“You’re strong for a little guy, Liu.”
“He’s conscious,” said Liu, holding the man in front of him as if he were displaying a piece of meat.
Powder clambered up onto the helicopter. The aircraft slid a lot this time. “Damn,” he said, grabbing the copilot.
“I’m okay,” grumbled the man. “I can walk myself.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Powder, ignoring him. He turned to get off the helicopter, then noticed something peculiar — though the Pave Low had moved several times, it hadn’t pushed up any snow in front of it as it slid.
“That’s because the whole sheet of ice is moving,” explained Liu before ducking back inside the craft.
“Damn,” said Powder. “Damn, damn, damn.”
He helped the copilot back to the rock, then ran to Liu. The wind rattled the helicopter propeller back and forth. Powder heard a low rumble, as if a train were approaching from the distance.
“Liu! What the hell are you doing in there?”
“If we use this spar as a lever,” Liu answered from inside the cockpit, “maybe we can move the wall away.”
“The whole thing is moving,” said Powder. “Feel it?”
“Quickly then.”
“Shit.” Talcom squeezed around Liu to push his legs into the small opening to the rear of the helo. There was a loud groan from outside as he did.
“Hope that was the Abominable Snowman,” he said.
“Ice is giving way,” said Brautman.
Powder wedged his foot against the metal side of the helicopter and tried levering the piece of spar in the opposite direction. As he did, Liu dropped the flashlight.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Brautman told them. “Go.”
“Now who’s using bad words?” said Powder. The helicopter or the ice it was on slid downward, and he felt an empty impotence in his stomach.
“Screw this horseshit!” Talcom yelled, jamming his boots against the metal.
It snapped away, springing back as the door released from its latch. Snow and sleet and ice and rain fell through, twinkling artistically in the dim flare-light. None of them stopped to admire it — Brautman pulled himself upward through the hole, helped by Liu, who was outside. The flight engineer’s leg trailed behind him at an odd angle, and Powder felt a twinge in his stomach, thinking of how the damn thing must feel.
The twinge was replaced by full-scale nausea as the helicopter jerked hard to his left, starting to ride down the incline. It had finally slipped on the ice — which also shifted in its own direction.
“Get the hell out of here! Go!” Powder shouted. He’d started to push himself upward when he saw something moving beneath the twisted metal where the snow was falling.
Dalton, still strapped to the stretcher.
Chapter 52
Hawk Three knifed through the turbulence, accelerating toward the jagged, snow-laden peaks where the Pave Low had disappeared. While the flight computer could cope with the strong vortices of wind easily enough, there was little it could do about the ice trying to freeze on the wings. The lower and slower Zen went — and to do the search properly, he had to go low and slow — the more precipitation clung to the control surfaces. While not enough to keep the plane from flying, it added considerably to the difficulty factor in the swirling winds near the crags.
“Sector Alpha-Baker-1 is clear,” said Jennifer Gleason, who’d volunteered to come along and help monitor the scans. Major Cheshire had bumped Bree’s copilot and was at the stick; Bree had slid over to the second officer’s seat and was also studying the feeds.
“Alpha-Baker-2 is also clear,” snapped Breanna. Both women were examining the IR video from Hawk Four, which was being flown entirely by the computer through a ravine at the very northern edge of the search area. The weather there was not as severe and the terrain not as twisted as the area Zen was working himself further southwest.
Hawk Three hit a patch of clear air and shot forward as if her engine had ingested pure oxygen. Zen steadied his left joystick, glancing at the vital signs projected at the lower edge of the visor. Everything was in the green.
His attention back on the main screen, he saw a dull shadow at the edge of the approaching valley, below a triple-dagger peak. It wasn’t warm enough to be a body, but since it was the first non-rock he’d seen, he switched from the IR to the optical feed.
“Computer, zoom in the dark object at the bottom of Hawk Three’s visual feed,” Zen directed.
The computer formed a box around the image, which seemed to burst into the middle of his view screen.
Ejection seat.
“Mark location,” said Jeff.
“What do you have?” Jennifer asked over the interphone. “Jeff?” said Bree.
“Excuse me. Are you manning your scans?” he snapped. “Affirmative, Hawk Leader,” answered Bree testily. Jennifer said nothing.
“Raven, I have a piece of the seat, I think, from the Boeing,” Jeff said, technically speaking to Cheshire though they could all hear him. “I’ve marked it. I’ll continue to sweep the sector. Hawk Four is going to stay in the pattern we planned.”
“Raven Leader acknowledges,” said the pilot. Although Jeff was actually sitting a few feet below Cheshire on Raven’s lower deck, they had found it easier to communicate as if flying separate planes — which, of course, they were.
Zen pushed Hawk Three to the south, dropping her lower to scan close to a W-shaped ravine at the edge of a shallow mountain plateau. The severe storm shortened the IR’s range considerably, though from a technical viewpoint the fact that he was even receiving an image was impressive. Even light rain played havoc with conventional FUR systems.
As he neared the end of the ravine, a small shadow flickered into the upper right-hand corner of the view screen. He was by it before he could ask for a magnification; he pulled back on the Flighthawk’s joystick, then felt the plane fluttering in the heavy wind.
“Disconnect in zero-three,” warned the computer. The storm and jagged terrain degraded the link between the Hawk and its mother.
“Raven, I need you closer to Three,” snapped Jeff. He started to pull up, but saw something in the IR screen at the right-hand corner. He pushed toward it, despite the disconnect warning that flashed in the screen.
“Disconnect in zero-three, two—”
Zen managed to nudge the U/MF upward at the last second, retaining the data flow. But the storm whipped hard against the small plane’s wings. It pushed up and then down, yawing like a gum wrapper tossed from a car. Even with the assistance of the computer and the vectoring nozzles, Zen couldn’t get it where he wanted.
“Raven, lower,” he demanded.
“You want me to park on Mount Whitney?” snapped Cheshire.
“That’s too high.” He just missed a ravine wall as he tried to slide Hawk Three back toward the ridge where he’d seen the image. Hawk Three hugged the hillside, her altimeter nudging six thousand feet — half the altitude Raven needed to clear the surrounding peaks. This was too damn low for comfort, and even C3 began doing a Bitchin’ Betty routine, warning that he was going too low and too slow. Still, the only way to get a good view was to practically crawl across the terrain. Hawk Three’s forward airspeed nudged below ninety knots.
Stall warning. But something hot, real hot, filled the screen. Above — up. Jeff throttled and pushed the stick, climbing the side of the ridge.
“Disconnect in zero-three.”
“Nancy! Closer!”
“We’re trying, Zen!”