The Rescue Pilot

by Rachel Lee

  “If you watch it, it’ll never boil,” Rory remarked, lighting a candle beneath her assemblage. The women shared a quiet laugh at the old joke, then together balanced a chafing dish full of water on the structure.

  “I think it’ll hold,” Wendy said.

  “It looks like it, but this time I’m going to watch it boil anyway. Too dangerous to do otherwise.”

  “I agree. And maybe I should speak to Chase about this.”

  “Why?”

  Wendy tipped her head. “Because we’re burning oxygen back here, and this plane is probably pretty airtight.”

  Rory hadn’t thought of that, but as soon as Wendy spoke, she knew she was right. Planes had air exchangers, but they probably worked on electrical power like everything else. Power they didn’t have now. “Go ask. I’ll babysit.”

  Much better to have Wendy ask. Not that Chase Dakota had spared her more than a few words, but she got the feeling he didn’t much care for her. Ordinarily, she didn’t turn tail in the face of men like that, but right now she was acutely aware that she wasn’t the person in charge. That put her on the defensive, and for now that meant stirring up as little trouble as possible.

  “Houston,” she muttered under her breath, “we have a problem.”

  Except they weren’t halfway to the moon. Although they might as well have been at the moment. She heard some noise from up front and stuck her head out of the galley. Chase and Wendy’s husband were pushing the door open a crack. Just a crack. Then they disappeared in the men’s compound, so aptly named a cockpit, she thought sourly, and went back to their machinations with the machinery.

  No emergency beacon? She refused to believe that was possible. Weren’t those damn things supposed to work no matter what? Or maybe that was the cockpit race recorder she was thinking of. All of a sudden she wished she knew more about planes and less about finding and drilling for oil. Or more about cancer and her sister’s condition.

  She was so used to being on top of things that it killed her to consider all the things she didn’t know anything about—like planes and cancer and how long it would take that damn water to boil. Because she sure would like a cup of that coffee.

  Wendy rejoined her. “We might get a little chilly. They tried to open the door to a minimum so we don’t suffocate, but…” She shrugged. “Nobody said camping in a blizzard in a crashed plane was going to be easy.”

  “What do you know about the pilot?” Rory asked. “I mean…”

  Wendy’s face gentled. “It’s okay. He’s a stranger to you and here we are in a mess. But, trust me, Chase was a military pilot before he started his charter service. He knows what he’s doing, and if we lost fuel, then he’s right about why. He’s not the kind of guy who would authorize any maintenance shortcuts. And, as for right now, I can tell you the military gave both him and my husband a lot of survival training.”

  “Okay.”

  Something in Wendy’s face changed. “Billy Joe—oh, he’d kill me if he heard me call him that to someone else—”

  “Why?”

  “He’s just never liked his given name. He prefers everyone to call him Yuma.”

  “I can do that.”

  Wendy smiled. “I’m sure you can.”

  “You were going to say?”

  “Yuma lived up here in these mountains for a few years after he got back from the war. Post-traumatic stress. He knows how to survive these mountains in the winter.”

  “That’s good to know. That he’s experienced, I mean, not the other.”

  “I understood.”

  “How did you two meet? Were you just neighbors?”

  Wendy smiled again. “Oh, it’s a much more interesting story than that. Billy Joe was a medevac pilot in Vietnam. The experience left him with a lot of nightmares, so for years he lived up in these mountains with some other vets. They just couldn’t handle the bustling world at times. So they kind of built their own hermit-age.”

  Rory nodded. “That must have been rough.”

  “Oh, it was. Anyway, my dad was a Vietnam vet, too, and when Billy Joe got well enough to try to return to life, Dad got him hired as our medevac pilot. Our first one, actually.”

  “That was nice of your dad.”

  “He lived to regret it.” Wendy laughed quietly, letting Rory know it wasn’t a bad thing. “Anyway, I had a crush on Yuma from the time I was sixteen. He was so much older and so aware of his flaws that he ran from me like a scared rabbit. And finally my dad told me to stop torturing the man.”

  “Ouch. That must have hurt.”

  “It did at first. But, you know, it finally got through my thick head that my dad was right. I was too young, too inexperienced, and Billy Joe had every reason to avoid me, and not just because I was a kid.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I went off to nursing school, then worked in a big-city hospital for a few years until I practically had my own PTSD. When I came back here it was to become the flight nurse with the Emergency Response Team.” She gave a little laugh. “You could say I wasn’t exactly welcome on that helicopter.”

  “But something must have changed.”

  Wendy nodded, her gaze becoming faraway for a few minutes. “It was rough, but here we are now…together forever as Yuma likes to tease me.” She turned a bit. “Is that water heating?”

  Rory looked back. “I see a bit of steam on the surface.”

  “Good, we’ll make it yet.”

  Even the little bit that Wendy had told her had given her an inkling of what her husband had suffered. And some of it, at least, had to be replaying in her heart and mind.

  Rory sighed, realizing she wasn’t the only person on this plane who had serious concerns. Yes, Cait’s life hung in the balance, but surely Wendy must be worrying about Yuma and whether this would affect him.

  Yet Wendy soldiered cheerfully on, confident that things would work out. Rory found herself wondering, for the first time, when she had started to lose hope for Cait. Because that’s what was going on here: the loss of hope.

  Not just the threat of being stranded, but the loss of hope. Did she really think nothing could save Cait now?

  The thought appalled her. She shook it away, mentally stomped it into some dark place she couldn’t afford to look at. Not now.

  Twenty minutes later the four of them were sitting in the passenger lounge savoring hot cups of coffee. Cait still slept, but Wendy and Rory had agreed that their next task would be making soup for her.

  “The way I see it,” Chase said, “we need to get a fire going outside for at least a little while. We can’t keep that door open too long or we’ll freeze. And cooking with candles is not only slow but could be deadly.”

  Rory nodded agreement. No argument with him on that score.

  “The wind is a beast, though, so it won’t be easy. We’ll need to cook, and cook fast before the fire gets buried in snow.”

  Rory glanced toward one of the few windows still not covered by snow, and could see nothing but white. “It’s that bad?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he answered her. “I don’t want to burn any more candles than we absolutely must because of fire danger, but we’re going to have to burn some, obviously. We’ve got protection against the wind, our body heat will help in a space this small, but it’s still going to get pretty cold.”

  Rory couldn’t help but glance back at the tiny bedroom where her sister slept. “I hope she can handle it.”

  “She’s my top priority,” Chase said flatly. “Cancer?”

  Rory nodded. “Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. NHL for short. She hasn’t got a lot of reserves left.”

  “I can see that. We’ll keep her warm and fed if I have to light a fire in the aisle, okay?”

  “I’m not sure going that far would help anyone.” But for the first time she met his gaze, truly met it, and felt a pleasant, astonishing shock. It wasn’t because those gunmetal eyes for the first time looked gentle, though. No, it was something else, something that heate
d places she was ashamed to even be aware of at such a time.

  A sexual reaction at a time like this? She almost wanted to hang her head until a quiet voice in the back of her mind reminded her that adrenaline, shock and danger did funny things to a person. Life asserted itself in the most primitive way imaginable.

  Plus, she was dependent on this guy. It was probably a cavewoman response, nothing more. At the same time, it felt good, shocking though it was, so she just let it be. Something in her life needed to feel good.

  But it also put her on guard. She couldn’t afford to lose her mental footing now—most especially now—and not to a primitive impulse to forget all sense and escape into a few moments of hot pleasure.

  “What do you do?” Chase’s question shocked her out of her internal dissection.

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m just wondering if you bring any additional skills to the table here. Yuma and I are trained in survival, and he’s a huge advantage for us in that he lived in these mountains during weather like this, without so much as a cabin. Wendy’s a nurse and can help take care of your sister. So what do you do?”

  For the first time in her life, Rory was embarrassed to admit the truth. “I’m a petroleum geologist. I know about finding oil, and I know about drilling for it. The closest I’ve ever come to survival conditions was when I told the men working for me to stop drilling because they were going to hit a pocket of natural gas, and they didn’t listen. And it wasn’t my survival that was at stake.”

  Chase nodded, but didn’t look scornful. Instead, all he said was, “You probably know more than you think.”

  “Well, I do know the air is getting stale in here and apparently you have to open the door to let in fresh, and that cools us down, too.”

  He nodded. “We’re in a fairly airtight tube. That has advantages and disadvantages, obviously. Something I need to work on.”

  “And the beacon?”

  “Something else I need to work on. But that’s not all, Ms. Campbell.”

  “Call me Rory, please.” Formality felt utterly awkward right now.

  “I’m Chase then. Anyway, an emergency beacon works great when someone’s looking for it. Assuming, of course, it’s one of the things on this plane that’s still working, and little enough is.”

  Rory felt her chest tighten with anger and something approaching despair. She had only one goal right now: get Cait into that trial before it was too late. So, of course, everything possible had gone wrong. Listening to Chase, it was hard to remember they were lucky the plane had come down reasonably intact and that no one was injured. Or maybe not just lucky. Maybe she needed to acknowledge this man’s piloting expertise. But she wasn’t ready to do that. Not with every new bit of information hitting her like a body blow.

  Chase continued, his tone quietly emphatic, as if he were determined to make her understand. “Nobody’s looking for us right now because of the storm, and we’ve got an additional complication…we’re down in the mountains. That limits range. I don’t have a satellite downlink, either, maybe because of the storm, but GPS is down, so that means the beacon can’t transmit our location. And with every minute we’re getting buried deeper in snow. I doubt the trail left by our slide along the mountain is going to be visible for long, if it even still is.”

  Her heart knocked uncomfortably. “So we’re invisible.”

  “Right now, yes, and we’re also inaccessible, so we need to conserve everything we can. After the storm passes, we might get satellite back, but I’m not going to keep trying until after the storm because I need to preserve what batteries I’ve got. I’ll work on checking the beacon. With any luck it’s still working and will work for days.”

  “And after the storm?” she asked. “I can’t just sit here waiting indefinitely for rescue. My sister…my sister only has four days of medicine.”

  His answer was quiet. “I understand. Believe me. I understand.” Then he dropped another bomb. “I’m going to have to turn off the emergency lighting. That’s running on batteries, too.”

  It was already dark in the plane. And now it was going to get even darker. Rory suppressed a shudder and tried to find the steel will that had helped her rise in what was most definitely a man’s world.

  Right now, however, it had deserted her. All she could do was look toward the back of the plane and her sick, dying sister, and wonder if she was going to fail Cait.

  All because she’d tried to spare Cait a fatiguing, uncomfortable commercial flight. All because she’d wanted to get Cait to the hospital the fastest way possible.

  Maybe sometimes fate just wouldn’t let you take charge.

  Chase watched the expressions play over Rory’s face as she absorbed the bad news. It took real effort to read her, as if she practiced keeping a straight face, but her guard seemed to be down at the moment. She truly worried about her sister, of that he had no doubt, and her acceptance of his risk assessments suggested that she wasn’t one who argued for the sake of argument. Once she had accepted that someone knew what he was doing, she didn’t waste energy fighting it.

  That made her fairly unique in his experience. But no less troublesome, because she really was a rare beauty, though she did nothing to enhance her looks. Not even a smidgeon of makeup highlighted her eyes, lips or cheeks. Nor did she need them. And those bright blue eyes of hers appealed to him at a deeper level than thought. A level he told himself he couldn’t afford to pay attention to right now. Rescuing passengers and indulging in passions couldn’t possibly mix well. Besides, as he ought to know by now, women didn’t seem to like him for very long.

  He shook himself free of reverie and looked at Yuma. “You said something about the wind when we were outside.”

  “Yeah,” Yuma said. “We need to get ready to build that fire. The wind won’t entirely stop, but it will change direction after sunset. It always does in these mountains, even in a storm. I don’t know why that is, but it’ll get calmer for a while and we need to be ready to take advantage of it. Ideally, we should try to make a firebox with metal, if we can find enough in here.”

  “We can,” Chase said firmly. “The galley doors are aluminum. And there are other things, too.”

  “Good. Let me get one more cup of that coffee before we go out again. Damn, I’d forgotten how cold this mountain can get.”

  Chase saw Wendy lay her hand on Yuma’s forearm, and thought again about how hard this could turn out to be for the man. Not just the plane crash, but all the resurrected memories of his time in these mountains, hiding from the demons of war that wouldn’t leave him alone.

  The only solution for any of them right now was to keep busy, to feel that they were accomplishing something. First rule: Leave no room for despair. Paralysis would accomplish nothing, and despair could be a killer.

  “Okay,” he said briskly. “Let’s see about making that firebox. A hot meal would do us all some good.”

  He noted that Rory went first to check on her sister. Understandable. Unfortunately, the fact that she looked more worried when she emerged concerned him.

  “Is she too cold?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. It’s just that she’s sleeping so much. Too much.”

  “We need to get some calories into her,” he said. “Can she hold down food?”

  “Mostly liquids.”

  “Then we’ll get her some soup first thing.” With that he picked up a screwdriver and started helping Yuma pull down the galley doors.

  “What can I do?” Rory asked.

  Chase’s instinctive response was to tell her to keep an eye on her sister. Then he realized that she needed something far less passive to do. Something that made her feel like she was doing more than holding a death watch.

  “There are some aluminum doors up front, too. They’re faced with wood veneer, but they’re aluminum. There’s another screwdriver in the service hatch I left open.” He wasn’t sure she’d be able to work the screws—they’d been mechanically tightened—but
she might surprise him. He and Yuma weren’t exactly finding it impossible to loosen the screws in the galley doors.

  She didn’t say a word as she eased past him, but as his gaze followed her briefly, he could see a sense of purpose in her posture and step. Good.

  Then he watched Wendy slip back into the bedroom to check on their patient. Rory, he suspected, hadn’t wanted to let anyone else touch her sister. A born guard dog. He liked that.

  Chase and Yuma carried the aluminum doors outside into the blizzard to hammer them into the shape they needed. Neither of them wanted to do it in the confines of the plane because the banging would be deafening.

  Ignoring the cold and the snow that stung like small knives, they battered the doors into a box with a top. Removing a couple of the inset latches created for air to circulate.

  “Instant stove,” Chase remarked an hour later.

  “Hardly instant,” Yuma replied. “I’m soaked with sweat.”

  “That’ll teach you to wear warm clothes in the dead of winter.”

  Yuma chuckled. “Better than being out here in rags with ratty blankets.”

  “Guess so.” Chase paused after shaking the firebox to ensure it was sturdy. “You doing okay?”

  “I’m fine. Yeah, I’m remembering, but the memories of being out here aren’t memories of Nam. It’s too damn cold.”

  Chase laughed. “I guess I can see that.”

  Yuma stood straight and looked toward the almost invisible trees that surrounded the clearing. “Can I be honest, Chase?”

  “Hell, yeah.” But Chase felt himself tightening inwardly, ready for criticism he felt he deserved.

  “You did an amazing job of bringing us down. I’m not sure how you managed it. We’re alive because of it.”

  Chase waited, sure there was more, but it didn’t come immediately. Finally, Yuma sighed, the sound almost snatched away by the wind.

  “I’m grateful,” he said. “More grateful than I can tell you because honest to God, Chase, I’m not sure I could survive without Wendy.”