Page 48 of Touchdown
“I'm going to turn around,” Noah said. “You ready?”
“They'll come after us.” As if I needed to say so.
“Sure, but I've got an idea about that...”
I had a bad feeling about his idea. “Let me guess. We're going to ditch, and somehow you're going to make it look like the chopper went down somewhere else, and they're going to be distracted and all looking in the wrong place, and meanwhile we're going to be floating on a raft in the middle of one of several choices of Earth's seven seas.”
“Don't make it sound lame. It could work. It could totally work to get us away from these guys.”
“Oh, it'll work,” I said. “It has to. Nobody here has a better idea.”
When I closed my weary eyes, I stood again at that last party. My hand looked pale in the dark where it curled around a red paper cup. What was in that drink? Why wasn't I more careful? Hadn't I been warned?
Bill Mitchell was standing there. His mouth was moving. Lights flickered in the distance but not here. Somewhere, the fans squealed for selfies.
I jerked awake again. None of that was real. Those flickers of the party were nothing more than a micro-nap.
What a time to zone out. Why didn't guys in the movies ever need sleep?
Easy. They have coffee.
All I had was adrenaline. This deep into the eternal hours and days of what felt like an endless escape, I was jittery but far from alert. My bones ached with weariness. My thoughts kept skittering in all directions. Clarity was very far away.
My gut clenched in time to the shifts in acceleration that come with an aircraft changing directions. In my headphones, Noah said something about the autopilot's programming.
He'd changed it. Or thought he had.
I was vaguely aware of somebody else pulling out orange life preservers. No, not somebody else. Those were my hands. And those were the kind of life preservers they had on commercial airplanes.
The kind that—as far as I knew—had almost never preserved anyone's life in the event of a water landing. There was that one plane in the Hudson River up north, near New York. They made a movie about it because it was so amazing.
The Hudson wasn't even the Mississippi. Much less an ocean.
Stop thinking if you can only think of negatives.
A positive came to me right away. “Wait,” I said. “Why are we doing this? Don't helicopters have their own flotation devices? The big ones do. I know they do. That navy tour I did the senior year of high school...”
“We want the helicopter to go down somewhere else.” Noah sounded very tired. “Where we're not. So we can't be in it when it splashes down.”
“But its inflatable raft is larger. We'll go down softer. And we'll be easier to find.”
“If we're easy to find, who's going to find us first?”
He was right, of course. I wasn't thinking clearly, and I could only pray that Noah was.
Lack of sleep is as dangerous as alcohol, Coach always said. Get your rest before the game, he said. Time to party later when you're champions.
I said something, and Noah said something, and then the helicopter dropped. We stopped short of crashing into the sea like a pelican after a fish, but my stomach felt like it kept going. Right through the floor and down...
A door opened, and there was a rush of wind and prop noise and terror...
Not that I felt genuine terror. The wooziness that came with lack of sleep had blurred out strong emotions. You couldn't call it courage, but you couldn't call it genuine fear either.
“I can't program it to hover any lower.” Noah had to shout because we'd taken off the headphones. When had we done that? “Come on, we don't have much time.”
We were wearing the orange life inflatables that hadn't been inflated yet. Not until we hit the water. We didn't want air resistance. We wanted to drop lightly and easily and down, down, down.
His smile was dreamy as he pulled me by the hand through the open door into the roar and the wind.
