Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Too late. Dar’s airspeed was approaching the sailplane’s terminal velocity. For a precious few seconds, he could match the chopper’s airspeed. He did so, attacking the right rear flank of the white-blue-and-red chopper as if the shaking, bucking Twin Astir were a P-51 coming in for the kill. Of course, Syd could not fire forward because of the canopy, and if she waited until they were close to the chopper and alongside it, Constanza’s semiautomatic assault rifle would cut them to pieces. Neither aircraft offered a stable gun platform, but at least Dallas Trace’s ex-mafia hit man had the advantage of being able to spray bullets all over the sky.

Dar was not going to give him that chance again.

What do we have that they don’t? he thought again for the twentieth time. And for the twentieth time he came up with the same answer. Parachutes. Of course, his parachute might have been cut to shreds by the bullet that had passed under him. He would find out.

What glider pilots fear more than anything else is a midair collision. Now he had to cause one.

Dar, Syd, and their fragile, wounded Twin Astir swooped from above—the sparrow attacking the hawk. If he continued on this glide path, he would overtake the chopper for an instant just as they flew into the fifty-foot buzz saw of the rotor blades. That would be fatal for everyone. At the last second, Dar dropped the nose of the Twin Astir, opened his speed brakes, matched velocities as best he could, and banked left.

The glider’s left wing banged against the protected rotor assembly. Part of the wing cracked and bent.

Dar kicked hard right, fighting the stick and rudders. He had perhaps three more seconds of control.

The sailplane slewed left again. This time the torn wing threaded the rotor assembly like a plank of wood going into the hungry maw of a circular saw. The rotor blade made contact with the wing, sliced through it, chewed up chunks of the wing, and then began to tear itself and its jammed rotor assembly apart.

Responding to Newtonian imperatives, the glider was spun violently counterclockwise and tumbled into a flat spin. Dar knew that no pilot in the world could recover from such a flat spin. The sailplane, a work of aerodynamic perfection a few minutes earlier, was now just tangled junk falling straight out of the sky. Dar lost sight of the helicopter and tried to focus on the instruments, but between the bullets that had passed through the console and the rate of deadly spin, he saw nothing intelligible. The horizon, mountains, ridges, desert, were spinning by at unbelievable speed, but because Dar and Syd were still in the center of the swirling mass, there was very little sense of centrifugal force. Dar had no idea whether they were three thousand feet high or thirty feet above the impact point. There was no noise except for ice-cracking sounds as the left wing continued to break up.

Syd was wrestling with the canopy lock, but it seemed to be jammed. Dar slammed his five-point-harness buckle free, shook off the straps, and stood in the wildly spinning plane. He knew that they just had seconds in which to act because already the spin was turning into a tumble in the direction of the shattered wing. He leaned over Syd’s left shoulder and threw his weight against the second canopy latch. The broken Plexiglas flew open and suddenly the wind was cool and rushing against Dar’s face and upper body, trying to pluck him up and out of the little cockpit. He held on to the low instrument console in front of him while he leaned forward to help Syd get free of her harness.

“No, not those straps!” he shouted over the wind as she continued, wildly, to unbuckle and uncinch. “That’s your parachute.”

She stopped and stood. He saw that she had taken time to shove the pistol back in her belt holster and to secure the strap over it.

He grabbed her right hand where it clutched the edge of the cockpit. “Jump when I count to two,” he shouted. “Push hard against the fuselage…We have to get clear! One…two!”

They hurtled into space. For a second Dar saw Syd’s arms go out like wings and his blood ran cold as he wondered if she would forget to pull the rip cord. But she was just diving away from the wreckage—the Twin Astir had now started tumbling about its axis and had turned into a huge eggbeater thirty feet behind them—and several seconds later he saw her sport chute blossom. He pulled his rip cord a second later.

Only after the spine-jarring shaking of the canopy opening did Dar look up. He saw no holes in the fabric, no torn risers. His hands went to the riser controls and he spun the chute around just as he heard the noise of the Bell Ranger’s descent toward them. If the pilot had kept control of the helicopter, Dar knew he and Syd were dead.

But the helicopter was not under power or control—at least not under much control. The vertical tail rotor blade was essentially gone, and what was left of it was chewing up the rotor assembly in great gulps. The pilot had cut the engine—which appeared to be smoking, perhaps from one of Syd’s wild shots, more likely from chunks of shrapnel thrown forward from the runaway tail rotor—and was trying to autorotate down to safety, allowing the freewheeling main rotors to give them enough lift to survive a crash landing.

The helicopter was headed straight for Syd and him.

It took only an instant for Dar to realize that this was not another murder attempt. He was sure that the pilot did not want a second collision—especially with bodies and parachute fabric fouling up his rotors—but there was very little the pilot could do but ride the autorotating helicopter down in its mad death spiral toward the ground.

There was a noise above and behind him and Dar twisted in his harness to look. He realized then that whether he was destined to live another thirty seconds or another fifty years, he would never forget the image he saw then.

Syd had taken her hands off the riser controls and had the 9mm semiautomatic held firmly in both hands. Her legs were apart in the proper shooting stance—just a thousand feet too high—and she was emptying the Sig’s entire second clip into the Plexiglas windshield of the Bell Ranger.

The helicopter missed Dar, but not by so much that he did not literally pull his legs up to avoid the rush of the rotors. Then the heavy machine continued to spiral down faster and faster.

Syd’s pistol had locked open. Dar watched her drop the empty magazine, pull the last one from her belt, and slap it into place, even as her orange-and-white parachute swirled her around in spirals above him. She was just a bit too far away for shouting, so all that Dar could do was point toward the risers, pull on the right one to spill enough air to send him dipping and spiraling in that direction, and then point to an open meadow area.

Syd nodded, holstered the weapon, and began tugging her riser D-rings, attempting to follow Dar into the clearing. Then both of them quit struggling and watched the Bell Ranger’s last seconds four hundred feet below them.

The pilot was good, but not quite good enough. A helicopter in autorotation is essentially so much dead weight controlled by a mostly dead stick, but the pilot managed to time the death spiral so he missed the trees and came around into a clearing and lined up, more or less, with the thirty-degree slope. If Dar had been piloting a sailplane, he would have followed the rules for off-field glider landings and attempted to land going uphill, both to reduce his roll-out and to use the last bit of lift the hillside offered. But the hillside offered nothing to the massive Bell Ranger, and the pilot had no choice but to land headed downhill, at a good clip, and let the skids slide along the ground like the runners on a bobsled.