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They were losing power. It felt like the main rotor blades were drooping.
They were going down.
Without thinking, his left hand twisted the throttle, yanked the collective arm upward, until it was angled as high off the floor as he could pull. The other turbine strained to keep up, whining, growling, screaming. He eyeballed its temperature gauge as the needle snuck into the red. If they lost the Number One engine here above the bridge like this, rotor blades catching in the bridge piping above these people, it was all over.
No way! Got to get it restarted in the air!
He’d been running the right engine off the rear tank, the left engine off the front. He hit the boost switches. Too late for that. Its flame was already out. The rotor continued to lose RPMs.
And then Everon felt the automatic stabilizer system drop out too.
The Pelican rocked in the air, her controls suddenly super-sensitive. Overhead a chip light from the rear crankcase illuminated. He knew what that was. Pieces of metal getting inside the gearbox. This thing is more of a mess than I realized. We shouldn’t even be in the air!
Down below, Franklin watched with a kind of detached fatalistic awe, the helicopter slowly descending on top of him.
He didn’t even have time to move.
Everon glanced at Clarence in the left seat and pointed upward with his chin. “Hit that switch!”
“Which one?” Clarence gulped.
“The one marked right engine boost pump, front tank!”
Clarence flipped it.
“Move that lever,” Everon pointed with his eyes to the overhead console. “Twist it! From left tank — to crossfeed — the right engine.”
Clarence moved the lever to the first notch.
“One more!”
The newspaper vendor twisted the black lever all the way over.
“Now this one here,” Everon nosed, “the speed selector lever — to SHUTOFF.”
He waited a few moments, licked his lips. “Okay, push the start button on Turbine Two.”
“Here?” Clarence asked.
“HIT IT!”
Clarence pushed. Nothing.
In back, the transit engineer crossed his fingers in front of himself. The Russians joined him, making the sign of the cross.
Then they all felt it. A vibration.
Everon glanced at the gauge for Turbine Two. The needle jumped. It was restarting. As the rotor’s torque increased, the blades felt springier. As the right turbine spun up, he felt a power surge.
They climbed.
Franklin’s senses were overwhelmed by the screams of people falling off the sides of the bridge now, screams of people smashed against tractor-trailers, legs and bodies forced against cars, breaking glass, crumpling metal.
He was kneeling on top of the silver trailer, trying to push the big hook out of the box’s corner metal eye, when he realized the helicopter’s pitch overhead was changing. He looked up. The helicopter’s bottom was feet above his head — But — it doesn’t seem to be getting any lower.
The thick heavy-lift cables tightened. His hand barely moved in time to keep from getting crushed when the hook yanked itself straight in the box eye.
The trailer’s corner, its entire rear end, slowly rose. Higher. Several inches. Without pause, the helicopter immediately moved sideways. The cables grew tighter, pulling the rear of the whole trailer backward. A foot — two feet — dragging its end away from the other truck blocking the road, away from the cars stuck beneath it. And away from the fighting struggling compressed mass of people pressed against it.
The now cheering mob!
As though it were the start of the New York City Marathon — one that might never be run again, like releasing a torrent of water from a breaking dam, thousands burst toward freedom.
And ran with everything they had.
A Loss Of Reason
As Franklin was hoisted back up to the Sea Pelican, his eyes studied the bridge’s structure, followed the lines of its blue-gray girders, the way they connected. Something he could almost see nagged at him, and faded. Something —
Suddenly, in his mind he saw another structure, as it last lay. His brain had snapped a picture at the last possible moment, an image he didn’t know he had. If it was still like that when they got — He wouldn’t be able to take anything down with him. Did he dare?
Chuck and the Russian Petre swung him through the cargo door.
“We have to go back!” he yelled.
“About time!” said Kone. “We ought to just make it.”
“No,” said Franklin. “Back to Cynthia’s. I know how to get on top!”
“WHAT!” screamed Kone.
“We’ve already tried twice!” Everon yelled. “Bro,” he head pointed, “Look! See that dark stuff out there not making it to the ground? That’s virga. It could turn to full-on radioactive rainstorm in an instant. She’s gone! All that’s left to us is to figure out who did it. Vengeance is all we have left and even that’s extremely unlikely. They’re gone! Let them go!”
“They’re not! Trust me,” Franklin said fiercely. “I know how to get in. Let me try!”
Everon shook his head, lips tight. “This bird’s barely in the air.”
“You can fly anything.”
Everon studied the severe, begging intensity in his younger brother’s face. Franklin shouted over the whining engine, “If you don’t go back, it’s not that I won’t forgive you — you’ll never forgive yourself!”
Everon’s hand left the stick for only a second. To wipe across his eyes.
“You’ve got to get these people to a hospital first!” Kone yelled.
“If we land, they won’t let us take off again,” Franklin shouted back.
“What about radiation?” Kone pointed out the Pelican’s east windows. “That cloud doesn’t look any farther away.”
Franklin didn’t answer. It’s not. It’s closer.
“Let them have one more try,” said van Patter.
“You owe your life to these men, Mr. Kone!” It was Victoria and she pointed a finger at Franklin while looking at the little bureaucrat. “He nearly drowned getting us out! And now you say they can’t take every chance, any possibility to find their family?”
Franklin looked at her gratefully. “I didn’t know you knew about that.”
“The engineer told me,” her voice rising to reach Everon. “Put us down somewhere on the Manhattan shore.” She pointed at Kone, “Let him walk back!”
Kone yelled. He screamed. He went for the cockpit. At one point Franklin thought he was going to try to wrestle the controls out of Everon’s hands.
But with the support of Victoria, of Walter van Patter, the others physically restraining Kone who refused to agree to get out, Everon turned back into Manhattan. They were going back into it. Back toward the cloud.
Bits of ash clung to the Impala’s old white body. Edie’s left hand gripped Lou’s right thigh as she rode next to him in front — while Cheri Enriquez, their new neighbor, tried to comfort her son Johnny in the back.
Kid looks pretty sick, thought Lou Goodman. Another quick look in the rearview mirror. And his mother isn’t looking much better.
The Goodmans were an old Jewish couple in their seventies, Lou balding, his wife Edith’s hair whiter than the Brooklyn snow from the bomb. They had planned to take the girl and her kid to their son’s house in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Lou and Edie’s grandkids had moved away to Vegas. Jake and his wife were out there visiting. The apartment was empty.
But a couple miles after they’d left Kings highway, Edith made another whispered suggestion. “Let’s take them to Brooklyn Hospital, Louie. Something’s really wrong with that kid.”
Which would have been a good idea. Except the Belt Parkway was out. Not just closed. From what Lou could make out three blocks away, long sections had cracked and slanted out of alignment.
For the next three hours, Lou wound their way through east Brooklyn neighborhoods, and little Johnny got sicker. Cheri too. The young woman was hyperventilating and the kid looked green. He couldn’t stop crying either.
When they got into Queens, Edie agreed they should give up and try again to get over to Jake’s place in Jersey.
But at the George Washington Bridge turnoff, it looked like no one was getting anywhere. And there was still no cellphone signal. When the minivan ahead slowly veered off a northbound exit, Lou followed. Maybe we can get up across the Tappan Zee Bridge? Drop down into Fort Lee from there?
Another three hours, traffic channeling them this way, that way. Lou grabbed a look over his shoulder. Kid isn’t breathing too well. Looks sweaty. Somehow they’d narrowly avoided getting completely stuck, but they weren’t making great progress either. They were still in Queens. Lou turned on the radio. The announcer said something about emergency hospital services at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Hmmm . . .
“Lou! Stop!” Edie screamed. “Louie! Stop the car!”
Lou Goodman mashed the brakes as Cheri Enriquez flung open the rear door.
Too late. Little Johnny was already puking his guts out on the back seat. The Goodmans helped Cheri and Johnny outside. The kid was really heaving it up when the thick dark clouds over their heads began to drizzle.
What started as a mist soon thickened. Within a minute all four of them were being pissed on by stinging black rain as the clouds grew even heavier and pushed in toward the city.
Cynthia And Steve
The huge ball of fire was still in the way. From the look on Everon’s face, the jerky movements of his hands on the controls, the wind had strengthened and was gusting from the east. Out 60th Street, a wall of black mist was moving toward them.
None of it could matter.
“Let me down over there,” Franklin pointed. “On that.”
Everon took one look. All of two seconds — “No, no way, Bro! You can’t! It’s suicide!”
A falling statue’s descent had been arrested by the top of a water tank, on the building separated by the alley behind Cynthia’s building. It was some kind of winged creature. An angel?
Its feet and the lower tips of its huge flared wings had pierced the tank’s round lid. It had come to rest about knee high. One end of a narrow steel I-beam sat nestled between the arched, protruding top of the broad, curved left wing, and the statue’s ugly head.
Not an angel. A stone gargoyle.
The I-beam’s other end sat across the alley on the top remaining floor of Cynthia’s building. Four stories in the air.
“Even if you find them, how would you get them out?” Everon shouted.
“I’ll take some rope, lower them over the side.”
Everon was right. He didn’t have to do this. He could just stop. No! He couldn’t!
“I have to know!” he cried. “We have to know!”
“Are you both fucking crazy? Is he?”
“Hey!” Clarence jumped in at Kone. “Do you realize you’re speaking to a —”
“It’s okay,” Franklin said.
“I don’t care if he’s the Queen of Sheba.” Kone was looking down through the window and let out a piercing, maniacal laugh. “You can’t be serious!”
The roly-poly bureaucrat’s words hung on the fetid air.
But in his
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