Chapter 22 - The Screaming Descent
"EVASIVE!" Gabriel roared.
He didn't wait for Miller to react. Gabriel vaulted into the copilot's space, his massive hand slamming downward onto the twin control yoke. He kicked the left rudder pedal with all his weight.
The de Havilland Beaver wrenched violently out of the sky, rolling onto its port wing just as a deafening *CRACK* tore through the air outside.
A .50 caliber armor-piercing round shattered the starboard cabin window where Nora’s head had rested a fraction of a second prior. The bullet ripped through the empty seat cushion, spraying foam and fabric into the air, before punching clean out the floorboards.
The cabin instantly turned into a hurricane. Decompression and freezing sub-zero mountain air howled through the fist-sized holes, ripping flight charts and loose papers into a blinding white vortex.
"NORA! STAY DOWN!" Gabriel bellowed over the deafening scream of the wind.
Nora had slipped out of her seat and was wedged onto the aluminum floor, her tiny arms wrapped tightly around her head. She didn't scream; terror had locked her vocal cords, but her wide, dilated pupils locked onto Gabriel with pure, unquestioning trust.
Outside, the black Eurocopter banked with predator-like agility, its rotor blades beating the thin air with a heavy *thump-thump-thump* that rattled the very bones in Gabriel’s chest.
"My controls! I can't hold her!" Miller screamed, his hands battling the shuddering yoke. "The round clipped my secondary hydraulic line! We're losing elevator authority!"
"Put her into the cloud deck!" Gabriel commanded, his voice cold, steady, and terrifyingly clear amidst the chaos. "Miller, dive! Now! Into the valley!"
"There are granite peaks down there! The Olympic Range! We can't see the ridgelines without radar!"
"If you stay at this altitude, that sniper will put the next round through your forehead! DIVE!"
Miller gritted his teeth, tears of adrenaline leaking from the corners of his eyes, and shoved the nose forward. The world tipped upside down. The vintage seaplane entered a screaming near-vertical dive, hurtling straight into the dense, blind white soup of the Pacific storm clouds.
Behind them, the gunship opened up with a burst of three-round suppression fire. Tracers burned neon-green through the gray vapor, punching through the Beaver’s right wing flap and severing the fuel return line. An alarm chimed frantically—a shrill, high-pitched death knell inside the cockpit.
"Left engine's burning!" Miller yelled. Thick, choking black smoke began to seep through the cockpit floor vents. "We're going into the trees! We're dead! We're dead!"
"Shut the master fuel valve!" Gabriel commanded, reaching across the console and violently slapping down the red emergency cut-offs. He pulled the manual fire extinguisher lever. A dull *thud* echoed from the wing as fire-retardant foam smothered the engine, killing the fire, but instantly killing half their aerodynamic thrust.
The plane dropped like a stone through the fog. Four thousand feet. Three thousand feet.
Suddenly, the white mist tore open.
Below them lay not open water, but a jagged, primeval abyss of black rock, glacial ice, and towering, prehistoric Douglas firs. A razor-thin strip of a glacial lake—frozen at its edges, gray-green and lethal—gleamed between two vertical rock walls at the bottom of the gorge.
"There!" Gabriel pointed with an outstretched arm toward the glacial water. "Dead stick landing! Drop the pontoons onto the lake!"
"The canyon’s too narrow! If we catch a wingtip on the timber, we cartwheel!" Miller shrieked, pulling back on the yoke with both arms as the controls resisted like solid concrete.
"Pull, Miller! PULL!"
Gabriel threw his weight onto the dual yoke alongside the pilot. Their combined strength forced the nose up just as the dark canopy of the forest rushed toward them at one hundred and twenty miles per hour. The tips of two-hundred-foot fir trees scraped the aluminum belly of the floats with a screech that sounded like metal screaming in agony. Branches shattered. The windshield was smeared with green pine needles and sap.
*SKRRRRRR-SPLASH!*
The pontoons hit the glacial lake not as a landing, but as an explosion.
Water erupted fifty feet into the air. The impact threw Gabriel against the instrument panel, splitting his forehead open. Blood immediately sheeted down the left side of his face. The plane violently fishtailed across the freezing surface, spinning three hundred and sixty degrees before the port float sheared off against a half-submerged boulder with a sickening crunch.
The Beaver tilted violently, its broken wing slamming into the icy shallows near the rocky shore, and finally slid to a shuddering, steaming halt.
Silence descended. Only the tick-tick-tick of cooling metal and the hiss of steam rising into the freezing mountain air broke the stillness.
Gabriel didn't waste a second to register the pain in his skull. He wiped the warm blood from his eye with his sleeve and spun toward the back. "Nora!"
Under the mangled passenger seat, the pile of coats moved.
Nora’s tiny, pale face emerged from beneath the fabric. She was trembling uncontrollably, her teeth chattering so hard they clattered, but she crawled toward him on hands and knees. "Gabriel... we flew."
Gabriel lunged, scooping her into his chest with one arm, checking her limbs with rapid, practiced efficiency. No broken bones. No punctures. "You're a brave girl, Nora. You're the bravest girl in the world."
He turned to the cockpit. "Miller! Unstrap! We have less than three minutes before that gunship circles back to verify the wreckage!"
Miller didn't answer.
The pilot sat slumped forward against the bloody steering yoke. A heavy steel support strut from the sheared wing had penetrated through the cockpit roof, impaling the veteran through the center of his chest. His eyes were wide, glassy, staring down at his lifeless hands.
Gabriel’s jaw hardened into iron. There was no time to mourn. There was only the mission.
May you like
He reached down, ripped the survival kit and Miller’s tactical shotgun from the bulkhead clip, grabbed an extra bandolier of ammunition, and kicked the warped cabin door open into the freezing, mist-shrouded wilderness.
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