The second commando stuck his head and arms through the door, his face a mask of unbridled rage. Despite his fury, which likely stemmed from witnessing the demise of his companion, the man had learned from the mistakes of the other; he lay prone on the deck of the aircraft so that Kismet wouldn’t be able to easily knock him from his perch. Cradled in his hands was a compact VZ61 Skorpion machine pistol.
Kismet thrust his head beneath the airframe as 7.65 mm rounds sprayed from the muzzle of the Czech-manufactured weapon. A few of the bullets chattered against landing skids and Kismet could feel vibrations of kinetic energy beneath his fingers. While his current position kept him just barely out of the gunman’s line of sight, Kismet had no intention of remaining where he was. The success of his earlier maneuver had bolstered his confidence and the thought of further acrobatics no longer filled him with paralyzing dread. When the gunman fired again, Kismet was nowhere to be seen.
The commando was still peering through the door, searching the night for a glimpse of Kismet’s body spiraling down to the a watery fate, when the latter pulled himself through the opposite door and into the relative safety of the helicopter. The pilot caught a glimpse of Kismet and shouted something into the microphone at his lips. The commando, who like the pilot wore a headset, twisted around frantically, but Kismet was faster. He chopped the edge of his hand into the nerve cluster at the base of the gunman’s neck then ripped the Skorpion from paralyzed fingers. A second blow, this time with the still smoking barrel of the machine pistol, bludgeoned the man unconscious.
Before the pilot could react, Kismet threaded his way into the cockpit and took the empty seat on the right. He aimed the gun at the pilot and shouted to be heard over the deep thrum of the rotors. “Change of plans!”
The pilot threw him a defiant grin, and then jerked the cyclic control stick to the right. Kismet was just reaching for his tie in order to free himself from the prussik knot, which still bound him to the rope, when the helicopter turned on its side. The Skorpion fell from his grasp as both hands reflexively grabbed for any available handhold, and the discarded weapon smashed into the perspex windscreen, followed an instant later by Kismet himself.
A look of horror contorted the pilot’s face as the unmoving form of the second gunman slid through the open hatch and plummeted into the night; his attempt to rattle Kismet had inadvertently sealed the fate of his comrade. Too late, he tried to wrestle the cyclic back in order to level the craft but it refused to budge. It was only then that Kismet realized the object he had grasped, purely as a reflex, was the second control stick, and his weight, now suspended almost vertically from the stick, was holding the helicopter in a fixed bank. The rotor blades narrowly missed the tail boom of the other trailing helicopter in the formation as the out-of-control chopper veered to the south.
Kismet released his hold on the cyclic, and as the pilot righted the aircraft, he dropped easily back into the co-pilot’s chair, and in the same motion scooped up the discarded Skorpion and drew a bead on the pilot’s forehead. “Let’s try that again!”
The man regarded him contemptuously. “If you shoot me, who will fly? You?”
Something about the man’s arrogance prompted Kismet to do something admittedly rash. “Why not?”
The pilot’s eyes widened in disbelief for an instant as Kismet reached across and clouted him with the barrel of the machine pistol, and then he slumped forward against his harness restraints. Kismet immediately tossed the Skorpion aside and gave his full attention to the redundant control system on his side of the cockpit. Even that brief moment, where the trained pilot’s hand had slipped from the cyclic stick, had been enough to permit the helicopter to be knocked off course by the vagaries of wind currents. Kismet steadied the cyclic, while at the same time grasping the collective pitch control stick to his left, and feathered the throttle.
Nick Kismet was not a pilot. While he had flown in helicopters more than a few times and made a point of observing how the crew of those aircraft interacted with their environment, he had only once before, sat in the pilot’s seat and that flight, through no fault of his own, had ended very badly. Strangely, he felt no sense of panic, only a grim satisfaction at having wiped the pilot’s smile off his face.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Time for a refresher course.”
He knew the controls: the collective changed the pitch of the rotor blades to adjust lift; the cyclic titled the rotor assembly to bank the aircraft in any direction, or to simply hover; and the foot pedals controlled the rudder. Book knowledge was no substitute for experience, but at least out here in the open air above the river, there was a lot of room for him to get a feel for the unfamiliar systems. At first, his maneuvers were sloppy and erratic, but he quickly learned where only a feather touch was needed and which controls required constant attention.
The other two Jet Rangers had regrouped and were continuing on toward the Brooklyn shore. Kismet hastened to bring his commandeered aircraft back into the formation. Hopefully, the other pilots had no idea that the enemy was in their midst, but Kismet hadn’t yet decided how to best exploit that advantage. For now, he just wanted to keep them in sight, especially the one transporting Capri.
The momentary respite from physical activity afforded him a chance to contemplate the events of the evening. While he had no reason to question his original conclusion, namely that his old nemesis Prometheus had emerged from shadows like Leviathan from the sea, there were a few niggling details that he couldn’t quite fit into the equation.
He glanced at the unmoving form of the pilot and noted the man’s olive complexion and coarse black hair. Every man involved in the operation, at least those he had actually seen, seemed to share a common racial background, but he couldn’t put his finger on their shared ethnicity; it had been impossible to discern an accent from the few words he had heard the pilot shout. He stored the information in his memory bank and moved on.
The Skorpion pistols, originally manufactured in the Soviet satellite nation of Czechoslovakia, had been widely distributed among Communist-bloc armies, and subsequent to the fall of the Iron Curtain, had become very popular on the black market. The gun's compact design made it a favorite with urban terrorist cells. He thought back to his singular encounter with Prometheus assassins. Those men had also been well-trained commandos, but had gone to great lengths to conceal their features. Only their leader had revealed his face — a man with fair hair and skin, and a German name. The weapons they had employed had been top of the line, not old Soviet surplus. The discrepancies weren’t overwhelming to be sure, but there was a more troubling question that lent significance to those disparate scraps of information. What did they want with Capri Martelli?
The formation had been steadily descending as it moved across the river, so that now the helicopters were only about two hundred feet above the water. On the Brooklyn shore, Kismet could make out the industrial environs of the old naval yard; a maze of warehouses and cranes that had once been the foremost construction facility for American warships but was now a private concern. As the approach continued, he saw a cluster of black vans ringing an open space on a large wooden pier, an area just large enough for three helicopters to land.
He stared intently at the tableau, searching for some way to take control of the situation. He did not doubt that Capri’s abductors would have reinforcements waiting in those vans, further stacking the odds against him. If he was going to have a chance at rescuing her, he would have to force that helicopter to land somewhere else.