live thing throwing itself against the bars of a cage, but it began to
beat harder, faster.
Certain that they had to be within a few steps of the hole in the
fusalage that he had glimpsed earlier, Jim opened his eyes, which stung
and watered copiously. Perfect blackness had given way to a
charcoal-gray swirl of fumes through which throbbed blood-red pulses of
light. The pulses were flames shrouded by smoke and seen only as
reflections bounding on millions of swirling particles of ash. At any
moment the fire could burst upon him from out of the smoke and sear him
to the bone.
He was not going to make it.
No breathable air.
Fire seeking him on all sides.
He was going to ignite. Burn like a living tallow candle. In a vision
sparked by terror rather than by a higher power, he saw himself dropping
to his knees in defeat. The child in his arms. Fusing with her in a
melting inferno. . .
A sudden wind pulled at him. The smoke was sucked away toward his left.
He saw daylight, cool and gray and easily differentiated from the deadly
glow of burning jet fuel.
Propelled by a gruesome image of himself and the child fried by a flash
fire on the very brink of safety, he threw himself toward the grayness
and fell out of the airliner. No portable stairs were waiting, of
course, no emergency chute, just bare earth.
Fortunately a crop had recently been harvested, and the stubble had been
plowed under for mulch. The newly tilled earth was hard enough to knock
the wind out of him but far too soft to break his bones.
He clung fiercely to Casey, gasping for breath. He rolled onto his
knees, got up, still holding her in his arms, and staggered out of the
corona of heat that radiated from the blazing plane.
Some of the survivors were running away, as if they thought the DC-10
had been loaded with dynamite and was going to blow half the state of
Iowa to smithereens any second now. Others were wandering aimlessly in
shock. Still others were lying on the ground: some too stunned to go
another inch; some injured; and perhaps some of them were dead.
Grateful for the clean air, coughing out sour fumes from his soiled
lungs, Jim looked for Christine Dubrovek among the people in the field.
He turned this way and that, calling her name, but he couldn’t see her.
He began to think that she had perished in the airplane, that he might
not have been treading over only passengers’ possessions in the port
aisle but also over a couple of the passengers themselves.
Perhaps sensing what Jim was thinking, Casey let the palm tree decorated
T-shirt fall from her grasp. Clinging to him, coughing out the last of
the smoke, she began to ask for her mother in a fearful tone of voice
that indicated she expected the worst.
A burgeoning sense of triumph had taken hold of him. But now a new fear
rattled in him like ice cubes in a tall glass. Suddenly the warm August
sun over the Iowa field and the waves of heat pouring off the DC-10 did
not touch him, and he felt as though he was standing on an arctic plain.
“Steve?”
At first he did not react to the name.
“Steve?”
Then he remembered that he had been Steve Harkman to her-which she and
her husband and the real Steve Harkman would probably puzzle about for
the rest of their lives-and he turned toward the voice. Christine was
there, stumbling through the freshly tilled earth, her face and clothes
stained from the oily smoke, shoeless, arms out to receive her little
girl.
Jim gave the child to her.
Mother and daughter hugged each other fiercely.
Weeping, looking across Casey’s shoulder at Jim, Christine said, “Thank
you, thank you for getting her out of there, my God, Steve, I can’t ever
thank you enough.”
He did not want thanks. All he wanted was Holly Thorne, alive and
uninjured.
“Have you seen Holly?” he asked worriedly.
“Yes. She heard a child crying for help, she thought maybe it was