Page 157 - Brokenclaw - John Gardner

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through you.’

The pilot nodded, and Bond watched as he began to swing the machine to
the left on its own axis. They were lower than he had thought, and must have
been about to land by the time his short tussle with Ding was over. Below them
the dome of the camouflaged tree hangar was open, and they t
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two hundred feet towards the house.
‘Get her up!’ He prodded the pilot’s neck again, for during the turn they
seemed to have lost another fifty feet. The house was now directly in front of
them, and as they began to slip to the right in order to fly back over the sea,

like some monster rising from its hiding place, a second wicked-looking
helicopter lifted from behind the house. It flashed through Bond’s mind that the
machine looked like an old Bölkow-Kawasaki 117, and he could clearly see
the left-hand door open, with a heavy machine-gun mounting swung forward,
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the gunner himself in a harness manning the weapon.
‘Go left!’ Bond yelled, but as they did so the other chopper followed suit.
The pilot was in a Mexican standoff, obviously terrified both by Bond’s pistol
and by the aggressive machine in front of him.

He put down the nose and tried to gain height, but the 117 followed his move
so that, in the space of a minute, the two helicopters appeared to be performing
a strange insect-like ritual dance. Then the shots came.
The gunner from the door of the 117 put a single burst to their right. The

pilot jerked away to his left, the machine tilting dangerously on one side,
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recovering only seconds before the rotors would have lost their grip on the air.
‘He’ll blow us out of the sky!’ the pilot was shouting hysterically as Bond
slid back one of the side panels of the cabin, leaning over to get a quick shot in

at the gunner. But the 117 seemed to have disappeared.
He looked around, then was aware of new forces on their own machine – a
great buffeting from above as the 117 came down directly over them. Bond
turned his hand and fired off a couple of random shots aimed upwards. But

there was no reduction of pressure; slowly they were being forced down, the
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helicopter swaying and bouncing as the down-wash from the 117’s rotors
tossed them about.
‘It’s no good!’ the pilot shrieked. ‘No good! Don’t shoot! I can’t maintain

control.’ He had tried to back out from under the massive turbulence but was
only forced down further. Bond glanced to his right and saw they were almost
level with the circular hangar. Then a sudden surge in the wind from above

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