Padraig and Catherine spent the morning in walk-through rehearsals, making certain that the stuntman hit each of his marks and that the cameras were able to follow him. They were getting ready for their airborne run-through when a rental car rolled up to the site and Peter Barnes stepped out.
Padraig nearly went into shock. “What’s that bastard doing here?” he demanded of Catherine.
“He’s our partner,” she answered. “Don’t get excited. I’ll take care of him.” She rushed from the rehearsal conference down to the parking area and threw her arms around Peter. “What a surprise. I thought you were in a sailboat, out of touch with the world.”
“I had enough sailing,” he lied. “I couldn’t figure what to do, and then I heard we were making a movie.”
Catherine forced a smile. “From Jennifer, I suppose.”
He nodded.
“And I suppose she told you that we were overbudget?”
“She did. But she didn’t seem concerned. Why do you ask? Have you spent everything we own?”
They laughed as if the money were insignificant. Catherine took his arm and led him up the slope to where the helicopters
were waiting. “You’re just in time,” she said. “We were about to take off for a run-through on a spectacular scene.” She filled him in on the details of the shot.
“Live explosives?” he asked with a hint of apprehension.
“Not now. We have to simulate the shot and see if we run into any problems. It’s a final rehearsal. But you can ride in one of the helicopters. It should be exciting.” They reached the gathering where Padraig was presiding. “Padraig, look who’s come to join us!”
Only years of training enabled Padraig to form a genuine-looking smile. “Peter, what brings you here? Have your detectives turned up some new dirt?”
“Just looking after my money,” Peter said, offering a handshake that lacked enthusiasm.
Catherine jumped in. “I told him he was about to get an aerial view of what we were doing. Can he ride in one of the helicopters?”
“Sure,” Padraig allowed. There was an empty seat next to the pilot in each of the choppers. Certainly there was room for the biggest backer.
They gave Peter a windbreaker and strapped him into one of the photo helicopters. Padraig gave him a quick rundown on the setting, and what it was that they hoped to accomplish in the shot. Peter seemed more concerned with the latch on the seat belt. Then the photo crew took to their helicopters.
Padraig lifted off first, sitting right behind the director. The helicopters took their positions on each side of the long meadow. “Action,” the director called into his microphone, and the stuntman broke out of a small thatched cottage and began running, pumping furiously to imitate the untrained gait of a young boy. Trailing behind him, fastened by a thin wire to his belt, came the dog.
They ran in a zigzag pattern, avoiding the lights that flared up as they approached. “Those will be explosive charges tomorrow,”
the cameraman explained without lifting his face from the viewer. “Wow!” Peter said in acknowledgment.
“They’ll look like artillery blasts,” the cameraman went on. “You see those cannons in the woods right under us. Tomorrow they’ll be firing. Blanks, of course, but what you’ve got are the cannons firing and then the shells exploding. All hell will be breaking loose.”
Peter could see the cannons, outdated artillery pieces with oversize wheels. He could imagine the close-ups that would be cut into the sequence. Men ramming in shells, then turning away as the cannon fired and recoiled. The gritty details would complement the explosive puffs and the floating smoke rings from the helicopter shots.
The running boy was exciting even in rehearsal. He had to move quickly to keep up with the pattern of the lights. When he was close to a light, he hurled himself sideways, sprawling out on the ground. The dog pulled up next to him and raced to the figure, struggling to his feet in a show of concern. It all seemed very realistic. It was easy to fill in the violent explosions that would replace the lights, and the hundreds of tight shots that would show the terror on the boy’s face. Peter’s only problem was imagining how they were going to get close-ups of the dog.
He also wondered about the obvious dangers. The stuntman would be running within a few feet of the explosions. A false step and he might be blown to pieces. Then there were the blank artillery rounds. His understanding was that even blank rounds fired pieces of the wax plug and hot chars from the burning powder. Was it safe to fly helicopters through a cloud of this kind of debris? And there were the maneuvers of the choppers. At the director’s orders, they were dropping suddenly to ground level and then climbing rapidly. They were touching the treetops and turning sharply to soar out over the field. The possibilities of a miscalculation seemed obvious, and he could imagine what would happen to a helicopter if it lost a rotor against the top of a tree.
“Spectacular,” he said to Catherine as she was helping him out of his seat belt. “This is going to be fantastic.” He went
directly to Padraig. “It’s marvelous! I can really picture it. How can you see all this in your imagination?”
Padraig was flattered. “That’s what I do, boy. It’s magic.”
Peter joined Catherine, Padraig, and some of the crew in an evening trip to the pub where Padraig took particular delight in holding court. “Drink up, my boy,” he ordered each time he carried a bottle to Peter’s table.
“I hope none of your helicopter pilots is here,” Peter told Catherine, indicating the crowd of loose tongues at the bar.
“Do you want to go up again for the real shooting?” she asked.
“Not on your life. This business is a lot more dangerous than launching satellites.”
“Peter?” she had to ask. “You don’t still suspect Padraig of … hiring that thug?”
He answered as if he had been expecting the question. “Doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what you think. And you seem to feel that you’re perfectly safe.”
“I am. I know I am.”
Peter took her hand. “Good! Then the only thing I have to worry about is the budget. How badly are we over?”
She began itemizing expenses. They were way over on props and special effects. Lots of the shots required dollies and cranes, and of course there were several that would use helicopters. But, on the other hand, they were a day ahead of schedule, and if they could hold to that …
Peter cut her off with a gesture. “A figure?” he asked. “Or a percentage?”
She pursed her lips. “Peter, this is a totally new kind of business for us. It’s not as precise as the cost of building a satellite or outfitting an earth station.”
“And never in your life have you not known how much you were spending,” he answered. “So where are we?”
“Twenty million over. Maybe twenty-five. I really don’t have the exact figures.”
“Maybe thirty-three?” he asked, quoting Jennifer’s best estimation.
Catherine slammed down her drink. “Okay, maybe thirty-three. As I said, I’m not a bean counter. And if that’s more than you can handle, then Padraig and I will buy you out. You can stick with a business you understand and leave the more adventurous stuff to me.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay. If that’s your best answer. But I don’t think Jennifer is in any mood to finance a Padraig-and-Catherine production. So your funding will be cut off.”
Catherine swallowed hard. Her eyes blinked as she calculated the equations. So that was it. Jennifer and Peter were going to put Padraig out of business.
They started early in the morning, before the usual mammoth clouds could blow in from the sea. The morning also gave them a low sun, so the shadows of the helicopters would fall well away from the action.
“We’re only going to do this once,” Padraig warned his team. “What we get is what we’ll have to go with. There’s no money for reshoots.”
Catherine looked around for Peter, hoping that he would hear evidence of her concern for the budget. But he wasn’t in the gathering. True to his word, he had no intention of flying through a war zone—even a simulated one—in a helicopter.
They made a final check. Cameras loaded and powered. Buried charges connected to the sequencer that would fire them in a precise pattern. Blank rounds ready at all the cannons. Communications systems working. Padraig was satisfied. He gave the signal for takeoff.
The copters lifted, circled briefly, and then formed up. At the director’s command, the artillery pieces began firing. Then the stuntman raced out of the house and started across the field. The helicopters swooped in around him.
The stuntman ran up a slope. Ahead, a charge exploded, simulating the hit of a cannon round. He darted right, leaping over the edge of the still smoldering crater, the dog yapping at his heels. Another simulated shell hit, this time closer to his right. The stuntman, who really did look like the boy he was standing
in for, launched himself into the air, landed on his side, and rolled down the hill. Instantly, he scampered to his feet, looked around quickly, and then ran back onto his heading.
There were random-looking explosions in the distance, each supposedly a stray shell from the cannons that were firing and belching smoke. Then another landed in front of the boy, knocking him backward. Again he picked himself up and darted ahead, mud and turf raining down on top of him.
In the helicopters, all the cameras were rolling, one panning the landscape, another flying above the action and shooting down. The director’s chopper, with Padraig aboard, was down at treetop level, ahead of the stuntman and shooting back into the action. It paused, hovering, to get the sense of the boy running toward the lens, then darted in from behind to see the dog pull up next to its fallen master. It peeled away from the action and flew to the edge of the meadow, going for a rising shot that would start close on the boy, spin around, and gradually envelop the whole countryside. When it reached height, the running boy would be simply a dot, insignificant in a landscape of devastation.
Suddenly, the helicopter shuddered. A puff of dark smoke billowed out from its turbine exhaust. The rhythmic popping of its rotors against the air turned into a steely whine. The body of the helicopter began to spin, then the craft spiraled down toward the ground.
Aboard, the pilot battled the controls, trying to get the aircraft to respond. The cameraman let go of the camera and grabbed the open door frame to keep from being thrown out. The ashen director screamed into the microphone. Padraig, pinned into the corner of the backseat, rushed into the recitation of a Hail Mary.
Catherine, watching from the ground, wasn’t aware of what was happening. There were clouds of smoke puffing out from the cannons, detonations across the field, and the hellish crack of shellfire. She couldn’t separate the smoke and whine of the sinking chopper from the planned catastrophe it was filming. Nor did the fact that it was falling register. It had been in the
process of swooping all over the sky. All she knew was that the director was screaming into her earphones. Something terrible was happening. Maybe a camera had lost power and was missing the shot. Worse, maybe the stuntman had run too close to one of the charges. Was someone hurt? Why was the director suddenly out of control? She put her full attention to the babble of voices ringing in her ears. She didn’t notice Padraig’s helicopter crash into the trees.
The crews manning the cannons were closest. Most were too involved in the firing to register that the aircraft was in trouble. The few who did see it stayed frozen at their positions, too stunned to act. They watched the fuselage smash into the trees, followed by the rotors, which cut through the branches like a giant lawn mower. Then the rotors splintered and threw down a shower of shattered metal.
On the headsets a voice was screaming to stop the filming. Within seconds, a ghostly peace settled over the battlefield. The shell bursts stopped and the cannons were suddenly quiet. The two helicopters still in the air veered away. The gun crews broke from their positions and rushed to the broken body of the chopper resting gently in the trees. Catherine heard scraps of the commotion. “It’s down in the trees!” Another voice, “What happened? What hit it?” Still another, “I’m at the crash site. I see the plane. I don’t see anyone.” Then a voice with more authority ordered, “Get a cherry picker over there. Some ladders. And someone call the hospital.”
Padraig was still praying when he opened his eyes. He found himself in a tree house, with branches broken against his window. One branch had cut through the floor and looked like a houseplant standing just inches from his face. The cameraman had fallen into his lap. There was a deep scratch on his forehead and a tuft of leaves growing out of his shirt collar. Behind the houseplant, he got a glimpse of the director, who was sobbing with his face buried in his hands. The pilot was sitting upright,
rapidly throwing switches on the control console. It was as if he didn’t know that his mount had crashed.
What had saved them, they reasoned when they were brought down from the tree, was the superb skill of the pilot. When he had seen that he couldn’t recover from the spin and that his helicopter was doomed, he had switched instantly to crash-survival mode. He had killed the engine and shut down the fuel lines, which had kept the wreckage from bursting into flames. The trees had cushioned the fuselage and harmlessly dismantled the rotors. The impact had been abrupt and had broken the helicopter into pieces, but the cabin space had remained intact.