Chapter 42 - Blood on the Shattered Rotors
The helipad was a howling vortex of kerosene fumes, blinding spotlights, and driving sleet.
The twin turbines of the Sikorsky S-76 were already screaming at full whine, the massive rotor blades cutting a deadly, invisible circle mere feet above the deck. Inside the cockpit, a pilot wearing night-vision goggles was frantically battling the collective lever, trying to keep the skids glued to the pitching platform as the mega-yacht surrendered to the ocean.
Elena hauled herself over the top combing of the helipad deck, her knees scraping bloody tracks across the non-skid mesh. Every breath tasted of bile and copper. Her labor pains had compressed into an unending, crushing vise; the baby was descending, urgent and violent, demanding entry into a world of drowning iron and gunfire.
Behind her, a brutal crack echoed above the engine roar.
Christian crashed against the cockpit glass of the helicopter, his nose shattered, blood streaming across his jaw. Julian strode toward him like an immaculate executioner, his black coat fluttering like the wings of a vulture. Julian’s revolver was gone, lost to the Atlantic depths, but in his hand gleamed a ceramic combat trench knife.
"You were always the spare, Christian," Julian spat, grabbing his younger brother by the throat and slamming his head back against the fuselage. "Father knew it. Mother knew it. You gave up your birthright to play soldier in dirt-water countries, while I built an empire."
Christian spat a mouthful of dark blood into Julian's face. "You didn't build shit, Julian. You stole it from dead men."
With a roar of agony, Christian drove his knee into Julian’s groin, then hooked his elbow into Julian’s throat. Julian staggered back, coughing violently, his knife slashing through Christian’s tactical vest, carving a red trench across his ribs.
Elena knew Christian couldn't win. He had taken shrapnel in the lower bridge, his shoulder was dislocated, and he was losing blood rapidly. If Julian put him down, there was no one left between the predator and her unborn child.
Her eyes darted across the deck.
Lying near the fueling station was a heavy brass tie-down cleat, torn free from the deck plates when the yacht snapped its spine. Five pounds of solid, jagged metal connected to a steel safety cable.
Elena grabbed the cold steel cable, wrapping it three times around her right wrist. Her pelvis screamed in protest as she forced herself to her feet, balanced on the swaying, forty-foot high ledge over the abyss.
"Julian!" she screamed into the gale.
Julian froze, wiping the blood from his cheek with the back of his glove. He turned, looking at Elena with exasperated amusement. "Elena, darling. Please. Lie down before you hurt the merchandise."
"Look at me," she breathed, her voice carrying an unnatural, terrifying calm. "Look at the woman you pushed into the water on our wedding night."
Julian sneered, taking two strides toward her, raising the knife. "I should have watched you drown."
"You should have," Elena whispered.
She didn't swing the brass cleat at his head. Instead, with every ounce of fury, maternal instinct, and visceral hatred left in her shattered body, Elena whipped the heavy brass cleat straight upward—directly into the spinning, six-foot tail rotor of the idling Sikorsky.
The result was an instantaneous, apocalyptic detonation.
The brass weight caught the high-speed composite blade. The tail rotor exploded in a blinding shower of sparks, sheared titanium, and shrapnel. The entire tail boom snapped with the sound of a cannon shot. Unbalanced by the sudden loss of torque, the twenty-thousand-pound helicopter bucked wildly on its landing gear, its massive main rotors tilting violently downward toward the deck.
"Down!" Christian roared, throwing himself flat.
Julian looked up just in time to see a five-hundred-pound spinning rotor blade slicing through the rain toward him like a horizontal guillotine. He dove backward, screaming, as the blade sheared through the composite deck beneath his boots, ripping the helipad apart in an eruption of sparks and ruptured fuel lines.
JP-8 aviation fuel flooded the deck, instantly igniting against the red-hot turbine exhaust.
A wall of fire swept across the helipad, separating Julian from the helicopter cabin.
The pilot, panic-stricken, dumped the collective. The bird shuddered, skidded across the flaming deck on its broken landing gear, and tipped precariously over the starboard railing.
"Elena! The cabin!" Christian screamed, crawling through the fire and hauling Elena by her vest straps into the open sliding door of the listing aircraft.
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As the *Leviathan* took its final plunge, the helicopter fell off the deck—not flying, but tumbling into the storm-tossed darkness above the raging sea.
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