Soon the peak was rearing directly before us, and as Skidder continued hurtling toward it, I felt my fingers digging into my thighs. I’d thought that the deputy had pushed his luck — as well as the envelope of flight and the boundaries of sanity — when he’d hovered the sheriff’s helicopter a stone’s throw from the burning aircraft wreckage. Today, in the helpful light of hindsight, that maneuver seemed comparatively tame: Skidder was now aiming our flying egg toward a small rock shelf jutting from the mountainside, just below the crash site. As the spinning rotor edged closer and closer to the trees and boulders, I found myself clenching the sides of my seat. Afraid of looking, but terrified of closing my eyes, I focused my gaze out the left side of the canopy, where the hazards lay slightly farther away. “Looks like a mighty tight fit here,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt.
“Skidder could do a backflip and set us down on that spot,” said Mrs. Janus. “Those helicopter chase scenes you see in Hollywood movies? Skidder does the flying for some of those.”
I spoke before I thought. “You mean the ones where the chopper collides with a train — or a tumbling car or a motorcycle — and then explodes?”
“Don’t forget the one where the chopper gets taken down by a bow and arrow,” Skidder said. “Rambo Three. Or by a squadron of fierce flamingos—Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.” I felt the skids settle onto the rock, and he shut down the engine.
“Nice,” I said, my admiration exceeded only by my relief.
The last time I’d seen the crash site — the day we’d hoisted the Citation’s flattened nose off the rock face, revealing the crushed corpses of the Mexican and the mountain lion — the place had been bustling, still swarming with people and vehicles from the FBI, the sheriff’s office, the fire department, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Transportation Safety Board. Now, as I stepped out onto silent scorched earth, the place seemed out of kilter and surreal, as if its transformation back to wilderness were not just implausible, but somehow unnatural.
Carmelita Janus called to me from the helicopter’s cabin. “How can we help, Dr. Brockton?”
“Let me take a look around first,” I said. “I need to get my bearings again. Get my head back in the game.”
“We’ll sit tight,” said Skidder. “Just holler when you need us.”
As I surveyed the vertical bluff, some thirty yards upslope from where we had landed, I conjured up a mental image of the debris field as it had been the first day after the crash, with pieces of engine cowling and wingtips strewn across the narrowing valley, the shredded rubble of the fuselage still smoldering. As I picked my way up the rocky slope, I replayed the excavation, fast-forwarding through three days of digging in just three minutes.
Nearing the base of the bluff, I began to glimpse remnants of wreckage amid the rocks: shards that would have required weeks of tedious tweezering to pluck from their nooks and crannies and crevices. I found the presence of these fragments strangely comforting — confirmation, perhaps, that I was indeed in the right place; reassurance that I hadn’t just imagined the entire episode.
For some reason — perhaps a continuation of my earlier sensation of being a human projectile aimed at the mountainside — I felt drawn to the impact’s epicenter, the broad, shallow crater created by the jet’s missilelike strike. During the excavation, we’d spent three days crouching and stooping beneath that crater, picking our way steadily down, down, down, until we’d cleared the rubble and reached bare rock at the base of the bluff. Now, as I approached, I found myself looking up, not down: up at the wide, shallow crater; up at the still-fresh fractures radiating outward, like some gigantic spider’s web etched into the stone above my head. And in one of those fractures, I caught a glimpse of something — of several small somethings, in fact — that called out for a closer look, and a climb.
Years before — for my forty-fifth birthday, when Kathleen had decided that I was sliding into some sort of midlife rut — she’d given me a weekend of instruction at a rock-climbing school in the mountains of North Carolina. The lessons hadn’t transformed me into Spider-Man by any stretch of the imagination, but they had shown me how to find toeholds on surprisingly small ledges, and how to jam a few fingers or cram a whole fist into a crack, twisting it to lock it into place and to create a powerful handhold — one that was “bombproof,” as my instructor liked to say. Now, standing at the base of the cliff, I studied it from a fresh perspective: sizing it up not as a forensic scientist, but as a climber. I noticed a half-dozen or so small, blocky bumps zigzagging upward — a simple ascent for a serious climber, though not for a rank, rusty amateur like me. But the crash itself had worked in my favor, I realized: Besides creating new cracks and sharp edges in the rock, the impact had subtly altered the angle of the rock face. The lower half of the crater was no longer absolutely vertical, but — because of its concavity — only relatively vertical now. If I was lucky, that subtle difference in geometry might just be enough. Might.
Reaching overhead, I hooked my fingertips over two bumps in the rock. Then I took a small step up with my right foot, and a bigger step with my left, stretching wide and splaying myself against the rock. I clawed higher with my left hand, then raised my right foot, feeling for a foothold that had looked within reach but that suddenly seemed to elude me. Again and again I scrabbled — with my toes, with the side of my foot, with my toes again — seeking but not finding purchase. The muscles in my hands and forearms began to tremble and shriek, and just as I finally found the foothold I needed, my grip failed, my fingers loosened, and I felt myself toppling backward. In that instant — the instant when I realized I was falling — I had just enough time to recall the last person who had fallen to the base of this cliff: a supremely jinxed man who had jumped from the frying pan of Mexico’s hardships and fallen straight into the combined fires of perilous terrain, a powerful predator, and a hurtling jet.
My descent ended not in a bone-breaking thud onto rocks, but in an unexpected embrace, of sorts: Skidder, to my surprise, was there to catch me, sort of, or at least slow my fall. “Damn, Doc,” he grunted as I half slid, half staggered to my feet in front of him. “What the hell you doing? I thought I was the only crazy stuntman around here.”
Carmelita Janus was hurrying toward us. “My God, Dr. Brockton, are you hurt?”
“Just my pride,” I said. “I was trying to get a closer look at something up there. Probably nothing, but seemed worth checking out.”
“I don’t think you should try it alone,” she said. “Let us help you. Please.”
Reluctantly — ashamed of my clumsiness and weakness — I assented. Skidder interlaced his fingers to create a stirrup for my right foot, hoisting it as high as his waist. As I raised my left foot, feeling for a toehold, Carmelita Janus grabbed my shoe and guided it to a ledge I had not noticed. Then Skidder did the same with my right foot — angling it into a niche that was as high as his head — and after one more step with my left foot, this time unaided, I reached a stable, sustainable position, my feet secure, my fists wedged into cracks that would hold me with virtually no effort required. “That’s about as high as we can get you, Doc,” Skidder said.
“It’s as high as I need to be.” I felt a second wave of adrenaline kicking in, and this one was not from my fall or my fear.