Return to Atlantis: A Novel (61 page)

Body tilted down, arms held back at her sides, Nina was rapidly catching up with Eddie. Steering herself in free fall had proved to be an almost instinctual matter of twisting her body and limbs to direct the airflow; what she would do when she reached her husband was another matter entirely.

He rolled over onto his back, waving his arms. The signal was clear:
Leave me!
She ignored it, guiding herself at him like a missile and arching her back to lift her head and slow down. Her body began to seesaw; she almost panicked before managing to stabilize herself by bringing out her arms and raising her knees.

Eddie was right below her, still gesturing for her to abandon him.

Not a chance—

The collision was like a tackle. They both spun and tumbled before Eddie brought them under control. Nina clutched his jacket, screaming into the wind. “Grab on to me!”

He tried to push her away. “It’ll kill us both!”

“No!
You and me! Always and forever
!”

Their eyes were locked for a precious moment before he relented. “You’ve put this on wrong!” he cried as he hooked his right arm into one of her chute’s loose leg straps and wound it tight.

“I was kinda rushed!”

He forced his left arm through her shoulder harness and bent his elbow to trap it, then strained to bring his
hands together. A momentary glance down; they were well below two thousand feet, only seconds left before they hit the ground. His fingers interlocked; he gripped as hard as he could. “This is gonna hurt, but—
pull it!
”

Nina yanked the ripcord.

The spring-loaded pilot chute popped out of the pack, snapping open in the airstream—and snatched the main chute out after it with a
whump
of billowing fabric.

The sudden drag as the parachute deployed wrenched the harness upward. Nina screamed as it cut deeply into her shoulders, almost slipping loose on one side. Eddie cried out too as the jolt almost ripped his arms from their sockets, but he clung on, holding the backpack in place by sheer force of muscle.

The wind dropped. He looked up. The chute was fully inflated, slowing their fall, but it was designed to carry the weight of only one person, not two. No matter what, they were going to have a painful landing.

A shadow crossed the thin nylon, something falling toward it—

A burning meteor streaked past, missing the parachute by less than a foot as it hurtled toward the ground in a trail of fire. “What the hell was
that
?” Nina yelled.

It wasn’t part of the helicopter, so that only left—“Sophia!”

Despite the flames gnawing at her skin, Sophia was still alive, still conscious, still screaming as she fell.

Something whipped through her pain-racked vision—a parachute, two forms dangling from its lines.

Nina had caught Eddie. They were going to survive.

“You … 
bastards
!” she managed to shriek—

The wet thump of her impact on the stony ground was mixed with the horrible crack of shattering bones.

The parachute’s aerofoil design meant Eddie and Nina were now traversing the landscape rather than merely
plunging straight at it, but they were still descending too quickly. A hundred feet remained, ninety—

Eddie unclasped his fingers. “What’re you doing?” Nina demanded.

“Making you lighter,” he said, painfully slipping his arms out of the harness straps to hang from them by his hands. “Just before you land, turn side-on and let it drag you—try to kind of crumple from your feet upward when you hit. And for Christ’s sake, bend your legs or you’ll break ’em both.”

Fifty feet. “What about you?”

“I haven’t turned forty yet—there might just be a little bit of bounce left in me!”

Thirty. “Are you out of your mind?”

“You’re the one who jumped from a fucking chopper!”

Twenty—

Eddie let go. Even with his legs bent to absorb the impact, he hit hard, rolling uncontrollably before bouncing to a stop in a cloud of dust.

Nina whisked past overhead, wailing “Oh
shiiiiiit
!” as she was carried helplessly down. At the last moment, she remembered what Eddie had said and twisted sideways. Her feet scraped through the sand—then she slammed down like a toppling tree. The parachute flopped on top of her like a shroud.

Groaning, Eddie slowly tried to get up, discovering numerous new sources of pain throughout his body. No bones seemed to be broken, to his relief, although his already injured leg now hurt worse than ever. Wobbling, he stood and dizzily surveyed his surroundings. The black plume from the volcano rose into the sky on the northwestern horizon; much closer was another, smaller column of smoke.

He knew what it marked, resolving to investigate, but completed his turn. The helicopter was about half a mile away to the west, slowly heading toward him. On the ground, the parachute wobbled in the wind like a
beached jellyfish. He limped toward it. “Nina? Nina! Are you okay?”

“No, I’m dead,” came the weak reply. He pulled the entangling sheet and cords aside to find Nina sprawled facedown in the sand. “I
must
be dead. We couldn’t have survived that. Could we?”

“Well, I’m alive, more or less—and like you said, we stay together, so you must be too.” He quickly checked her for obvious signs of injury, finding nothing beyond plentiful cuts and grazes.

She sat up and blew sand off her face, giving him a pained smile. “Wow. So we actually made it.”

“Yeah, we did.” He kissed her—then they both recoiled.

“Ow,” said Nina, putting a hand to her face and finding it bruised and swollen. “My lips hurt.”

“My
everything
hurts,” Eddie complained. “Think you can stand?”

“I’ll try.” Grunting, he helped her up. Nina winced at a sharp pain in her ankles; her touchdown had been far from soft. “Oh crap.”

“What?”

“I just realized, we’re still sixty miles from town in the middle of a desert. And I’m
really
not up to walking all that way.”

Eddie jerked a thumb toward the approaching helicopter. “We’ve still got a ride.”

Nina regarded it in relief. “I guess Larry’s okay, then—shit!” She looked around in alarm. “What about Sophia?”

He indicated the nearby smoke. “I know where she is. Let’s take a gander.” Supporting each other as best they could, they hobbled toward it.

A little impact crater came into view, the smoldering line rising from the charred remains of a parachute backpack atop a broken, huddled shape within. Jagged spikes of broken bone jutted out from ruptured flesh. Splashed across the surrounding sand was an oozing
starburst of dark red. “Well,” said Nina after a long silence. “I guess she’s finally dead.”

Eddie had been through the experience of believing his ex-wife to be deceased twice before; this time, he was almost out of sympathy. Almost. He moved closer, pulling what remained of the parachute over the mangled body. “Good-bye, Soph,” he said, then paused for a moment before reaching down.

Nina cringed in revulsion as he picked something up from among the viscera. “Eddie, what the
hell
?”

“Thought we should take care of this,” he said, limping back to her. In his hand was the piece of meteorite Sophia had taken from the Temple of the Gods. “What do you want to do with it?”

Nina considered the question. The chunk of purple stone contained within it the secrets of earth energy, the untold history of all life on the planet, and potentially more besides. But …

She still didn’t believe that there were things man was not meant to know. But there were things man was not meant to
have
. This was one of them. “Get rid of it,” she finally said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” She watched as he turned and threw the stone with all his remaining strength into the empty wilderness. It landed with a puff of dust among other nondescript rocks, half-buried already; in time, it would be completely lost.

“So that’s it?” Eddie asked.

She nodded. “Earth energy, the meteorite, the Group, Stikes, Sophia … they’re all gone. Finished.”

“Thank fuck for that. Now we can take a break.” He gave her an exhausted smile and put his arms around her.

The noise of the helicopter made them turn. Larry had brought the AW101 into an unsteady hover a few hundred yards away, gradually descending into a cyclone of sand. Eddie watched—then stiffened. “Shit, that’s not good!”

“What’s wrong?”

“That wobble, something’s wrong—Dad!” He released Nina and waved his arms, frantically signaling for his father to ascend again. “Dad, go back up, it’s not gonna—”

Too late.

The tremendous downwash from the main rotor was bouncing back up off the desert floor as Larry lowered the helicopter, drastically affecting the aircraft’s handling. With an inexperienced pilot at the controls, the results were inevitable. The AW101 rocked like a toy boat, veering sideways. Larry tried to level out, but overcompensated—and the chopper lurched back, losing height.

Its landing gear dug into the ground, tipping the fuselage over—

The rotor blades carved into the desert with great sprays of sand, shearing off from the hub and flinging broken pieces high into the air. Torque twisted the aircraft’s body around, crunching its nose into the dirt before it fell back down on its belly with a shrilling crash of torn metal.

“Dad!”
Eddie cried, breaking into a staggering run. Nina caught up, and they hurried toward the wreck. Its engines cut out, leaving an eerie silence punctured only by the thumps of debris returning to earth. By the time they reached it, the stubs of the rotor blades had come to a halt.

The front windows were broken. Through them, Eddie saw Larry slumped over the central console. “Dad! Shit, Dad, are you all right?” No answer. No movement. He opened the side hatch and climbed inside, going to the cockpit. “Dad!”

For a moment, he thought his father was dead—then Larry coughed and took in a shuddering breath. “Eddie?” he gasped.

“Yeah, I’m here, Dad.” Eddie carefully lifted him off the console. A line of blood ran down his cheek where
he had hit a sharp protrusion on the instrument panel. “How bad are you hurt?”

“Not too bad … I think.” Larry opened his eyes, squinting in the sunlight as he tried to regain focus. “Tell you something, though.”

“What?”

“I definitely need more flying lessons.” A faint laugh.

Eddie joined in. “Yeah, one or two. You’ve just wrecked a twenty-million-dollar helicopter!”

“Like father, like son,” said Nina with a grin as she recovered a first-aid kit.

They patched up their various wounds as best they could, then took stock of the situation. Some of the Group’s supplies were still secured at the cabin’s rear, giving them a supply of water, and while the helicopter itself was a complete write-off, the radio was still functioning. Eddie sent out a mayday. The eruption of the volcano had already roused official attention; while the Ethiopian authorities were surprised that anybody had been near the isolated mountain, they nevertheless assured him that help was on the way, though the lack of precise GPS coordinates meant it might take a while to arrive.

He climbed out of the chopper and joined Nina and Larry, sitting nearby. “So,” said Larry, mopping the blood off his cheek, “this is what you do for a living, then?”

“It’s not
all
like this,” Nina told him. “Sometimes there’s actual archaeology involved.”

“All the same, I’m impressed. Still quivering with terror, but impressed. I can’t believe the things I’ve seen today. Floating rocks, exploding volcanoes …” He shook his head. “My daughter-in-law throwing herself out of a helicopter at eight thousand feet …”

Eddie gave him a mock shrug. “Meh. You get used to this stuff after a while.”

“Speak for yourself!” Nina cried. “You know, before I met you I’d never once had anyone shoot at me. Or been in a car chase. Or a plane crash, or jumped a Humvee
over a canyon, or been attacked by tigers and hippos and crocodiles—”

“They were caimans, not crocs,” Eddie corrected. “But if you hadn’t met me, you wouldn’t have found Atlantis either, would you? Or the Tomb of Hercules, or Excalibur, or the Garden of Eden …”