Keith Thomson - Once a spy

But Drummond had more switches to flick and buttons to press. Other than the toggles overhead labeled FAN and XPNDR-which Drummond avoided-Charlie couldn’t guess their functions. ENDCR? RMI? INV? Most of the dials and gauges and other glass bubbles on the instrument panel had no labels at all.

When Drummond finally pressed the starter button, the engine whine drowned out the siren. Now everyone on the club grounds knew both precisely where Drummond and Charlie were and what they were up to. Still, the ship sat on the tennis court, with Drummond continuing to tweak the instruments.

Helicopter takeoff wasn’t as simple as PlayStation portrayed it, Charlie thought, or even as simple as an Apollo launch. Unless one of Drummond’s blocked mental channels was to blame.

“Would there be a way to speed things up,” Charlie asked, “if, say, hypothetically, more bad guys were about to show up any second and shoot at us?”

Drummond tapped the temperature gauge. “Overheating during the start can cause catastrophic engine failure, which would be worse.”

“Sorry, don’t mind me,” said Charlie. Feeling his face redden, he turned away, focusing intently on the altimeter.

It read 0 feet, of course.

Drummond cracked the throttle. Fuel howled into the engine. The rotors awoke. The blades tingled. The helicopter went nowhere. Drummond was fixated on the temperature gauge.

Charlie noticed a flash of light from the terrace. Without ado, Drummond jerked open his window, drew his gun, and fired. More than a hundred feet away, a guard grabbed at his shoulder and toppled over the balustrade. A rifle fell from his hands, its scope catching the sunlight and replicating the flash Charlie had seen a moment ago.

“Forgetting how you even spotted him, I wouldn’t have thought that shot was possible,” Charlie said.

His attention back on the instrument panel, Drummond said, “The hard part is acting like I do it all the time.”

No, Charlie decided, definitely not the same guy he’d known from 1979 until today.

Four more guards had streamed out of the library, rifles in hand. Drummond glanced from them to the temperature gauge. Of the two, the temperature gauge appeared to trouble him more.

“No choice now,” he grumbled.

He snapped two more switches and wrenched the throttle. The engine responded with a roar. The blades reached full chop, raising dirt and grass all around. He jerked up the collective. With it went the nose, followed by the skids. Every part of the ship down to the lug nuts trembled.

“Let’s get some air,” he said, punching the cyclic.

At once it seemed like the ship was falling upward. Past the clubhouse. Past the treetops. Into a white explosion of sunlight.

On the terrace, uniforms billowed in the helicopter’s wash as the men traced the path of the helicopter with their rifle barrels. Their muzzles lit up like flashbulbs. With white knuckles, Charlie grabbed onto the center support strut and braced for the bullets.

They struck immediately, but without the rammed-by-an-asteroid effect he’d expected-it was more like birds pecking at the fuselage.

After five or six such pecks, a rope of blood whipped past his eyes, splattering against his window and peppering his face with warm droplets. He looked anxiously to the pilot’s seat.

Drummond was unscathed. “Our passenger,” Drummond explained, with a tilt of the head. “Upper thigh, apparently not serious, thankfully.”

Charlie turned around to see Cadaret stirring, as if in the midst of a bad dream. The seat cushion beneath him had turned crimson. Beyond basic humanity, Charlie wasn’t sure why Drummond cared. He decided not to distract him with questions.

The pecking continued. Charlie held his breath, if only because it allowed him to do something besides thinking about a midair explosion.

The pecks dwindled as the helicopter continued skyward. When the altimeter read 1,700 feet, the guards quit altogether.

Charlie took a deep breath of the cabin air. It was rich with the waxy aroma of aircraft hydraulic fluid people often associate with going on vacation. He admired the plush carpet of treetops below. The old yellow general store appeared quaint. The rhythmic thumping of the rotors became a song of respite.

It was interrupted by a sickly gasp from the engine.

Abruptly the ship yawed to Charlie’s side. The first aid box on the wall behind him popped open, raining supplies. Everything else that wasn’t tied down, including Cadaret, drummed the right wall. Charlie grabbed a strut to keep from hanging by his straps.

Drummond maneuvered the cyclic control stick and worked the foot pedals, but he couldn’t right the ship. His eyes mirrored Charlie’s bewilderment.

“What was the thing I was worrying about?” he asked.

The timing was so preposterous that Charlie wondered whether Drummond’s newly debuted lighter side included practical jokes.

That notion died as the engine fell quiet, and in its place came a loud, high-pitched horn. The row of warning lights over the instrument panel blazed red, as did the temperature gauge. The flapping of the blades began to slow, to sickening effect. And that was nothing compared to the ground racing nightmarishly upward. The air rushed past like fighter jets.

Any panic Charlie had ever felt before was an itch compared to this.

Fighting it, he took hold of the collective from Drummond, who slumped in his seat, stupefied. The lever felt like it had been fixed in concrete.

So much, Charlie thought, for his familiarity with helicopter controls. He had a better chance of landing a car from a thousand feet.

He expected scenes from his life to flash before his eyes.

Cadaret surged from the cabin. Although woozy, the killer squeezed through the gap between the pilot and copilot seats, then dove, slamming the collective to the floor.

“Right pedal!” he screamed to Drummond.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” Drummond said, stomping his right foot pedal.

With a groan, Cadaret grabbed Drummond’s knee. He manipulated Drummond’s foot as if it were a marionette, reducing pressure on the pedal.

Although the gauges still indicated the engine was dead, the rotor blades sped up. Their rich buzz returned. The ship entered a steady glide.

Charlie’s jubilation was tinged by disbelief. “How is this possible?”

“Autorotation,” Drummond said, as if recalling an old friend.

“Yeah,” Cadaret said, pulling back on the cyclic. “Still we’re going to dig a giant hole in the ground unless we can slow the hell down.”

The helicopter’s nose bumped up and the flight path flattened out. The vertical speed indicator dropped to 1,100 feet per minute, which sounded like a lot but didn’t feel it. Charlie suspected he’d been in faster elevators.

“Not bad,” said Cadaret. “Now if she’ll just level off a wee bit more, cocktails are on me once we-”

Out of nowhere a tall pine tree bit into the helicopter’s Plexiglas windshield. Green needles that felt like nails filled and darkened the cabin. Charlie shielded his eyes. There wasn’t time to think past that. The ship bouldered through branches. The main rotor was snagged by the tree trunk and snapped off. A stout bough peeled away the roof. The ground hit like a giant mallet.

A surreptitious peek into the Waynesboro Airport air traffic control database suggested the helicopter had dropped precipitiously within a thirty-mile radius of the Monroeville club. Front Royal, Virginia, the nearest town, was a likely place for Drummond to surface if he survived, and Fielding had a feeling that he had; the old man had a knack for it.

Fielding drove down Royal Avenue, the two-lane main drag, passing non-brand-name fast food restaurants and two-story federal buildings that had been nice, once. The glory days of this little burg had come to an end fifty years ago, he estimated, based upon the chipped and fading Coca-Cola advertisement on the side of a vacant bank.