Chapter 16-1
480 Words
Chapter 16
The Black Hawk ride had been everything Alice had imagined. They took off low and fast and roared down the Potomac as if they were racing over the Sea of Japan. A winter storm on the Atlantic had kicked up wind and whitecaps on the Chesapeake Bay. The helicopter bumped and dropped in the wind while they flew so low it looked as if the waves were going to claw them from out of the sky.
With a hard slam, they tilted nearly sideways and turned overland. They flew so low that they actually had to bounce upward to clear fences. The silence on the radio was absolute. The heavy helmets they wore offering only the slightest hiss over the built-in headphones to indicate they were latched into the radio and intercom system at all.
Alice could see the infrared projection of the FLIR across the inside of her visor, passed to her by the nose-mounted forward-looking-infrared camera. It revealed trees with alarming suddenness as they traveled over the Virginia countryside at just under two hundred miles an hour.
“Pending engine failure,” Mark Henderson announced from the left seat with a calmness that was startling, even in a practice scenario.
“Oh no!” Daniel’s whisper. “Not again.”
Alice had heard Emily tell the rest of the crew that they wouldn’t say the word “simulated” on this flight. Everyone was in the know but Daniel.
He convulsively clutched Alice’s hand.
“Silence on the intercom,” Beale snapped out. “Roger failure on one and two. Restart check.”
“Restart failure on one and two.”
“Roger. Initiating auto-rotate emergency landing.”
Alice’s could feel the adrenaline pounding her heart against her rib cage as the bird backed hard in a nose-high position to shed their forward speed. The ground was so close.
Alice bit the inside of her cheek hard enough that for a moment she’d thought she’d drawn blood. If she felt this stressed, even knowing it was a test, she now felt awful for pulling the trick on Daniel. But she didn’t dare speak while the pilots were so busy “saving” them. So instead she did her best to calmly pat his arm.
At the last moment, with the ground barely a dozen feet away, but still moving forward quickly, Emily did something and the rotor blades dropped into silence. The helicopter fell, causing Alice to float out of her seat, her body only held in place by the safety harness. They hit tail first. Then the front wheels slammed down hard enough that twenty-thousand pounds of helicopter actually bounced back up by several feet, then they hit again and remained earthbound this time. The helicopter rolled forward neatly across a handy ballpark’s outfield.
“End simulation.” Henderson remarked dryly.
“Roger end simulation.” Emily acknowledged and in moments the rotors were biting air and they were once again aloft.
“Simulation?” Daniel shouted into the headset.
Emily Beale actually laughed. “Didn’t want you to be able to say you’d ever flown with me without crashing.”
“Crap!” was all Daniel offered.
Alice could feel him shaking with the post-adrenal fear-reaction. Okay, not one of her better jokes.
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