages of beef strips, some boxes of raisins and chocolate chips. Survival rations.”
“Oh, yum.”
“We have to save some of it. It might be a long time until we’re able to hit a McDonald’s.”
“I’m
starving.”
“Here, have another bag of peanuts. And there’s coffee in this Thermos. Must have been the pilot’s.”
“Coffee!” Clara felt like she had died and gone to heaven. She fell upon the Thermos holding the heavenly black liquid and poured some into the plastic cup that screwed onto the top. Taking a sip, she closed her eyes at the feel of the hot, sweet brew rolling over her tongue. She usually took hers with cream as well as sugar, but under the circumstances just getting coffee at all was a miracle.
“Would you like some?” Guiltily she looked over at McClain. He was munching his peanuts, fiddling with the radio that was emitting mostly static. He’d put on the headphones, so she didn’t think he could hear her. She touched his shoulder, and he looked around inquiringly as she proffered the cup. He took it from her with a nod of thanks and drained it, grimacing at its sweetness. Then he pulled the headphones off one ear and passed the cup back over at the same time.
“There’s not much happening on the airways.”
“Oh, really?” Clara was just barely interested. She was far more concerned with savoring the last of her peanuts and another cup of coffee.
“Maybe there’s interference because of the mountains.”
“Could be.”
“Or maybe they’ve ordered radio silence.”
Clara swallowed. She tried not to think that they were still being chased, but of course they were. If anything, the search would be intensified. They had stolen a National Guard rescue helicopter, for God’s sake. “They can see us on radar.” The realization burst on her with a sickening flash.
McClain looked over at her, inclined his head once. Yeah.”
“Will they … shoot us down?”
He laughed suddenly, his eyes gleaming a warm green as he looked at her. “Poor Clara, you’re not having much fun, are you?”
“Unless you call being faced with a choice of roughly two dozen ways to die fun, then no, I’m not.”
“Trust me. I’ll get you out of this in one piece. If it’s humanly possible.” The last words were said under his breath.
Understandably enough, she didn’t find that reassurance particularly reassuring. Probably because she was beginning to suspect that it might
not
be humanly possible. She smiled rather hollowly at him, then lifted the cup to her mouth for another drink of coffee as she stared out the windshield at the landscape below.
The helicopter was swooping first low then high, following the contours of the mountains, keeping not far from the tops of the trees. The scenery was breathtaking, golden sunshine beaming down on hillsides covered with a variety of deciduous trees in their autumn finery. Other hillsides were shaded in various hues of greenish blue from the pines and other evergreens, gorgeous blue lakes, ribbonlike rivers
and roads, even a range of snow-capped peaks in the distance, the tallest of which McClain identified as Mount Mitchell. In the face of so much beauty it seemed impossible that their lives could be in such danger. Clara embraced the sense of unreality thankfully. It kept her from being scared out of her mind.
“Where did you learn to fly one of these, anyway? In the marines?” She was just making conversation, idle conversation to keep her mind off the chilling possibility of dozens of unfriendly radar screens tracking the tiny blip that represented their helicopter. They seemed so alone, so far away from everything soaring over the mountains. But they were not.
“Yeah. I flew a couple of Med-evacs. Then I got put out of business.”
“How?”
“Shot down by the Cong. Haven’t flown since. I’m surprised I remember how. I guess it’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.”
“Were you a prisoner?” Her eyes were wide as she looked over at him. She’d read what
POW’S
had suffered in Vietnam.
“For a couple of months. Then a buddy and I managed to escape. I made it back to the front lines eventually; I’d been wounded, thought I would be sent home. No such luck. They patched me up then turned me into a
LURP.”
“A what?”
“A
LURP.
Recon. The brass figured that since I’d managed to get out of the jungle with a more or less whole skin, I could just as easily survive in it for a while and keep an eye on what the Cong were up to. There were quite a few of us in there. The problem was, we didn’t have any contact with each other.”
“What happened to your buddy?”
“What buddy?”
“The one you escaped with,”
McClain’s voice was very even. “He tripped over the wrong wire about two miles from our lines. There weren’t even enough pieces of him left to carry out.”
Clara felt as though a tremendous fist were crushing her heart. McClain sounded so matter-of-fact about it that she knew he must have suffered terribly. In the brief time she had known him—it had been a little more than two days and yet it felt more like two years—she had learned that he kept his emotions under iron control. The less he showed, the more he felt. It was hard communicating with a man like that, but she was beginning to learn the trick of it.
“I’m sorry,” she said as evenly as he had. If she offered him tears and a shoulder to cry on he would turn on her in anger, she knew.
“Yeah. Things like that happen in war. It could just as easily have been me. But it wasn’t, so I figured the next one might get me. But nothing did, and I made it home. My mother was real happy about that.”
“You have a mother?”
He looked around with that glimmer of a grin. “What’d you think, I was hatched? Of course I have a mother. Everyone has a mother.”
“What I meant was, is she still living?”
A crooked smile curved his lips. “Oh, yeah. You couldn’t kill my Momma with an axe. She lives on a farm in Tennessee, same one my sisters and I were born and raised on. Since my dad died she’s been raising chickens, and does pretty well for herself.”
“Tell me about your family.” Clara was fascinated.
Somehow this was not the kind of background she had pictured her daredevil spy as having. A mother whom he called Momma with obvious affection, a chicken farm, and sisters? “To start with, how many sisters do you have?”
He grinned, shooting a sideways look at her. “Five. All older, and all bossy as hell. It was like growing up with six mothers. When I joined the marines I thought that if I just had one drill sergeant to boss me around I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven.”