Night Is Mine (39 page)

“Beale! What the—? You can’t do that.”

“You’re alive!”

“Bitch! Ouch! Goddamn it! She Tasered me! I think you knocked her out. I think you just broke my fucking neck. Now stop it!”

She corrected as well as she could. The ground now alarmingly close.

The Bell had reached its limit. And then passed it.

Something gave with a low crunch.

“That didn’t sound good.” Mark’s tone rang suddenly steady, exactly like a professional pilot. The calmest when the going got worst. If you listened to the black-box recordings of any airliner going down, the pilots sounded perfectly calm. Discussing engine-restart procedures, altimeter readings, and airframe integrity right up to the moment they augured into the ground. Except the final moment. Almost without variation, the last thing on black-box recordings was a soft, “Damn!”

She wasn’t planning on adding to that legacy.

The chopper started spinning. The tail rotor was gone. That moment of imminent ground contact was going to happen much sooner than she’d anticipated.

She glanced out the window over her right shoulder, and the gunshot wound in her left arm screamed bloody murder.

No, the tail was still there, but the angle was wrong. It should be sticking out straight behind them, but she could see it out the window.

Rolling over toward the left side should decrease the strain. Help gravity counteract what the rotor wasn’t doing.

The problem was, it made her crab sideways across the sky and lose altitude.

“Is she really out?” Emily shouted toward the back.

“Ouch. The intercom still works and I still have my headset on. Yes, she’s out cold.”

Emily thumbed the radio to call a Mayday. More sparks, more breakers popping. And the intercom went with it.

They needed to be on the ground and fast.

They were at five hundred feet and dropping rapidly.

She continued the sideways crab and surveyed the local area.

No answers. For once she had no answers. No way out or down. Mark had trusted her, as any passenger did, to get him back down to safety. And she couldn’t.

Emily looked down at her hands. The hands Mark had held when she needed him most. They clutched two lousy little control sticks. Not enough to keep a dying machine alive from this high up.

She raised her head to look back for help. To look to Mark for an answer, or at least for forgiveness for killing him somewhere in the next thirty seconds. The despair spread over her like darkness.

Altitude around three hundred feet. Too low for a clean auto-rotate crash, especially with only half a tail. Chopper crashes were usually survivable below forty feet and above four hundred. The death zone lay in between, right where they hung.

If she’d reacted faster, sooner, they might have had a chance. But now—

Mark shouted. She couldn’t make out the words, but she saw it.

A wash of light in the falling night.

The South Lawn.

Ahead and to the right. A quarter mile away. So close. Even the Mall was out of reach. They were out of options.

Turbine one started a runaway whine. This bird had clearly never been designed to be shot at from the inside. Throttling back did nothing. This was it; death was upon them. And damn it, she wasn’t ready. Emily eased down on the collective, hoping to bleed off her altitude without plummeting or creating a murderous spin.

The remains of the rear rotor wasn’t doing much of a job to keep the helicopter in any sort of a line. More and more, she was spinning one direction as the main rotors spun the other.

Rock it sideways; let gravity help. Keep the strain low. If the tail boom went, it would fold up into the main rotor, and no one would be walking away, not from three hundred feet. Not even from the two hundred they were plummeting through.

Mark called out again, but with the intercom dead and the helmet covering her ears, she didn’t get what he was saying. He’d have to deal. She was busy.

She nursed the collective up a fraction, testing the rotor’s lift, and swore against the pain in her arm. Even the adrenaline couldn’t knock all the pain out.

Now the helicopter crabbed sideways and backward in a sloping descending spiral. The South Lawn flashed across the windows, and a treacherous stand of trees swung into view. A moment later, the White House slewed across her view.

One fifty. Still too far to fall, but if the tail rotor held on a little longer…

One hundred.

Aim for the lawn. It flashed by, and she tried to fix it in her mind.

Another bad lurch and spin, but the lawn was… there!

The turbine screamed and started to come apart. She’d heard that noise once before. Over the opium fields of Myanmar. A small fan blade inside the engine had been fractured and then broken free, and it had begun dismantling the engine from the inside.

Below her, hurrying across the spreading field of summer-red poppy flowers, a half-dozen jeeps loaded with pissed-off drug runners had chased after her. While her turbine busily consumed itself. She retained few fond memories of that moment or the long days that followed.

And now, that same noise had once again come into her life. No one with guns after her this time, other than the First Lady. But the ground at seventy-five feet away looked no softer than it had in Southeast Asia. As a bonus, in about fifteen seconds, the entire airframe, including the passenger compartment, was going to be riddled with shards of flying engine metal.

Time to risk it.

At fifty feet, she swung the copter almost fully onto its left side and drove the right pedal into the floor.

For one long, horrid moment the Bell 430 shuddered. Shuddered and held.

She crossed the cyclic hard.

At twenty-five feet they righted and the tail boom let go with a scream of metal.

Jerking the cyclic back, Emily managed to get the nose up for the final impact.

They landed tail first, buffering the impact as the remains of the tail boom crumpled. Then the baggage area, followed by the cabin frame in the rear hitting the ground, and finally the nose slammed forward and down onto the wheels.

The wheels all blew with sharp bangs as loud as gunfire, easily heard over the roar of the thrashing engine.

The hydraulic shocks rammed against their stops and then folded up into crumpled twists of metal.

The bird rocked to one side, and rotor blades pinged off the ground. Broken, crumpled, scattered like birdshot from a shotgun, a thousand little bits flung in a hundred different directions.

Without the resistance of the rotor, the dying turbine climbed into full runaway. Emily pulled throttles, threw breakers, but couldn’t find the fuel shutoff. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

Neither was the left front side of the helicopter.

The engine whined higher and higher. Then she smelled it. JP-5. Nothing quite like it. That tang and sting of incredibly volatile kerosene.

She scrabbled for the release on her belt. She had to get Mark and Katherine out. Had to save her crew.

As she reached for the door, Mark yanked it open from outside, grabbed her collar, and dragged her out.

They fell together and stumbled clear.

“Katherine!” She turned for the helicopter.

Mark latched an arm around her waist and continued to drag her away.

“She’s done. Main tail-boom strut has passed sentence on her, right through the heart, if she had one. Damn woman Tasered me.”

Emily let Mark drag her away as flames spurted out of the exhaust ports on the screaming engine. A pool of liquid spread across the ground where one of the wheel struts had punched a fuel tank.

That was all she needed to see to get her feet moving.

They flew more than dove behind a heavy set of concrete stairs as the first tank went. Even self-sealing tanks could only take so much abuse. She landed on her shot-up arm and remembered the meaning of real pain in the moment before the world tunneled to black.

“You are hands down the best goddamn pilot I ever flew with.”

Emily came to kneeling in the flower bed behind the curving concrete stair at the front of the White House. Mark stripped back her jacket to expose her shoulder, unheedful of her brief unconsciousness or the searing pain of her arm. He flexed her arm once or twice before grunting.

“Just a lousy meat shot. Barely bleeding anymore.”

She glanced at the blood pouring from the wound and looked away.

He pulled free the bandanna he wore around his neck as part of his “Mr. Tropical Playboy” disguise. With a careless twist that made her teeth ache, he staunched the flow.

“That was amazing.” He looked at neither her nor what he was doing. Instead, he watched the burning machine over the lip of the stairs. “There is no book on the planet that says we should be alive after that flight. The way you kept the tail boom hanging on by slewing us sideways. It shouldn’t have worked.”

Emily raised her visor and peered over the edge of the South Portico stairs. The outline of the helicopter glowed deep within the blazing fire that consumed it. She couldn’t see any sign of Katherine’s body in the heart of the flames. The First Lady had been granted her own personal funeral pyre.

The late-evening light shrouded everything not lit by the roaring blaze. They were crouched behind the stairs leading up to the South Portico. A range of trees to either side were beginning to burn.

Sirens were approaching. A lot of them, by the sound of it. A quick survey testified that the results to the general area were also less than subtle.

Another first for the White House. An inferno reaching at least as high as the White House’s four exaggerated stories. A brilliant beacon drove out the dark of night. Most of the windows in the residence and the West Wing had been blown out. The only ones intact ringed the Oval Office. This face of the White House had some interesting scorch marks.

Mark followed the direction of her gaze, then shouted above the roar of the fire, “It will be the Black and Brown and White House for a while. Very urban. Very PC. One should always strive for political correctness. Especially here, don’t you think?”

She ducked back down as a series of sharp cracks sounded from the fire. She grabbed the back of Mark’s belt to haul him down. It must be his gun. Except for the round in the chamber, they’d just explode in place. But a stray round could fly, and she’d hate to be shot by their own armament.

“Damn it!” Mark glared in the general direction of the chopper on the far side of the concrete. “I liked that gun.”

“Not me. The woman shot me with it.” Emily raised her arm and its blood-soaked bandage as proof.

Another explosion, probably the other fuel tank, showered them with shredded bushes, chunks of sod, and a thousand bits of metal. A piece stung the back of her hand.

She and Mark both curled up with their hands under their arms and she kept her helmeted head down. Minimum target, no exposed flesh. Mark pulled his denim jacket over his head as well as he could while the metal rained down.

When the pattering ceased, they checked each other for flaming fragments. Their jackets showed several scorch marks but no fires.

The helicopter was silent now except for the crackle of flames. They stood to survey the remains of her crash.

Fire trucks zoomed up from who knew where. Over the roar of the fire, dozens of sprinklers were shushing out water at an amazing rate. The British had burned down the White House once. She’d take all the help she could get to make sure that an officer of the United States Army Special Operations Aviation Regiment didn’t torch it to the ground a second time.

“Goddamn it, Beale. When you take a bird down, you really take one down.”

The adrenaline surge hadn’t worn off yet. She peeled off her helmet. A bullet crease scarred deeply along the side. The .32 caliber bullet itself was lodged in the helmet near the ear. She hadn’t been thrown into the door; she’d been shot in the head by Katherine Matthews and only this good armor had saved her brain. She was going to figure out who’d created Kevlar and send her a really nice thank-you note. Emily tossed the helmet aside, and it rattled on the concrete walkway.

A real pity to destroy such a first-class craft as the Bell 430. It had brought them down safely before it gave up the ghost.

Mark leaned in, “Black-in-black, indeed. I had no idea. You’re bad. You goddamn did it! And we survived! The President will live to thank you for his life.”

She wasn’t sure Peter would be so terribly thankful to the woman who’d murdered his wife. But, it was starting to sink in that she’d walked away from another one. She cradled her arm for a moment. She’d have a scar. Another badge of survival.

She had made it.

Emily pumped a fist in the air, sending a sharp shot of pain into her shoulder, and laughed anyway. Once again she’d dodged the demon. She’d lost four choppers in a decade of flying, three while in the regular Army and now one with SOAR. And she’d managed to walk away from every one.