Dark Rivers of the Heart

piece of government machinery. Perhaps causing it to crash into occupied stores.
        Great, fiery gouts of aviation fuel splashing everything and anyone in their path. Respected Cedar City merchants transformed into human torches running in circles through the February morning, blazing and shrieking.
        It would all be colorful and exciting, and nailing the woman would be worth the lives of any number of bystanders, but explaining the catastrophe would be as hopeless as trying to explain the fine points of nuclear physics to the idiot sitting in the back of the Dodge pickup.
        And there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the chief of police would be a clean-cut Mormon who had never tasted an alcoholic drink in his life, who had never smoked, and who would not be tuned in properly to the concepts of untaxable hush money and police-agency collusion. Bet on it. A Mormon.
        Reluctantly, Roy lowered the submachine gun.
        The chopper rose swiftly.
        "Why Utah?" he shouted furiously at the fugitives that he could not see but that he knew were frustratingly close.
        Peach in. Green out.
        He had to calm down. Think cosmically.
        The situation would be resolved in his favor. He still had the second chopper to use as a pursuit vehicle. And Earthguard 3 would find it easier to track the JetRanger than the Rover, because the chopper was larger than the truck and because it traveled above all sheltering vegetation and above the distracting movement of ground-level traffic.
        Overhead, the hijacked aircraft swung east, across the roof of the card store.
        In the passenger cabin, Ellie crouched beside the opening in the fuselage, leaned against the door frame, and looked down at the shopping center roof that passed under her. God, her heart was booming as loud as the rotor blades. She was terrified that the chopper would tip or lurch and that she would fall out.
        During the past fourteen months, she had learned more about herself than in the entire previous twenty-eight years. For one thing, her love of life, her sheer joy in being alive, was greater than she had ever realized until the three people she had loved most had been taken from her in one brutal, bloody night. In the face of so much death, with her own existence in constant jeopardy, she now savored both the warmth of every sun-filled day and the chill wind of every raging storm weeds as much as flowers, the bitter and the sweet. She had never been a fraction as aware of her love of freedom-her need for freedom-as when she had been forced to fight to keep it. And in those fourteen months, she had been amazed to learn that she had the guts to walk precipices leap chasms and rin in the devil's face; amazed to discover that she was not capable of losing hope; amazed to find that she was but one of many fugitives from an imploding world, all of them perpetually on the rim of a black hole and resisting its God-crushing gravity; amazed by how much fear she could tolerate and still thrive.
        One day, of course, she would amaze herself straight into a sudden death. Maybe today. Leaning against the frame of the open door in the fuselage. Finished by a bullet or by a long, hard fall.
        They traversed the building and moved over the fifty-foot-wide service alley. The other helicopter was down there, parked behind Hallmark.
        No gunmen were in the immediate vicinity of the craft. Evidently, they had already bailed out and had moved in on the back of the supermarket, under the twenty-foot overhang.
        With Spencer giving orders to their own pilot, they hovered in position long enough for Ellie to use the Micro Uzi on the tail assembly of the craft on the ground. The weapon had two magazines, welded at right angles to each other, with a capacity of forty rounds-minus the few that Spencer had fired into the supermarket ceiling. She emptied both magazines, slapped in spares, emptied those too. The bullets destroyed the horizontal stabilizer, damaged the tail rotor, and punched holes in the tail pylon, disabling the aircraft.
        If her assault was answered by any return fire, she was unaware of it.
        The gunmen who had moved off to cover the back of the market were probably too surprised and confused to be sure what to do.
        Besides, the entire attack on the grounded chopper had taken only twenty seconds. Then she put the Uzi on the cabin deck and slid the