Cold Fire

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 steel-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 Casey.” Christine was shaking and frantic, as if she was not in the least convinced their ordeal was over, as if she thought the earth might crack open and hot lava spew out, beginning a new chapter of the nightmare. “How did we get separated? We were behind one another, then we were outside, and in the turmoil, somehow you and Casey just weren't there.”
    “Holly,” he said impatiently. “Where'd she go?”
    “She wanted to go back inside for Casey, but then she realized the cry was coming from the forward section.” Christine held up a purse and chattered on: “She carried her purse out of there without realizing she did it, so she gave it to me and went back, she knew it couldn't be Casey, but she went anyway.”
    Christine pointed, and for the first time Jim saw that the front of the DC-10, all the way back through the first-class section, had completely torn free from the portion in which they had been riding. It was two hundred feet farther along the field. Though it was burning less vigorously than the larger mid-section, it was considerably more mangled than the rest of the craft, including the badly battered rear quarter.
    He was appalled to hear that Holly had reentered any part of the smouldering wreckage. The cockpit and forward section rested in that Iowa