Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [125]
Devon’s hands were twisted together in her lap.
The narrow ridge dropped away on either side. The west was barren talus, the east studded with evergreens, the tops of their tall trunks below a rocky patch near the crest. Deering began to whistle tunelessly through his teeth.
He tapped the radio button to call Jack Owen, but the wind surged up from the west slope. Even with both hands fighting the controls, the chopper swept over the east side of the ridge.
Deering couldn’t fucking believe it. He struggled to stabilize, to achieve some lift. It wasn’t happening.
Jesus, why had he brought Clare’s daughter? In twenty-twenty hindsight, that was another of his brilliant hotshot moves.
The tail rotor caught the trees and the Huey whipped around. The main rotors sliced at the tops of the pines. The upper part of the slope was steep, dropping away so that there was at least a hundred feet to fall.
All he could do was watch it happen and wait for impact.
The chopper nosed over. It seemed to take a long time, yet he also had the impression of tree limbs flashing past.
Clare’s daughter screamed.
Rocks rushed up. The windshield shattered.
For an instant after impact Deering kept falling, then his seatbelt and shoulder strap seemed to crush his chest. Metal screeched on rock as the rotors smashed to a stop. The Huey came to rest on its left side and he thought it was over.
Then the chopper seemed to feel the slope. Very slowly, it began an almost gentle roll.
Through a haze, Deering registered that he had to do something. Help, they needed help. He reached to the radio, “Mayday, Mayday.”
Things speeded up fast. Once over, the chopper’s ceiling became the floor. His seatbelt eased, then tightened.
“West Yellowstone, come in. Mayday.” It was bad enough that he’d crashed twice in one season, but he’d promised Georgia he’d be home tonight. In a just few hours, he was supposed to be eating Greek meatballs and opening a nice jug of red. Everything would be back in place, including his wife in his arms.
The chopper continued its roll. He’d once had a nightmare like this, about being in an elevator that escaped its shaft and swung in a dizzying arc.
He had to get the message out, so that at least Georgia would know what happened.
“Mayday, Mayday.”
The familiar words reminded him of landing under fire. The tattered shreds of falling foliage marked where bullets ripped the lush green jungle. How many times in years since, had he dreamed the controls failed to respond to his handling? No matter how he pushed the pedals or moved the cyclic and collective, the Huey hovered, directly in the line of fire.
Another trip upside down and then upright. He tried to focus in the midst of tumbling chaos and saw the shattered state of the machinery in the dash.
“West Yellowstone, I am down on Nez Perce Peak,” he tried. Dead air told him all he needed to know.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
September 7
Clare did not look back as they left the burned-out heart of Yellowstone. Garrett drove in deference to the pain in Steve’s knees and she sat between them in the front seat of the tired Park Service truck. In her lap, she carried her great-grandmother’s journal.
On both sides of the Grand Loop Road, flames glowed crimson in a ten-mile stretch between Old Faithful and Madison Junction. If these dry weather fronts didn’t break soon, the entire two million acres of Yellowstone would end up like the trees that were torching tonight.
July 25th seemed a year ago instead of six short weeks. At Grant Village, she had never seen anything like the tunnel of flame on the narrow, deeply forested road. Tonight, she was deeply weary of watching fire’s relentless advance.
Garrett had radioed Ranger Shad Dugan about Devon and received a more satisfactory response than Butler Myers had offered during the siege at Old Faithful. All over the park, radios were crackling to life with a description of a blue-eyed blonde.
Somehow, that didn’t help. Even with a day’s high in the eighties,