CHAPTER NINE #2
The radio crackled, once, sharp, and then went to nothing but static — the specific dead hiss of a channel that had simply stopped carrying anything, whether from the wind, the water, or the chopper banking wide to reposition for the winch run.
Renz thumbed the transmit button twice, three times, got nothing back but the same flat hiss, and for a handful of seconds that felt considerably longer than they were, the two of them stood at the fence line with no way of knowing whether Cal was still overhead, still reading the same water, still coming for the same man.
"Cal, come in. Air One, this is shore, do you copy.
" Nothing. Renz's jaw tightened, the only visible sign of the sudden vertiginous drop from controlled competence to genuine uncertainty, a man who'd built his whole life around always having the next useful thing to do and finding, for these few seconds, that there was nothing useful left to do at all except wait.
"There," Pip said, pointing, and through the driving rain the chopper's shape resolved again, lower, closer, having simply repositioned out of the radio's effective line while it worked its way around for the winch approach, and a heartbeat later the handset crackled back to life, Cal's voice returning mid-sentence as though it had never left.
"—repeat, coming in for the winch now, hold your position—"
"Copy, Air One, we read you." Renz's shoulders dropped half an inch, the specific released tension of a man who'd just spent ten seconds doing the hardest kind of nothing there was — waiting, with no job to busy his hands, while someone else's fate hung on equipment he had no control over.
Pip stood beside Renz at the torn fence line with the rain coming sideways and the whole machinery of the Brotherhood — a chopper overhead, a pilot's steady voice, a bush flier reading currents from the sky, a man on a fence line who knew this ground better than any map, and her, simply present, simply staying, because that was apparently the only job left for her to do and she was, for once in her life, doing it without a bag packed nearby, without an exit route mapped, without any part of herself calculating how quickly she could leave — watched the winch cable drop down through the rain toward a stranded man who was about to be pulled, quite literally, out of the water by the combined and total effort of everyone this book had spent seven chapters teaching her to love.
The winch line swayed wildly in the crosswind before finding its mark, the downdraft from the rotors flattening the water around the pontoon into a strange churning circle, and for one terrible held second the cable seemed to drift wide of Delaney's outstretched hand, close enough to see, impossible to reach — and then it swung back on the wind's own correction and he caught it, both hands, and the winch operator began the slow careful haul, Delaney rising out of the flood in stages, spinning slowly on the cable, his shouted thanks lost entirely to the rotor noise but visible in the shape of his mouth, in the way his whole body seemed to sag with relief the moment his feet left the pontoon.
The winch took him clean. Delaney came up through the rain white-faced and shaking and alive, and the chopper banked away toward the surf club with Cal's voice already calling the all-clear, and Renz stood at the torn fence line in the driving rain and let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere much deeper than his lungs, his shoulders dropping all at once the way a held tension finally releases.
"You left the table," Pip said, when the noise of the chopper had faded enough to talk, the rain finally starting to ease into something less like an assault and more like ordinary weather.
"I did."
Renz looked at her, rain running off both of them, the fence line rusted and ordinary behind him, no fanfare anywhere, just two soaked people standing in the last grey light of a storm that was, finally, starting to ease.
"Turns out," he said, "when it actually matters, I know how to stop just setting the table and sit down at it instead. "
"Feels a bit like the burn, doesn't it," Pip said, quietly, both of them still catching their breath. "Wind turning faster than anyone planned for. Except this time it wasn't me who needed pulling clear."
"Wasn't going to let it be anyone, this time." Renz's hand found hers, steady despite everything, the same grip from the fence line drawing tighter. "Reckon I've had my eight seconds' warning already, back on that ridge. Wasn't about to waste a second chance at getting somebody out in time."
Pip reached for his hand, cold and wet and steady, and the two of them turned back toward the surf club, toward Josie's triage and Arjun's stretcher teams and Jax's clean headcount and the whole exhausted, soaked, entirely intact Brotherhood waiting for them, and neither one of them said anything else the whole walk back, because for once, there was nothing that needed saying that the held hand wasn't already saying better.
Josie met them at the door, her clinical composure cracking, just slightly, at the sight of them — soaked through, muddied to the knee, but unmistakably, gratefully whole.
"You went out there," she said, half accusation, half relief, the specific tone of a woman who'd spent three hours triaging strangers while quietly terrified for two people she'd known barely three weeks.
"Had to," Renz said again, the same two words he'd used at the fence line, though something in the way he said them this time carried less defensiveness than usual, as though the doing of the thing had already answered whatever argument might have followed.
"I know you had to." Josie looked at him a moment longer, the particular assessing look of someone checking for injury out of pure habit even though nothing about his stance suggested any, and then, unexpectedly, pulled him into a brief, fierce hug, the kind delivered fast and hard by someone uncomfortable with prolonged sentiment but unwilling to let the moment pass unmarked.
"Delaney's with his family. Doing fine. You did good, Kowalski.
Both of you." She stepped back, already turning toward the next thing that needed her attention, a stretcher coming through the side door, but not before adding, over her shoulder, in a voice pitched for only the two of them to catch, "Cal said the same thing about you that Jax did, back when it was him standing where you're standing now.
Guess it runs in the family, whatever this crew actually is. "
Renz remembered old Barry only once he'd finally sat down with a blanket and a mug of tea, the man whose boat shed he'd walked a hundred times checking on, and felt a fresh spike of concern cut through the exhaustion.
He found the number on his phone with wet, clumsy fingers and rang, relieved beyond measure when the old man picked up on the third ring, gruff and entirely unbothered.
"Kowalski? Bit late for a chat, isn't it."
"Just checking you're right, Barry. Storm surge got the ramp precinct bad. Wanted to make sure you weren't caught anywhere near it."
"Bah, I've been up at my daughter's in Coffs the whole week, mate, didn't even know there'd been a blow till the news came on just now.
" A pause, something warmer creeping into the gruffness.
"Decent of you to think of an old fool like me in the middle of all that, though.
Most blokes'd have their hands full enough without ringing round to check on an empty boat shed. "
"Wasn't empty tonight," Renz said, and left it at that, too tired to explain the whole strange shape of the evening, and Barry, sensing there was a story he'd hear properly another day, simply thanked him and rang off.