Page 148 of King’s Ransom

Braaaaack!

More gunfire impacted all around me as the drone swung into a lateral hover to my left and continued firing.

I turned my chopper’s flank to it and the bullets assailed the port-side windows of the rear passenger section.

I was a sitting duck. I had to get on the ground and get to cover, or at least prepare for an autorotation landing before my engines cut out—

Kachunk!

My engines cut out . . .

. . . there was a brief moment of silence . . .

. . . and then my helicopter began to fall out of the sky.

Autorotation.

With my engine’s last gasp of power, I raised the chopper’s nose, levelling the rotor blades . . .

. . . causing them to spin the other way as we fell . . .

. . . to autorotate . . .

. . . and we ‘glided’ down.

To say we glided would be kind. We shoomed downward at a shallow angle, really fast.

A bank of high sand dunes rushed toward me.

Positioned in front of them, half-buried in the sandy ground, was a huge concrete gun emplacement, one of the abandoned batteries that dotted the peninsula. The part of it that was above ground was the size of a two-storey building.

If we hit it, we were dead.

We were coming in too fast and an impact with it would cause the chopper to explode.

I gripped the stick, keeping the rotors level, hoping to clear the battery. With a whoosh, we roared low over it, missing its roof by inches, and slammed nose-first into a sand dune just beyond it.

Sand splashed all over the windshield.

The chopper came to a violent halt.

Beside me, the unmoving Murph lurched with the force of the landing, held in place by his seatbelt.

Crash-landing into the dune had probably saved our lives, because it had cushioned the blow.

And suddenly we were on the ground, the nose of the chopper buried in the sand, its tail angled up.

I hurriedly unbuckled my seatbelt, peering out the cracked windshield, searching for the drone.

It was nowhere to be seen.

Looking out my side window, I could see the concrete battery behind us, about twenty yards away across open sand.

If I could get there, I might have a chance—

A moan made me spin.

It was Murph.