The ground falls away into a steep, heavily forested valley. The tree line rushes upward at terrifying speed. Green and white blur together in the side windows.
Fifty seconds.
"Pull up," Santi commands. His low voice cuts through the shrieking wind with absolute authority.
“I’m pulling!” I shout back, my biceps burning as I haul the cyclic toward my chest.
Thirty seconds.
The tops of the pine trees scrape the bottom of the fuselage. The sound is horrific—a violent, tearing screech of wood against aluminum. The helicopter shudders massively, the impact throwing me forward against my harness. The straps dig into my collarbones, bruising the flesh instantly.
Twenty seconds.
"Hold it steady," he commands.
He is not looking out the window. He is looking at me. The gold watch on his wrist gleams as he grips the edge of the console.
Ten seconds.
The tail boom clips a massive pine trunk.
The metal tears away with an explosive crack. The helicopter snaps violently to the right, entering a terrifying, uncontrollable spin. The horizon tilts into a sickening diagonal line.
Five seconds.
The world turns into a violent blender of shattered glass, twisting metal, and the crushing impact of the earth rising up to swallow us whole.
The noise is apocalyptic. The cabin crunches inward. The windshield shatters, spraying the cockpit with freezing glass and black oil.
Then, everything goes violently black.
2
Santi
The sudden lackof combustion is deafening. The right engine failed minutes ago. Now the left engine chokes out, leaving the helicopter a dead weight beneath the storm. The canvas of my shoulder strap digs into my collarbone as gravity takes command of the airframe.
The forest canopy rushes upward to meet the glass. The sheer velocity makes the terrain blur into a solid wall of ice and wood. The wind howls through the hairline fractures forming in the windshield. The temperature inside the cabin plummets instantly. The smell of burning oil and electrical wire fills the tight space.
Reese holds back a scream.
She wrestles the cyclic with brutal efficiency. One hand works the collective while her boots fight the pedals, forcing the helicopter to obey for a few more seconds. Her arms strain, tendons standing out starkly beneath her skin. She fights the descent, wrestling a two-ton coffin away from a sheer granite cliff and aiming us toward the only patch of dense timber that might cushion the impact.
I watch every micro-adjustment she makes from the co-pilot seat, still and strapped in beside her, as she defies death.
Before the engines choked, my mind was anchored three states away. I was locked inside the fortified walls of the Costa compound in Chicago. The compound holds more women than it used to. The fortress my brothers built out of grief smells of bread and perfume and gun oil. The basement war room. The glowing screens. The dead man's signature on the financial ledger. The intelligence file held the key to the operation, but that problem belongs to another day. Survival eclipses betrayal.
The nose of the helicopter clips the first enormous pine.
The tree snaps like a dry matchstick. The sound is deafening. Wood splinters and tears through the aluminum hull. The helicopter yaws hard to the right. Reese corrects the spin with a full-body pull on the controls. We hit the second tree. Then the third. The tail boom shears away.
The world turns upside down into a blender of snow, splintering glass, and shrieking metal.
The fuselage slams into the earth. The impact is a brutal, bone-shattering collision of momentum and solid rock. The safety harness bites into my shoulder. My head snaps forward. Darkness edges my vision. The cabin rolls violently through the deep snow, crushing brush and snapping small trunks until the battered metal tube finally slams to a halt against a massive boulder.
The ringing in my ears is the only sound.
It is the kind of quiet that follows a slaughter. Slowly, it fades, replaced by the hiss of hot metal melting the deep snow packed against the smashed windows.
