Cliff Ryder - The Finish Line

David felt fingers scrabbling at his torn and bloody sweatshirt as the stunned man slipped farther down. He helped him along by grabbing his wrist and twisting it. Finding the other hand near his mouth, David sank his teeth into the back of it, biting as hard as he could. His opponent shouted in pain, and David tore at the slick, bloody flesh until the fingers released. The hand clawed at his face, but David swung his head so that it couldn't find any purchase. His sweatshirt was peeling away from his body as it came apart under the pressure.

As a last-ditch effort to save himself, the man tried to bring his legs up to wrap around David's waist, but David jackknifed backward to prevent him from cinching around his lower abdomen. The last threads of the sweatshirt tore apart, and the man fell away from David.

David hung there for long seconds, completely exhausted. Now that he had gotten the man off him, there was the complicated matter of trying to get back up into the helicopter. The pressure on his leg was excruciating, the nylon biting deep into his thigh, cutting off the blood supply. If he didn't do something about it quickly, he would end up permanently crippled. Taking a deep breath, David arced up, his fingers straining for the strap. His hand just brushed it, then he fell back again, sending a fresh jolt of pain through his leg and shoulder.

Long seconds passed before he gathered the energy to try again. This time he attempted to get himself rocking back and forth, building up the momentum to make that one desperate lunge to grab the strap. David swung back and forth, going just a bit higher each time. But he tended to swing around in the helicopter's downdraft, which could put him into a dizzying spin and make him miss the grab or, even worse, black out completely. But if he didn't try, David knew he was dead anyway.

He kept going, arcing himself up higher and higher, until with one final burst of energy, he hooked the strap with a white, wind-chilled claw of a finger. He hung there, unsure of what to do next. There was no way he'd be able to haul himself up with one hand…

David looked down, wondering if it might be better to fall rather than succumb to hypothermia, when he saw something very odd indeed. The ground seemed to be rising to meet him.

For a second he thought it was a trick of his vision, some kind of optical illusion, but the landscape below kept growing closer. We're going down, he thought. Sure enough, the helicopter descended to a field near the coast, slowing enough and hovering until it was only a few feet from the ground, then slowly settling to the earth. David managed to avoid the skids of the helicopter, landing and rolling out of the way as it settled into the grass, whipping twigs and debris up all around him. David lay on the ground, trying to claw the strap off his leg, when a shadow fell over him.

"Let me!" The voice sounded odd, clenched somehow, as if the words were spoken through gritted teeth. Someone bent over him, and with a few quick movements, the strap was off his leg. "Come on, let's get you inside!"

He allowed himself to be helped up and into the helicopter, which revved up and took off again. David lay on the floor, looking in disbelief at the orange strap that ran from around the pilot's neck to Maggie's wrist, held taut by her. Her face was a mask of bruised, torn flesh and blood, with one eye swollen completely shut, and her nose squashed into itself, crushed under the pounding she had taken. The way she held her jaw suggested that it had been fractured at the very least.

"Thanks…" he gasped, massaging the numb flesh of his leg with his good arm as he lay on the floor. He thought she might have grinned in response, but it turned into a grimace of pain instead.

"I had to pay you back for saving my life — again." She leaned back against the bench seat, slipped on a pair of headphones and addressed the pilot. "Now, take us to Heathrow, and you get to keep breathing normally."

David tore a strip of his shirt off to make a compress and tried to apply pressure to his arm wound, but he couldn't make his fingers hold on. His vision kept graying out, but he knew he had to stay awake, to make sure she was taken into custody.

"Oh, you're bleeding bad. Here, let me do that." David felt a warm hand on his skin, and firm pressure was applied to his shoulder wound, making him grit his teeth with the pain, and causing the grayness at the edges of his vision to swell into black as he passed out.

The next several hours were a blur for David. He remembered bits and glimpses — being carried from the helicopter…the roof of a fast-moving ambulance…hearing a squeaky, rattling wheel as he was carted through bland, sterile hallways…searing pain as something was done to his shoulder…then merciful blackness again.

He came to with a grunt, half-sitting up in his hospital bed, only to fall back as pain racked his body. His left arm was in a heavy, immobilizing cast, and he felt a thick bandage covering his left side, as well.

Before he could move or speak, a doctor was at his bedside to check on him, along with a nurse.

"Water," he croaked from a dry mouth, which was quickly supplied, the coldest, freshest liquid he ever remembered sliding down his throat. They monitored his vital signs, adjusted the flow of two IVs stuck into his arms and nodded to a short, chestnut-haired, intense-looking woman with gray circles under her piercing gold-green eyes. "You've got a minute, maybe two, then the morphine will kick in again. He needs to rest anyway," the doctor said.

She nodded, the simple action appearing to take more effort than it should. "Leave us."

David stared at her for long seconds, wondering if he should somehow know her, but unsure from where. "Hello."

"Good evening, Mr. Southerland. Glad to see you're still with us."

Regardless of her appearance, her voice was certainly familiar. "Nowhere else I'd rather be — even if I don't know where that is," he said.

She smiled, the simple expression fransforming her face. "Rest assured that you're with friends. My name is Donna Massen, from Primary."

David's brow wrinkled. "Really? The lock word is 'alpine.'"

Her grin turned sly, as she nodded. "Very good. The key word is 'evergreen.' Glad to hear that your training still comes through, even in your current circumstances."

"Which are what and where, exactly?"

"You're in a private hospital that Room 59 keeps available in western England for just such occasions. You've earned a fairly lengthy stay here, due to that shoulder, but they'll have you right and fixed up as soon as possible."

"What about Maggie?"

"We found her with you at the airport. She could have left, although I'm not sure how far she would have gotten, looking as she did. But she didn't. She said she wanted to make sure you were all right. We've taken her in, as well. It's best to keep her out of sight for now, for both the obvious and more subtle reasons. She's going to be fine, even with the number that was done on her."

"Well, if she doesn't know, tell her that the man who did that to her won't ever come after her again. He's splattered over a half acre of Belgium right now."

"I'm sure she'll sleep easier hearing that. They wired her jaw, but she still tries to speak, even while asleep. She mentioned two names — one is Ray, does that mean anything to you?"

David shook his head, the motion making him dizzy, and he leaned back against his pillow. "Maybe a relative?"

"The other name is yours."

He shrugged, wincing at the movement. "We've been through a good deal together. What about the package?"

"It's been recovered. MI-6 are going through it, just to make sure that all is as it should be. Still, we'll keep our Web crawlers busy for the next couple of weeks, just to make sure that nothing was leaked."