concrete. And the sea was stealing the last of her body heat until no matter what her barely functioning brain screamed at her, the signals just didn’t reach her muscles.
“She’s going to go down!” Zotov screamed at Alec. “She’s too weak to swim to the collar!”
With a curse, Alec watched the woman’s waxen features. When her eyes rolled back in her head, he knew she’d lost consciousness. He tore off his helmet, then his parka. There was no time to unlace his heavy black leather boots.
Turning to Zotov, he screamed at him above the roar of the helo, “I’m going to jump. I’ll get her to the collar. You lift us both up!”
Zotov nodded jerkily, his eyes huge.
It was a thirty-foot drop into the ocean. Alec’s alarm increased as he saw the woman slide beneath the surface for the last time. Taking a deep breath, he leapt from the helo.
Abby’s last coherent thought before she surrendered to her watery grave was of the man tearing the clothes from his body. When he removed the helmet, she could clearly see his taut features: a lean, intense face with dark brown eyes that seemed to burn with some undefinable inner light, hair cut military short and the color of the black walnuts that each autumn fell from the trees around her apartment in Alexandra, Virginia. Just the anxiety, the care building in his eyes, made her try one last time when she realized he was stripping off unnecessary clothing to jump out the door to save her.
With the last of her strength, she lifted her hand above her head as the sea jerked her downward. Her icy glove stretched upward in a silent plea of help. It was the last thing she remembered.
Alec landed in the Bering Sea with a huge splash. The icy water tore the breath from him as he shot back up to the surface. Shaking his head in a violent motion to blink away the seawater from his eyes, Alec saw her hand just as it slid beneath the surface. With floundering strokes he reached her, but she was already beneath the water. Gulping in a huge breath of air, he jackknifed into a dive, lunging beneath the surface. There! He saw her red hair floating around her waxen features like living red coral. Kicking hard, he propelled himself downward, his hand outstretched, but the cold was stealing his strength. If only…if only… There!
Alec grabbed the shoulder of her survival suit. Instantly, he kicked back toward the surface. To his surprise and terror, the survival suit was much heavier than he’d realized. It took every last vestige of his superb physical condition to get the woman back to the surface. Gasping for air, he placed one arm around her to keep her head up and out of the water. Swimming hard for the collar that dangled nearby, Alec sobbed for breath.
No wonder she’d gone down so quickly. The survival suit felt like an anchor. As hard as Alec kicked, he realized with a sinking feeling that his boots were retarding them from reaching the collar. Anxiously, he glanced at the woman. She wasn’t breathing. He had only minutes to revive her or she’d have permanent brain damage. If he could revive her at all. She was suffering from hypothermia and a small cut on her forehead.
The collar, once retrieved, was easy to bring around himself and the woman. Alec placed both his arms under her, locking his hands into a fist just below her breasts. He heard the winch begin and instantly felt the collar tighten around them. Hurry! Hurry! The weight from the deadly survival suit was ponderous. The winch was pulling them up, up, until finally, like two dripping towels being rescued from the grasping, hungry sea, they slowly came out of the water.
Alec was nearly beside himself at the slowness of the winch recovery. Zotov helped him maneuver the woman into the helo and laid her down on the metal surface that was glazed over with ice. Alec staggered into the aircraft on his hands and knees, gasping and shaking from the cold.
“Shut the door!” he ordered Zotov as soon as he shrugged out of the collar.
The crewman shut and locked it.
Alec crawled to the woman’s side and rolled her onto her belly. Like all officers in the Soviet navy, he’d been taught CPR and advanced first-aid life-saving techniques. Straddling her, he placed his hands low on her torso and, leaning forward, forced out the water he knew was in her lungs. Zotov hovered nearby. Without a helmet on, Alec was without communications ability with his pilot.
“Get to the Udaloy!” Alec yelled above the roar, hoping Zotov would understand him. The crewman jerked a thumbs-up that he understood the order and relayed the command to the pilot. Instantly, the Helix banked right, gained altitude, the engines revving up to maximum pitch.
A half an hour. They had half an hour before Alec could get the woman any kind of medical help. He kept pushing huge amounts of water out of her lungs. Alec was trembling badly, the dark blue one piece suit stuck to his body, icy and stiff. Zotov helped him turn her over on her back.
It was then that Alec got the first good look at her. Her flesh was a bluish gray, indicating she had stopped breathing. With trembling hands, he tore at the zipper of the survival suit. He had to get it off her! It would only impair her chances of surviving, now an icy coffin helping to induce her body into worse hypothermia. Zotov understood. Together, they wrestled with the bulky, wet material, stripping her out of it. Zotov retrieved the thermal recovery capsule and placed her in it.
Why was he doing this? Alec thought. Why was he risking his entire career—his life—for her? He tipped her head back, that mass of red hair spread like a limp halo about her. He saw copper-colored freckles across her cheeks and realized in anguish just how beautifully sculpted her lips really were. Trying to get a pulse at her throat and finding none, Alec knew he must do CPR if he was to even have a chance of saving her.
Even as the helo returned to the Udaloy, Alec continued to perform CPR. He tirelessly pumped on her chest to try and get her heart started, and blew his breath into her. He lost track of time, as he always did in an emergency. She became his sole focus, his entire reason for being. As he fitted his mouth to her slack lips, he envisioned not only his breath entering her, but his will for her to live flowing into her slender body at the same time.
Come on, fight back! Do you hear me? Fight back! Where is the fire that shows in your hair? Show it to me! Show it!
Several minutes before Mizin landed the Helix on the aft end of the destroyer, Alec felt a pulse. With a cry of elation, he watched her fine, thin nostrils quiver. He placed his hand on her chest, feeling a trembling, shallow inhalation on her part. He grinned triumphantly up at Zotov, who smiled back. Beneath the survival suit, the woman had worn a heavy pair of white cotton longjohns. They, too, were soaked, but Alec left them on as he and Zotov wrapped her in the thermal capsule once again.
As they landed and the deck crew placed the tie-down chains on the four wheels to stop the Helix from being tossed overboard into the sea, Alec quickly made sure the thermal unit fit snugly around the woman. Her flesh was frighteningly cold, and he knew she would have to be treated immediately for hypothermia. If she wasn’t warmed up, her heart would stop beating again.
Zotov jerked the door open. To Alec’s relief, two medical corpsmen waited with a stretcher just outside the aircraft. The rotors were slowing, the engine turned off. Alec ignored the curious looks of the sailors and those officers who gathered at a safe distance from the helicopter. With Zotov’s help, he transferred the woman to the stretcher and issued orders to have her taken immediately to the dispensary. He followed close behind, soaked to the skin and freezing as never before.
Entering the destroyer from a nearby hatch, Alec was on the heels of the corpsmen. They hurried, lifting their feet high above each hatchway, the passage narrow and confined. What had he done? The ship’s captain, Denisov, had never given permission to affect
