The slugs were stitching their way through the side window from somewhere above and behind. She rolled the control yoke to the right and kicked the rudder hard in the same direction, wheeling the big aircraft out of the way.
More staccato impacts, this time somewhere on the wing. She rolled out of the turn, looked to her left, and was startled to see the Caravan hanging in the left window. Its right side door was open and two figures with guns crouched there.
She rolled left and pulled up sharply, glancing at the only remaining airspeed indicator on the copilot’s side. The Caravan pilot yanked his craft up as well, pulling away just in time, but the shooters still had the Albatross in their sights.
More bullets found their mark on the left engine.
Kat felt the big aircraft yaw dangerously to the left as number-one engine lost power. There was a large red feather button on the overhead for each engine, and she punched at it, hitting it on the second try. She jammed the right rudder pedal forward as the prop streamlined with the wind and the Albatross righted itself. She was searching for the other controls to shut off the fuel when Robert’s voice reached her. “Kat! We’re on fire on the left!” She could already see the orange light of flames cascading from the left engine and smell the stench of burning fuel and oil.
“See if you can find the engine fire extinguisher button!” she called.
Robert searched the overhead panel as she looked left again, spotting the floats of the attacking aircraft above and to the left. To the right, a narrow mountain valley opened up less than 2,000 feet below, and she wheeled the Albatross in that direction, throttling back the right engine. She spotted a substantial river running through it that she could follow. They were less than 1,000 feet above the ground, and she kept descending, leveling a few hundred feet above the trees. She pushed up the right engine again, fed in corrective right rudder to compensate for the absence of power on the left wing, and checked to her left.
The sky seemed empty.
“Robert. Check the right.”
He stopped looking for the fire extinguisher and looked to the right and up. “Nothing there, Kat!”
Bullets stuttered through the fuselage, this time behind them. The plink-plink-plink of the powerful slugs as they punctured the metal skin was unmistakable. She banked sharply left and pulled up, once again exposing the Caravan on the left. But this time the pilot anticipated the maneuver and hung back, close enough to shoot but far enough away to simply follow as she tried unsuccessfully to outmaneuver the more maneuverable aircraft.
The Albatross was heading for the rising terrain on the west side of the valley. She banked sharply to the right to follow the valley again, knowing the Caravan would stay on her tail. More bullets hit them, and a muted cry came from the back. There was no time to look back. As the fire grew, Kat’s confidence sank; she knew the Albatross was simply too big, too heavy, and too damaged to outrun the smaller, turbine-powered craft.
Suddenly the right engine began running rough just as Robert, who had been watching out the right side, yelled, “Kat, something’s wrong. Look at the engine!”
Kat stole a quick glance, and her stomach froze at the sight of a dark stream of oil covering part of the cowling. A check of the oil pressure gauge told the tale.
She looked ahead in the valley, spotting a small dam and a lake beyond. The dam was moving under the nose, and the far end of the lake looked too close to accommodate a large amphibian.
I’ve got no choice!
“Hold on! I’m putting it in that lake!” she yelled, turning her head as far as she could to yell the same warning to Jordan and Dr. Maverick.
The right engine had begun to sputter as she jammed the yoke forward in a stomach-turning near-zero-G excursion. She yanked the right throttle to idle and found the flap handle, pulling it full down as she aimed for the water, gauging her altitude above the surface by the shoreline.
Too fast! she thought as she pulled hard just over the surface, stopping the descent and slowing, letting the nose come up as it settled toward the water.
The end of the lake was coming up rapidly. There was no power to climb, a raging fire on the left side, and no way to slow anymore. She thought of the landing gear too late, just as the fuselage touched the surface.
The Albatross kissed the water at first without slowing, and she tried to pull the yoke back to raise the nose and spoil the lift, as she’d seen seaplane pilots do. But the hull wasn’t far enough into the water, and the Albatross obediently climbed back into the air twenty feet above the surface.
The end of the lake and the bank were less than 500 yards away and coming up fast. Kat relaxed the back pressure and let the Albatross settle heavily into the water. The hydrodynamic pressure sucked the hull down as she yanked back again, this time achieving a cascade of spray and deceleration as the plane slowed.
But they were still moving far too fast at the end of the lake. Traveling at more than sixty knots, the Albatross slammed into the shoreline with the nose up. The fuselage screeched in protest as it slithered up the shallow embankment and spent its remaining energy on a grove of sturdy fir trees, which, one by one, progressively separated the burning left wing from the fuselage, causing the right wing to dig into the ground and spin the fuselage to the right.
“Come around and land. Quickly!” Schoen ordered his pilot as the Caravan flew over the wreckage of the Albatross.
The pilot wheeled around, extended the flaps, and pushed up the prop RPM, setting the aircraft into the water toward the middle of the lake. He dropped to a sedate speed and aimed for the spot where the Albatross’s tail jutted into the forest.
Fed by leaking aviation gasoline, the burning remains of the Albatross’s left wing and engine suddenly exploded, but the force of the explosion merely chewed into the ruined tail section of the aircraft.
Schoen motioned to the man in back to check his weapons before turning to the pilot. “Bring me to shore just to the left and beach her until we finish this. Shut it down, secure it, and follow us.”
The impact of the collision with the trees had slammed Kat’s head into the instrument panel, but not enough to knock her out. She shook her head and looked at Robert as the detached left wing exploded somewhere behind them. He was wiping blood off his face, but seemed okay otherwise.
“We’ve… got to get out of here,” she began. “They’ll be landing.”
Robert unstrapped and stumbled through the cockpit door before turning back to help Kat out. They saw Dr. Maverick kneeling beside a prone Jordan James. “He’s been hit!” Dr. Maverick said, his voice an octave higher than normal.
Kat moved to Jordan, finding his eyes open and his chest soaked in blood. “Oh God, Uncle. What happened?”
He took a breath and shook his head. “Not… that bad, Kat, I think…”
She opened his shirt and saw a major entry wound on the right side of his chest just below the rib cage, the bleeding steady and serious. “Can we move you? We’ve got to get out of here.”
The whine of the Caravan’s turbine engine could be heard outside as Kat and Robert and Tom Maverick struggled to lift Jordan James through the main door to the ground. “My pistol’s in my handbag,” Kat said to Robert.
“I’ll get it and a first-aid kit,” Robert answered.
They laid Jordan in front of the wreckage, by the nose, and Robert scrambled back into the aircraft. He jumped out again with Kat’s handbag and the first-aid kit. Kat grabbed her purse and pulled out her gun as Robert knelt beside James with the kit.
The click of a powerful gun being cocked reached their ears at close quarters, and Kat looked up to see Arlin Schoen step from around the nose.