“I knew I’d forgotten something,” Sam shouted. “The keys!” He returned his attention to the controls, working the collective to gain altitude. In his haste he jerked the cyclic to the right and pressed the rudder pedal. The helicopter dipped right, and the tail spun around. He overcompensated. The helicopter dropped straight down, bounced off the pad, rose again. Sam risked another glance out the side window.The Cushman was thirty feet away and closing fast. To one side a figure-Nochtli, it looked like-dashed across the pad and threw himself into the Cushman’s cargo bed.

“Slow them down!” Sam called. “Aim for the engine! Bigger target!”

In the back, Remi opened up with one of the AK-74s, firing controlled three-round bursts into the ground ahead of the Cushman, but got no result. She switched targets. Bullets pounded into the cart’s front end, sparking off the bumper guards and shredding the fiberglass. Steam gushed from the engine compartment. The Cushman stuttered and began slowing, but not before it slid from view beneath the helicopter.Sam lifted the collective, trying to gain altitude.

“I can’t see them anymore,” Remi called.

Sam glanced out one side window, then the other. “Where-”

Suddenly the helicopter lurched sideways and down, the open side door facing the ground. Remi’s feet slid out from under her, and she skidded toward the opening. Instinctively, she released her grip on the AK-74 to latch onto the safety harness. The rifle slid down the deck, bounced off the bell’s crate, and disappeared out the door.

“We lost an AK!” Remi called. A moment later a hand appeared in the opening, clawing at the deck for a handhold. Nochtli’s head rose into view. “And we’ve got a passenger!” Remi shouted.Sam glanced over his shoulder. “Kick him!”

“What!”

“Smash his fingers!”

Remi coiled her leg and lashed out, slamming her heel into Nochtli’s pinkie finger. He screamed but held on. With a grunt, he heaved his upper torso onto the deck and reached for the tie-down straps attached to the crate. Remi curled her leg for a second strike.

From below came three overlapping cracks. Bullets thunked into the cabin’s doorway.“Sam!”

“I hear it! Hold tight, I’m going to try to shake him!”

Sam jerked the helicopter to the left and looked out both side windows, trying to locate the source of the gunfire. Below and to the right, Rivera stood in the cargo bed of the Cushman with Remi’s fallen AK-74 tucked into his shoulder. The muzzle flashed orange. Sam’s passenger’sside cockpit window spiderwebbed. He shifted the cyclic again, continuing to slide the helicopter left toward the trees at the edge of the pad. He pulled up on the collective to gain altitude.

In the cabin, Remi cocked her leg again and heel-kicked Nochtli in the thigh. Nochtli grunted and collapsed face-first onto the deck, shattering his nose. With one hand still entwined in the safety webbing, she reached over her head, groping for one of the weapons.

Sam looked left, saw the dark outline of the treetops looming before the window. A bullet tore through the passenger-seat headrest, zipped past Sam’s chin, and punched through the windshield. He grunted and lifted the collective, but it was too late. Tree limbs scraped the belly of the helicopter. “Come on, come on . . .” he grumbled. “Remi, can you-”“Little busy here!”

A branch snagged on the helicopter’s tail boom, and the craft spun clockwise like a top. Alarms began blaring in the cockpit. Red and orange lights flashed on the dashboard. Sam worked the cyclic and collective, trying to compensate. Tree limbs slapped at the cockpit window.

Remi’s hand touched the wooden butt of one of the AKs; she grabbed it, pulled hard, and it slid from the webbing. It stopped. She craned her neck back. The AK’s front side was snagged on a strap. In the doorway, Nochtli was pushing himself upright. He hooked one of his knees over the edge of the doorway and began dragging himself toward Remi. Her hand slipped off the AK’s butt; her fingers touched something metallic, tubular-a pistol barrel. She grabbed it, jerked it free of the webbing. Nochtli latched his free hand onto her ankle. Remi set her teeth and swung the pistol in a backhand. The butt caught Nochtli on the side of the chin. His head snapped sideways, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Still kneeling, he teetered for a moment, then tipped backward and disappeared through the doorway.

She called to Sam, “He’s gone!”“You okay?”

She gulped a few breaths and replied, “Shaken and stirred but still here!”

Bullets peppered the fuselage. Sam saw an opening in the canopy and worked the cyclic and rudder pedals, crabbing the nose around until it was pointed in the right direction, then nosed down and lifted the collective. With the shrieking of wood on aluminum, the helicopter lurched forward and into the clear. Now he lowered the collective and dropped the helicopter below the tree line. He stopped in a hover twenty feet above the slope, looked around for the H-V-C-P Jingaro had mentioned, and flipped it on. The helicopter shuddered slightly, slid sideways, dipped, then settled into a steady hover. The alarms and the flashing lights stopped. Sam tentatively took his hands off the controls and exhaled heavily. In the back, Remi scooted sideways and slid the door shut. The thumping of the rotors faded.Sam turned in his seat and extended his hand between the gap. Remi grabbed his hand and pulled herself toward him. Sam asked, “You okay?”

“Yes. You?”

He nodded. “Let’s get out of here. I think we’ve fully worn out our welcome.”

CHAPTER 20

BIG SUKUTI ISLAND

THEY HAD JUST CLEARED THE ISLAND’S SOUTHERN COASTLINE when Sam realized Rivera’s gunfire had caused more than cosmetic damage. The rudder pedals felt spongy, and the collective and cyclic were sluggish, responding to his commands with a slight delay.“What do you think?” Remi asked, her face pressed between the seats.

“Hydraulics, maybe.” He scanned the gauges, looking for oil pressure, temperature, revolutions per minute . . . “Engine’s running a little hot, too, and the oil pressure looks dodgy.”“What’s that mean?”

“Nothing good.” “How far to the beach?”

“Three miles, give or take.”

“We should assume Rivera isn’t giving up.”

“I agree. Whether they call someone and how fast they respond is the question.”

“Or how fast they can get the Rinkers working again.”

“True. Let me see if I can get her settled down.”

Carefully Sam worked the controls, dropping both altitude and speed until they were a hundred feet off the water and moving at sixty knots-roughly seventy miles per hour. Below them, the sea was flat, calm, and black save the reflection of the helicopter’s navigation strobes.Remi said, “Sam, they’ll be able to track the lights.”

“Lights or no lights, they’re tracking us through the Big Eyes. Once we cross the beach, I’ll switch them off. Against the backdrop of the land we’ll be invisible.”

“You’re assuming they’ll come after us.”

“Have to.” He did a quick scan of the gauges. “The engine temperature’s come down a little bit. But the oil pressure is still hinky. The controls are still soft.”

“Hydraulics, then.”

“At the very least. Any one of those can put us in the drink. All we need is another four minutes or so.”

“And a non-crash landing,” Remi added.

“And that.”

Slowly through the windshield they could see Africa’s east coast turn from a dark smudge to identifiable bits of landmass: trees, white sand beaches, rolling hills, and rivers and streams zigzagging across the terrain.A half mile from the beach Sam felt the cyclic jerk in his hand, followed by a thump-bang above their heads. The cockpit and cabin began shaking. An alarm shrieked. Yellow and red lights flashed. “That’s a tad ominous,” Remi said with a tight grin.