abrupt jarring halt. Both he and Anna pitched forward against the
restraint belts; Bartlett, as Ben had hoped, was hurtled against the
metal grid that backed the cockpit.
Even as he heard the clatter of the assault rifle smashing into the
partition, Ben unbelted himself and sprang into action.
Bartlett, he could see, had been temporarily stunned by the impact; a
rivulet of blood descended from his left nostril. Now, with the
suddenness of a leopard, Ben hurled himself around his seat and pounced
on Bartlett with both hands, slamming the man’s shoulders to the grip
textured steel flooring. Bartlett put up no resistance.
Had the impact of the partition knocked him unconscious? Was he already
dead?
It was too risky to make any assumptions.
“I’ve got an extra set of restraints on me,” Anna said. “If you can
bring his wrists together…”
Within moments, she had manacled both his hands and legs, leaving her
old employer trundled in the back like a rolled-up carpet.
“Jesus,” Anna said. “There’s no time. We’ve got to get a move on. The
guards they’re on their way!”
Ben pushed the two sticks forward, then twisted the collective up while
maintaining his grip on the cyclic. The collective controlled the
helicopter’s lift; the cyclic controlled its lateral direction. The
helicopter’s nose moved to the right, the tail to the left, and then it
started rolling out of the bay and onto the snow-covered lawn, coolly
illuminated by the moonlight.
“Shit!” Ben shouted, pushing the collective down to reduce power,
trying to stabilize the craft.
Slowly he pulled the collective up, adding power slowly, and felt the
aircraft getting light.
He pushed the stick forward an inch or two, felt the nose pitch down,
then added a bit more power with the collective.
They were rolling now.
The helicopter taxied forward across the snow.
The collective was now halfway up.
Suddenly, at a speed of twenty-five knots, the chopper jumped into the
air.
They’d lifted off.
He pulled back on the stick to gain more power, and the nose went right.
They kept rising.
Bullets clattered against the cabin.
Several guards were running, their submachine guns pointed at the
helicopter, shouting.
“I thought you said they wouldn’t shoot at Lenz’s helicopter.”
“Word must have got out about the good doctor,” Anna said. “Hey, better
to travel hopefully, right?” She thrust the barrel of her Uzi out the
open side window and fired off a burst. One of the guards fell to the
ground.
Then she fired another, more sustained burst.
The other guard was down.
“O.K.,” she said, “I think we’re all right for a little while.”
Ben brought the collective back past center, and the nose corrected.
Higher, then higher still.
They were directly above the Schloss now, and the craft felt more
stable. Now he could fly it like an airplane.
Ben became aware of a sudden movement, and just as he turned, he felt a
jabbing, searing pain at the base of his neck and shoulders. What he
felt had some resemblance to the sensation of a pinched nerve but a
hundred times worse.
Anna shrieked.
From the hot moist breath near his face, Ben realized what had happened.
Bartlett, his arms and legs shackled, had thrown himself at Ben,
attacking him with the only thing left at his disposal his jaws.
A guttural vocalization, like the growl of a jungle creature, rose from
Bartlett’s throat as he sank his teeth farther into Ben’s exposed neck
and shoulders.
As Ben released the collective in order to grab hold of Bartlett, the
helicopter started to yaw perilously to one side.
It wasn’t over! Anna knew that to fire her gun at him would be to risk
killing Ben. She seized handfuls of Bartlett’s lank white hair and
pulled with all her might. Pulled until the hair came out, exposing
bloodied pink ovals of scalp.
And still Bartlett would not let up.
It was as if he were directing all his vital force into his jaws,
pushing his teeth down into Ben’s flesh with the muscular strength of
his entire body.
It was all he had left. A wounded animal’s one chance to survive–or,
at least, to ensure that his enemy did not.
Ben, obviously convulsed by agony, pounded at Bartlett’s head with his
fists, but to no effect.
Was it possible–to have come so far, survived so much, only to be
destroyed in the midst of escape?
Bartlett was maniacal, insensible to pain–a man of elegance and
supernal ambition now reduced to the most elemental posture of any
vertebrate. He could have been a hyena on the Serengeti plains, sinking
his incisors into another creature, hoping that only one of them would
make it to another day.
Even as his mouth vised on Ben’s neck and shoulders, Bartlett’s body was
writhing, flailing, thrashing–kicking at Anna with both feet, jolting
her out of position, weakening her grasp on him. A blast of cold air
suddenly filled the helicopter. Bartlett’s wild, eel-like movements had
kicked open the door on Anna’s side.
Another violent movement of his jarred the pedals, which controlled the
tail rotors, and the helicopter began to rotate left, first spinning
slowly and then more swiftly. As the centrifugal force gained in power,
Anna began to slide precariously toward the open door. She clawed at
Bartlett’s face, her nails in his flesh providing her sole purchase.
What she was doing sickened her, but it was the only way: she dug
deeper, harder, forcing her finger into his orbital cavity.
“Open wide, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, gouging into the yielding
flesh until, at last, with a blood-curdling scream, Bartlett released
his mandibular grip.
What happened next was a blur: both Anna and Bartlett were thrown toward
the open door, toward the yawning drop to the earth far beneath them.
Then she felt an iron like grip on her wrist. Ben’s hand had shot out,
grabbing her, holding her back as the helicopter continued to spin at a
forty-five degree incline and Bartlett, bellowing, finally succumbed to
gravity and slid out of the helicopter. His bellows became fainter as
he plunged to the Schloss far below them.
But would the helicopter follow him down? Unlike an airplane, a
helicopter that had moved beyond the limits of correct angular position
would simply drop like a stone. And the rotating helicopter continued
to tilt, horrifyingly, as the loss of lift became sickeningly apparent.
Regaining proper position would require both hands and feet. Ben
frantically adjusted the cyclic and the collective as his feet worked
the pedals, coordinating the tail rotor with the main rotor.
“Ben!” she yelled, only just managing to latch the door. “Do
something!”
“Jesus!” he roared over the straining rotors. “I don’t know if I can!”
The helicopter suddenly plunged, and Anna’s stomach lurched upward, but
she noticed that even as it fell, it was starting to right itself.
If it righted itself in time found the angle required for lift they’d
stand a chance.
Ben manipulated the controls with furrowed intensity. Viscerally, they
knew that the rotorcraft had only seconds remaining before the descent
velocity became unrecoverable: any wrong decisions would be fatal.
She felt it before she saw it felt the lift before she saw, from the
horizon line, that the helicopter had returned to even keel.
For the first time in a long while, she experienced a small but growing
abatement of panic. Deftly, she tore off a piece of her blouse and
pressed it to the area of Ben’s lower neck that had been attacked. The
area was deeply grooved with tooth marks, but the compression wounds
left very little blood, which was fortunate. No major vessels had been
breached. Ben would need medical attention before too long, but it
wasn’t an emergency.
Now she looked down out of the window. “Look!” she called out.
Directly below them she could see the toy-model castle surrounded by its
serpentine fence. And at the base of the mountain a dense crowd of
people was surging, streaming.
“That’s them!” she shouted. “It looks like they got out!”
They heard an explosion from below, and a great crater suddenly appeared
in the ground next to the Schloss.
A small section of the ancient stone fortress nearest the blast crumbled
like a fragile confection of spun sugar.
“The dynamite,” Ben said.
They were more than a thousand feet up now, cruising at 140 knots. “The
idiots dynamited the mouth of the cave. Way too close to the building
look at what the explosion’s done. Jesus!”
She saw what looked like a white cloud forming near the summit of the
mountain, rolling like dense fog down the mountainside.
A white cloud of snow, a great wave, the avalanche a cruel fact of
nature in the Austrian alps.
It was a strangely beautiful sight.
Apart from scores of children who managed to flee the grounds of the
Schloss, there were no survivors.
Thirty-seven people around the world, many of them great men and women,