Eddie checked the altimeter, then closed his hands around the two control sticks. ‘Yeah.’
Harvey raised his own hands. ‘Okay, all yours.’
The Englishman gingerly edged the cyclic forward. He had flown as a passenger in numerous helicopters during his military career with the elite Special Air Service, and in many more since, but his only attempts to fly an aircraft himself had been when the pilot was incapacitated, or dead. Which, he mused, had happened alarmingly often.
Today, though, nobody was trying to kill him. Operating a chopper even in peaceful conditions was still tricky, however. The Bell twitched and squirmed with every shift in the wind, and the fuselage felt as if it were swinging from the rotor hub like a hanging basket. But he held it steady, making slight adjustments to balance the airspeed indicator and altimeter.
‘You’re doing fine,’ said Harvey. ‘Okay, we’re gonna follow the land.’ He indicated the shores of New Jersey and Staten Island. ‘Use the pedals like I showed you before, real easy.’
Eddie carefully depressed one of the anti-torque pedals, adjusting the power being fed to the tail rotor. The helicopter slowly turned. ‘That okay?’
‘Yeah, that’s great — whoa, hold on.’ A new voice came through Eddie’s headphones: one of the heliport’s staff, telling Harvey that he had a phone call. ‘Eddie, I gotta take this. Just keep doing what you’re doing.’
The Englishman gave him an okay as the call came through. ‘Lena, hey hey!’ said Harvey, his Bronx accent becoming even more rapid-fire. ‘How you doin’? Great night last night, huh?’
Eddie tried not to be distracted by what very quickly became a personal conversation, concentrating on following the shoreline. The huge jetties of the New Jersey container terminal rolled by. He glanced down at them, only to realise with alarm when he looked back at the instruments that the altimeter was falling towards the thousand-foot mark. He moved the cyclic, but the descent continued. ‘Oh bollocks.’
‘Babe, I gotta call you back,’ said Harvey over the headset. ‘I got a slight altitude deficiency situation here.’ He laughed, then ended the call. ‘All right, man, I got this.’ He retook the controls, bringing the LongRanger back into a climb. ‘Sorry ’bout that. Women, huh? Gotta love ’em, but…’ He briefly took one hand off the throttle to mime a duck quacking. ‘Damn, that reminds me, I gotta make another call.’
There was a cellphone connected to the cabin’s communication system by a cable; he thumbed through its contacts list. ‘Lana, hey, it’s Harv,’ he said after connecting. Eddie was again an unwilling eavesdropper. ‘Yeah, sorry about last night. I had to stay late at the hangar to deal with some FAA paperwork. How ’bout I make it up to you tonight, huh? Yeah, that place on Leland. Nina o’clock? Epic. See you then. Bye, babe.’
‘Lena and Lana, eh?’ said Eddie.
Harvey nodded. ‘Yeah. I gotta be so careful not to get their names mixed up! That might cause problems.’
A sardonic smile. ‘You’re not kidding.’
‘You ever been a juggler like that?’
Eddie shook his head. ‘Not me. One woman’s always been enough for me. More than enough sometimes.’
‘You’ve had problems?’
‘Well, my first wife wanted to kill me. And I mean she literally tried to murder me.’
Harvey made a face. ‘Yow!’
‘Yeah. Nina… well, at the moment it sometimes seems like she wants to as well.’
‘You want my advice? First hint of bunny-boiling, run, run, run! Life’s too short to be dealing with psychos.’
Eddie chuckled. ‘It’s nothing like that. It’s just…’ He became more serious. ‘She’s been pretty hard to get through to lately. And when I try, she…’
‘Bites your head off?’
‘Actually, yeah. She’s a redhead; I’m used to a bit of mardiness, but this is different.’
Harvey gave him a quizzical glance. ‘Mardiness? I guess that’s British slang?’
‘Yeah. Use it in conversation with Lana — or Lena — and she’ll think you’re all cultured and refined, just like me.’
‘No offence, man, but your accent? Not even slightly Downton Abbey.’ The pilot grinned, then nodded at the duplicate controls in front of Eddie. ‘Okay, you’re on the stick. Take us around the Narrows, then back towards the city.’
The LongRanger was now cruising parallel to the shoreline of Staten Island, the great span of the Verrazano — Narrows Bridge straddling the mouth of the bay ahead. Eddie pushed the pedal again, and the helicopter swung into a lazy turn across the water. Brooklyn spread out before them, Manhattan coming back into view beyond. ‘Doin’ good,’ Harvey assured him, before checking his watch and making another call to air traffic control. ‘Okay, gotta start heading back now. My next tour group’ll be waiting.’
‘Damn, and I was just starting to get the hang of this,’ Eddie replied. He still felt as if he were trying to balance a carton of eggs on a fingertip, but at least now he could maintain a constant height and speed.
‘Stick with me and you’ll be an expert in no time. I told you I’m a licensed instructor, right?’
‘Several times,’ said Eddie, grinning. ‘How long can I stay in control?’
‘Until we get to Governors Island. I’ll take over when we’re in the East River VFR corridor.’
‘The what?’
‘Something you’ll have to know about if you wanna be a proper pilot! Visual flight rules — basically, flying by eye. If you’re in a ’copter, you don’t need to tell ATC what you’re doing in the Hudson and East River corridors, although it’s kinda good sense to let ’em know. Although they’ll be making the East River into controlled airspace soon for some UN summit. Pain in the ass.’
‘Yeah, I know what it’s like dealing with the UN,’ Eddie told him with amusement.
He continued flying until the flat pear of Governors Island loomed ahead. ‘I got it from here,’ said Harvey as he took control once more. He reported to ATC that he was returning to the heliport, then pointed to the right, up the East River. ‘You seen that?’
‘It’s a bit hard to miss,’ said Eddie. The object of their attention was a huge Airlander airship, slowly cruising down the length of the waterway. The enormous twin-lobed craft, dwarfing even the largest airliner, was a new addition to New York’s long list of tourist attractions, having arrived a month earlier to act as a mammoth advertising billboard. With the Airlander presently head-on to them, though, the commercials on its flanks were invisible. ‘It looks like a massive arse from the front.’
‘I always thought it looked like boobs myself. Whatever turns you on, man!’ Harvey snickered. ‘I’ll be glad when it’s gone — it’s a pain in the butt. Even in VFR, you’re supposed to maintain spacing with other aircraft, but that damn thing moves so slow, you’ve gotta go wide to keep clear of it. Airships, jeez.’ He shook his head. ‘What is this, the 1930s?’
‘Oh, the humanity,’ Eddie joked. He sat back to watch the skyscrapers of Manhattan’s financial district grow larger as the helicopter descended. ‘Thanks for the flight.’
‘No trouble,’ said Harvey, guiding the LongRanger towards the jetty where the helipads were located. ‘Like I said, any time you want a lesson, I’ll tell you when my next free slot is. Hopefully there won’t be too many — if I’m not carrying passengers, I’m not making money! — but I owe you.’