Then I looked up.
The MITI Aerospatiale, about two hundred feet off the ground, had become a blazing sphere, a grotesque nova. Now its rotor blades were clawing the air, askew, while it circled downward like a wounded bird. An instant later it nosed into the parking lot behind us, hurtling fragments of tail assembly through several empty staff cars.
I sat mesmerized as a second ball of fire erupted where it had crashed. One of the fuel tanks had ignited, just like in the movies.
"Ken!" Tam let out a choked cry after the first few seconds of disbelief. Then she slammed the transmission into 'Park' and began ripping off her seat belt.
Where's she going? Doesn't she realize—?
Her door was open and she was stumbling out. That's when I finally came to my senses, which included the sobering thought that there might be more fuel tanks, such as the auxiliary, that hadn't yet blown.
"Wait!" I'd ripped off my own seat harness by that time and had rolled out to begin running after her as she stumbled across the snowy stretch of asphalt separating us from the flames.
She was moving like a gazelle, but I managed to catch up about thirty yards from the wreckage. Using a modified shoulder block, I pulled her around and tried to get a grip.
"Tam, nobody could survive that. We've got to stay back . . ."
At which point we both slipped and collapsed in a patch of snow . . . just as the last fuel tank detonated with the impact of a sonic boom. Memory can be a little unreliable under such circumstances, but I still remember more wreckage sailing past us, including a strut off the landing gear that gouged a furrow in the asphalt no more than ten feet from our heads.