Relying on instinct alone, Eddie managed to get the JetRanger onto an even keel; the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t see the instrument panel only feet from him. They had started to auto rotate as they fell to the ground, the chopper spinning on its own axis in a tightening circle, pressing the men outward against the fuselage. Eddie used this to his advantage, slowing the descent by using what little lift remained in the still-spinning main rotor.
“I can’t see,” he shouted above the jarring noise of the fragmenting helicopter.
Mercer leaned forward, groping blindly through the smoke until his hands felt the cold metal of the Heckler and Koch MP- 5 submachine gun the sergeant had lost when the chopper was hit. Straightening, he cocked the weapon. “Cover your face!”
Aiming over Eddie’s shoulder, he loosed a hail of bullets against the windscreen.
The Plexiglas starred, then lost all integrity, flying into space in nearly one whole chunk. A few fragments whipped into the cockpit, one dagger-size shard burying itself in the shoulder of an unconscious Mike Collins. The swirling torrent of wind sucked the smoke out of the cabin, taking with it the paralyzing smell of avgas. Once again Eddie could see, his hands taking tighter control of the spiraling aircraft.
“We ain’t gonna make it,” Eddie yelled over the din.
A thousand feet below, the ground was a featureless, dark abyss, the starless night revealing nothing. They couldn’t tell if there were rocky mountains or a soft field or water below them. Eddie would have to try to make the landing blind, not even able to rely on the altimeter to get a fix on their position. It had frozen when they were hit.
“There!” Mercer shouted, pointing to their left.
Out of the gloom came a stand of tall, straight spruce trees, their high pyramidal tops like medieval church spires. The grove appeared tightly packed and would soften the controlled crash of the falling helicopter. Eddie banked toward the site, the engine coughing as the remaining fuel was burned up at a prodigious rate.
“It ain’t happening, man. It looks close, but it’s at least half a mile away,” Eddie shouted. Rain soaked them all. The soldier used a sleeve of his BDUs to wipe the water from Eddie’s dark face because the pilot couldn’t afford to take his hands from the controls for even a second. Suddenly Eddie was struck with an idea. “Both of you, your doors have emergency release pins on the hinges. Pull them and let the doors drop away.”
Mercer and the sergeant did what Eddie asked, tugging at the large red handles and kicking the doors outward. More rain surged through the cabin, wild eddies swirling in all directions at once. The wind reached a banshee pitch.
“I can hold it for only a second, and the drop is still gonna be about twenty feet to the tops of the trees, but it’s the best I can do.”
“No way, Eddie,” Mercer shouted. “I’m not leaving you and Collins.”
“Mercer, either we all die in the crash or just maybe I can save the two of you. Don’t take that chance from me, goddamn it.”
Mercer didn’t argue with Eddie’s dying wish. Bracing himself near the open doorway, his clothes rippling and snapping around him, he watched as Eddie brought them to the edge of the forest, just above treetop level. Echoes of the beating rotors kicked back from the hard earth below. On closer inspection, the evergreens were not nearly as dense as he’d first thought. There were huge gaps between many of the trees, and a straight fall from this height would split a man like a dropped sack of cement. He held the MP-5, waiting for Eddie’s signal, one hand clutching the empty door frame as the wind tried to suck him into the void.
“Jump!” Eddie screamed, reining in the chopper to an unsteady hover for an instant. He then turned the JetRanger away so when the rotors hit the trees and flew apart, the fragments wouldn’t slice into Mercer and the sergeant.
The soldier hesitated for a second, not launching himself until the helicopter was already heeled over. The delay threw off his timing and he missed his intended tree, his body falling through space, picking up speed exponentially so that he barreled into the loamy ground at eighty miles an hour. The impact broke his skull, spine, ribs, shoulders, hips, arms, and legs. He was dead before his nervous system could perceive the injuries.
Mercer had been watching Eddie and jumped the moment the African-American opened his yellow-toothed mouth, not waiting to even hear the order. He tumbled only eleven feet before crashing into the topmost branches of a particularly tall tree, the thin boughs grabbing at him as he fell, each impact jarring him mercilessly but nonetheless slowing his descent. He hit the first thick branch with his shoulder, the rough, scaly bark rasping against the layers of his leather jacket.
Downward he plunged, branches whipping him like switches, flaying his hands and face, one catching him in the stomach, knocking the air from his chest, another on the thigh, deadening his entire right leg from groin to toes. The ground rushed at him too fast. Each new contact was a torment, the tree tearing at him like a wild animal even as it saved his life. Finally, after almost forty feet of torture, he fell onto a larger branch. Scrabbling to hook his hands around it, he missed but managed to clutch the next one down, arresting his descent with only six feet to go before he dropped from the tree’s canopy and plummeted to the ground. He hung there, exhausted, one arm and a leg hooked over the bough, dangling like a gibbon, blood dripping from his face and hands.
Then he felt the JetRanger crash, the rotor blades chopping through the tops of nearby trees and then coming apart, spiraling outward like scythes, sending bits of wood and whole branches swirling in their destructive path. A bit of the rotor passed only a foot above Mercer’s position, and rather than chance another close call, he let go, falling the last few feet and landing in a tangled heap.
The helicopter struck the high canopy so violently that the weakened tall boom separated and fell independently, cutting a six-foot gouge in the earth. The rest of the aircraft became enmeshed in the thick branches of several closely packed trees, the fuselage never actually hitting the ground but hanging up nearly twenty feet in the air, swinging precariously as the trees resettled themselves.
Mercer lay on his back. The rainwater that struck him in the face was slightly acidic because of its contact with the spruce tree. It burned his eyes and forced him to turn over. It took a minute for him to gather enough strength to actually stand, moaning as his back and shoulders cracked and popped from the strain they’d just endured. When he heard a clear call for help, he moved quickly, gathering up the machine pistol that had landed next to him and taking off at a fast trot. Torn bits of metal and whole sections of newly cut trees littered the ground.
After only a couple dozen yards he came upon the crushed body of the sergeant. Mercer needed only a quick, gruesome glance to tell that the young soldier had not been the source of the distress call. Continuing on, he came upon the crash site, or more accurately, he stumbled underneath it. Looking up, he could see the main cabin of the JetRanger tangled over his head, the chopper secured by tightly entwined branches. Eddie shouted again and then coughed wetly.
“Eddie, what the hell are you doing up there?” Mercer forced levity into his voice. “Don’t you know when you crash you’re supposed to hit the ground?”