The Sleepless (3 page)

They were flying so low now that John could see people on the streets and beaches below them, shading their eyes and turning around as the helicopter burped and stuttered over their heads. He saw some people running, obviously afraid that they were going to crash right on top of them. He couldn’t believe that they were still airborne. They were well below the level of the rooftops and the powerlines, but somehow they managed to snatch a few lurching feet of extra lift, and cross the grey sandy diagonal of Wollaston Beach, so that they were flying out over the sun-chipped waters of Quincy Bay. 

Through the oil-fogged window, John saw yacht sails shining, like fresh-laundered sheets, and for a moment he was convinced that they were going to make it, that Frank was going to put them gently down in the sea, and that everything was going to be fine. 

He reached across and grasped Sissy’s hand, too, and said, ‘We’re making it, we’re making it. He’s putting us down in the bay. Just hold on, we’re going to be fine.’ 

Dean could do nothing but stare at him in horror, and open and close his mouth. He turned to Eva but Eva had her right hand pressed over her face and she looked as if she were praying. 

John prayed too.
Dear God save my family from death. Dear God, just this one time, let us all live.
 

The Sikorsky’s turboshafts let out a last hideous
grrrrrr!
like a pit-bull having its guts torn out, and then it simply dropped. It hit the water at well over 150 knots, and John felt something slamming into his back. Eva let out a scream that was so high-pitched and unearthly that he thought for a split second that it was metal tearing – that the whole fuselage was being ripped in half. Then the helicopter bounced again, and hit something much harder than the sea, although the window burst open on John’s side of the fuselage and saltwater spray exploded in his face. 

Jesus! Wouldn’t it ever stop bouncing and crashing and rolling and bouncing? He saw sea, sunlight, the pink flurry of Sissy’s face, the jolting blur of Dean’s left arm, and all the time Eva was screaming and screaming
Oh God oh God we’re all going to die We’re all going to die We’re all going to die.
 

The helicopter suddenly came to a stop, three-quarters tilted, like a baseball player who suddenly stops himself on the third base, and tilts, and staggers, still full of momentum, still full of forward motion. Then it rolled with a heavy crunching onto its belly, onto the sand. As it did so, its floor buckled in, and mercilessly compressed their feet underneath their seats, where they had been tucked in the foetal position. John felt his heels forced up against the aluminum rack which held his lifebelt. Then all of their ankles snapped in unison, like a crackle of pistol fire, and they stared at each other and shouted in pain. 

After that, apart from the sound of the incoming tide, and the doleful whistling of the wind, and the stray clanking of cooling metal, there was silence. The whole cabin stank of kerosene, but the smoke seemed to have died down, and there was no crackling of fire. Eva kept pulling at John’s hand and whispering, ‘God, oh God, John. Oh God.’ Her face was grey and her forehead was badly bruised. Dean was shuddering and massaging his kneecaps over and over in pain. Sissy simply stared at nothing at all, and John guessed that she was already lapsing into clinical shock. 

As for himself, his feet were on fire. He had never experienced such pain, even when he had fallen from his polo pony late last year and dislocated his shoulder. Every nerve in his ankles cringed and throbbed, and if somebody had asked him then and there if he had wanted his feet to be amputated, he would have paid them to do it. 

‘Oh God, John,’ wept Eva. ‘I think that both of my ankles are broken.’ 

‘I think
all
of our ankles are broken,’ said John. ‘Keep an eye on Sissy ... she’s gone into shock.’ 

‘Where are we?’ said Dean, in a clogged-up, unreal voice. He peered unfocused at the bay. ‘I thought we were over water.’ 

‘We were,’ John told him. ‘But we must have hit Nantasket Beach. It’s kind of a spit of land that sticks out into the bay.’ 

‘They can get to us, though? The emergency services can get to us?’ 

‘For sure,’ John shivered. ‘We’ve made it, don’t worry. They can get to us.’ 

‘What about Frank?’ Dean asked him. ‘Do you think he sent out a mayday?’ 

John leaned a few inches sideways in his seat. It was the most that he could manage before his ankles were gripped by intolerable agony. He could just make out the back of Frank’s helmet, and part of Frank’s blue-shirted shoulder. 

‘Frank!’ John called out, desperately. ‘Frank, are you all right? For Christ’s sake, our feet are trapped!’ 

Frank didn’t answer. ‘Maybe he’s concussed,’ Dean suggested. 

‘Maybe,’ said John. From the unnatural angle of Frank’s head, he suspected that Frank might be more than concussed. It looked as if his neck might be broken. But John didn’t want to panic Eva, and he was suffering too much pain himself to want to speculate. As far as he was concerned, their first priority was to lift these seats off their legs, so that the pressure on their broken ankles was relieved and they could drag themselves clear. 

Drag, not walk. No question of walking. He could feel the fractured bones grating inside his skin, like a smashed jelly jar full of crushed-up pieces of glass. 

Eva said, with a curious note of resignation in her voice, ‘John, can you hear me? I can’t bear it. It really hurts so much.’ 

‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ John reassured her. ‘The rescue people are going to get here real soon. You don’t think they’re going to leave their newest Supreme Court Justice stranded on Nantasket Beach, do you?’ He winced, and his mouth filled with metallic, sour-tasting blood; but he managed to turn away from her and spit it down the side of his seat. That slam on the back must have broken some ribs, maybe punctured a lung. 

‘So long as we don’t burn,’ said Dean. The stench of kerosene was even stronger now, and John could see the fumes rippling in the breeze. ‘I couldn’t bear to burn.’ 

‘It’s all right,’ John told him. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ 

‘I saw somebody burn in a Volkswagen once, out on the Rockville Pike. Never want to see anything like that again. Kid went
black,
like beef.’ 

Dean’s voice wandered from high pitch to low, and John guessed that he was going into shock, too. Sissy’s eyes had rolled up into her head, and her breathing was laboured and slow. 

‘For Christ’s sake, how long are those rescue people going to be?’ John ranted, at nobody at all. 

But almost as soon as he had said that, he saw the shadow of a man pass the broken window. 

‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey – we’re in here!’ 

‘Has somebody got here?’ asked Eva, wincing with pain. ‘Has somebody got here already?’ 

The shadow passed the window again. Although his image was blurred by the sunlight that was shining from the sea, John could see that he was wearing a long dark raincoat. Thank God, it must be a firefighter from the Fire & Rescue Service. 

‘Hey!’ he yelled out, hoarsely. ‘Hey, we’re all in here! We’re trapped! Can you get us out of here, for Christ’s sake?’ 

There was a long pause, but no reply. In the far distance, John could hear sirens, six or seven or even more, yowling and scribbling in the chorus. The pain in his ankles was so intense now that his legs throbbed, all the way to his thighs, and a scarlet mist was blurring his vision.
Don’t pass out now,
he ordered himself.
Your family needs you; Dean needs you; your country needs you.
 

He heard somebody tugging away a length of bent window frame. Then a thin dark man appeared in the broken window, a man with cropped spiky hair and intensely black sunglasses. In some oblique, extraordinary way, John thought that he recognized him – but it was probably no more than an overwhelming sense of relief that they had survived the helicopter crash and that somebody had actually come to get them out. 

The man kicked out the last fragments of plexiglas with the heel of a high black lace-up boot. The window frame had been bent too narrow for him to climb inside, but he carefully eased his head in, and peered around the cabin, sniffing dryly from time to time. 

‘We’re all trapped by our ankles,’ John told him. ‘The floor collapsed. We’re going to need somebody to take the seats out – maybe jack them up or something. Can you be quick please? My daughter’s in a pretty bad way.’ 

The man wiped his nose with the back of his black-gloved hand. Then he said, in a soft but rather strangled North Shore accent, ‘This is Mr O’Brien’s party?’ 

‘I’m John O’Brien. This is my family. Come on, please. Get us out of here as quick as you can.’ 

The man peered around a little more, up at the ceiling, down at the floor. ‘This is going to take cutters,’ he announced, with great deliberation, like a house painter trying to decide which type of paint to use. 

John said, ‘Whatever it takes. Just do it.’ 

He could feel blood running out of the side of his mouth, and dripping on to his shirt collar. He coughed, and wished he hadn’t, because it hurt, and because it filled his mouth with even more blood. 

The man carefully withdrew his head from the window frame and vanished into the sunlight again. Eva tugged at John’s sleeve and asked, ‘What’s happening? What’s he doing? Can’t he get us out?’ 

‘He has to cut us out.’ 

‘Oh God my legs hurt, John. I can’t stand it. Oh God where are the paramedics.’ 

Dean said nothing. His eyes were glassy and his cheeks were grey. His breath came in little painful sips. They waited in agony that seemed to be endless. Where had the man gone now? What was he doing? Why wasn’t he trying to get them out? And where were the rest of the firefighters, and the paramedics, where were the drips and the oxygen masks and the anaesthetics? 

John closed his eyes and thought that he was probably going to die. And when he closed his eyes, he became aware of ‘Mr Hillary’, waiting and watching in the very, very back of his brain, like a grey beetle waiting motionless inside a hollowed-out nut, but ready to scuttle out at the slightest disturbance. 

So you’re here, you bastard,
he thought.
You were here at the beginning, and now you’re here at the end. I just hope that when I die, you’ll die, too. It’ll almost be worth it.
 

John began to slide into unconsciousness, as if he were sliding down a grey greasy slope, into the grey greasy waters of a silent canal. 

Perhaps it would be better, just to go to sleep. If he were asleep, then all the pain in his ankles would vanish, and he would be standing in front of the Supreme Court taking his oath, and everything that had happened this morning would be nothing more than a dream. 

But – abruptly – the morning air was shattered by a loud, rasping roar, louder than a motorcycle starting up. Almost immediately, the man reappeared in the window and he was carrying a pair of huge shining steel pincers, like a grotesque parody of a giant parrot’s beak. 

‘What’s that?’ asked John. ‘What the hell’s that?’ 

With a hiss of hydraulics, the parrot-beak slowly opened, revealing rows of serrated steel teeth. The man looked at John and smiled and said nothing. Then, with laconic expertise, he positioned the beak over the lower corner of the window frame, and twisted the hand-grip. The pincers cut right through the frame with a warping, crushed Coke-can noise. Then the man released the parrot-beak, and manhandled it further down, and twisted the hand-grip again. He cut again and again, and in less than a minute the whole side of the helicopter’s fuselage was cut wide open, and the cabin was filled with wind and sunlight. 

The man climbed into the cabin between them, hefting the pincers in his left hand. ‘You’re lucky you landed here, Mr O’Brien,’ he told him. ‘You’re right on the tip of Sagamore Head, off Nantasket Beach. If you’d crashed just fifty feet short of here, you’d be surely drowned by now.’ 

John shivered, and gritted his teeth, and nodded his head. ‘Is this going to take long? Get my daughter out first, then my wife.’ 

‘Well, we’ll have to see what’s what,’ the man told him. He gave him a slanted, uneven grin. ‘But it shouldn’t take long at all.’ 

‘Please, hurry,’ John begged him. Dean began to whimper, and then to cough. 

‘Let’s just take a look at this pilot first,’ the man suggested. He lowered his head and made his way through to the cockpit, trailing his hydraulic line after him. He peered into Frank’s face, and patted his cheeks. 

‘Still alive,’ he announced. ‘Not for long, though, and he must be suffering something terrible. Tch, tch, you should see his legs, Mr O’Brien. Crushed all to mush.’ 

The man looked at Frank reflectively for a moment or two. Behind those tiny dark glasses, it was impossible for John to guess what he might be thinking. 

‘Hate to see anybody suffer,’ he said, at last. ‘What about you, Mr O’Brien? Don’t you hate to see people suffer?’ 

John’s vision was blotchy with scarlet and grey. He nodded in jerky agreement. Anything to get it over with. Anything to get Eva and Sissy out of here.