by Vicki Tharp
He stared at the pieces of metal as they swung from the key. Those tags represented a life. A selfless life. A life that had been sacrificed in the quest to help these women.
He couldn’t let the same women, or Kurt, down.
Pulling back on the cyclic, he lifted the collective. In front of him, El Verdugo’s army lined up to fire at them. He waited for the sound of gunfire from his two M2 fifty-cal machine guns mounted on either side behind him as his gunners opened fire, but this wasn’t his Shitter.
No machine guns.
No gunners.
Just girls.
The helo shuddered from the wind and the extra weight. He yawed the helicopter, trying to protect Jenna and the rear of the helo from direct shots, but the men had spread out, and their only protection was distance.
He climbed, higher and higher, the wind shoving him toward the building, then pulling him toward the trees. His grip tightened on the cyclic, his shoulder straining from the exertion, the muscles in his forearm feeling every minute adjustment.
Another shot. Quinn smelled smoke. His tail rotor controls got sticky. Boxed in, between the building, and the trees, and the shooters, he didn’t have room to gather any forward momentum to help him gain altitude.
He fought for every vertical foot, trying to break the overloaded helo free of his own rotor wash. More muzzle flashes, but the rounds either missed or didn’t hit anything significant. Higher he climbed, the rotors clearing the top of the building and the helo starting a slow spin as he ran out of left pedal.
Without forward speed to help compensate for the spin, he needed to set this puppy down before he screwed them all into the side of the building or the trees or the mountain.
“Oh my God!” Jenna cried out, pointing down below.
Quinn chanced a quick glance below, through the pounding rain and strobe of lightning, as two people came out of the brush firing on El Verdugo’s army.
“Mac and Boomer,” Quinn said as he brought his attention back to the cockpit, back to the battle raging between machine and Mother Nature. “They followed you up here.”
Jenna said something else, but Quinn was too focused on keeping his tail rotor from clipping the tops of the trees. The muzzle flashes no longer aimed in their direction. El Verdugo’s men scattered. Boomer and Mac, the size of toy soldiers. But these soldiers were real and fighting and—
Mac went down. Quinn caught a flash of movement, Boomer dragging Mac into the forest, three of El Verdugo’s men advancing on them. Nothing he could do to help.
A few feet higher, and he caught an updraft that shot him up a good seventy-five more feet. Clear of the building and the tops of the trees.
The anti-torque pedals seized.
The helo spun.
He milked the collective, opened the throttle, and pushed forward on the cyclic, the forward momentum evening out the spin. The smoke worsened. He needed to land. Yesterday.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Slowly the helicopter climbed higher and higher. Jenna found numbers on a dial labeled Altimeter. As the numbers increased, the tightness in her chest eased. One hundred feet, two hundred.
The spin of the helicopter had evened out as they cleared the tops of the trees and gained forward momentum. The trees, the house, the mountain, all fell away. She had one hand on the door, and the other braced on her seat. Between the wind and mechanical issues, the helicopter pitched and shuddered worse than the mechanical bull ride at the honky-tonk in Sheridan.
But the smell of smoke grew heavier, and it tickled the back of her throat. That couldn’t be good.
Behind her, Pepita and a petite woman huddled on the floor between the front and rear seats, wedged in tight in front of the other passengers. Jenna couldn’t tell whether any of them were strapped in, but by their wide eyes and slack jaws, even if they could have heard her yelling for them to put their seat belts on, Jenna didn’t think their minds were functioning well enough to follow the simple instruction.
They gained speed and the helicopter stabilized. The altimeter crept toward three hundred feet, and Jenna breathed easier. Quinn was doing it.
They were going to make it.
Beep beep beep. An orange light started flashing. Another. More smoke seeped into the cabin, and the altimeter started going backward. “What’s that?”
“Fuck!” Quinn ground out, his voice deafening in the sudden silence. “We lost the engine.”
Quinn’s training took over as he dropped the collective, added right pedal, and entered an autorotation. With minimal control, they were all along for the ride. “Look for a clearing. We’re going down.”
“I don’t see anything.” The earth pitched and rolled and started to spin again. She had a hard time telling which way was up. How was she supposed to find—Lights! Blue and red. Flashing. Emergency vehicles. “There, on your right.” Jenna pointed, but as soon as she did, it was gone.
The ground drew closer, but so did the lights. She glanced over at him. His jaw was tight, the muscles on his arms in stark relief to the flashing orange of the cockpit warning lights. Two hundred feet. One-seventy-five.
Below, the headlights shone into a clearing.
“Down there,” Jenna said. “They’re lighting the clearing for you.”
“Got it,” Quinn said, his voice clipped.
One-fifty.
One-thirty.
Cold sweat broke out over her entire body, and adrenaline dumped into her system, a hot fire scorching arteries and veins and boosting her heart rate to supersonic speeds.
“Too far.” Quinn’s fierce growl roared through the intercom and settled in her chest. In her heart.
She glanced over at Quinn. At the man who didn’t give up. At the man battling, fighting, struggling, to save them. She felt useless, helpless.
One-twenty.
One hundred.
They were going to crash.
Something in her chest snapped, and her heart was finally free. Seemingly insurmountable odds to their relationship were, in reality, mere blips on the radar. There was so much she wanted to say to Quinn, so much she wished to take back, so much she wished she’d done different. But there was no time for that.
“I love you,” she said, as the emergency lights from the vehicles below flashed in front of her eyes. She slammed her lids closed and braced for the impact.
* * * *
Dead Man’s Curve—a nifty little chart that shows the very valid reason that low altitude and low speed didn’t mix when your engine failed.
A soul-eating, scary-ass, valid reason.
Quinn had fought the odds once before with success. If you could call his crew dying and him and Kurt surviving a success. A smart man would have taken his money and gone home, not willing to face those odds ever again.
Guess you’re not as smart as you thought you were.
Because here he was, battling with an unfamiliar, overloaded helo in a storm, in the mountains, operating within Dead Man’s Curve.
Every muscle in his body strained, his grip locked on the cyclic. No way was he letting go. He would either land, or the medics would have to pry the cyclic out of his cold, dead hands. The g-forces of the spin turned the helo into that ride at the amusement park where you spun so fast the floor could drop out from beneath you, and you would stay in the air.
The difference was, they were spinning—and they were going down.
He saw the clearing spotlighted by the emergency vehicles’ headlights, but doubted he had enough altitude to make it. If they cleared the tops of the trees, they stood a chance. Whoever was down there had better run like hell, because when they crashed, his rotors would likely shred the trucks and the trees.
Like a twenty-five-hundred-pound storm-tossed blender.
Whatever happened in the next few seconds wasn’t going to be pretty.
/> The muscles in his forearms burned, and his right hand was nearly numb from gripping so tight. Slick with sweat, the cyclic slipped in his grip, and the skids brushed the top of the trees as he battled for control.
I love you. Jenna’s words filled his brain, swelled his chest, made his thundering heart stop for a beat.
The corner of his mouth tipped up as he recaught his grip on the controls and her words sank deep into his soul.
Now she tells me.
The skids brushed the tops of the trees, and the helo toppled over the far side, the rotors missing the top of a truck. His skids spudded into the front and rear windows of the crew-cab pickup. The force tipped the truck sideways, but the sheer mass of the vehicle slowed the helo’s momentum. The harness cut across his body, jerked him to a stop, and ripped the cyclic from his hand.
The rotors ripped into the earth like an overzealous Weed eater. Chewing through rocks and dirt and metal. The rotors sheared off and flew God knew where.
The helo slammed into the ground.
All motion stopped. For a moment, no sound. Smoke poured into the cockpit. Quinn ripped off the headset, coughing as he fumbled with his harness release and fell against his door.
“Everyone okay?”
There were some moans. Someone was crying.
“My arm,” one of the women said.
Pepita said, “I think so.”
Jenna said nothing.
“Jenna? Jenna!” The helo rested on its right side. Jenna hung from her harness directly above him, her arms dangling in front of him like she was reaching out for him. Only she wasn’t reaching out for him, because she was unconscious.
Or dead.
No. No. No no nonono!
He coughed again, his lungs burning as he fought to breathe. His peripheral vision starred. A screech of metal as someone forced open the rear door. A rush of wind and rain flooded in.
“Give me a hand,” a man said to someone as he started rescuing the women from the back.
Quinn’s vision cleared, and he reached up to undo Jenna’s harness, but with her full weight against it, the release refused to budge. “Help her,” he rasped out, so low he barely heard himself.
He coughed, cleared his throat, and reached for the knife he always kept in his flight suit—except he wasn’t in his flight suit and he didn’t have his damn knife.
Jenna’s door wrenched open, and someone dropped into the back of the helo. “Let her go,” the man said to Quinn. “We’ve got her.”
But Quinn couldn’t let go.
Suddenly there was a face in front of his. Clean shaven and soot covered. “You got to let her go, man. We’ve got her. Promise.”
Quinn let go of her hand, and her fingers slipped from his as someone hoisted her out of the cockpit. She didn’t talk. She didn’t fight.
Holy hell.
What little strength he had left drained from his body and he deflated, collapsing against his door with a dull thunk. He stared out the open door above. Not caring that the cold rain pooled beneath him. His right hand shook. His whole body shook.
The same man climbed back into the helo and reached a hand out to him.
“How is she?”
The man didn’t say.
Dead.
The paramedic said, “Come on, man, this thing’s a death trap. It could blow any second.”
All the warmth a living being possessed died and shriveled within him. Without Jenna, Quinn found it hard to care. If the helo blew, it blew. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, because once again, he’d failed.
* * * *
Quinn staggered toward one of the ambulances staged near the clearing, one arm draped around the shoulders of the first responder. Quinn coughed, the lining of his lungs feeling like they’d been licked by a flamethrower.
Under a spotlight, a makeshift triage area had been set up under the protective cover of a tarp. The wind blew rain under the cover in gusts, but no place in a five-mile radius was more dry. The women from the back of the helo were there being treated. One was having a splint put on her arm, another—
“Quinn!” Wrapped in a blanket, Pepita jumped up and tried to run over to him. One of her legs gave way, but she caught herself and hopped over on one leg. She wrapped her arms around his waist and gave him an anaconda squeeze.
“I’ve got it, man,” Quinn told the rescuer.
The man slid his shoulder from beneath Quinn’s arm and went to help elsewhere. Quinn held Pepita tight, one arm around her torso, the other clamping her head to his chest. She shook in his arms, and he cupped her face and took a half step back. “You okay?”
She nodded once, swiping the back of her hand against her nose. She pointed to the open rear door of one of the ambulances. “They have Prima.”
Quinn was afraid to ask. Afraid not to. “How is she?”
Pepita shrugged. “They wouldn’t say.”
His heart slowed way…the…fuck…down. He couldn’t hear it or feel it. For all he knew, it had stopped. Maybe that was why his knees buckled, and the trees started spinning again.
Pepita took his hand, squeezed. He refocused on her. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She pulled. He pulled back. “You should wait here.”
“Why?” Pepita looked at him, not as if he’d lost all his marbles, but as if he’d never had any to begin with.
He didn’t know how to tell her the truth. “It could be bad.”
That little chin of hers went up, and he saw so much of Jenna and Sidney and Boomer, and hell, the rest of the Lazy S, in that defiant tilt, that brave squaring of her shoulders. That determined squint of her brown eyes. “Then she’ll need us both.”
Even though he’d thought himself incapable of smiling at the moment, his mouth curved. He ruffled his hand over the top of her head and pulled her to his side, and together they helped each other to the ambulance.
Thirty yards to the ambulance, and by the time he got there, he was coughing and hacking. A five-pack-a-day chain-smoker wouldn’t have been as out of breath. Spots flickered and flashed at the edges of his vision. He caught himself against the rear door and held on tight.
The paramedics had laid Jenna out on a gurney in the back of the ambulance, an oxygen mask over her face, not a sheet. Alive. His heart jump-started as if the paramedics had zapped him with the AED. His vision cleared, and he stepped closer.
“How is she?” Quinn suffered through another round of coughing fits. Unable to hear the answer over his sputtering. His eyes watered and he dried them with the heels of his hands. “What?”
“Unconscious, but stable,” the paramedic said. A monitor beeped, and the woman checked the IV going into the back of Jenna’s left hand. “You can come—”
Quinn didn’t wait for her to finish. He scrambled into the back and pulled Pepita in behind him. He scooted over, and they both sat on a narrow bench. Jenna’s body shivered under the two layers of blankets, her hair wet, the pillow damp beneath her head, a long abrasion down one cheek.
He took Jenna’s right hand in both of his. Her skin blended with the white sheets. He turned her hand over, the skin shredded and torn on the underside of her fingers where she’d gripped the gutter. Quinn’s stomach did a slow roll and hung there in midair. He’d come so close to losing her.
He kissed the back of her hand, the skin warm and cold at the same time. Jenna groaned, and he squeezed her hand tighter.
Pepita patted Jenna’s shin. “Prima.”
Jenna rolled her head back and forth, her eyes scrunched. She tried to reach up with her left hand, but the paramedic stopped her. “I need you to keep this hand still,” the woman said.
Jenna pulled her hand out of Quinn’s, ran it across her left temple, and grumbled, “My head.”
Quinn palpated the egg-sized swelling along Jenna’s hai
rline. “I guess that hard head of yours came in handy.” Her eyes fluttered open, and he’d never been so happy to see those green eyes half-focused on him.
“Hey, beautiful.” He stroked the back of his finger across her cheek. “Nice of you not to sleep through the whole—”
Jenna bolted upright and tried to swing her legs over the side of the gurney. “Mac. Oh my God, is she okay?”
Quinn laid his hands on her shoulders and pressed her back down. “Relax,” he said. “She can take care of herself.”
“But she went down, and those men—”
Guilt built inside him, cold and insidious. He honestly hadn’t thought once about Mac or Boomer since he’d climbed out of the helo. All his thoughts, all his focus, had been on Jenna. “Boomer will take care of her.”
But what if—No, he wouldn’t let his mind go there. Mac and Boomer were professionals. Marines. If they couldn’t get out of that scrap, no one could.
“The baby.” Jenna grabbed his arm, her fingers digging in. For someone who might have a concussion, she had a damn strong grip.
The paramedic glanced over at him with an oh-shit look on her face. “She’s pregnant?”
“What?” Pepita said.
Quinn shook his head. “Not her. Mac.”
Pepita giggled behind her hand, having no idea Mac had taken a bullet. “No way!”
The paramedic held Jenna’s chin and came at her with the penlight. “Pupils are normal.”
“All these lights are so bright.” Jenna pushed the light away and tried to sit up again.
Quinn caught her.
“Follow my finger.” When the paramedic finished with a few more eye tests, she asked, “Anything blurry, any double vision?”
“A little blurry, maybe, but it’s fine.”
“Do you know what happened to you?” The paramedic wouldn’t give up.
“Last thing I remember was we were going to crash. Can I get up now?”
To Jenna, the paramedic said, “You have a concussion. You need to relax until the hospital can check you out and make sure you don’t have any other injuries. If I send him to find out about your friend, will you stay down?”
