its wings, standing on its nose, and hammering its cockpit windshield with clubs.
Zoe stepped up alongside Wizard, seeing the activity going on all over the big seaplane.
Wizard saw her eyes narrow. “You’re not thinking…”
“You bet I am,” she said, taking the chief’s shotgun from him.
Thus while the plane’s two Congolese pilots fired their guns wildly, defending their plane against the many Neetha attackers, five figures swam silently and unnoticed around the tail fin of the floating plane, around to its open side and to the entry door there.
Zoe led the way, climbing up out of the water and reaching for the door.
She pulled it open—only to be confronted by a yellow-toothed Neetha warrior-monk, looming over her! He whipped up his bow…just as, one-handed, Zoe brought up the shotgun and blasted the monk out of the way.
A minute later, still brandishing the chief’s shotgun, she hustled into the upstairs cockpit, just in time to see the plane’s Congolese copilot get yanked bodily out of the smashed forward windshield, screaming as he went.
Two Neetha monks hacked into the poor man right there on the nose of the plane. When they were done, the two murderers crouched to enter the cockpit, only to find themselves looking straight down the barrel of Zoe’s gun.
Boom! Boom!
The two monks went flying off the nose of the plane, sailing down into the river.
Zoe slid into the pilot’s seat while the others piled in behind her. With Ono beside him, Wizard stood guard at the top of the spiral staircase that led down to the lower passenger deck, covering the stairs with an AK-47 he’d picked up downstairs.
“Can you fly this thing?” Lily asked Zoe.
“Sky Monster’s been giving me lessons.” Zoe scanned the dizzying array of dials in front of her. “It’s not that much different from a helicopter…I think.”
She punched the ignition switch.
The big seaplane’s four turboprop engines roared to life.
Its remaining pilot—firing vainly from the shoreside doorway—was taken completely by surprise as the big Clipper’s propellers began to rotate and then blur with speed.
His surprise was his undoing.
For as he turned at the sound, he was struck by six arrows from his Neetha opponents and he fell from the doorway—and as the plane began to move away from the shore, the ten or so remaining Neetha warrior-monks assailing it from the riverbank went rushing en masse up the gangway before the gangway itself fell away into the water behind the departing plane.
Wind blasted in through the shattered cockpit windshield as Zoe jammed forward on the collective and felt the plane surge beneath her.
The waves of the river started to rush beneath the bow of the seaplane, getting faster and faster, until suddenly they fell away and Zoe had them airborne.
She smiled with relief. “Dear God, I think we made—”
Gunfire from the cabin made her turn.
Wizard was firing his AK-47 at the Neetha warrior-monks trying to enter the upper deck via the stairs.
They were practically suicidal in their assault—hurling themselves over their dead, shrieking and screaming, trying to fire arrows if they could.
If she could have seen her plane from the outside, Zoe would have been shocked: several Neetha men were still on its roof, clambering forward on their bellies toward the open cockpit.
At the same time, two more warriors on one wing were preparing to—suicidally—throw a thick net into one of the propellers. They threw the net…and with a great mechanical jerk, the thick rope got hopelessly entangled in the propeller…and with a blast of black smoke, that engine seized completely!
The entire airplane banked wildly at the unexpected loss of power and the two Neetha men were thrown off the wing and went plummeting to their deaths.
Zoe spun in her seat just in time to see them flail off the wing. She wrestled the plane back level.
“What is wrong with these people!” she shouted.
Diane Cassidy answered: “They guard the location of their realm with rabid fanaticism. If, by his death, a Neetha warrior can prevent an intruder from escaping, then he is assured a place in heaven.”
“So our escape plane is infested with suicidal fanatics,” Zoe said. “Wonder—”
Gunfire cut her off. Oddly distant gunshots.
“Wizard!” she called.
“It’s not me!” Wizard shouted back from the stairs. “They’ve stopped trying to storm the upper deck. A moment ago they all just went downstairs.”
More distant gunshots.
And suddenly Zoe saw another of her wing-mounted engines explode with belching black smoke, its propellers stopping.
Then she realized what was going on.
