by Dan Simmons
Too late, thought Dar as he heard at least another two hits somewhere behind him.
As they went up and over the loop, Syd holding her semiautomatic in both hands, Dar wondered how badly they were hit. None of the bullets had penetrated the cockpit yet. The sailplane had no engine to destroy, no fuel tank to ignite, no hydraulic links to cut, but its very simplicity meant that any hit on a control cable would disable them. A bullet in the ailerons could cause Dar to lose all control. Even the slugs that seemed to have passed harmlessly through the fuselage behind him were already spoiling the airflow over the glider’s smooth surface, hindering control.
Dar rolled during the loop, seeing the Bell Ranger hovering a hundred meters to the west, waiting for them to resume level flight. Instead of pulling out of the loop, Dar kept the nose down and dived for the earth.
Mistake, he thought, watching the altimeter unwind with startling speed. His instinct had been to get the sailplane down into those canyons and gulleys, using the ridges for lift, trying to put something—a hill, a mountain, trees—between them and the shooter. But as soon as he saw the altitude drop below a thousand feet, he knew that he had made an error—possibly a fatal one.
This was no regular aircraft chasing them. The damned thing could turn on its own axis while flying straight ahead, bank as steeply as the Twin Astir, and hover when the glider would reach stalling speeds.
But Dar had committed himself. He glanced over his shoulder.
The Bell Ranger was hovering above and behind, a bird of prey waiting for its victim to end its contortions before pouncing.
Dar was just beginning his contortions. He came low across a wide valley, looking for a place to set the Twin Astir down, sure that they would have a better chance on foot than in the air. No meadows. No open mountainsides. All trees and boulders and ridgeline.
The helicopter nosed forward in a screaming dive behind them, rotors glinting.
“Can we open this canopy?” shouted Syd. “I need to get a shot.”
“No,” said Dar. He flew the glider directly at a rock wall, found the heated ridge-lift thermal less than fifty feet from the rock, and banked hard left, climbing on the thermal.
The helicopter easily made the turn, matched climb rates, and flew with them just beyond rotor distance. Dar could see the man in the back grinning as he raised the AK-47.
“Tony Constanza!” said Syd. She had loosened her harness enough to lean forward and get the muzzle of her Sig-Sauer out the open ventilation panel.
Constanza fired on full automatic even as Dar put the nose down, aiming for the ridgeline.
A bullet struck the nose of the Twin Astir. Another smashed the canopy, passed through between Dar’s and Syd’s heads, and exited through the Plexiglas on the right.
“Are you all right?” shouted Dar.
Before Syd could answer, Dar drove the nose of the sailplane inches above the Douglas firs, knocking needles off the treetops, and then banked hard right down the narrow valley.
The Bell Ranger gained altitude, clearing the ridgeline by yards instead of inches, and then roared above and past them headed south, Constanza’s assault rifle firing on full automatic.
Dar flew lower than the trees, following a small river running down the center of the narrow gully. Ahead of them, the helicopter slewed, swerved, and stopped directly in their path, hovering with its open door facing them and the AK-47 muzzle already flashing.
Dar banked hard left and felt two impacts on the right wing. Then he was through the gap in the east ridge he had noted from above. There was lift here, but he could not afford the airspeed to utilize it fully as he kept the nose down and flew down this even narrower gully, the Twin Astir’s wingtips less than two meters from rock walls on either side.
The Bell Ranger roared in behind them.
“I need to get a shot,” cried Syd again, swiveling wildly in her seat. Her harness had been loose enough that she had been thrown back and forth during the hard banks and choppy recovery.
“No,” said Dar. “We’re already beginning to handle poorly. If we open the canopy, our aerodynamics aren’t worth shit.”
The helicopter roared overhead at four times the glider’s speed. Constanza was leaning out, spraying slugs in their direction, but he had a bad angle.
The sailplane came into a wider valley just at the edge of the major uplift, almost back to the stacks of lenticular clouds, and Dar banked up and left. The glider lurched from the thermals flowing up and off the rock and they were over the ridge, soaring a thousand feet above a wider, descending valley.
“This isn’t going to work down here,” Dar said to Syd. “We need altitude.”
“We had altitude,” said Syd, still holding the 9mm pistol in both hands. “Then you came down here.”
“I know,” said Dar. “I fucked up.”
Dar worked the glider into the powerful vertical currents closer to the ridge just as the Bell Ranger made another sweep. Constanza was leaning out against his safety strap, blazing away, ejected brass glinting in the sunlight. Slugs struck the Twin Astir’s tail and Dar felt control go sluggish. Another bullet shattered the canopy just behind Dar’s head. He pitched the nose up steeply—trading speed for altitude as he entered the turbulent borders of the lift column—and another bullet ripped through his seat cushion.
Or was it through my parachute? Dar wondered, knowing then what he was going to do.
“Are you all right?” he called again to Syd as they spiraled up, the altimeter and variometer spinning clockwise as they gained altitude rapidly in the lift rotor. The sailplane’s ground speed dropped to almost nothing as they headed back west into the strength of the wind, climbing like a panicked sparrow while the helicopter roared up and around them in a carefully choreographed helix.
Dar’s eyes were on the instruments. He needed at least five thousand feet above ground level for his plan—if he could call it a plan—to have any chance of working. It was obvious that the chopper was not going to give them that kind of time. The Bell Ranger crabbed closer, the shooter leaning out the left side this time, both aircraft climbing in a slow left spiral.
Syd loosened her harness further, leaned forward so she could get an angle through the narrow air vent, and fired five times at the helicopter.
Dar saw sparks fly on the forward fuselage and then watched as Tony Constanza ducked back into the shadows of the backseat. Dar could see the heavyset gunman shouting at the pilot.
The Bell Ranger banked right and roared above them in a counterclockwise spiral; they knew that Dar would have to level off at some point. Then they could come in from the rear or from above—at some angle where Syd could not fire without shooting through the Twin Astir’s own canopy.
“Tighten your straps!” Dar shouted, then explained to her what they were going to do.
Syd’s head swiveled around. Her mouth hung open. “You’re shitting me.”
Dar shook his head. “Hang on.”
The sailplane swept right into the outer edge of the foehn gap rotor thermal. The winds were stronger and the heat of midday had added to the powerful thermal updraft, but Dar could not be sure whether the increased turbulence they encountered was from the lift or from damage to the fuselage and control surfaces of his aircraft. It did not matter. Steve’s beautiful high-performance two-seater only had to hold together for another few minutes.
The Bell Ranger moved in to shooting range, sliding sideways as if it were on rails.
Dar dived to pick up speed and then looped the sailplane. As they passed the helicopter, bullets rained onto the aft part of the fuselage like pellets of hail. Dar felt the right rudder go slack, but he still had some control.
The helicopter stayed where it was: the pilot knew that Dar would have to complete the loop.
He did so, climbing into another, broader inside loop. Syd fired twice from the front seat. Slugs from the AK-47 slammed into Dar’s instrument console, shattering the instruments, punched four holes in the top o
f the canopy inches above their heads, and struck the nose hard enough to slew the glider to the left as he tried to climb into his second loop.
The Bell Ranger held its place, waiting for Dar to pass by again.
Just before the top of their loop, perhaps five hundred feet above the helicopter, Dar rolled the sluggish Twin Astir until they were performing an outside loop. He felt the negative g’s trying to force him up and out of the aircraft—the pressure of the restraint harness on his shoulders was painful—and he heard Syd gasp. Dar’s vision dimmed and then turned red for an instant before he forced the balking sailplane into level flight and then raised the nose again.
There was no more lift. The Twin Astir stalled and fell out of the sky.
Dar put the nose down enough to keep some control. The helicopter pilot must have been watching their insane aerobatics, for he pitched the nose of the Bell Ranger down and accelerated up the valley.
Too late. Dar’s airspeed was approaching the sailplane’s terminal velocity. For a precious few seconds, he could match the chopper’s airspeed. He did so, attacking the right rear flank of the white-blue-and-red chopper as if the shaking, bucking Twin Astir were a P-51 coming in for the kill. Of course, Syd could not fire forward because of the canopy, and if she waited until they were close to the chopper and alongside it, Constanza’s semiautomatic assault rifle would cut them to pieces. Neither aircraft offered a stable gun platform, but at least Dallas Trace’s ex-mafia hit man had the advantage of being able to spray bullets all over the sky.
Dar was not going to give him that chance again.
What do we have that they don’t? he thought again for the twentieth time. And for the twentieth time he came up with the same answer. Parachutes. Of course, his parachute might have been cut to shreds by the bullet that had passed under him. He would find out.
What glider pilots fear more than anything else is a midair collision. Now he had to cause one.
Dar, Syd, and their fragile, wounded Twin Astir swooped from above—the sparrow attacking the hawk. If he continued on this glide path, he would overtake the chopper for an instant just as they flew into the fifty-foot buzz saw of the rotor blades. That would be fatal for everyone. At the last second, Dar dropped the nose of the Twin Astir, opened his speed brakes, matched velocities as best he could, and banked left.
The glider’s left wing banged against the protected rotor assembly. Part of the wing cracked and bent.
Dar kicked hard right, fighting the stick and rudders. He had perhaps three more seconds of control.
The sailplane slewed left again. This time the torn wing threaded the rotor assembly like a plank of wood going into the hungry maw of a circular saw. The rotor blade made contact with the wing, sliced through it, chewed up chunks of the wing, and then began to tear itself and its jammed rotor assembly apart.
Responding to Newtonian imperatives, the glider was spun violently counterclockwise and tumbled into a flat spin. Dar knew that no pilot in the world could recover from such a flat spin. The sailplane, a work of aerodynamic perfection a few minutes earlier, was now just tangled junk falling straight out of the sky. Dar lost sight of the helicopter and tried to focus on the instruments, but between the bullets that had passed through the console and the rate of deadly spin, he saw nothing intelligible. The horizon, mountains, ridges, desert, were spinning by at unbelievable speed, but because Dar and Syd were still in the center of the swirling mass, there was very little sense of centrifugal force. Dar had no idea whether they were three thousand feet high or thirty feet above the impact point. There was no noise except for ice-cracking sounds as the left wing continued to break up.
Syd was wrestling with the canopy lock, but it seemed to be jammed. Dar slammed his five-point-harness buckle free, shook off the straps, and stood in the wildly spinning plane. He knew that they just had seconds in which to act because already the spin was turning into a tumble in the direction of the shattered wing. He leaned over Syd’s left shoulder and threw his weight against the second canopy latch. The broken Plexiglas flew open and suddenly the wind was cool and rushing against Dar’s face and upper body, trying to pluck him up and out of the little cockpit. He held on to the low instrument console in front of him while he leaned forward to help Syd get free of her harness.
“No, not those straps!” he shouted over the wind as she continued, wildly, to unbuckle and uncinch. “That’s your parachute.”
She stopped and stood. He saw that she had taken time to shove the pistol back in her belt holster and to secure the strap over it.
He grabbed her right hand where it clutched the edge of the cockpit. “Jump when I count to two,” he shouted. “Push hard against the fuselage… We have to get clear! One…two!”
They hurtled into space. For a second Dar saw Syd’s arms go out like wings and his blood ran cold as he wondered if she would forget to pull the rip cord. But she was just diving away from the wreckage—the Twin Astir had now started tumbling about its axis and had turned into a huge eggbeater thirty feet behind them—and several seconds later he saw her sport chute blossom. He pulled his rip cord a second later.
Only after the spine-jarring shaking of the canopy opening did Dar look up. He saw no holes in the fabric, no torn risers. His hands went to the riser controls and he spun the chute around just as he heard the noise of the Bell Ranger’s descent toward them. If the pilot had kept control of the helicopter, Dar knew he and Syd were dead.
But the helicopter was not under power or control—at least not under much control. The vertical tail rotor blade was essentially gone, and what was left of it was chewing up the rotor assembly in great gulps. The pilot had cut the engine—which appeared to be smoking, perhaps from one of Syd’s wild shots, more likely from chunks of shrapnel thrown forward from the runaway tail rotor—and was trying to autorotate down to safety, allowing the freewheeling main rotors to give them enough lift to survive a crash landing.
The helicopter was headed straight for Syd and him.
It took only an instant for Dar to realize that this was not another murder attempt. He was sure that the pilot did not want a second collision—especially with bodies and parachute fabric fouling up his rotors—but there was very little the pilot could do but ride the autorotating helicopter down in its mad death spiral toward the ground.
There was a noise above and behind him and Dar twisted in his harness to look. He realized then that whether he was destined to live another thirty seconds or another fifty years, he would never forget the image he saw then.
Syd had taken her hands off the riser controls and had the 9mm semiautomatic held firmly in both hands. Her legs were apart in the proper shooting stance—just a thousand feet too high—and she was emptying the Sig’s entire second clip into the Plexiglas windshield of the Bell Ranger.
The helicopter missed Dar, but not by so much that he did not literally pull his legs up to avoid the rush of the rotors. Then the heavy machine continued to spiral down faster and faster.
Syd’s pistol had locked open. Dar watched her drop the empty magazine, pull the last one from her belt, and slap it into place, even as her orange-and-white parachute swirled her around in spirals above him. She was just a bit too far away for shouting, so all that Dar could do was point toward the risers, pull on the right one to spill enough air to send him dipping and spiraling in that direction, and then point to an open meadow area.
Syd nodded, holstered the weapon, and began tugging her riser D-rings, attempting to follow Dar into the clearing. Then both of them quit struggling and watched the Bell Ranger’s last seconds four hundred feet below them.
The pilot was good, but not quite good enough. A helicopter in autorotation is essentially so much dead weight controlled by a mostly dead stick, but the pilot managed to time the death spiral so he missed the trees and came around into a clearing and lined up, more or less, with the thirty-degree slope. If Dar had been piloting a sailplane, he would have followed the rules for off-field glider
landings and attempted to land going uphill, both to reduce his roll-out and to use the last bit of lift the hillside offered. But the hillside offered nothing to the massive Bell Ranger, and the pilot had no choice but to land headed downhill, at a good clip, and let the skids slide along the ground like the runners on a bobsled.
Even from several hundred feet up, the meadow looked smooth enough. Dar was wise to the lie of that appearance: there would be large rocks and small boulders, gullies and rock-dense shrubs, and probably larger obstacles. Whatever the Bell Ranger hit, it hit hard, the front of the skids digging in and the helicopter going nose over in an instant, the freewheeling rotors slamming into the earth one second later and sending a cloud of dust a hundred feet into the air.
Through that dust Dar could make out the Bell Ranger tumbling end over end, the tail boom ripping free, the cockpit bubble smashing inward. The sound was audible and terrible even from two hundred feet above it all. Then the mass of twisted fuselage came to a stop against two larger boulders about a hundred yards downhill. There was a lesser noise to the south and Dar twisted just in time to see the folded mass of the Twin Astir disappear into the tall pine trees several hundred yards away.
Dar concentrated on trying to land gently, showing Syd how to do it by example. It was not much of an example. He ended up hitting a thick willow crotch first and catapulting head over heels into the weeds, coming to rest on his back with the chute dragging him across the slope. Syd landed gently fifty feet uphill…on her feet. She took two hops and stood there, apparently dazed but certainly in one piece.
Dar struggled out of his harness and jumped to his feet to help her out of her gear before the wind came up and started dragging her back up the slope. Suddenly everything began to spin again. He decided to sit down for a second until the movement stopped, and he had no sooner flopped on his butt than Syd was there—free of her harness and helping him disentangle his feet from the chute fabric billowing all around him.
