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Stokes' inexperience caused hesitation. He was barely coming to the top of the loop in preparation for the half roll when the 7.62 millimeter shells began smashing into the floatplane's thin aluminum skin. The windshield burst into a thousand pieces as shells hammered the instrument panel. The Defender's pilot altered his aim and raked his fire from the cockpit across the fuselage. It was an error that kept the Beaver in the air. He should have blasted the engine.
Pitt fired off his final three rounds and hurled himself forward and down to make himself as small a target as possible in an act that was pure illusion.
Remarkably, Stokes had completed the Immelmann, late to be sure, but now the Beaver was headed away from the helicopter before its pilot could swing his craft around 180 degrees. Pitt shook his head in dazed incredulity and checked his body for wounds. Except for a rash of small cuts on his face from slivers that had flown off the shattered windshield, he was unscathed. The Beaver was in level flight, and the radial engine was still roaring smoothly at full revolutions. The engine was the only part of the plane that hadn't been riddled with bullets. He looked at Stokes sharply.
"Are you okay?"
Stokes slowly turned and gazed at Pitt through unfocused eyes. "I think the bastards just shot me out of my pension," he murmured. He coughed and then his lips were painted with blood that seeped down his chin and trickled onto his chest. Then he slumped forward against his shoulder harness, unconscious.
Pitt took the copilot's control wheel in his hands and immediately threw the floatplane around into a hard 180-degree bank until he was heading back on a course toward Mason Broadmoor's village. His snap turn caught the helicopter's pilot off guard, and a shower of bullets sprayed the empty air behind the floatplane's tail.
He wiped away the blood that had trailed into one eye and took stock. Most of the aircraft was stitched with over a hundred holes, but the control systems and surfaces were undamaged and the big 450 Wasp engine was still pounding away on every one of its cylinders.
Now what to do?
The first plan that ran through his mind was to make an attempt at ramming the helicopter. The old take 'em with you routine, Pitt mused. But that's all it could have been, an attempt. The Defender was far more nimble in the air than the lumbering Beaver with its massive pontoons. He'd stand as much chance as a cobra against a mongoose, a fight the mongoose never failed to win against the slower cobra. Only when it came up against a rattlesnake did the mongoose go down to defeat. The crazy thought running through Pitt's mind became divine inspiration as he sighted a low ridge of rocks about half a kilometer ahead and slightly to his right.
There was a path toward the rocks through a stand of tall Douglas fir trees. He dove between the trees, his wingtips brushing the needles of the upper branches. To anyone else it would have seemed like a desperate act of suicidal madness. The gambit misled the Defender's pilot, who broke off the third attack and followed slightly above and behind the floatplane, waiting to observe what looked like a certain crash.
Pitt kept the throttle full against its stop and gripped the control wheel with both hands, eyes focused on the wall of rocks that loomed ahead. The airstream blasted through the shattered windshield, and he was forced to turn his head sideways in order to see. Fortunately, the gale swept away the trickling blood and the tears that it pried from his squinting eyes.
He flew on between the trees. There could be no misjudgment, no miscalculation. He had to make the right move at the exact moment in time. A tenth of a second either way would spell certain death. The rocks were rushing toward the plane as if driven from behind. Pitt could clearly see them now, gray-and-brown jagged boulders with black streaks. He didn't have to look to see the needle on the altimeter registering on zero or the needle on the tachometer wavering far into the red The old girl was hurtling toward destruction just as fast as she could fly.
"Low!" he shouted into the wind rushing through the smashed windshield. "Two meters low!"
He barely had time to compensate before the rocks were on him. He gave the control column a precisely measured jerk, just enough to raise the plane's nose, just enough so the tips of the propeller whipped over the ridge, missing the crest by centimeters. He heard the sudden crunch of metal as the aluminum floats smashed into the rocks and tore free of the fuselage. The Beaver shot into the air, as graceful as a soaring hawk released from its tether. Unburdened by the weight of the bulky floats, which lay smashed against the rocks, and with the drag on the aircraft decreased by nearly half, the ancient plane became more maneuverable and gained another thirty knots in airspeed. She responded to Pitt's commands instantly, without a trace of sluggishness as she chewed the air, fighting for altitude.
Now, he thought, a satanic grin on his lips, I'll show you an Immelmann. He threw the aircraft into a half loop and then snapped it over in a half roll, heading on a direct course toward the helicopter. "Write your will, sucker!" he shouted, his voice drowned out by the rush of wind and the roar of the engine's exhaust. "Here comes the Red Baron."
Too late the chopper's pilot read Pitt's intentions. There was nowhere to dodge, nowhere to hide. The last thing he expected was an assault by the battered old floatplane. But here it was closing on a collision course at almost two hundred knots. It came roaring at him at a speed he didn't believe possible. He made a series of violent maneuvers, but the pilot of the old floatplane anticipated his moves and kept coming on. He angled the helicopter's nose toward his opponent in a wild attempt to blast the punctured Beaver out of the sky before the imminent crash.
Pitt saw the helicopter turn head-on, saw the flash from the guns in the pods, heard the shells punching into the big radial engine. Oil suddenly spurted from under the cowling, streaming onto the exhaust stacks and causing a dense trail of blue smoke to streak behind the plane. Pitt held up a hand to shield his eyes from the hot oil splattering against his face in stinging torrents from the airstream.
The sight that froze in his memory a microsecond before the impact was the expression of grim acceptance on the face of the helicopter's pilot.
The prop and engine of the floatplane smashed squarely into the helicopter just behind the cockpit in an explosion of metal and debris that sheared off the tail rotor boom. Deprived of its torque compensation, the main body of the helicopter was thrown into a violent lateral drift. It spun around crazily for several revolutions before plummeting like a stone, five hundred meters to the ground. Unlike special-effects crashes in motion pictures, it didn't immediately burst into flames after crumpling into an unrecognizable mass of smoldering wreckage. Nearly two minutes passed before flames flickered from the debris and a blinding sheet of flame enveloped it.
Pieces of the Beaver's shattered propeller spun into the sky like a fireworks pinwheel. The cowling seemed to burst off the engine and fluttered like a wounded bird into the trees. The engine froze and stopped as quickly as if Pitt had turned off the ignition switch. He wiped the oil from his eyes, and all he could see over the exposed cylinder heads was a carpet of treetops. The Beaver's airspeed fell off, and she stalled as he braced himself for the crash. The controls were still functioning, and he tried to float the plane down into the upper tree limbs.
He almost made it. But the outer edge of the right wing collided with a seventy-meter-tall red cedar, throwing the aircraft into an abrupt ninety-degree turn. Now totally out of control and dead in what little sky was left, the plane plunged into a solid mass of trees. The left wing wrapped itself around another towering cedar and was torn away. Green pine needles closed over the red plane, blotting it out from any view from above. The trunk of a fir tree, half a meter wide, rose in front of the battered aircraft. The propeller hub struck the tree head-on and punched right through it. The engine was pulled from its mountings as the upper half of the tree fell across the careening aircraft and knocked off the tail section What remained of the wreckage plowed into the moist compost earth of the forest floor before finally coming to a dead stop.
For the next few minutes the ground below the trees was as silent as a cemetery. Pitt sat there, too stunned to move. He stared dazedly through the opening that was once the windshield. He noticed for the first time that the entire engine was gone and wondered vaguely where it went. At last his mind began to come level again, and he reached over and examined Stokes.
The Mountie shuddered in a fit of coughing, then shook his head feebly and regained a small measure of consciousness. He stared dumbly over the instrument panel at the pine branches that hung into the cockpit. "How did we come down in the forest?" he mumbled.
"You slept through the best part," Pitt muttered, as he tenderly massaged a gang of bruises.
Pitt didn't require eight years of medical school to know Stokes would surely die if he didn't get to a hospital. Quickly, he unzipped the old flying suit, ripped opened the Mountie's shirt and searched for the wound. He found it to the left of the breastbone, below the shoulder. There was so little blood and the hole was so small, he almost missed it. This wasn't made by a bullet, was Pitt's first reaction. He gently probed the hole and touched a sharp piece of metal. Puzzled, he looked up at the frame that once held the windshield. It was smashed beyond recognition. The impact of a bullet had driven a splinter from the aluminum frame into Stokes' chest, penetrating the left lung. Another centimeter and it would have entered the heart.
Stokes coughed up a wad of blood and spit it out the open window. "Funny," he murmured, "I always thought I'd get shot in a highway chase or in a back alley."
"No such luck."
"How bad does it look?"
"A metal splinter in your lung," Pitt explained. "Are you in pain?"
"More of a throbbing ache than anything else."
