“No, not those straps!” he shouted over the wind as she continued, wildly, to unbuckle and uncinch. “That’s your parachute.”

She stopped and stood. He saw that she had taken time to shove the pistol back in her belt holster and to secure the strap over it.

He grabbed her right hand where it clutched the edge of the cockpit. “Jump when I count to two,” he shouted. “Push hard against the fuselage…We have to get clear! One…two!”

They hurtled into space. For a second Dar saw Syd’s arms go out like wings and his blood ran cold as he wondered if she would forget to pull the rip cord. But she was just diving away from the wreckage—the Twin Astir had now started tumbling about its axis and had turned into a huge eggbeater thirty feet behind them—and several seconds later he saw her sport chute blossom. He pulled his rip cord a second later.

Only after the spine-jarring shaking of the canopy opening did Dar look up. He saw no holes in the fabric, no torn risers. His hands went to the riser controls and he spun the chute around just as he heard the noise of the Bell Ranger’s descent toward them. If the pilot had kept control of the helicopter, Dar knew he and Syd were dead.

But the helicopter was not under power or control—at least not under much control. The vertical tail rotor blade was essentially gone, and what was left of it was chewing up the rotor assembly in great gulps. The pilot had cut the engine—which appeared to be smoking, perhaps from one of Syd’s wild shots, more likely from chunks of shrapnel thrown forward from the runaway tail rotor—and was trying to autorotate down to safety, allowing the freewheeling main rotors to give them enough lift to survive a crash landing.

The helicopter was headed straight for Syd and him.

It took only an instant for Dar to realize that this was not another murder attempt. He was sure that the pilot did not want a second collision—especially with bodies and parachute fabric fouling up his rotors—but there was very little the pilot could do but ride the autorotating helicopter down in its mad death spiral toward the ground.

There was a noise above and behind him and Dar twisted in his harness to look. He realized then that whether he was destined to live another thirty seconds or another fifty years, he would never forget the image he saw then.

Syd had taken her hands off the riser controls and had the 9mm semiautomatic held firmly in both hands. Her legs were apart in the proper shooting stance—just a thousand feet too high—and she was emptying the Sig’s entire second clip into the Plexiglas windshield of the Bell Ranger.

The helicopter missed Dar, but not by so much that he did not literally pull his legs up to avoid the rush of the rotors. Then the heavy machine continued to spiral down faster and faster.

Syd’s pistol had locked open. Dar watched her drop the empty magazine, pull the last one from her belt, and slap it into place, even as her orange-and-white parachute swirled her around in spirals above him. She was just a bit too far away for shouting, so all that Dar could do was point toward the risers, pull on the right one to spill enough air to send him dipping and spiraling in that direction, and then point to an open meadow area.

Syd nodded, holstered the weapon, and began tugging her riser D-rings, attempting to follow Dar into the clearing. Then both of them quit struggling and watched the Bell Ranger’s last seconds four hundred feet below them.

The pilot was good, but not quite good enough. A helicopter in autorotation is essentially so much dead weight controlled by a mostly dead stick, but the pilot managed to time the death spiral so he missed the trees and came around into a clearing and lined up, more or less, with the thirty-degree slope. If Dar had been piloting a sailplane, he would have followed the rules for off-field glider landings and attempted to land going uphill, both to reduce his roll-out and to use the last bit of lift the hillside offered. But the hillside offered nothing to the massive Bell Ranger, and the pilot had no choice but to land headed downhill, at a good clip, and let the skids slide along the ground like the runners on a bobsled.

Even from several hundred feet up, the meadow looked smooth enough. Dar was wise to the lie of that appearance: there would be large rocks and small boulders, gullies and rock-dense shrubs, and probably larger obstacles. Whatever the Bell Ranger hit, it hit hard, the front of the skids digging in and the helicopter going nose over in an instant, the freewheeling rotors slamming into the earth one second later and sending a cloud of dust a hundred feet into the air.

Through that dust Dar could make out the Bell Ranger tumbling end over end, the tail boom ripping free, the cockpit bubble smashing inward. The sound was audible and terrible even from two hundred feet above it all. Then the mass of twisted fuselage came to a stop against two larger boulders about a hundred yards downhill. There was a lesser noise to the south and Dar twisted just in time to see the folded mass of the Twin Astir disappear into the tall pine trees several hundred yards away.

Dar concentrated on trying to land gently, showing Syd how to do it by example. It was not much of an example. He ended up hitting a thick willow crotch first and catapulting head over heels into the weeds, coming to rest on his back with the chute dragging him across the slope. Syd landed gently fifty feet uphill…on her feet. She took two hops and stood there, apparently dazed but certainly in one piece.

Dar struggled out of his harness and jumped to his feet to help her out of her gear before the wind came up and started dragging her back up the slope. Suddenly everything began to spin again. He decided to sit down for a second until the movement stopped, and he had no sooner flopped on his butt than Syd was there—free of her harness and helping him disentangle his feet from the chute fabric billowing all around him.

“Come on,” she said, and the two of them started moving down the hill toward the debris field of the Bell Ranger.

Syd paused to look at the tail boom and mangled rotor—pieces of their sailplane’s wing still entangled—but Dar stupidly jogged the last hundred feet. He could smell the raw stink of aviation fuel in the breeze and knew that if anything ignited the passenger cabin, anyone surviving the crash would have done so in vain.

The cockpit was completely smashed in. The pilot was dead—still in his harness and seat—eviscerated and almost decapitated by the twisted Plexiglas and metal floor. Dar could not see in the back. Fuel was running freely from the wreck. He pulled himself up the skids of the toppled machine and stood on the main cabin, looking down into the backseat. Constanza was not there.

“Dar!” Syd shouted from seventy-five feet uphill, and then froze.

Tony Constanza had just staggered from behind the larger of the two boulders. He was battered and bloody, his suit jacket and shirt almost torn off, but he was pointing the AK-47 assault rifle at Dar.

“Freeze!” shouted Syd, going into a crouching stance and aiming the little Sig-Sauer.

Constanza gave her a fleeting glance. He was not eight feet from Dar and the Kalashnikov automatic weapon was aimed at Dar’s chest.

I can jump him, Dar thought muddily. No, you can’t, asshole, was the more clear mental reply.

“You going to shoot me with that little thing from way back there, bitch?” shouted Constanza. “Not before I cut this motherfucker in two. Drop your gun, cunt.”

Hearing that word almost made Dar leap. The AK-47 kept him standing in place.

Syd lowered her weapon.

“No!” shouted Dar.

“I said drop it, bitch,” screamed Constanza, raising the assault rifle’s muzzle toward Dar’s face.

Syd brought the Sig-Sauer back up and fired three times, the shots so close together that they sounded like one continuous hammering to Dar. The first bullet blew Tony Constanza’s left knee into a flap of red meat and white gristle; the second struck him high in the left leg; the third hit him in the left buttock and swung him around.