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Sam smiled, nodded. “I may be a bit thick at times, but there’s no way I’m crawling onto that death trap without a safety line. We’re going to need something piton-like.”
“I may have just the thing.”
Testing the ground as she went, Remi moved off across the plateau and soon returned. In one hand she was holding a shard of helicopter rotor, in the other a fist-sized rock. She handed them to Sam and said, “I’ll start on the rope.”
Sam used the rock to first smooth the edges of the shard’s upper half, then to taper and sharpen the lower half. Once done, he found a particularly thick patch of ice a couple paces from the edge of the plateau just to the right of the Z-9. Next, he began the painstaking process of hammering the makeshift piton into the ice. When he finished, the shard was buried a foot and a half in the ice and angled backward at forty-five degrees.
Remi walked over, and they used their combined weight to wrench and pull the belay until confident it would hold. Remi uncoiled the spliced rope—into which she’d tied knots at two-foot intervals—and secured one end to the piton with a bowline knot. After shedding his jacket, gloves, and cap, Sam used the loose end to fashion a rope seat, with the knot tight against his lower back.
“If this thing starts going over the edge, get clear,” Sam said.
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Concentrate on you.”
“Right.”
“Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said with a smile.
He kissed her, then walked toward the Z-9’s upturned tail assembly. After giving the aluminum side a few test shoves, he climbed up and began crawling toward the cabin.
“Getting close,” Remi called. “A couple more feet.”
“Got it.”
As he reached the edge of the plateau, he slowed down, testing each of his movements, before continuing on. Aside from a few heart-skip-inducing creaks and groans, the Z-9 didn’t budge. Foot by foot, he crawled forward until he was perched atop the Z-9’s belly.
“How’s it feel?” Remi called.
On his hands and knees, Sam shifted his weight from side to side, slowly at first, then more vigorously. The fuselage let out a shriek of tearing aluminum and shifted to one side.
“I think I found its limits,” Sam called.
“You think so?” Remi shot back. “Keep moving.”
“Right.”
Sam moved sideways until his hip was up against the landing skid. He grasped this with both hands and leaned over the side as though looking for something.
“What are you doing?” called Remi.
“I’m looking for the rotor mast. There it is. We’re in luck; it’s jammed into the runnel. We’ve got a bit of an anchor.”
“Happy day,” Remi said impatiently. “Now, get in there and get out.”
Sam gave her what he hoped was a reassuring grin.
After adjusting the rope so it ran straight back to the piton, Sam grasped the skids with both hands and lowered his legs down along the fuselage. The spewing water immediately drenched his lower body. Sam groaned, clenched his teeth against the cold, then kicked his legs, trying to gauge his position over the door.
“I’m going in,” he called to Remi.
Sam kicked forward, swung his legs backward, then repeated the process until he’d built up a steady rhythm. At the right moment, he let go. The momentum carried him through the cascade and into the cabin, where he slammed into the opposite door and landed in a heap on the floor.
He went still, listening to the Z-9 groan around him. A shudder coursed through the fuselage. Everything went still. Sam looked around, trying to orient himself.
He was sitting in icy water up to his waist. Part of the flow was seeping out around the closed door, the other part flooding into the cockpit and out through the shattered windshield. A few feet away, the body of a soldier lay lifeless. Sam eased forward until he could see between the cockpit seats. The pilot and copilot were dead, whether from his bullets or the impact, or both, he couldn’t tell.
He could now see that the cockpit had suffered more damage than he’d realized. In addition to most of the windshield, a section of the nose cone and dashboard, including the radio, was gone, probably somewhere at the bottom of the lake by now.