"Good. Keep watching it."
The altimeter unwinds. Nine thousand feet. Eight thousand.
The wilderness below grows larger. The green canopy of the pines separates into individual, lethal spears. The gray rocks turn into massive, sheer cliffs.
"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday," I bark into the radio headset. "This is charter flight Niner-Two-Charlie. We have a starboard engine failure. Declaring an emergency. Requesting nearest flat terrain."
Static hisses back in my ears.
"Mayday, Mayday. Anyone on this frequency, do you copy?"
More static. An unbroken wall of white noise. We are too low. The mountains are blocking the radio signals. We are cut off.
"Nobody is coming," Santi states. It is not a question.
"We are out of range. The terrain is blocking the transmission."
"Understood."
Seven thousand feet.
The left engine holds steady for ten agonizing minutes. Then, it begins to sputter.
The sound is small at first. A tiny hesitation in the rhythmic roar of combustion. A misfire.
My blood turns to ice.
“No, no, no,” I chant, my hands flying over the controls. “Come on. Don’t do this to me. Not both.”
The left engine surges, catching the fuel mixture, whining loudly, and then?—
A massive, concussivebangrocks the entire aircraft.
Black oil sprays across the windshield, immediately freezing into an opaque sludge. The left engine grinds to a horrific halt, and the rotor RPM bleeds dangerously low.
Silence slams into the cabin.
It is the worst sound in the world. The absence of engine noise. The only thing left is the high, shrieking whistle of wind tearing across the aluminum hull as the helicopter drops out of the sky.
Gravity rips away from us. My stomach lurches as the nose dips aggressively toward the earth. The altimeter spins wildly. The Master Warning alarms scream in a deafening chorus.
We’re dropping out of the sky.
I haul back on the cyclic with all the strength in my arms, trying to keep the nose up, trying to convert our falling momentum into forward glide speed. The controls are leaden without the hydraulic assist from the engines. My muscles burn. The flight suit pulls tight across my shoulders.
"Impact imminent," I shout over the wind. "Brace!"
Santi Costa shifts his weight. He reaches down, grabs the canvas bag, and wedges it firmly between his legs. He reaches over and pulls his harness tighter until the straps dig into his chest. He does not duck or brace his head against the instrument panel.
He turns his head and looks directly at me.
The dark eyes lock onto mine. The aristocratic face is devoid of panic. He is watching me wrestle the metal frame toward the ground. He is watching me drag the metal cyclic backward, my teeth bared, my arms shaking with the effort of keeping us alive for three more seconds.
"Sixty seconds to impact," I grit out, my boots stomping on the rudder pedals to keep the airframe level.
The frozen oil on the windshield blocks the forward view. I am flying by instruments and the peripheral vision out the side windows. A massive, snow-covered peak rushes past the starboard side, close enough that I can see the individual cracks in the stone.
We clear the ridge by inches.
