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that?”
    “Yes,” Wilczynski
answered. He was clearly trying to avoid any movement of his head. He looked
pale and weak.
    “Okay. I’ll go as
quickly as I can.” She waited until the injured pilot had lifted his hands,
then removed hers and helped him position his in what she hoped was the best
location. The amount of blood soaking the jacket was frightening. When he
indicated he was ready, she stood and scanned the instrument panel, amazed at
the sheer number of gauges, dials and switches.
    Finally she found
the altimeter. “Twenty-three thousand, five hundred feet,” she said.
    “And how long has
the plane been flying itself?”
    Tracie thought
hard. It seemed like forever, but in reality was probably not long at all.
“Ninety seconds,” she guessed.
    “Okay,” he
answered, then was silent for a moment, obviously trying to calculate a rate of
descent. “We have maybe five minutes before we hit the water.”
    Shit. At
the rate the color was draining out of Wilczynski’s face, Tracie wondered if he
would last five minutes. “Where’s the first-aid kit?” she asked, conscious of
the seconds ticking away.
    He pointed to a
metal box clipped to the side wall behind what had been Mitchell’s seat, then
quickly returned the hand to his head. Tracie leaned over the dead bodies of
Mitchell and Berenger, unclipped the kit, and then returned to Wilczynski’s
side. She opened the metal box and rummaged inside, pulling out a roll of
gauze.
    She gently removed
Wilczynski’s hands and lifted the jacket away from the head wound. Blood surged
out of a ragged, splintered hole where the side of his skull used to be. For
the second time since discovering Wilczynski alive, she wondered how in hell he
was still breathing.
    She anchored one
end of the gauze on the back of his head with her left hand and began unrolling
it, wrapping it expertly around and around with her right, moving as quickly as
she dared. She finished wrapping Wilczynski’s head and secured the bandage,
then examined her handiwork quickly, anxious to move the pilot. The portion of
the gauze located directly over his injury had already begun darkening,
changing from a pristine white to a frightening maroon, but the patch job
looked secure enough, at least for now.
    She nodded and
forced a smile. “There. Good as new.”
    Wilczynski
grimaced and the effect was ghastly. A thick smear of blood coated the side of
his face and his teeth had been stained a blackish-red from all the blood he
had swallowed. “I appreciate the lie.” He closed his eyes and Tracie knew he
was steeling himself against the pain to come.
    Finally he opened
his eyes again. “Let’s take our seats and get this thing on the ground.” Tracie
nodded and knelt over his prone body, straddling his legs. She slipped her
hands under his armpits. His flight suit was sticky with blood. She eased the
pilot’s body up and forward, until she had gotten him into a sitting position
on the floor, legs straight out in front of him, next to his seat.
    He had maintained
a grim silence through all the jostling, despite the pain he must be feeling. This
is one tough bastard, she thought. But things are about to get a lot
worse. She looked him in the eyes and could see he knew.
    “Are you ready?”
she asked quietly.
    He nodded.
    She hooked her
arms under his armpits at the elbow, locking the two of them in an awkward
embrace, then struggled to a kneeling position and began rising, her legs
screaming in protest as they took the brunt of the two-hundred-pound man’s dead
weight. When she had lifted his body to where his butt was level with the
flight seat, Tracie took a half-step left, then dropped the pilot as gently as
she could into the seat.
    He groaned and his
eyes rolled up into his head and his body began sliding back toward Tracie. She
used her small body to brace his larger one in the seat and then buckled him
into his harness.
    Wilczynski’s eyes
were closed and his pallor had turned a sickly