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"Now you won't fall out," she exclaimed.
Pitt smiled. "I don't deserve you." Then he was lying flat on his stomach aiming the rifle out the door. "I'm ready, Al. Give me a clear shot."
Giordino fought to twist the helicopter so that Pitt would face the blind side of the attackers. Because the passenger doors were positioned on the same side of both helicopters, the Peruvian pilot was faced with the same dilemma. He might have risked opening the clamshell doors in the aft end to allow the mercenary rifleman to blast away with an open line of fire, but that would have slowed his airspeed and made control of the chopper unwieldy. Like old propeller-driven warbirds tangling in a dogfight, the pilots maneuvered for an advantage, hurling their aircraft around the sky in a series of acrobatics never intended by their designers.
His opponent knew his stuff, thought Giordino, with the respect of one professional for another. Outgu
"Now!" he yelled in his microphone.
Pitt didn't aim at the pilots in the cockpit, he sighted at the engine hump below the rotor and squeezed the trigger. The gun spat twice and went silent.
"What's wrong?" inquired Giordino. "No gunfire. I run interference to the goal line and you fumble the ball."
"This gun had only two rounds in it," Pitt snapped back.
"When I took it off one of Amaru's gunmen, I didn't stop to count the shells."
Furious with frustration, Pitt jerked out the clip and saw it was empty. "Did any of you bring a gun on board?" he shouted to Rodgers and the petrified students.
Rodgers, tightly strapped in a seat with legs braced against a bulkhead to avoid being bounced around by Giordino's violent tactics, spread his hands. "We left them behind when we made a break for the ship."
At that instant a rocket burst through a port window, flamed across the width of the fuselage, and exited through the opposite side of the helicopter without bursting or injuring anyone. Designed to detonate after striking armored vehicles or fortified bunkers, the rocket failed to explode after striking thin aluminum and plastic. If one hits the turbines, Pitt thought uneasily, it's all over. He stared wildly about the cabin, saw that they had all released their shoulder harnesses and lay huddled on the floor under the seats as if the canvas webbing and small tubular supports could stop a forty-millimeter tank-killing rocket. He cursed as the wildly swaying aircraft threw him against the doorframe.
Sha
Pitt caught the look and it infuriated him. "What do you expect me to do," he demanded, "leap across space and brain them with the jawbone of an ass? Or maybe they'll go away if I throw rocks at them-" Pitt broke off as his eyes fell on one of the life rafts. He broke into a wild grin. "Al, you hear me?"
"I'm a little busy to take calls," Giordino answered tensely.
"Lay this antique on her port side and fly above them."
"Whatever you're concocting, make it quick before they put a rocket up our nose or we run out of fuel."
"Back by popular demand," Pitt said, becoming his old cheerful self again, "Mandrake Pitt and his deathdefying magic act." He unsnapped the buckles on the tiedown straps holding one of the life rafts to the floor. The fluorescent orange raft was labeled Twenty-Man Flotation Unit, in English, and weighed over 45 kilograms (100 pounds). Leaning out the door secured by the rope Sha
Giordino was tiring. Helicopters require constant hands-on concentration just to stay in the air, because they are made up of a thousand opposing forces that want nothing to do with each other. The general rule of thumb is that most pilots fly solo for an hour. After that, they turn control over to their backup or copilot. Giordino had been behind the controls for an hour and a half, was denied sleep for the past thirty-six hours, and now the strain of throwing the aircraft all over the sky was rapidly draining what strength he had in reserve. For almost six minutes, an eternity in a dogfight, he had prevented his adversary from gaining a brief advantage for a clear shot from the men ma
The other craft passed directly across Giordino's vulnerable glass-enclosed cockpit. For a brief instant in time he could clearly see the Peruvian pilot. The face under the combat flight helmet flashed a set of white teeth and waved. "The bastard is laughing at me," Giordino blurted in fury.
"What did you say?" came Pitt.
"Those fornicating baboons think this is fu
Pitt's opportunity came in just the blink of an eye, but his timing was right on the money. Lifting the life raft above his head with both hands as easily as if it were a sofa pillow, he thrust it out the open door as the Peruvian chopper whipped beneath him. The orange bundle dropped with the impetus of a bowling ball and smashed through one of the gyrating rotor blades 2 meters (about 6 feet) from the tip. The blade shattered into metallic slivers that spiraled outward from the centrifugal force. Now unbalanced, the remaining four blades whirled in ever-increasing vibration until they broke away from the rotor hub in a rain of small pieces.
The big helicopter seemed to hang poised for a moment before it yawed in circles and angled nose-first toward the ground at 190 kilometers (118 miles) an hour. Pitt hung out the door and watched, fascinated, as the Peruvian craft bored through the trees and crashed into a low hill only a few meters below the summit. He stared at the glinting shreds of metal that flew off into the branches of the trees. The big injured bird came to rest on its right side, a crumpled lump of twisted metal. And then it was lost in a huge fireball that erupted and wrapped it in flames and black smoke.
Giordino eased back on the throttles and made a slow circular pass over the column of smoke, but neither he nor Pitt saw any evidence of life. "This has to be the first time in history an aircraft was knocked out of the sky by a life raft," said Giordino.
"Improvisation." Pitt laughed softly, bowing to Sha