She had time. She knew the time he would take to get the bird off the ground, to turn on the master electrical switch and avionics, to check fuel levels and turn the fuel valve master on.
She was halfway down the road as the navigation lights turned on. Right on cue.
She pushed herself harder as the rotors began to turn, ducking down low as she made for the pilot’s door, her fist slamming on the window.
The pilot, Randall, looked around, first in shock, a smile of recognition tinged with concern spreading his lips wide a moment later before he opened the door. ‘Hey, there,’ he said in his lazy American drawl. ‘I thought you weren’t coming. What’s up?’
She gulped down air into burning lungs and did her best to smile while she swiped away at her damp cheeks. ‘No time for small talk. Just get me out of here.’
‘I love it when a lady tells me exactly what to do.’ He grinned and waited until she was in the seat alongside him, her seatbelt buckled, before he raised the helicopter from the ground. ‘You almost missed me,’ he said, shouting to make himself heard. ‘Any later and we would have been stuck here for the night. Damn curfew.’
She nodded, still trying to regain her breath. She knew all about the damn curfew.
‘We missed you at the office,’ Randall said, as the bird moved under his expert hands. ‘Been taking a vacation?’
‘You could say that.’
He flicked a glance into the back. ‘You didn’t bring any luggage.’
‘Sudden change of plans.’
‘Only there was this rumour going ’round, y’know, that you were maybe stuck on Montvelatte for good.’
‘Big storm coming,’ she said, pointing out the windscreen, and the pilot beside her laughed. ‘I get the picture. And, yeah, it might get a bit bumpy, so hang on.’
The bumps didn’t worry her, at least not the bumps in the air. It was the bumps that life dealt out that were infinitely worse. She turned around, trying to gauge their distance from the island, wondering when she’d ever be far enough. Escape had been ridiculously easy in the end. But, then, Rafe had practically thrown her out.
Sienna sat back down in her seat, letting out a long breath. To their left the looming peak that was Iseo’s Pyramid claimed sovereignty over the surrounding waters, a dark prince in a darker sea, and she shivered as she let her gaze drift over its frightening dimensions, its sheer size just as overwhelming from above as below. She wasn’t afraid. She’d left the real Beast of Iseo behind on Montvelatte, but still the dark brooding shape held the power to fascinate, the power to disturb.
She sensed it rather than heard it, something no passenger would notice but an experienced pilot would. She looked across at the pilot and then down at the gauges at the exact same time he did. ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’ His eyes scanned the controls, nothing evident, and then it happened again, a tiny blip, a momentary loss of power, and this time Randall’s hands were hard at work. ‘Damn,’ he yelled. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll have to turn around back to Montvelatte.’ And her spirits plummeted. To be foiled when she was so close to escape! How could she return to that island? How could she ever risk facing him again, the man who had banished her because she had been foolish enough to love him? But right now there was no other choice.
Then a bolt of lightning rent the sky in two, the world around her appearing in black and white, like some crazy negative, and she would have sworn the bolt hit the very rock itself. Birds erupted from the peak like magma from a volcano, a cloud of huge seabirds, panicked from sleep and lumbering through the air in every direction. Normally they would have been fine where they were, far enough from the rock and the wheeling cloud of birds that they would be in no danger, but these birds were stunned, beyond instinct other than to escape.
‘Watch out,’ she cried, as Randall continued to do battle with the handicapped craft. But it was already too late. There was a bang as something hit the rotors and the aircraft shuddered and yawed to one side, the smell of smoke filling the cockpit. And now she was helping him with the controls, battling to put the chopper into autorotation and regain control, but it was no use.
‘We’re going down,’ he called, ‘we won’t make it to the island.’ But she was already at the radio, barking out a Mayday call.
‘Head for the rock,’ she said, and the pilot tossed her a look that said she was as mad as Iseo himself. ‘There’s a small beach,’ she shouted, clutching at the controls, ‘around the side.’ And the only place they had a chance of making an emergency landing.