flailed his arms helplessly, sliding out into the void . . .
His left hand slapped against one of the wrecked hinges. He grabbed it. Torn metal cut into his palm, but he had no choice but to cling on as his free hand hunted for purchase—
Boodu’s hand clamped around his throat.
The militia leader pulled himself higher. Choking, Eddie looked down at him, seeing his face twisted into a defiant snarl. Behind the Antonov’s tail, the pursuing Alouette came into view as it climbed after the biplane. ‘If I die,’ Boodu roared into the wind, ‘so do you, Chase!’
He squeezed harder, trying to force Eddie away from the hatch. The hinge’s sharp edges dug deeper into the Englishman’s hand. He tried to push Boodu back down, but didn’t have enough leverage. Instead, he groped inside the cabin for a handhold . . .
His fingers found sharp, thick metal.
The machete!
He tugged at the handle. The blade shifted, but didn’t come loose, still stuck in the floor like a crude Excalibur. Boodu dug his thumb harder against Eddie’s windpipe, hauling himself higher. Another few inches and he would be able to get an elbow over the edge of the hatch to pull himself inside.
A last desperate yank – and the blade came free.
Supported by only one hand, Eddie swung further out of the hatch. Boodu shot him a look of triumph – which abruptly vanished as he saw what his opponent was holding. ‘No, don’t!’ he cried.
‘Hands off!’ Eddie shouted.
He brought down the machete in a savage slash – and lopped the Zimbabwean’s clutching arm off at the wrist.
With a horrible shriek, Boodu plummeted away in the Antonov’s wake—
And fell into the helicopter’s rotor blades.
The lower half of his body burst into a thick spray that repainted the olive-green military camouflage in a gory red, the upper smashed screaming through the cockpit windows. The Alouette slewed round, rapidly losing height – then hit the ground and exploded in an oily fireball.
Eddie stabbed the machete into the plane’s side and dragged himself back into the cabin as the Antonov levelled out. He lay gasping for several seconds before realising that Boodu’s severed hand was still gripping his neck. He pulled off the appendage and was about to toss it through the hatch after its former owner when he took in the ring on its finger, the emerald still gleaming in its gold setting. A moment’s thought, then he wedged it in a seat frame and staggered to the front of the compartment. Strutter was still clutching his chair, petrified. Eddie leaned into the cockpit. ‘TD! Are you okay?’
Maximov had the controls, hunched in the co-pilot’s position with a look of laser-beam concentration. Beside him, TD was very pale, her left hand tightly squeezed around her bloodied right biceps. ‘Not – really,’ she managed to say through her pained grimace. ‘Oh, God, it hurts!’
‘Let me see.’ He carefully lifted her hand. She cried out, but he saw enough of the injury to know that it wouldn’t be life-threatening if she got prompt medical attention. ‘Okay, it’s okay,’ he said, trying to sound reassuring. ‘Just keep hold of it. We’ll fix you up when we land. How far to the border?’
She squinted at the instruments, then out of the window. ‘We’ll be . . . across it in a minute.’
‘I have question,’ said Maximov, gripping the controls so hard that the tendons stood out on the backs of his hairy hands like brake cables. ‘How do we land? I don’t know how to fly!’ He gave Eddie a hopeful glance. ‘Do you?’
‘Nope – it’s been on my to-do list for about five fucking years!’ He looked back at TD. ‘Can you talk him through it? I don’t want to have been in three plane crashes in eleven bloody months.’
She managed a feeble smile. ‘No problem. Another reason I bought . . . an Antonov. If you turn into the wind, the stall speed is . . . zero knots. So much lift it can just – float down.’
‘You’re kidding.’ Another attempt at a smile through her pain. ‘You’re not. Wow. I guess Russian stuff isn’t as crap as I thought.’
‘Hoy!’ Maximov protested.
Eddie grinned and retreated into the main cabin. Strutter’s look of rictus terror had finally relaxed, and he was hesitantly loosening his seatbelt straps. ‘I’d keep ’em fastened,’ Eddie warned him. ‘This might be a bit bumpy.’
Twenty minutes later, the Antonov was on the ground, in more or less one piece. Eddie had radioed ahead