“Again!” said Syd.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Dar. He removed his mask and shut off the regulator. “All this horsing around has got us down to eight thousand feet. You can take your mask off and shut off the O-two.”

Syd did, but said, “Let’s loop.”

“You wouldn’t like a loop,” said Dar, knowing perfectly well that she would love it.

“Please.”

Before Dar could respond, a white Bell Ranger helicopter roared up to within fifty feet of them on their starboard side and leveled off at their same altitude.

“Idiot!” Dar began, and then silenced himself as he saw that the rear doors were missing and that a man in a dark suit was crouching in the opening. Then a muzzle flashed, and bullets struck the sailplane just behind the cockpit.

Dar had listened to countless cockpit voice recorders—the fifteen-minute loop tape in the orange so-called “black box”—and in the vast majority of fatal air crashes, the pilot’s or co-pilot’s final words were “Shit!” or some other choice epithet. Dar knew from the tone that the obscenities were not outcries against imminent death, but a professional’s final exclamation of outrage and frustration at his or her own stupidity—at getting into the problem or not being able to solve it. At killing everyone aboard.

“Shit,” Dar said as he put the nose down and rolled the glider hard left, losing altitude as he rolled. He leveled off several hundred feet below the chopper, but the helicopter flew ahead and buzzed around a full 180 degrees, roaring back within fifty feet of the Twin Astir, the man in the back firing as the aircraft passed. Dar had hit the air brakes and now the Twin Astir stalled—simply dropped—and the bullets passed just over the cockpit.

Syd had managed to extricate her 9mm Sig-Sauer from the straps and harnesses and was trying to get it in the tiny sliding portal that worked as a wind vent. “Goddammit!” she said as the helicopter zoomed past them and whirled around to attack from the rear. “That guy in the back has an AK-47!” she shouted.

Syd slid the right vent panel open. “I can’t aim from these stupid little vents without unstrapping!”

“Don’t unstrap!” said Dar. He was desperately trying to think, to find an advantage. What advantage does a high-performance sailplane have over a two-hundred-mile-per-hour helicopter? The glider could perform a loop and no helicopter could…Big damned deal, thought Dar. The Twin Astir could do a nice slow-motion loop while the Bell Ranger flew circles around it, shooting it to bits.

Anything else?

Well, thought Dar, we can fly one hell of a lot slower than they can.

They can hover, dipshit.

The Bell Ranger was coming past on their left side again. Dar could see that there were only two occupants—the pilot on the right side in front, and the man in the suit with, yes, an AK-47 assault rifle, in the back with both doors removed. The man appeared to have some sort of safety strap attached and he slid easily along the rear bench from one open door of the chopper to the other.

Dar waited until the last possible second, dived for speed, and looped the Twin Astir as they entered the turbulence of the foehn gap rotor of vertical air.

Too late, thought Dar as he heard at least another two hits somewhere behind him.

As they went up and over the loop, Syd holding her semiautomatic in both hands, Dar wondered how badly they were hit. None of the bullets had penetrated the cockpit yet. The sailplane had no engine to destroy, no fuel tank to ignite, no hydraulic links to cut, but its very simplicity meant that any hit on a control cable would disable them. A bullet in the ailerons could cause Dar to lose all control. Even the slugs that seemed to have passed harmlessly through the fuselage behind him were already spoiling the airflow over the glider’s smooth surface, hindering control.

Dar rolled during the loop, seeing the Bell Ranger hovering a hundred meters to the west, waiting for them to resume level flight. Instead of pulling out of the loop, Dar kept the nose down and dived for the earth.

Mistake, he thought, watching the altimeter unwind with startling speed. His instinct had been to get the sailplane down into those canyons and gulleys, using the ridges for lift, trying to put something—a hill, a mountain, trees—between them and the shooter. But as soon as he saw the altitude drop below a thousand feet, he knew that he had made an error—possibly a fatal one.

This was no regular aircraft chasing them. The damned thing could turn on its own axis while flying straight ahead, bank as steeply as the Twin Astir, and hover when the glider would reach stalling speeds.

But Dar had committed himself. He glanced over his shoulder.

The Bell Ranger was hovering above and behind, a bird of prey waiting for its victim to end its contortions before pouncing.

Dar was just beginning his contortions. He came low across a wide valley, looking for a place to set the Twin Astir down, sure that they would have a better chance on foot than in the air. No meadows. No open mountainsides. All trees and boulders and ridgeline.

The helicopter nosed forward in a screaming dive behind them, rotors glinting.

“Can we open this canopy?” shouted Syd. “I need to get a shot.”

“No,” said Dar. He flew the glider directly at a rock wall, found the heated ridge-lift thermal less than fifty feet from the rock, and banked hard left, climbing on the thermal.

The helicopter easily made the turn, matched climb rates, and flew with them just beyond rotor distance. Dar could see the man in the back grinning as he raised the AK-47.

“Tony Constanza!” said Syd. She had loosened her harness enough to lean forward and get the muzzle of her Sig-Sauer out the open ventilation panel.

Constanza fired on full automatic even as Dar put the nose down, aiming for the ridgeline.

A bullet struck the nose of the Twin Astir. Another smashed the canopy, passed through between Dar’s and Syd’s heads, and exited through the Plexiglas on the right.

“Are you all right?” shouted Dar.

Before Syd could answer, Dar drove the nose of the sailplane inches above the Douglas firs, knocking needles off the treetops, and then banked hard right down the narrow valley.

The Bell Ranger gained altitude, clearing the ridgeline by yards instead of inches, and then roared above and past them headed south, Constanza’s assault rifle firing on full automatic.

Dar flew lower than the trees, following a small river running down the center of the narrow gully. Ahead of them, the helicopter slewed, swerved, and stopped directly in their path, hovering with its open door facing them and the AK-47 muzzle already flashing.

Dar banked hard left and felt two impacts on the right wing. Then he was through the gap in the east ridge he had noted from above. There was lift here, but he could not afford the airspeed to utilize it fully as he kept the nose down and flew down this even narrower gully, the Twin Astir’s wingtips less than two meters from rock walls on either side.

The Bell Ranger roared in behind them.

“I need to get a shot,” cried Syd again, swiveling wildly in her seat. Her harness had been loose enough that she had been thrown back and forth during the hard banks and choppy recovery.

“No,” said Dar. “We’re already beginning to handle poorly. If we open the canopy, our aerodynamics aren’t worth shit.”

The helicopter roared overhead at four times the glider’s speed. Constanza was leaning out, spraying slugs in their direction, but he had a bad angle.

The sailplane came into a wider valley just at the edge of the major uplift, almost back to the stacks of lenticular clouds, and Dar banked up and left. The glider lurched from the thermals flowing up and off the rock and they were over the ridge, soaring a thousand feet above a wider, descending valley.