“Go!” screamed Kate, slamming the banging door shut. “Higher!” Her watch said 12:26 and thirty seconds.

Something banged against the fuselage behind them, but O'Rourke ignored it, twisted something on the stick in his right hand, lifted a lever in his left hand, kicked at rudder pedals, and the Jet Ranger's engine whined higher. They banked to the left and started climbing away from the citadel and the muzzle flashes.

Kate looked down, realized that the castle was now on the other side, saw something dark far belowlike a giant bat, it's shadow rippling across the river for the briefest second, and then she raised her wrist again, looked at her watch, and shouted above the engine roar to O'Rourke. “What time is it?”

He glanced toward her incredulously. “You expect me to take my hand off the collective to tell you“

“What is the fucking time?” she screamed, realizing that she sounded a little hysterical even to herself.

O'Rourke blinked, freed his left hand for a second, and said, “My watch says twelve twenty-fi“

The world exploded beneath them and around them.

Chapter Forty-two

At the last second O'Rourke swung the helicopter around, still in its climb, to face the shock wave, and that probably saved their lives. Instead of being swatted out of the sky like a fleeing insect, the Bell Jet Ranger rose on the blast like a leaf above a roaring fire. The ride was vertical, faster than any elevator Kate had ever been on, and the view below was not something she would soon forget.

Poienari CitadelCastle Draculaexploded in a score of places, gigantic mushrooms of flame rising a thousand feet above the crag the castle was built on. More explosions ripped through the woods, the stairway, the grassy area where the helicopter had been parked, and the stairway to the valley below. An instant later a second series of explosions seemed to erupt from the cliff wall itself.

The west tower of the citadel became a billion fragments of shrapnel flying ahead of the blossoming orange ball of flame, but the east tower seemed to rise like some medieval space shuttle, much of the upper battlements seemingly intact and balancing on a tail of pure flame. Then the illusion dissolved as the tower flew apart in tenton fragments and fell onto the screaming strigoi crowded on the terrace. The terrace itself was rocked with explosions that sent flame a hundred yards out over the river valley.

If there were any human forms left on the east and north sections of the crag that held the citadel, they were not visible as more explosions opened cracks in what little brick and stone that remained. The terrace section of the castle separated itself from the rubble of the main keep and tumbled a thousand feet into the valley, its cloud of dust adding to the pall of smoke and haze that filled the entire width of the, canyon.

The trees within a hundred yards of the former citadel had burst into flame, the fire jumping to their crowns in seconds, and a great wind seemed to be whipping thick trunks back and forth like reeds.

Kate saw all this in the few seconds of their vertical elevator ride. She cradled the screaming Joshua tighter as the helicopter reached the top of its arc and prepared to drop straight down into that conflagration. She had no seat belt on and she and the baby rose six inches off the seat as the helicopter reached its apogee.

“Hang on!” O'Rourke yelled uselessly, and then he threw the stick in his right hand hard to the left, kicked his right rudder pedal, and squeezed the throttle wide open. The roar of the jet turbine became louder than the explosions and landslides two thousand feet below them.

They could not recover in the fifteen hundred feet of altitude they had above the blazing ruins of the citadel. O'Rourke obviously did not try to. He put the helicopter's nose down and dove it into the canyon. The turbine screamed louder, alarms went off on the console in front of both him and Kate, and the wind slammed at the notquitelatched door inches from Joshua's face. Kate held the baby tight and watched the river rise toward them at a terrifying rate.

O'Rourke set both his good leg and artificial one hard against the pedals, gripped the stick in both hands, and began easing the machine out of its bucking, screaming dive. Kate felt the heat of the burning mountain as they hurtled past it, and then the canyon walls were whipping by on both sides, the river rising to fill the sootstreaked windscreen in front of them. Kate closed her eyes for a second.

When she opened them, they were hurtling along in level flight thirty feet above the Arges, heading south. Kate saw trucks and lights on the riverbank to her left and realized that it was the spot where the Dacia had crashed. The spot where she had left Lucian. She closed her eyes again. Goodbye, my friend. There will be no more orphans used to feed the strigois' thirst, Joshua stirred in her arms and she patted the baby's back. With luck . . . just a little luck . . . there will be no more AIDS babies.

O'Rourke was clicking off alarms, snapping toggles on a panel between them. He glanced to his right. “Are you all right?”

Kate started to answer but began laughing instead. She put her free hand up to stop the giggles but ended up just snuffling and giggling into her wrist. O'Rourke frowned for a second, but then began laughing himself.

When they could stop, Kate shifted the baby to her right arm and touched his shoulder with her left hand. “Are they going to shoot us down now? The air force or something?”

O'Rourke let go of the stick for a moment to take a headset from a bracket and slip it over his head. He tapped the microphone and then lifted the right earphone. “hope. I don't think so. Romania has one of those air forces that doesn't like to fly at night.” He threw toggles on the console and she could hear a beeping from the earphones near her head. O'Rourke gestured and she set them on.

“Hear me better now?” he asked. The engine roar and rotor noise was a distant thing, his voice clear in her headphones.

She nodded.

He banked to the right and gained altitude over the foothills. Kate realized that they had already covered all the ground that it had taken Lucian and her hours to drive through the Transylvanian hills between Rimnicu Vilcea and Curtea de Arges. She settled back in the seat, found a shoulder harness, and buckled herself in. Joshua was breathing easily, dozing off. Kate shook her head.

“This kind of aircraft carries a transponder,” O'Rourke said through the intercom. “I suspect that no one in Romania would mess with this particular helicopter even if we buzzed the capital. “ They continued to climb. High peaks were ahead but they were already flying higher than the snowcapped summits.

“Do we have enough gas to get out of here?” she asked into the little microphone. O'Rourke would know that “here” meant Romania.

He smiled at her. His eye was still swollen almost shut and his lips were a mess from the beating they had given him, but he looked happy. “If I find even the slightest tail wind, we'll have enough gas to land in downtown Budapest,” he said. “Which side of the river would you prefer, Buda or Pest?”

“You choose,” Kate whispered into the microphone. “I've made enough decisions for one day.”

O'Rourke nodded and concentrated on the controls.

“Mike,” she said a minute later. She was gently rocking Joshua, feeling the baby's warm breath on her cheek. “Lucian is dead.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Do you want to tell me about it? And how you managed all this?”

“In a while,” said Kate. “But tell me something first . . . do you know anything about Lucian's mentor?”

“Mentor? No.” His voice was puzzled.

“It wasn't you?”

“No, Kate.”

She rubbed her hand across her baby's head. His hair had grown. He was blowing bubbles in his sleep. New cure for colic, she thought irrelevantly. Take the baby for a helicopter ride. “Could it have been the Church . . . sponsoring Lucian in his fight against the strigoi, I mean?”