The Surprise of His Life (26 page)

Lindsey
walked back into the room just as Walker was replacing the phone. She knew that
something was wrong the moment she saw Walker's face. Her heart dropped at her
feet.

"What
is it?"

Walker
hesitated, then said, "Your father." He hesitated again. It was only
for seconds, but Lindsey thought it might well have been the passage of days.
"His helicopter's missing."

Rain,
driven
by the rising wind, slanted downward from a scowling sky. Occasionally
lightning zigzagged, illuminating the stormy darkness as though it were a stage
to be spotlighted for an eager audience. Huddled in a rain slicker that some
kind soul at the airport had handed her, Lindsey, a player on that stage,
walked toward the helicopter that stood waiting for flight. Already the copter
blades whipped and whirled, while the lights, like the eyes of a keen-sighted
bird, stared ahead. His hair soaking wet, Walker stood talking—shouting,
really, to be heard over the wind—to a man by the side of the aircraft. Inside
the helicopter, the charter pilot got a last-minute briefing on the weather.

Her
father was missing.

Over
the last hour, ever since they'd been notified that her father's helicopter was
missing, Lindsey had thought of little else. And yet, for all of that, the four
words, the simple four words, would not compute. It wasn't that she didn't
understand the words. She did. She just couldn't understand them in terms of
her father. There had never been a time in her life when she didn't know where
her father was. There had never been a time when he wasn't, at worst, a phone
call away. But now she had no idea where he was... or if he was even alive.
Walker had said that there would be a tomorrow for her to apologize to her
father for slapping him. It had never crossed her mind that tomorrow was such a
fragile thing. These last thoughts—the possibility that her father might not be
alive, the possibility that she might never get the chance to apologize to
him—congealed her blood, making her ice-cold and chilled to the bone.

At
her approach, Walker glanced up. He hadn't wanted her to come to the airport to
see him off, but he hadn't been able to stop her. After the shock had settled
in, she'd become coolly efficient, almost frighteningly efficient. She hadn't
shed a tear. Not one. She'd simply garnered what information she could, then
had gone by her parents' house to tell her mother. She had promised to be at
the airport before Walker left. Even now, as she walked toward him, she looked
calm. Below the calmness, however, Walker suspected that she was nothing more
than raw, jangled nerves. He longed to pull her into his arms and never let go.
He longed to have her never let go of him because, for the first time in his
life, he was scared. Scared half out of his mind.

"Yeah,
thanks," he said to the Coast Guard representative.

"Let's
keep each other informed," the tall, lean man said.

"Right,"
Walker said, but his gaze was once more on Lindsey. "You shouldn't be out
in this," he said when she stood before him. Fat, moist raindrops hurled
themselves against her cheeks and into her hair, making the latter frizz and
curl like corkscrews, making her look—as she often did—youthful and in need of
protection.

"I'm
all right. How about you?"

"Okay,"
he lied, adding, "I have the coordinates where they think the copter went
down."

Up
until now, the situation hadn't been summed up so bluntly. Missing was one
thing, gone down was another, although one certainly implied the other. All
this Lindsey thought out rationally before tipping her chin with courage.
"Do they know for a fact that it went down?" The "they" she
referred to was the Coast Guard.

"No,
but it's a fair assumption. They know the flight plan he filed. They know his
time of departure. They know the last radio contact they had with him. Those
facts set up a rough set of coordinates. The Coast Guard has a vessel headed in
that direction right now."

"I
see. So what are you going to do?"

The
wind carried this last away, and Walker was forced to shout, "What?"

She
turned her face upward, so that the words would better reach his ears. Her
eyes, their lashes dewed like the grass on a spring morn, squinted against the
rain. "What are you going to do?" she repeated.

Die
if I don't kiss you,
he
thought, but said, "Go out and see if we can see anything. Wreckage can be
seen better from the air than from the sea."

Wreckage.
A grim scene of helicopter parts floating on the wind-tortured sea captured her
mind. "Do you think—"

"Yes,"
Walker said, anticipating her question by the stark look on her face. It was
the question she'd wanted to ask ever since hearing the distressing news.
"He's alive." The same funny feeling that had told him that something
was wrong, the funny feeling he'd tried to ignore, now told him that his friend
was alive. Walker hoped to God he could trust the funny feeling. "There's
no reason he shouldn't be. Even if he went down, he had a life jacket, a raft,
flares. Your father's not stupid. Plus, he's had survival training. He's all
right."

Something
in the grit of Walker's jaw told Lindsey that he wanted to believe what he was
saying so much that he was going to make himself believe it. Since she had to
believe it as strongly as he, she, too, would make herself.

"Bring
him back," she whispered. The words found their mark—they wove themselves
through and through and then about Walker's heart.

"I
will!" he said gruffly. "I will!"

Each
wanted to say more, but what? There were still no answers to their personal
problems. Lindsey still wanted commitment in the form of marriage, Walker still
felt that he couldn't ask her to make that kind of sacrifice. Not for the rest
of her life. Her young life.

At
the revving of the engine, Walker looked toward the pilot, who gave a let's go
sign. Walker waved an okay.

"I've
got to go," he said to Lindsey.

She
nodded. "I'll, uh, I'll be with Mother. When you learn anything—"

"I'll
let you know immediately," he interjected.

She
nodded again. Took a reluctant step backward. Followed by another. Then she
turned and started running for the building. Suddenly, she stopped. Cold. On a dime.

"Walker?"
she hollered.

The
sound of his name caught up with him just as he opened the helicopter door. He
looked back at Lindsey. "Be careful! Please!"

Like
she, he nodded... and watched as once more she turned and started for the
airport terminal.

"Lindsey?"
he called after her.

She
whirled, and waited. One second. Two seconds. For him to say something. Which
he never did. Instead, he slammed the helicopter door and started toward her at
a clipped run. Without preamble, with a strength that startled even him, he
pulled her to him. His lips slammed hard against hers. Her lips were wet from
the rain. So were his. Wet and slippery and wonderfully soft, wonderfully hard,
each wonderfully hungry for the other. The kiss lasted only seconds. On a
groan, Walker tore his mouth from hers. He stared, saying nothing. Yet he
didn't have to. Lindsey heard the silent words.

He
loved her.

She
had accused him of not loving her enough, but she saw that he did love her...
every bit as much as she loved him.

Finally,
he said, "Believe in miracles."

And
then he was gone, racing back toward the waiting helicopter. She watched as he
disappeared inside. In seconds the engine whined and the craft began to rise
from the ground. The motion created a frenzy of wind, causing the slicker to
lap about her body. She held her head downward. The pose was prayerful. In that
moment she prayed for a miracle. For a miracle that somehow she and Walker
would be able to work out their differences. She prayed, too, that he'd bring
her father back to her. So that she could apologize, so that she could feel his
arms again, so that she could tell him she loved him.

In
spite of how he'd hurt her, she still loved him.

In
spite of how he'd hurt her mother, her mother still loved him.

It
dawned on Lindsey that maybe she'd just learned a valuable lesson, a lesson
that only maturity could teach.

Below
the helicopter, the iron-gray sea roiled in anger. Pitching, churning, it sent
waves crashing high and wide. Walker's stomach similarly pitched and churned in
fear. Even if Dean had managed to survive the impact of a crash, he couldn't
last long in this sea, not when the beast was foaming at the mouth so madly,
not when the beast was swallowing everything in sight.

"Pretty
choppy!" the pilot shouted over the sound of the whining wind and wild
rain. He indicated the water below.

"That's
an understatement!" Walker hollered back, not for a second taking his eyes
off the convulsing gray canvas before him. He was searching for a dot, any dot,
that looked out of the ordinary—copter, debris of copter, man.

"The
storm's worse than I expected!"

"Yeah,"
Walker said, glad now that he'd sent word for Ramsey and the last of the crew
to abandon the platform. He didn't like the looks of the way the weather was
shaping up. All of the other men had been accounted for, their names
meticulously checked against the rosters as they'd boarded the boats.
"Let's stay in this area," Walker said as he consulted the map, the
approximated coordinates of the crash marked in red.

"Right,"
the pilot said, and set the helicopter on its course. The course consisted
roughly of a two-mile area, some ten miles from Platform Four, some sixty miles
from shore.

After
ten minutes, the pilot shouted, "Hell, you couldn't see a whore dressed in
red in this!"

Walker
had already arrived at this discouraging conclusion... and had rejected it
completely. "I can see!" he growled.

The
pilot said nothing, and Walker instantly regretted the snap in his voice.

Another
ten minutes passed. Silent minutes. Minutes in which the pilot flew as close to
the sea as he dared. Minutes in which Walker thought—he couldn't confirm it
with visibility as poor as it was—he saw a Coast Guard boat in the far
distance. Then again, maybe he saw nothing. Weary, frightened, he closed his
eyes for a moment, giving in to the tension headache that throbbed behind his
eyes. One second of rest was all he'd allow himself, however, and he began
searching, scanning again. Please, please! he prayed.

"Could
we make another run in this area?"

The
pilot nodded. Walker knew that the pilot thought that it wouldn't do any good—it
hadn't the dozen times they'd already done it—but he was at least willing to
indulge him for a while longer. Walker knew, though, that their time was fast
running out. The wind was becoming unmanageable, making the craft increasingly
hard to handle. Walker could tell this by the way the pilot fought the
controls.

"There!"
Walker cried suddenly, squinting through the driving rain.

"Where?"

"There!
At three o'clock!" Walker's heart sprinted into a hurting rhythm. He told
himself not to get his hopes up, but that's precisely what he did. In fact, his
hopes soared.

The
helicopter angled, banked, lowered as the pilot brought it down as low as he
safely could. Beneath the craft's whirring blades, the water swirled in a
circular motion. In the center of the circle bobbed part of the hull of a
helicopter.

Walker's
hopes plummeted. Not only hadn't he located Dean, but he'd irrefutably
documented that his helicopter had gone down.

"I'm
sor—" the pilot began, only to be cut off with, "Let's make the run
again. He's got to be out there."

Walker
was keenly aware of what the pilot was thinking, which was that Dean was out
there all right—in the belly of the beast. He knew, too, that holding the
helicopter on course was growing harder minute by minute. This last was confirmed
by the way the wind jostled the craft, as though the chopper were made of
straw.

"Damn!"
the pilot said, fighting with the collective stick in an attempt to maintain
balance. For a second, the sea looked dangerously near. Then the helicopter
righted itself. The pilot looked over at Walker, "It's getting bad out
here—"

"I
know, I know, but let's make the run again!"

Walker
knew that he'd given the man no option. But then, if the circumstances had been
reversed, would Dean have given the man an option? Hell, no! Walker thought.
Dean would have screamed, hollered, demanded and commanded. In short, he would
have made a royal pain in the butt of himself. Which was exactly what Walker
intended to make of himself. He wasn't going back without Dean. Come hell or
high water, come the devil or the salty sea, he was bringing Dean back home
with him!

"Make
the ran again!"

"I'll
make more coffee," Bunny said as she reached for the coffeepot.