John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Copyright 2006 by John Case

There was this ping.

A single, solitary noise that announced itself in the key of C-ping! and that was that. The noise came from somewhere in the back, at the rear of the fuselage, and for a moment it reminded Mike Burke of his brothers wedding. It was the sound his father made at the rehearsal dinner, announcing a toast by tapping his glass with a spoon.

Ping!

It was funny, if you thought about it.

But that wasnt it. Though the helicopter was French (in fact, a single-rotor Ecureuil B2), it was not equipped with champagne flutes. The sound signaled something else, like the noise a tail rotor makes when one of its blades is struck with a 9mm round and snaps in half and flies away. Or so Burke imagined. Ping!

Frowning, he turned to the pilot, a Kiwi named Rubini. Did you-?

The handsome New Zealander grinned. No worries, bugalugs! Suddenly, the chopper yawed violently to starboard, roaring into a slide and twisting down. Rubinis face went white and he lunged at the controls. Burke gasped, grabbing the armrests on his seat.

In an instant, his life his whole life passed before his eyes against a veering background of forest and sky. One by one, a thousand scenes played out as the helicopter tobogganed down an invisible staircase toward a wall of trees.

In the few seconds it took to fall five hundred feet, Burke remembered every pet hed ever had, every girl hed kissed, every house apartment teacher friend and landscape hed ever seen. Candyland and Monopoly. Christmas lights and incense, Chet Baker and the stalls along the Seine. His past washed over him in a wave, and kept on coming. As the helicopter sawed through the air, he remembered the dawn coming up behind Adams Peak, and the three-point shot hed taken against Park High, the way it rattled the rim with two seconds left on the clock and the celebration that followed. A shit-shot, yes, but thank you, Jesus!

His mothers face appeared like a curtain of rain between his seat and the altimeter, while lines of long-forgotten poetry ran through his head and the smell of gardenias gardenias? filled the cockpit.

The pilot yelling. Or not quite yelling screaming. The pilot is screaming, Burke thought.

Not that there was anything Burke could do about it. They were going down fast plummeting really and only a miracle could save them. Burke didnt believe in miracles, so he sat where he was, listening spellbound as a voice in the back of his head recited notes for an obituary:

Michael Lee Burke

27-year-old Virginia native

award-winning photographer

crashed and burned

50 miles from the border of Sierra Leone

will be much missed

As the helicopters undercarriage scraped the tops of the trees, Burke saw his future telescope from fifty years to five seconds. Still, the memories came only now, he was almost up to date.

Last night, hed gone out drinking with Rubini. And theyd ended up singing karaoke at the Mamba Point Hotel. Burke sang California Stars to the hoots of some UNMIL types, but he must have done all right because he went home with a Slav agronomist named Ursula who was reliably said to be the last natural blonde in Monrovia. She was probably still asleep in his room, just as hed left her, arm crooked above her head on the pillow, like a movie star swooning for the cameras.

As a blizzard of vegetation slammed into the windshield, Burke had an epiphany. A 9mm round wasnt going to kill him. What was going to kill him was a tidal wave of bad karma brought on by years of photographing people in extremis. Whatever his intentions, however benign they might have been to expose, to explain the simple reality was that hed made his living on other peoples despair.

The more painful the images in the photographs he took, the better they sold. That fact did something to a person. The favelas in Rio, the orphanage in Bucharest, the red-light district in Calcutta he thought hed been doing a public service when in reality it had all been a kind of well-intended voyeurism.

And now today, barely a week before his twenty-eighth birthday, he was on his way to take pictures at a refugee camp for children whod suffered amputations in the diamond wars.

Except he wasnt going to make it. He wasnt going anywhere but down.

The helicopter dug deeper into the canopy of the forest and Burke wordlessly realized hed never again take another photograph. One way or another, he was done with that.

Jesus!

Something came through the windshield with a crash and Rubinis forehead exploded, sending a spray of blood and brains through the cockpit. Burke caught a mouthful as the chopper meteored through the trees, bucking, plunging, falling like a box of tools, slamming finally into the waterlogged earth of a swamp.

So this, Burke thought, is what its like to be dead But that didnt make much sense. If you were dead, you didnt feel dead. So maybe he was dying. That made more sense because he felt as if every bone in his body was broken. He tasted blood in his mouth. He was shaking. And the world was turning, slowly, round and round.

His eyes flew open and he realized what was happening. The helicopter was revolving on its axis like a bluebottle fly in its death throes. The overhead rotor slashed at the water, the earth, and the trees, then flew apart like a grenade, sending shrapnel in every direction.

The engine coughed, spluttered, and whined, showering sparks through the cockpit.

With great difficulty, Burke fumbled with his seat belt. Even the smallest movement was painful. His body was a bag of broken glass and thorns. And he was covered with blood. It ran down the side of his face, and his shoulders were soaked.

But that wasnt right. It wasnt just blood. He took a deep breath, and choked on it.

Aviation fuel!

His fingers tore at the seat belt, but even as it popped open, he realized it was too late. A soft whump announced the fuels ignition and, in an instant, the cockpit was engulfed. His shirt went off like a flare and, for a moment, it seemed as if the side of his head was on fire. Stumbling and falling, he erupted out of the cockpit, tearing the shirt off his chest, staggering blindly until a fallen log caught his foot and spilled him into a pool of shallow water.

Where he lay for hours or days, delirious and suppurating. Incredibly, his burns attracted the attention of bees, who fed on the clear liquid oozing from his skin. Occasionally, he rose to consciousness, only to faint dead away. It was the pain, of course. That and the sight of the apiary embedded in his chest.

Bad karma? Oh, yeah

They sat on revolving stools at a small plastic table under the proprietary gaze of Colonel Sanders. Sunlight poured through the oversized windows. Behind the Corniche, the beach curled away like a ribbon of gold, and the Mediterranean sparkled.

Hakim, the older man, sat with his hands folded in front of him, like a schoolchild waiting for class to begin. They were beautiful hands, with long and elegant fingers, and they were carefully manicured. Too much! he said, nodding toward the windows.

The younger man, whose name was Bobojon Simoni, screwed his face into a squint, and nodded. I know. Its too bright.