Jerry fought to keep the helicopter stable in the face of the ever-increasing winds. Hurricane Gerard was heading toward the state of New York faster than predicted, and, as experienced a chopper pilot as he was, he was not a miracle man. He was trying to convince Jax to let him set them down as quickly as possible, before Gerard grounded them permanently, and to get ground transportation to continue their pursuit of their prey. But Jax was not listening to him; he was too intent on trying to see who was in the driver's seat of the little, red Porsche that they were rapidly gaining on.

Jerry hadn't wanted to bring the chopper in the first place, having been aware of the storm warnings, but Jax had needed to reach Brenda and her mother as quickly as possible and Jax felt that the chopper was the fastest way to do that. So, against his own better judgment and the advice of the crew at the airport, Jerry had given in to his younger brother's pleas and had taken the J&J Jacks helicopter from the Port Charles Airport to where they were now, somewhere on Highway 101, approximately 10 miles south of Port Charles.

"Get closer, dammit, Jerry!" Jax barked at his brother. "I can't tell if it's Brenda or Veronica at the wheel!"

"Jax, I'm having a hard enough time trying to keep this thing aloft and us alive without having to try to maneuver low enough for you to see in the windows of Brenda's car!" Jerry was exasperated by his brother's inability to see things rationally at the moment.

"Just do it!" Jax shot back. And Jerry complied, despite the danger that it was putting them into. He hovered next to the car as best he could given the weather conditions, and afforded Jax a quick look into the driver's side window.

Jax heaved a sigh of relief, as he was able to see that Brenda was driving and not Veronica and it appeared they were headed safely back to Port Charles. Jax's fears that something terrible would happen with Brenda and Veronica had been unfounded, and soon they all would be home and Brenda would be safe in his arms again. Jerry maneuvered the helicopter back away from the red Porsche, and headed toward the nearest airfield and shelter from the approaching storm.

Brenda was shocked to look out her window to see Jax in a helicopter, nearly close enough to touch. Veronica turned white as a ghost at the sight of the chopper, which looked like it would collide with them at any minute. "Oh, God, it's Harlan!" Veronica screamed hysterically. "He's trying to kill us both!"

Before Brenda could reassure her mother that it was Jax in the helicopter beside them and not her dead father, Harlan, the helicopter had ascended back to a space above and behind them, and her mother was grabbing for the wheel of the car, and, in her sick and twisted mind, trying desperately to get control of the vehicle to get them safely away from the clutches of her dead ex-husband.

Just as Jax had convinced himself that everything would be fine, he saw Brenda's car begin to swerve wildly on the winding, mountain road, careening from one side of the pavement to the other. Jax and Jerry could only watch in horror as the car then shot through the guardrail at the top of the next hill and plunged headlong into the Charles River below.

"No!!!!" Jax screamed, staring in total disbelief at the horror that was unfolding in front of his very eyes. "Oh, God, noooooo!!!!"

Jerry's heart caught in his throat as he watched his brother split apart before his eyes, and Jax's whole life tumbled down the steep cliff and into the river gorge below.

"Set it down now, Jerry! I have to get to her!" Jax screamed as Jerry attempted to land them safely in the face of the rapidly approaching storm. Jax was out of the chopper as soon as Jerry hit the pavement, and got to the edge of the cliff just in time to see the back of the Porsche disappear beneath the surface of the river below. He shot down the steep embankment, falling the last 20 feet, but he was oblivious to the pain of the jagged rocks as they assaulted his body during his rapid descent. He was only aware of one thing - his Brenda was in that car, and that car was heading for the bottom of the extremely deep Charles River.

Jerry got Veronica out of the water, and found that she was still alive. He rolled her onto her side to help clear her lungs of water, and Veronica coughed as the water was forced out. "Don't let Harlan get us!" she gasped. "He'll kill us if he catches us!" Jerry picked up his jacket he had discarded before plunging into the Charles River and wrapped it as best he could around Veronica's thin body, hoping to preserve whatever body heat he could for her. "It's okay," he said soothingly. "You're safe from Harlan now."

"And Brenda's safe, too?" she asked. But luckily for Jerry, she lapsed into unconsciousness before she could see the look of anguish and fear on his face that would have given her the painful answer to her lingering question. Jerry looked out onto the river which was becoming wild from the winds that continued to whip through the area, and he saw his brother resurface empty-handed time after time after time, and he did something he hadn't done since he was a child: he whispered a prayer that both Jax and Brenda would somehow be safe. But with each successive dive that his brother made, Jerry knew that it would take a true miracle for Brenda to survive this.

Jerry had called 911 from the chopper, and soon he could faintly hear the rapidly approaching sirens above the increasing roar of the wind. Within minutes several emergency crews surrounded him and Veronica. Jerry stood back as the paramedics tended to Veronica, busily taking vital signs and starting IVs before loading her into one of the two waiting ambulances that were at the scene, and taking her back to General Hospital. After seeing that Veronica was in good hands, Jerry headed back toward the river's edge.

"Please stay back, sir!" a deputy, who looked too young to drive, shouted at Jerry, who was attempting to join Jax in his search for Brenda. "Let our divers take care of this!"

The young deputy stepped into Jerry's path. "That may be true any other time, but right now you could be more of a hindrance than a help if the divers have to waste precious time trying to keep track of you out there, too. Please step back and let them do their jobs."

A part of Jerry wanted to bristle at the impertinence of this young pup, but a larger part - the part not controlled by his churning emotions - told him the lad was right. Jerry could inadvertently cost Jax and Brenda their lives all under the guise of trying to help. He stepped back from the water and watched as the team of over a dozen divers with searchlights methodically searched the water where the car had gone down. Then a struggle near the middle of the river caught his eye, and he saw an exhausted Jax being pulled back to shore by two of the divers.

"I have to find her!" Jax was shouting, as he struggled to free himself from the clutches of the men who literally had to drag him out of the river. "Nobody leaves, Brenda!" he shouted back toward the spot just above where her car was submerged. "We promised that this time nobody leaves!"

Jerry took Jax from the divers, and Jax crumbled into his arms, sobbing. Jerry once again felt like Jax's protective, big brother, a role he had abdicated as of late since Jax seemed to be the more mature of the two most of the time. Suddenly Jerry was acutely aware of the intense love that Jax indeed felt for Brenda, and Jerry's heart broke as he watched his brother try to come to terms with the fact that all that he loved had disappeared in less than an instant. The two brothers held each other and cried as the wind howled around them, and the first wave of rain in advance of Gerard hit the river area. Both were praying for a miracle, but they would not see one that night. Four hours later, with driving wind and rain hampering the rescue efforts, the search for Brenda Barrett was called off, and despite the absence of a body, she was presumed dead.

A Port Charles police car took Jax and Jerry to Brenda's cottage. Jerry had thought Jax should return to the penthouse, but Jax had insisted on being at Brenda's place. He wanted to keep the place safe during the storm, he had said.

Jax had been unusually quiet when the search coordinator had informed him and Jerry that the conditions were too bad to continue the search, and that Brenda's body might never be found as the current and the wind had most likely forced her body downstream, and possibly even out to sea. Jax had nodded numbly, but then had insisted that the squad car take them to Brenda's rather than his place. Jerry was trying to be calm in this, but Jax's eerily quiet and collected facade was frightening him more than if Jax were ranting and railing at the fates for having done this to him and Brenda.

Jax broke the silence that had enveloped the room. "I'm going to put some water on for tea. Do you want some?" he asked Jerry.

Jerry nodded as Jax headed toward Brenda's little kitchen to put the teakettle on the stove. It was then that Jerry saw the red, blinking light on Brenda's answering machine. He looked back toward the kitchen to make sure that Jax had closed the door behind him when he went in to start the tea, and he had. Jerry pushed 'play,' and a cheerful female voice rattled on: "Ms. Barrett, this is Tonja from Dr. Eckhart's office. You had asked to be notified when your test results were back. The results of the one test will not be back for another 2-3 weeks, but we did run another pregnancy test since you had said you still had not had a period in several weeks, and this test was positive. Congratulations! You are indeed pregnant! I suggest you contact your Ob/Gyn..." But the rest of the message was drowned out by a wail from somewhere behind him that sounded to Jerry like it came from the depths of Hell, and in a way it had. Jerry turned to see Jax standing in the kitchen doorway, and he knew that Jax was indeed in the bowels of Hell now - he had lost the love of his life and their unborn child, both in the blink of an eye. Jerry was afraid that now it would take nothing short of a miracle to bring Jax fully back into the world again.

Tom Langan waited impatiently in the doorway of his family's vacation cabin, trying in vain to keep dry as he yelled into the storm for Charlie to get the hell back inside. Charlie was Tom's three-year-old golden retriever, and for some reason Charlie had decided that he wanted to stay out in this storm and bark at something on the riverbank.

"Damn dog!" Tom muttered to himself. Of course, this turn of events really didn't surprise him. Nothing seemed to be going the way Tom had planned since he had come on this vacation. This was just the first week of his long-awaited eight week vacation, and already he had been hit by nearly every scourge known to vacationing man: his car had stopped on the way up here, and needed to be towed to nearby Brighton (population 300; one gas station, one stoplight, and no newspaper) for transmission work; there had been an ant infestation when he had arrived on Wednesday because his ex-wife had not bothered to clean up after herself and her boyfriend when they had used the place a few months ago; and now Hurricane Gerard had deigned to darken his door as well! Biblical men and their plagues and pestilence had nothing on him!

What had he done to deserve any of this? He was a decent man - honest, hard working, intelligent, reasonably good-looking, and, at thirty-one, fairly in tune with the ways of the world. Didn't he deserve to have something go right for him soon? Since his divorce nearly two years ago, he had buried himself in his work, not even taking time out for a love life - not that he ever thought he wanted to fall in love again after his disastrous marriage to Emma! This was his first real vacation in years, and he had seen it as a good sign when he had actually looked forward to this little getaway from responsibilities and civilization. Heck, he hadn't been just looking forward to this little time away from the world, he had actually been dreaming about this place and this vacation for months, while he was working undercover for the FBI as a member of one of New York City's infamous organized crime families.

Some dream vacation this was turning out to be! "Nightmare was more like it!" he grumbled. Work was more fun than this! he thought as he pulled on his rain slicker and reluctantly went out into the elements to extract Charlie from whatever was so important that not even a hurricane could drive him from it. But work was too often filled with dead bodies, and Tom was at least sure that none of those would be turning up on this vacation!

Pushing through the wind and the rain, Tom ran the hundred yards to the riverbank where Charlie was barking furiously at something that had washed up from the river. "Whatcha got, boy?" Tom asked as he bent down to get a closer look at Charlie's treasure. "Damn! What was I saying about no dead bodies here?" Tom swore, as he turned over the motionless body of the young woman Charlie had found washed up on the shore.