The trees within a hundred yards of the former citadel had burst into flame, the fire jumping to their crowns in seconds, and a great wind seemed to be whipping thick trunks back and forth like reeds.
Kate saw all this in the few seconds of their vertical elevator ride. She cradled the screaming Joshua tighter as the helicopter reached the top of its arc and prepared to drop straight down into that conflagration. She had no seat belt on and she and the baby rose six inches off the seat as the helicopter reached its apogee.
“Hang on!” O'Rourke yelled uselessly, and then he threw the stick in his right hand hard to the left, kicked his right rudder pedal, and squeezed the throttle wide open. The roar of the jet turbine became louder than the explosions and landslides two thousand feet below them.
They could not recover in the fifteen hundred feet of altitude they had above the blazing ruins of the citadel. O'Rourke obviously did not try to. He put the helicopter's nose down and dove it into the canyon. The turbine screamed louder, alarms went off on the console in front of both him and Kate, and the wind slammed at the notquitelatched door inches from Joshua's face. Kate held the baby tight and watched the river rise toward them at a terrifying rate.
O'Rourke set both his good leg and artificial one hard against the pedals, gripped the stick in both hands, and began easing the machine out of its bucking, screaming dive. Kate felt the heat of the burning mountain as they hurtled past it, and then the canyon walls were whipping by on both sides, the river rising to fill the sootstreaked windscreen in front of them. Kate closed her eyes for a second.
When she opened them, they were hurtling along in level flight thirty feet above the Arges, heading south. Kate saw trucks and lights on the riverbank to her left and realized that it was the spot where the Dacia had crashed. The spot where she had left Lucian. She closed her eyes again. Goodbye, my friend. There will be no more orphans used to feed the strigois' thirst, Joshua stirred in her arms and she patted the baby's back. With luck . . . just a little luck . . . there will be no more AIDS babies.
O'Rourke was clicking off alarms, snapping toggles on a panel between them. He glanced to his right. “Are you all right?”
Kate started to answer but began laughing instead. She put her free hand up to stop the giggles but ended up just snuffling and giggling into her wrist. O'Rourke frowned for a second, but then began laughing himself.
When they could stop, Kate shifted the baby to her right arm and touched his shoulder with her left hand. “Are they going to shoot us down now? The air force or something?”
O'Rourke let go of the stick for a moment to take a headset from a bracket and slip it over his head. He tapped the microphone and then lifted the right earphone. “hope. I don't think so. Romania has one of those air forces that doesn't like to fly at night.” He threw toggles on the console and she could hear a beeping from the earphones near her head. O'Rourke gestured and she set them on.
“Hear me better now?” he asked. The engine roar and rotor noise was a distant thing, his voice clear in her headphones.
She nodded.
He banked to the right and gained altitude over the foothills. Kate realized that they had already covered all the ground that it had taken Lucian and her hours to drive through the Transylvanian hills between Rimnicu Vilcea and Curtea de Arges. She settled back in the seat, found a shoulder harness, and buckled herself in. Joshua was breathing easily, dozing off. Kate shook her head.
“This kind of aircraft carries a transponder,” O'Rourke said through the intercom. “I suspect that no one in Romania would mess with this particular helicopter even if we buzzed the capital. “ They continued to climb. High peaks were ahead but they were already flying higher than the snowcapped summits.
“Do we have enough gas to get out of here?” she asked into the little microphone. O'Rourke would know that “here” meant Romania.
He smiled at her. His eye was still swollen almost shut and his lips were a mess from the beating they had given him, but he looked happy. “If I find even the slightest tail wind, we'll have enough gas to land in downtown Budapest,” he said. “Which side of the river would you prefer, Buda or Pest?”
“You choose,” Kate whispered into the microphone. “I've made enough decisions for one day.”
O'Rourke nodded and concentrated on the controls.
“Mike,” she said a minute later. She was gently rocking Joshua, feeling the baby's warm breath on her cheek. “Lucian is dead.”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “Do you want to tell me about it? And how you managed all this?”
“In a while,” said Kate. “But tell me something first . . . do you know anything about Lucian's mentor?”
“Mentor? No.” His voice was puzzled.
“It wasn't you?”
“No, Kate.”
She rubbed her hand across her baby's head. His hair had grown. He was blowing bubbles in his sleep. New cure for colic, she thought irrelevantly. Take the baby for a helicopter ride. “Could it have been the Church . . . sponsoring Lucian in his fight against the strigoi, I mean?”
O'Rourke thought a minute. “No, I don't think so. I think I would have heard about it if the Church had been actively involved like that. The best the Church could do was tend to the victims all these years. I'm sorry, Kate . . . is this mentor thing important?”
“Perhaps not,” said Kate. They were flying through scattered clouds now, still climbing. The instrument lights were red. O'Rourke fiddled with something and a heater came on. The sound and feel of the warm air was soothing to Kate, like being a child again, out on a ride in her parents' car at night with the heater fan blowing gently. Despite the adrenaline still surging through her body, Kate actually felt sleepy.
“There is something important we have to talk about, though,” she said. She did not add the “us.”
O'Rourke nodded. She looked his way and saw him smiling at her. “I look forward to talking about that,” he said softly.
Joshua made the kind of vaguely troubled noise that babies make while dreaming, and Kate rocked him gently. Suddenly they came out of the cloud layer and it seemed to her that the tops of the clouds were like a sea and they were a submarine rising to the surface . . . and above it. The cloud tops gleamed beneath them as far as she could see in each direction. There was no sense now of national boundaries, or of nations, of the darkness that lay below those clouds. Kate would not mind staying above these clouds for a while. She rocked the baby, crooning very softly, and watched out the window as they leveled off and flew northwest.
“I've got the tail wind we needed,” said O'Rourke. “And I'm pretty sure the NavStar system is working right. We'll be following the Danube for part of the way.”
Kate nodded in a distracted way. She had just realized how bright the stars were up here in this moonless sky, so bright that they turned the cloud tops into a milky ocean of subtle white hues.
O'Rourke was holding the stick with his left hand now, turning a radio dial with his right. When he had found the channel he wanted, Kate reached over and gently took his hand.
Not speaking, still holding hands, they flew west under the canopy of stars.
Epilogue
When they opened my grave on Snagov Island, they found it empty. That was in 1932. In the winter of 1476, I had briefly regained the throne of Transylvania, but my enemies were legion and they would not cease their attempts until I was dead.
That winter, surrounded and outnumbered by foes, I was driven into the swamps near Snagov by those who would have my head. Instead, they found my headless and mangled body in the marshes there. They identified me by my royal clothes and by the signet ring bearing the sign of the Order of the Dragon on my finger.