Her legs felt like jelly. “Just shaken up, I think. How about you?”
He stepped back, looked at the chopper. “I’m good, but this bird is beat. I hope they don’t take it out of my paycheck.”
The helicopter’s skids were bent, its tail rotors crumpled, its boom buckled. She didn’t have to be an expert on helicopters to know it wouldn’t fly again.
He climbed back inside, searched the corpses, then hopped to the ground, the dead men’s weapons in his hands. “That’s my first helicopter crash as a pilot, and, as chopper crashes go, it wasn’t bad.”
“Your first crash?”
He tucked the pistols inside his waistband. “I’ve only spent about three hours flying helicopters and never on my own.”
“What?” Shanti gaped at him. “You told him you’d flown helicopters for years.”
“That’s called ‘bluffing.’”
Shanti’s legs gave out, landing her flat on her butt.
Connor sawShanti drop to the grass. “Hey, you okay?”
“You said you knew how to fly one of these! That whole time, I kept telling myself it would be okay because you knew what you were doing.”
Head throbbing, he walked over to her, took her hands, pulled her to her feet. “I got us safely down, didn’t I?”
She laughed, a manic kind of laughter.
He couldn’t blame her for being upset.
He kept hold of her hands, looked into her eyes. “This is about survival now, Shanti. I know this must have been terrifying but—
“Terrifying?” Her expression turned to rage. “I thought you were dead! I thought they had killed you! There was so much blood and…”
Warmth blossomed behind Connor’s breastbone, some part of him touched to think she’d been afraid for his sake.
He drew her into his arms. “I’m okay, Shanti, thanks in part to you. I’m sorry you went through that. This should never have happened.”
But Shanti wasn’t finished, words burbling out of her. “I kept remembering what you’d said about making peace with death. I didn’t know how to do that. But when I saw you were alive, I thought you might moan or move and then they’d shoot you again. I squeezed your hand, tried to wake you, to warn you.”
“It worked.” He stepped back, hands on her shoulders. “Thank you.”
“I saw you’d dropped your gun, so I pulled it across the floor with my foot and waited until they were distracted to pick it up. I told myself that I would pull the trigger to save your life if I had to. I was going to kill them.”
That was a huge step for a woman who’d grown up terrified of firearms and who had committed herself to nonviolence.
“That was incredibly brave.”
“I don’t feel brave.”
He released her, tucked a finger under her chin, lifted her gaze to his. “Being brave just means doing what you have to do, even when you’re afraid.”
“Have you ever been afraid?”
“More times than I can count.” That seemed to surprise her. “You are strong, Shanti. I know you are. You need that strength now. There are two hundred fifty kilometers between us and the border. Soldiers will be trying to find us. They’ll have helicopters, vehicles, and maybe even dogs—and we’ll be on foot.”
“Won’t Cobra or the US government send a rescue team?”
“They’d have to get permission from the Pentagon for an op like that. Myanmar won’t allow it. Your abduction will already be an international incident.”
“They’ll say I was spying.”