“The blast will also knock you out of the sky.” King felt Queen grip his arm. She couldn’t hear what Bishop was saying, but evidently she grasped his intent.
“That’s why it makes more sense for me to do this alone,” Bishop said in an unnaturally calm voice. “No sense in all of us getting killed.”
King felt numb. He wanted to argue with Bishop, tell him that he had a better idea, a strategy that would let them win without such a sacrifice. He considered ordering Bishop to return so that he could go instead. He didn’t have Bishop’s familiarity with the helicopter, but maybe Deep Blue could talk him through it.
I didn’t fight my way across three millennia so Bishop could die on the next big mission.
Even as denial and helplessness raged within him, King realized that he had been wrong. His obsession with protecting his friends had overshadowed what should have been his real purpose: to help them give their lives meaning.
Bishop was about to risk his life to save two million people, and perhaps — if Felice’s estimates were correct — the whole world.
King couldn’t think of anything more meaningful than that. He swallowed down the emotion that was thick in his throat, and whispered, “Godspeed, Erik.”
54
Bishop saw the woman in the Zodiac waving an object over her head. The warning was clear: back off or I’ll blow us all to hell. He looked past her and spotted the familiar olive-drab cylinder of the backpack nuke. The sight filled him with a sense of relief. Favreau hadn’t deployed it yet. If she blew the bomb now, only she and Bishop would die.
“Do it,” he murmured. “Save me the trouble.”
Her wave-off became more frantic, and Bishop knew that what he had to do needed to be done quickly. He eased back on the cyclic, allowing the helicopter’s forward momentum to take it the rest of the way, and used the rudder to maneuver to a stop directly over the little boat. He spun the Mil around until he could just see her through the transparent bubble window beneath his feet. Then, with the same calm detachment that had gotten him this far, he twisted the collective-pitch control, flattening the rotor blades.
The helicopter dropped like a stone and Bishop closed his eyes, waiting for the brilliant light that would—
There was a cacophony of metal crunching and shearing apart, bulkheads twisting, the rotor blades snapping off their axle. The Mil jolted violently and Bishop felt the flight seat collapse beneath him. A spike of pain shot up his spine as he was driven straight down by the sudden stop. His head snapped forward, glancing off the cyclic control stick, and the taste of blood filled his mouth, as his teeth were slammed together, removing a small piece of tongue. The impact left him momentarily stunned, but as that moment gave way to the next and then another, he knew that he had failed.
The bomb had not detonated.
It seemed impossible that Favreau could have avoided the crash without inadvertently releasing her grip on the trigger.
Was the bomb a dud after all? He couldn’t take that chance.
Wracked by pain, Bishop hauled himself up. In that instant, the helicopter started to roll beneath him, and he was thrown sideways into a bulkhead. As he struggled to move again, a wave of cold water blasted him back.
The calm that had guided him through what he had expected to be the last few seconds of his life fell into ruin, as agony and desperation reawakened the beast within.
He pulled himself out of the cockpit and into the half-submerged cabin. Water streamed in through dozens of cracks in the fuselage, but most of it was rising up through the sliding door, which had buckled inward upon impact. The pressure change in his ears told him that the helicopter was already sinking.
Bishop plunged both hands into the water and found the bent metal door. With a heave, he wrenched it out of its track and pitched it aside, then dove down into the water. He kicked away from the submerged aircraft and followed the line of bubbles trailing away from it, clawing his way back to the surface.
The Zodiac floated just a few yards away. The impact of the falling helicopter had evidently caused it to squirt free, like a bean from its husk.
While his kamikaze dive had not quite had the expected effect, it had done significant damage to the rigid-hulled inflatable craft. Though it was still afloat, several of its inner tube-like air cells had collapsed, allowing the lake to pour in.
As Bishop stared at the Zodiac, incredulous, he saw a hand appear on its far side, gripping the air bladder. Another hand fell beside it, and then a bedraggled Monique Favreau hauled herself up and out of the water.
Bishop saw that her hands were empty. She had lost the dead-man trigger in the crash, but the bomb had not detonated.
The bomb.
Bishop’s gaze fell on the canvas pack, still nestled inside the boat, held in place by its own weight. Favreau looked at it, too. Then she saw Bishop.
When their eyes met, her dazed expression hardened into a mask of triumph, and then with deliberate glee, she wrapped her arms around the bomb and lifted it onto the inflatable gunwale. It seemed to hang there for a moment, wobbling indecisively, as if trying to find a balancing point. Bishop waited for Favreau to warn him off with some kind of threat, but she had nothing to say. Instead, she gave it a final shove and sent it plunging into the depths.
Bishop, driven more by feral instinct than rational decision, slid beneath the surface and dove after it. With the water blurring the image projected against his retinas, it took him a moment to locate the olive-drab cylinder, sinking steadily toward the lake bottom. He pulled himself deeper, kicking his legs with the desperate ferocity of an animal fleeing a wildfire — only Bishop was chasing the very thing that would bring the flames.
And somehow, he caught it.
The pressure of the water squeezed his head like a vise, but he gritted his teeth through it and wrapped his arms around the sinking object as if, by simply seizing hold of it, he would fix everything.
There has to be a timer. The thought seemed to come from somewhere beyond him, and for a fleeting instant, he thought it was King, guiding him through what he had to do next. Radio signals don’t travel through water. She must have replaced the dead-man switch with a timer. Or some kind of automatic trigger. You have to disable it.
His head felt like it was going to implode, and his blood was starting to seethe with the buildup of acidic carbon dioxide. Even though he was no longer swimming, the bomb itself was dragging him deeper.
I’ve got to get it back to the surface, he thought, and he spun his burden around so that he and it were aimed upward.
But even with his tremendous strength augmented by primal rage, Bishop could not overcome the laws of physics. His furious kicking slowed the downward plunge, but he could not reverse it.
The timer, repeated the voice. That’s the only thing that matters.
He stopped struggling and instead reached for one of the clips that held the canvas flap in place. It fell away to reveal a red LED display — numbers, but inexplicably they were counting up.
101… 102…
It wasn’t a timer at all. It was a depth-gauge, ticking off the feet as it sought out the bottom of the lake.
He had no idea how to disable it, and no time to figure out.
Think. A depth gauge means it’s set to blow when it reaches a certain depth. So don’t let it do that.