David Morrell - First Blood

The rocks below distorted huge, attracting him, as though he were leaning closer and closer into their image in a magnifying glass, and he tried to pretend this was merely like an exercise at jump school. It was not though, merely like an exercise at jump school. It was not though, and as he listened to the dogs, the helicopter droning near, he quickened his descent, hanging to the limit of his reach, taking less care to test his foot holds, sweat dribbling itchy down his cheeks, accumulating tremulously on his lips and chin. Before, when he had heard the copter as he ran across the field of grass toward the cover of the fallen pine tree, the sound of its approach had been like a solid force that was pushing him. But here, now, restricted, slow in spite of his haste, he felt its growing roar as a slippery thing that was inching up from the small of his back, heavier the higher it came. When the thing leeched up to the base of his skull, he glanced over toward the sky behind him and clung motionless to the wall, the helicopter enlarging rapidly over the trees, bearing toward this cliff. His outside wool shirt was red against the gray of stone; he prayed the gunman would somehow fail to see it.

But he knew that the gunman would have to see it.

His fingers were dug bleeding into a slit in the cliff. The toes of his shoes were pressed hard onto an inch-wide ledge; his throat shuddered involuntarily as one shoe slipped off the ledge. The close whack of the bullet into the cliff by his right shoulder dazed him, and so startled that he almost lost his grip, shaking his head to clear it, he began groping frantically down.

He managed only three more toe holds and then there were no more. Ca-rang! the second bullet ricocheted off the rock, striking higher, nearer to his head, startling him as much as the first one, and he knew he was as good as dead. The jiggle of the copter was all that had saved him from being hit so far: it was throwing off the gunman's aim, and the pilot was bringing on the copter fast, which made the jiggle worse, but it would not be long before the pilot understood and held the copter steady. His arms and legs trembling from the strain, he grasped down for a handhold and then another and then let down his feet, taking a chance, dangling again, scraping the cliff with his shoes for something, anything, to step onto.

But there wasn't anything. He hung by his bleeding fingers, and the helicopter swooped toward him like some grotesque dragonfly, and sweet Jesus, keep that damn thing moving, don't let it hang still so he can get a decent shot. Ca-rang! Chips of stone and molten bullet ripped burning into the side of his face. He peered at the rocks a hundred feet below. Sweat stinging his eyes, he barely made out a lush fir tree that rose up toward him, its top branches maybe ten feet under him. Or fifteen, or twenty: he had no chance to figure.

The helicopter looming huge, wind from the rotors rushing over him, he aimed his body at the top of the tree and let loose his pulpy fingers and dropped. His stomach gushed up, his throat expanded in the sudden emptiness, and it was so long, so endless before he slammed past the first branches, plummeted through the clutching boughs, cracked to a stop against a stout limb.

Absolutely numb.

He could not breathe. He gasped, and pain flooded his body; his chest throbbed sharply, and his back, and he was certain he had been shot.

But he hadn't, and the din of the copter above the tree and the slash of a bullet through the branches got him moving. He was high in the tree. His rifle was still between his belt and his pants but the impact when he hit had rammed it violently against his side, half-paralyzing him. In agony, forcing his arm to bend, he clutched the gun and tugged, but it would not come. Above, the helicopter was circling, returning for another shot, and he was tugging at the gun, wrenching it free, the release so strong that the branch he was on started swaying. He slipped off balance, scraping his thigh along sharp bark, desperately hooking his arm around the branch above him. It made a crack; he quit breathing. If it broke, it would send him falling outward past the ends of the boughs down onto the rocks deep below. The branch made one more crack before it held firm, and he breathed again.

But the sound from the copter was different now. Constant. Steady. The pilot was getting the idea, keeping it still. Rambo didn't know if they could see him in the tree or not, but that didn't matter much — the area at the top of the tree was so small that if the gunman sprayed it with bullets he was sure to be hit. He didn't have time to switch to a stronger branch; the next bullet might finish him. Hurried, desperate, he pushed away needles and light boughs and sought where the helicopter hung there whipping in the air.

Across from him. A house distance high. And craning his head out the open cockpit window was the gunman. Rambo saw his round, big-nosed face quite clearly as the man prepared to fire once more; a glance was all Rambo needed. In one smooth instinctive motion, he raised his gun barrel to the branch above him, steadied it there, and aimed out along it at the center of the round face, at the tip of the big nose.

A gentle squeeze on the trigger. Bull's-eye.

Inside the cockpit the gunman clutched his sunken face.

He was dead before he had a chance to open his mouth and scream. There was a moment when the pilot went on holding the helicopter steady like nothing had happened, and then at once Rambo saw through the glass front of the cockpit how it registered on the man that there were bits of bone and hair and brain everywhere, that the top of his partner's head was gone. Rambo saw him gape down in horror at the blood that was spattered across his shirt and pants. The man's eyes went wide; his mouth convulsed. The next thing he was fumbling with his seat belt, clutching his throttle stick crazily as he dove to the cockpit floor.

Rambo was trying to get a shot at him from the tree. He could not see the pilot, but he had a fair idea where the man would be huddled on the floor, and he was just aiming at that part of the floor when the helicopter veered sharply up the cliff. Its top section cleared the ridge nicely, but the angle of the copter was so steep that the rear section caught on the edge of the cliff. In the roar of the motor, he thought he heard a metallic crack when the rear section struck: he could not be certain. The copter seemed interminably suspended there, and then with an abrupt flip over backward, it plunged down directly against the cliff wall, screeching, cracking, blades bending and breaking as the explosion came, a deafening ball of fire and zing of metal that flashed up past the tree and died. The outer branches of the tree burst into flame. A stench rose up of gasoline and burning flesh.

Straight-off Rambo was on the move, scrambling down the tree. The branches were too thick. He had to circle the trunk to find where he could squeeze down. The dogs were barking louder, fiercer now, as if they were past the barricade up onto the ridge. That boulder should have taken longer to clear away; he couldn't understand how Teasle and the posse had climbed up so fast. He held tightly to his rifle, scraping down past the branches, through the pointed needles pricking at his hands and face. His chest was throbbing from his drop into the tree — it hurt like some ribs were cracked or broken, but he couldn't let that bother him. The dogs were yelping closer; he had to climb down faster, twisting, sliding. His outside wool shirt caught on a branch and he ripped it loose. Faster. Those sonofabitch dogs. He had to go faster.

Near the bottom he reached thick black smoke that choked his lungs, and saw indistinctly through it the twisted wreck of the helicopter burning and crackling. Twenty feet from the bottom he could not climb down any farther: there were no more branches. He couldn't spread his arms around the trunk and shinny down: it was too wide. Jump. No other way. The dogs yelping up on top, he checked the rocks and boulders underneath him and chose a spot where dirt and silt and dry brown needles were gathered in a pocket between the rocks, and without realizing, smiled — this sort of thing was what he had been trained to do — the weeks of leaping from towers at parachute school. Holding his rifle, he grabbed the last bough with his free hand and eased down hanging and dropped. And struck the ground perfectly. His knees buckled just right and he slumped and rolled just right and came to his feet as properly as he had done a thousand times before. It wasn't until he left the choking smoke around the shelter of the tree and scurried over the rocks that the pain in his chest got worse. Much worse. And the smile disappeared. Christ, I'm going to lose.