Pitt was watching the solitary dark speck in the northern sky turn into a sleek jet aircraft. He leaned forward, screwing up his eyes against the bright blue glare. The stranger was one of the new executive jets built by the British-fast, reliable and capable of whisking twelve passengers halfway around the world in a matter of hours without a fuel stop. Pitt barely had time to realize that the stranger was painted an ebony black from nose to tail when it swept past his range of vision traveling in the opposite direction.
"What did Fyrie do for an encore?" he asked.
"Mined manganese off Vancouver Island in British Columbia and brought in an offshore oil field in Peru to name a few.
There were no mergers, no subsidiaries. Kristjan built Fyrie Limited into a great industry specializing in underwater geological exploitation, nothing else."
"Did he have a family?"
"No, his parents died in a fire when he was very young. All he had was a twin sister. Don't really know much about her.
Fyrie put her through a finishing school in Switzerland, and, so rumor has it, she later became a missionary somewhere in New Guinea. Apparently her brother's fortune meant nothing to-" Hunnewell never finished the sentence. He jerked sideways facing Pitt, his eyes staring blankly, his mouth open in surprise but no words coming out. Pitt barely had time to see the old man slump forward, limp and dead to all appearances, as the plexiglass bubble encircling the cockpit shattered into a thousand jagged slivers and fell away. Twisting to one side and throwing up an arm to protect his face from the blasting wall of cold air, Pitt momentarily lost control of the helicopter. Its aerodynamics drastically altered, the Ulysses nosed sharply upward, almost on its end, throwing Pitt and the unconscious Hunnewell violently against their backrests.
It was then Pitt became aware of the machine gun shells striking the fuselage aft of the seats. The sudden uncontrolled maneuver temporarily saved their lives; the gunner aboard the black jet had been caught off guard, adjusting his trajectory too late and sending most of his fire into an empty sky. Is slow steed withUnable to match the helicopter without stalling, the mysterious jet soared forward and swung around in a hundredand-eighty-degree turn for another assault. The bastards must have made a sharp circle east and south and west before attacking from the rear, Pitt quickly figured as he struggled to 'bring the helicopter on a level course, a near impossible task with a two-hundred-mile-an-hour air stream tearing at his eyes. He throttled down, trying desperately to reduce the unseen force that pinned his body against the seat.
The black jet swept by again. but this time Pitt was ready for it. He pulled the Ulysses to an abrupt horizontal stop, the rotor blades frantically beating the atmosphere, raising the light craft in a straight vertical climb.
The dodge worked. The pilot of the jet roared under Pitt, unable to bring the machine gun to bear. Twice more Pitt managed to shake his attacker, but it was only a question of time before his opponent compensated for his rapidly diminishing bag of tricks.
Pitt didn't kid himself. There was no escape; the battle was too one-sided. The score was seven to nothing in favor of the visitors, with only a few seconds left to play in the fourth quarter. A grim smile wrinkled around Pitts eyes as he lowered the copter to a bare twenty feet above the water. Victory was hopeless, but there was a slight chance, an infinitesimal fingertip chance, he thought, for a tie score. He studied the inkblack aircraft as it jockied for the last pass. There was nothing left now but the mad clangor of steeljacketed bullets smashing through the thin aluminum skin of the Ulysses. Pitt steadied the small defenseless craft and hovered as the jet dove like a concrete bird, directly toward him.
The gunner, laying prone and firing out an open cargo door, played it cool this time. He laid down a steady stream of shells, waiting for the narrowing gap to carry them into the path of the helicopter. The barrage of death was only thirty yards away now. Pitt braced himself for the impact and threw the Ulysses straight up into the attacking plane, the helicopter's rotor blade!
shattering as they sliced through the jet's horizontal stabilizer. Instinctively Pitt flicked the ignition switch off as the turbine engine, without the drag from the rotor, raced wildly mid the howl of tortured metal. Then the racket stopped, and the sky was silent except for the wind that whistled in Pitts ears.
He snatched a glance at the strange jet just before it crashed into the sea, nose first, it's tail section hanging like a broken arm. Pitt and the unconscious Hunnewell weren't much better off. All they could do was sit and wait for the crippled helicopter to drop like a stone nearly seventy feet into the cold Atlantic water.
When the crash came, it was much worse than Pitt had anticipated. The Ulysses fell on its side into the Iceland surf in six feet of water, a scant football field length from shore. Pitts head whipped sideways and glanced off the door frame, sending him into a vortex of darkness. Fortunately the agonizing shock of the icy water jolted him back to dizzy wakefulness. Waves of nausea swept over him, and he knew he was only a hairbreadth away from saying To hell with it and drifting off to sleep for the last time.
His face twisted with pain, Pitt undid his seat belt and shoulder harness, taking a gulp of air before a breaking wave crest passed over the helicopter, then quickly he unfastened the insensible Hunnewell and lifted his head above the swirling water.
At that instant, Pitt slipped and lost his balance as a crashing breaker knocked him from the Ulysses into the surf. Still grasping Hunnewell by a death grip on the coat collar, he battled the rolling surge as it swept him toward shore, rolling him end-over-end across the uneven rocky bottom.
If Pitt ever wondered what it was like to drown, he had a pretty good idea now. The freezing water stung every square inch 24
of his skin like a million bees. His ears failed to pop, and his head was one tormenting ache; his nostrils filled with water, stabbing like a knife at his frontal sinus, and the thin membranes of his lungs felt as if they'd been dipped in nitric acid. Finally, after bashing his knees into a bed of rocks, he struggled to his feet, his head bursting gratefully into the pure Icelandic air. He swore to himself then and there that if he should ever decide to commit suicide, it definitely wouldn't be by drowning.
He staggered from the water onto a pebble-strewn beach, half carrying, half dragging Hunnewell like a drunk leading a drunk. A few steps beyond the tideline Pitt eased his burden down and checked the doctor's pulse and breathing; both were on the fast side but regular.
Then he saw Hunnewell's left arm. It had been terribly mangled at the elbow by the machine gun bullets. As quickly as his numbed
hands would allow, Pitt took off his shirt, tore off the sleeves, and tightly wrapped them around the wound to stem the flow of blood. As bad as the tissue damage looked, there was no artery spurt, so he automatically discarded the idea of a tourniquet in favor of direct pressure. Then he sat Hunnewell up against a large rock, made a crude sling, and elevated the wound to aid the control of bleeding.
Pitt could do nothing more for his friend, so he lay down on the lumpy carpet of stone and let the unwelcome pain in his body and the hated currents of nausea sweep through his body. Relaxing as much as the sickness would let him, he closed his eyes, shutting out a magnificent view of the cloud-dotted Arctic sky.
Deep unconsciousness should have held Pitt for at least several hours, but a distant alarm in the depths of his brain, began signaling, and instinctively, in response to the stimuli, his eyes popped open only twenty minutes after they had closed. The scene was different; the sky and clouds were still there, but something stood in front of them. It took a second for Pitts eyes to focus on the five children standing around him. There was no fear in their faces as they stared down at Pitt and Hunnewell.
Pitt sat up on one elbow, forced a smile-it wasn't easy-and said, "Good morning, group. Up a bit early, aren't you?"
As if on cue, the younger children looked at the oldest, a boy. He hesitated several moments, collecting his words before he spoke. "My brothers and sisters and I were herding our father's cows on the meadow above the cliffs. We saw your-" he paused, his face blank.
"Helicopter?" Pitt prompted.
"Yes, that is it." The boy's face brightened. "Helicopter. We saw your helicopter lying in the ocean." A slight blush reddened his flawless Scandinavian complexion. "I am ashamed that my English is not so good."
"No," Pitt said softly. "I'm the one who is ashamed. You speak English like an Oxford professor, while I can't even offer you two words in Icelandic."
The boy beamed at the compliment as he helped Pitt struggle awkwardly to his feet. "You are hurt, sir. Your head bleeds."