Chapter 25 - The Sins of the Handler
The Sikorsky couldn't climb.
The sheer volume of the acoustic feedback being pumped from Harold’s antenna was overloading the helicopter's fly-by-wire navigational avionics, sending the digital flight controls into an uncontrollable gyro-oscillation. The aircraft wobbled violently in mid-air, its tail rotor swinging through an erratic thirty-degree arc as the pilot fought the collective stick with both hands.
"Pull up! Pull up, damn you!" Campbell’s screams were audible even over the engine shriek, broadcast through the open cabin door.
Beneath the swaying belly of the aircraft, Rex used the momentum of the swing to heave himself upward. His front paws caught the diamond-plate edge of the cabin threshold. With a savage, desperate heave, the dog hauled his entire body over the coaming and onto the rubber matting of the main passenger compartment.
Campbell turned, his revolver coming up, his finger tightening on the trigger.
Rex didn't go for the gun. He went for Campbell’s good leg, slamming his heavy muzzle into the side of the man’s knee.
The joint gave way with a sickening, wet crack. Campbell shrieked, collapsing backward onto the leather bench seats as the revolver discharged harmlessly into the padded ceiling insulation.
The helicopter took another violent roll to the port side. The pilot, panicked by the gunshots and the flashing red master alarms, lost his horizon reference in the blinding rain and tree-covered ridge. The tail rotor clipped the upper branches of an eighty-foot white pine at the edge of the clearing.
The sound was like a table saw hitting an iron spike.
The tail rotor shattered in an explosion of fiberglass and carbon fiber. Without counter-torque, the helicopter instantly began to spin—a flat, sickening, centrifugal carousel that threw Campbell across the cabin toward the open cargo door.
"Donald!" Harold screamed from the tarmac below, killing the power to his antenna as the aircraft began its death spiral. "Get back! She’s coming down!"
The spinning helicopter pancaked into the soft, muddy embankment fifty yards from the runway threshold.
The impact sheared the landing gear off in an instant, the main rotor blades striking the wet earth and disintegrating into thousand-mile-an-hour shrapnel that cut the surrounding saplings down to stumps. The fuselage skidded fifty yards through the red Virginia clay, throwing up a thirty-foot wall of mud and fuel-saturated debris before slamming to a halt against the heavy concrete footing of the airfield’s decommissioned radar tower.
The deafening roar of the turbines suddenly died, replaced by the ominous, high-pressure hiss of punctured fuel lines spraying kerosene over red-hot exhaust manifolds.
A single flame bloomed in the wreckage.
"Rex!" I broke into a dead sprint toward the smoking hulk, ignoring the agony in my shoulder, ignoring Harold’s frantic warnings behind me. "REX!"
The sliding cargo door had been ripped off its tracks.
Inside the crushed cabin, through the choking black smoke of burning hydraulic fluid, I saw Campbell. He was pinned beneath the collapsed ceiling frame, his face blackened with soot, his eyes wide with animal terror as fire began to crawl up the upholstery toward his legs.
And sitting six inches from Campbell’s throat, perfectly still, was Rex.
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The dog was covered in soot and mud, his side gashed from flying plexiglass, but his posture was absolute granite. He wasn't biting. He wasn't tearing. He had his heavy front paws planted squarely on Campbell’s chest, his fangs bared, his breath hot against the man’s sweating forehead.
He was holding the prisoner.
