would be grounded by the time they reached land again. It was highly unlikely that this life raft would be spotted by any other boats and, even if it was, it would be impossible to effect a rescue.
If they didn’t do something, they were signing the death warrants of another two people. There had already been too much carnage in this disastrous leg of the Ultraswift-Round-the-World yacht race. At least one death had been confirmed, a lot of serious injuries and there were still people unaccounted for.
‘We can get one,’ Ellie said desperately. ‘He can ride with me on the end of the line. We’re so close to land. We can drop him and try going back for the other one.’
There was a moment’s silence from above. It was Mike who spoke this time.
‘You really want to try that, Ellie?’
Did she? Despite the skin-tight rescue suit she was wearing under her flight suit, Ellie knew she was close to becoming hypothermic. Would her fingers work well enough to manipulate the harness and carabiner clips to attach another person to the winch safely? She was beyond exhaustion now, too, and that old back injury was aching abominably. What if the victim was terrified by this form of transport and struggled? Made them swing dangerously on the end of the line and make a safe landing virtually impossible?
But they all knew there was no choice.
‘Let’s give it a try, at least,’ Ellie said. ‘We can do that, can’t we?’
And so they did, but Dave was having trouble keeping the chopper level in the buffeting winds, and the mountainous swells of the sea below were impossible to judge. Just as they got close enough to hover near the life raft, the foaming top of a wave reached over Ellie’s head and she was suddenly underwater, being dragged through the icy sea like a fish on a line.
And that did it.
She wasn’t under the water for very long at all, but it was one of those moments where time seemed to stand still. Where a million thoughts could coalesce into surprising clarity.
Eleanor Sutton was totally over this. She was thirty-two years old and she had a dodgy back. Three years ago this hadn’t been the plan of how her life would be. She would be happily married. At home with a gorgeous baby. Working part time, teaching one of the subjects she was so good at. Aeromedical transport or emergency management maybe.
The fact that she could actually remember this so clearly was a death knell. This kind of adrenaline rush had been what had got her through the last three years when that life plan had been blown out of the water so devastatingly. Losing personal priorities due to living for the ultimate challenge of risking her life for others had been the way to move forward.
And it wasn’t working any more.
If she could see all this so clearly as she was dragged through the wave and then swinging in clear air again over the life raft, Ellie knew it would never work again. She shouldn’t be capable of thinking about anything other than how she was going to harness another body to her own in the teeth of the approaching cyclone and then get them both safely onto land somewhere.
This was it.
The last time she would be doing this.
She might as well make it count.
Unbelievably, the men in the life raft weren’t ready to cooperate. Ellie had the harness in her hands. She shoved it towards one of them, holding it up to show where the arm loops were. The harness was taken by one of the men, but he immediately tried to pass it to the other.
‘Just do it, Ben. Put the harness on. You’re going first.’
But he pushed it back and there was a brief struggle as he tried to force the other man’s arm into one of the loops. Too caught up arguing over who got to go first, they were getting nowhere.
‘I’ll be okay,’ one of them was yelling. ‘I can wait.’
‘This isn’t make-believe,’ the other yelled back.
Static in her ears made Ellie wince.
‘You still on the air?’ Dave’s voice crackled. ‘That radio still working after getting wet?’
‘Seems to be.’ Ellie put her hand out to stop the life raft bumping her away. It was dipping into another swell. And the men were still arguing. Good grief—had one just accused the other of being just like his mother?
She thought the terrifying dunk into that wave had been the final straw, but this was just too much. Ellie was going a lot further than the extra mile here, making her potentially last job as a rescue helicopter paramedic really count. She shouldn’t be doing this and this lack of cooperation was putting them in a lot more danger. Suddenly Ellie was angry.
Angry with herself for endangering everybody involved in the helicopter hovering overhead.
Angry with these men who wanted to save each other instead of themselves.
Angry knowing that she had to face the future without the escape from reality that this job had provided so well for so long.
She was close enough to help shove the harness onto one of the men. To shout at them with all the energy her anger bestowed.
‘There’s no time for this.’
But they were ignoring her. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ one yelled.
There was another painful crackle of static in Ellie’s headphones. ‘What’s going on?’ Dave asked in her ear.
‘Stand by,’ Ellie snapped. She was still angry. Ready to knock some sense into these men, but whatever had been said while Dave had been making contact had changed something. The man she’d been helping to force the harness onto had gone completely still. Thankfully, Ellie’s hands were working well enough to snap the clips into place and check that he was safely anchored to the winch line.
‘The chopper’s full,’ she shouted at the other man. ‘We’ll come back for you as soon as we can.’ She clipped the last carabiners together and put her face close to her patient’s. ‘Put your arms around me and hang on,’ she instructed him grimly. ‘Just hang on.’ She knew they would have been listening to every word from above. Hopefully, they’d think the lack of reassurance she was providing was due to the tension of the situation, not the anger that was still bubbling in her veins like liquid lava.
‘Take us up, Dave. Let’s get out of here.’
* * *
‘Ben...’
The despairing howl was whipped from Jacob Logan’s lips by the force of the wind as he felt himself pulled both upwards and forwards in a violent swinging movement. It was also drowned by the stinging deluge of a combination of rain and sea spray, made all the more powerful by the increasing speed of the helicopter rotors above.
It was too painful to try and keep his eyes open. Jake squeezed them shut and kept them like that. He tightened his grip around the body attached to his by what he hoped was the super-strong webbing of the harnesses and solid metal clips. There was nothing he could do. However alien it felt, he had no choice but to put his faith in his rescuers and the fact that they knew what they were doing.
Shutting
