Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson
CHAPTER 1
Alex Van Helsing leapt from the plane without another thought, and in the corner of his eye he saw the black shape of the aircraft zip away, leaving him to plummet to earth or find a better option. As the ground roared toward him, Alex scanned the sky for vampires.
This was not how the end of the weekend was supposed to go. He should be doing flash cards right now. He should be trying to recognize the obscure names of monsters rather than diving after them.
“What is a stikini?” the computer voice had asked on the monitor earlier that evening. The word floated in silver on the screen, and Alex sat forward in the window seat, staring at the letters and searching his brain. Beside him in the aisle seat, a broadly built Swedish agent named Hansen crossed his arms and threw a glance to see if maybe Alex had the answer. There was no one else who might know it; they were the last two agents on the flight.
Hansen and Alex were flying back from Anzio, Italy, where Alex and several other agents of the Polidorium—a secret organization funded by the black budgets of more than a dozen nations—had been studying at what everyone called Creature School. The school’s actual name was P6 Identification Readiness Training, or PIRT, but Alex had tried using that acronym once and everyone had laughed at him. The purpose of Creature School was to familiarize the agents with the entities they might meet in the field. There were vampires out there, but those intelligent, dangerous beings were extremely varied, and Alex was only familiar with the most common kind. And of course there were plenty of other things to worry about.
Like everything else about Alex’s time in the Polidorium, Creature School felt like a dream. His mentor in the Polidorium, Agent Sangster, had come to Alex just a few days before with news that he had pulled a few strings and gotten Alex a spot.
Alex’s parents had given Sangster permission to create excuses for getting Alex out of classes at his boarding school whenever it made sense—as long as Alex kept up his grades. This time the cover story was a soup kitchen dedication ceremony in a poor village in Romania, where Alex would supposedly be representing his own family’s Van Helsing Foundation.
With time off from school procured, Alex flew out on a Friday morning from a military strip near Geneva, Switzerland, not far from his school, and by that afternoon he was walking through a secret lab hidden in the cliffs of the Italian shore.
Sangster himself hadn’t come—the agent was also Alex’s literature teacher and still had classes to teach. Besides, Sangster had already been through the training, so it was a rare opportunity for Alex to work alongside the Polidorium without his mentor looking over his shoulder.
They had started in a hospital-like building with long rows of glass cases and canisters where specimens floated inside. Alex and twelve other students walked behind a bald, slightly built teacher in a lab coat named Dr. Stu DeKamp, and every now and then DeKamp would stop and point out a specimen.
“This is a Caribbean jumbie skin.” DeKamp pointed to a long, leathery thing with braided hair at the top. “The jumbie is a vampire that can leave its skin behind while it travels on the air at night. Capture the skin and the creature will not survive long.” Nods all around. “This is a chonchon, a Chilean flying head.” The chonchon looked like a normal head with incongruous bat wings growing out of the sides of it. Alex had to stifle a mild laugh.
DeKamp had looked back to where Alex had been walking next to an agent in his twenties who had joined the Polidorium straight out of a police academy in Iowa. “Something you’d like to share?” DeKamp asked.
“Uh, no,” Alex answered. “It’s just that I have a friend who would absolutely kill to be seeing this.” That would be Sid, a classmate of Alex’s who seemed to know everything about vampires. Alex turned to Sid whenever he had a question about anything even remotely vampire-related, and he suspected that Sid would know what a chonchon was and would die to get a look at one.
“A friend at school?” asked the professor. Alex felt his face flush. This group of agents was young, but at fourteen, Alex was the prodigy. Everyone else was doing this as part of his or her job; Alex was still in high school. He shouldn’t have laughed. He’d work on that. “Just be sure you learn it, Agent Van Helsing.”
They saw more that afternoon: a vampiric pumpkin that was actually still alive and tried to attack Alex through the cage, squashing its orange gourd self against the glass, a mouth opening red and mushing as it yearned for his blood. Alex’s brain buzzed with a familiar, humming static, the awareness that something evil and dangerous was near.
They saw a pihuechenyi, a Central American winged snake that had been captured after it crashed into an airliner in the 1980s, dead and suspended from the ceiling.
Then, running around in a closed-off grassy area, they saw a sort of yellow-skinned, vein-covered centaur. It was a Scottish vampire called the nuckelavee and it had killed people all over a small group of islands called the Orkneys.
Dr. DeKamp called a break as they reached a commissary and stewards passed out bottled water. As Alex got his water he held up his hand. “I don’t get it. Are these creatures vampires?”
“Well, it depends what the meaning of the word vampire is.” DeKamp’s holographic ID badge shimmered in the light, and Alex saw that the instructor was from Canada. The Polidorium was diverse, but a lot of the people Alex had met were from the United States, Britain, and Canada. Alex’s friend Sid, also Canadian, would be thrilled to know that the resident creature genius among the Polidorium was one of his countrymen.
“Vampire,” DeKamp continued, “is a word that does a lot of duty. Chiefly it refers to modified post-initial-failure humans; those creatures are generally the smartest ones, the ones calling the shots on the other side. But we can group into the realm of vampires anything that lives off the energy, blood, or flesh of others as long as it’s touched by the curse.”
“The curse?” Alex repeated.
“Any lion or snake, for example, lives off the flesh of others,” explained DeKamp, “but they’re not vampires. What distinguishes a vampire is that it carries what Polidori called the existential seed of corruption. The curse that turns men and creatures against their own souls.”
Alex scrunched his face and DeKamp asked, “You’re uncomfortable with the word curse?”
“Well, it just seems strange to hear a word so…magical.”
DeKamp set down the bottle of water and came close. “You’re the one who killed an augmented dog down in the Scholomance, right? And even you find the discussion of magic uncomfortable. Now think of the rest of the world. That is why our work must remain as secret as we can make it.”
DeKamp turned. “Talia sunt, ladies and gentlemen.” He beckoned them to continue the tour. “There are such things.”
Two days later, Alex found himself actually accepted by the agents. They all suffered together through lectures on human vampires and their many variations—zombies, werewolves, and such—plus the myriad others broken into various parts of the plant and animal kingdoms. DeKamp also told them they all should take the training on vampire organizations, politics, and clans. Oh, and apparently witchcraft would take years.
This was a great weekend, and not a single thing that wasn’t already behind glass actually tried to bite him, which was a nice change for an Alex/Polidorium activity.
And then on the plane ride home it all came crashing down.
The cabin of the Polidorium C-130 in which Alex and six of his fellow agents began the flight home did not have the battered metal interior that Alex had seen in the movies, with long benches and no frills. The plane was dressed up for comfort, with TVs on shiny gray walls; big, padded seats; and thick gray carpet bearing the stitched-in Polidorium crest and the words Talia sunt. Like DeKamp had said, this motto meant, “There are such things.” It was an answer to a question, an answer to a doubt. Don’t tell yourself there are no such things. Of course there are, and we keep track of them.
Agent Hansen and Alex sat together in front of a middle wall, or bulkhead, so they could take the PIRT creature quiz on a Polidorium computer mounted on the wall. When they left Anzio there had been five more agents spread out across the plane, but they had departed in Venice. It was eleven forty-five P.M.; with the layover, Alex had been traveling for about six hours.
“I know this one.” Gunnar Hansen sat forward, wagging his finger. He had slightly curly, receding blond hair and a pug nose, and cheeks that were perpetually flushed. Alex always had the impression that Hansen was a Viking that someone had captured and shaved.
“Stikini.” Alex repeated the word, watching the silver letters rotate on the screen. A thirty-second clock had begun to count down. Stikini. “It sounds like pasta.”
“You’re just hungry.” Hansen gestured toward a go package, a Polidorium backpack usually filled with all manner of lethal and not-so-lethal stuff, which hung on a peg across from them, next to an emergency exit. “I have some granola bars.”
“Wasn’t there a steward?” Alex asked, looking up.
Hansen nodded. “That’s right; where is he?”
Alex looked over the back of the seat toward the rear of the plane. “No one in the galley.”
His neck was bugging him—Alex tugged at a collared shirt he had been wearing since Friday morning, a flexible polyvinyl “turtleneck” that was slightly bulky, threaded with strands of silver, and etched with crosses. They wore them all weekend at Creature School in case one of the captured creatures broke out. He’d need scissors to cut it off and hadn’t gotten around to it. A vampire, meanwhile, could probably tear it loose if sufficiently motivated. So Alex was uncomfortable.
And hungry. When he was twelve, on a dare from his father, Alex had survived three days on only what he could catch or pick near their farm in Oklahoma, one of a handful of estates his family had in the United States. This was in January, when the trees were frozen black and snow blanketed the ground. And he had done fine. But now it seemed like every three hours his stomach grumbled, making him distracted and angry.
Stikini, the silver circling word continued. Five seconds. Then they would see the answer and lose points.
As if hearing Alex’s mental howls, the cockpit door opened and a tall, wiry man with wisps of light brown hair and glasses emerged with an empty tray. When Alex saw the steward’s glasses, his own eyes itched; he was longing to take out his contacts.
“There he is,” said Hansen. The steward shut the cockpit door and glanced at them, heading toward the galley, presumably to get some food.
An image lit up in Alex’s brain, a vampire image that faded into view. “Choctaw.” Alex spoke to the computer. “Stikini is a Choctaw vampire that usually disguises itself as an owl.”
As soon as the keywords Alex spoke registered with the computer, the countdown stopped and a diagram of the owl-vampire appeared.
“Not bad,” Hansen said. “But it looks to me like an owl.”
“It’s an evil vampire owl.” Alex smiled. But there was something wrong.
When Alex had thought of the owl, it had come to him in a rush, as if a part of his brain had opened up and growled at him. Alex looked back at the steward, who was bent over pulling plastic-wrapped sandwiches out of a cooler in the galley. He got nothing off the steward.
Alex rose from his seat and brushed past Hansen, stepping into the aisle. “Excuse me.”
“Want me to pause it?” Hansen asked.
Standing in the aisle next to the emergency exit, Alex didn’t answer. Maybe he was crazy, but he touched the wide gray cockpit door and felt the thin plastic bend slightly under his fingertips. If he understood the static in his brain at all—and really, he could not claim to understand it much—he could surely sense something evil through a plastic door.
He felt nothing.
Alex turned back and shrugged at Hansen as he reached the bulkhead seats.
“You okay?” Hansen asked, looking only a little concerned.
“Fine. Sorry. I think the steward is getting sandwiches.”
As Alex sat, Hansen got up and reached for his go package. “You know, I want a granola bar anyway.”
“Get me one, too.” Alex turned back to the screen. “Let’s see the next vamp—”
The cockpit door suddenly burst open and fell into shards.
A blurred, dark image ripped through the air, tearing into Hansen as it collided with him, sending the huge agent spinning end over end down the cabin. Alex saw Hansen’s legs hit a set of seats in the back and the man cartwheeled with his own weight, finally crashing into the rear bulkhead.
The blur in the cabin slowed and became what Alex already knew it was—a vampire, though not one that Alex had met. The vampire’s muscles strained against the borrowed Polidorium pilot’s uniform he wore, and Alex saw dingy gray hair under the vampire’s pilot cap as he whipped his head up and down the cabin, surveying his opponents.
Alex looked back at the cockpit and saw the mistake he’d made. The bent pieces of the door still stuck in its frame were about two inches thick and made of steel, with a thin plastic layer on top. When the door had opened once before, he had felt something briefly, some whiff of evil flowing from the cockpit. But otherwise the door was too thick to sense anything through, even when he touched it.
Alex could see another vampire, human-looking except for the alabaster skin and eyes that seemed to sparkle black, still sitting inside the cockpit at the controls of the plane.
“Get it under control!” came a roar from the cockpit.
Adrenaline rushed through Alex’s body, tingling in his fingers, and he felt the edge of panic. He was on a plane with vampires, and—and then the questions began.
The tingling in your chest is a temptation to lose control. Don’t listen to it. Ask the questions. What’s going on?
The pilot vampire now emerged from the cockpit and ran to the back, and Alex heard a scream as the steward, who was already stammering into a radio, suddenly went quiet.
Vampires, Alex thought.
What do you have?
Alex looked at Hansen’s go package, hanging where the agent had left it. For a moment he stole a glance back at the crumpled form of Hansen. In the go package, there would be all kinds of small weapons—a stake or two, some glass holy water grenades, and probably a gun. The gun would be useless on the plane, thought Alex, and anyway he had never used one. His own package—in the overhead compartment—never had a gun. But it would have something else good for close quarters, and he hoped Hansen’s package would as well.
Alex jumped for the go package and grabbed it, crouching against the bulkhead. In an instant he was scrounging through the bag and found what he was looking for—an eighteen-inch, narrow, crossbow-like weapon, completely encased in heavy composite plastic and loaded with a cartridge of silver-threaded hawthorn wood bolts. A Polibow.
Alex heard a gasp farther back, in the galley, and looked beyond Hansen’s body. The vampire dressed as the pilot had not killed the steward after all—he was hauling him forward, his arm wrapped around the steward’s neck and shoulders.
“You!” the vampire in the pilot uniform called, pointing at Alex. The steward came under his own power, his legs moving rapidly to keep up with the muscular vampire.
Alex didn’t waste any time with the Polibow. He reached in and grabbed a glass grenade, feeling the slosh of holy water inside, and threw it. The glass ball landed perfectly, with a heavy crunch, smacking the vampire on the head. It knocked his cap off as water flew in tinkles of glass, making the vampire’s flesh sizzle. The vampire bared his teeth, but he didn’t drop the steward.
“No, no.” The vampire shook his head. His hair was sizzling, his flesh seeming to boil for a moment. He stuck a claw to the steward’s neck, a long thumbnail digging in just below the crook of the thin man’s jaw. The steward’s eyes widened with terror behind his glasses. “We regret that there has been some turbulence, but if you’ll just comply with the requests of the flight personnel you should soon be on your way.” The pilot had an accent. Central American, Alex guessed, so that all his yous and yours came out ju and jorr.
Alex’s static was roaring in his mind, and he realized the other vampire in the cockpit could be on him in a second, so he slammed back against the wall, his hand on the go package. He could reach for the Polibow. Could he hit the vampire and not the steward? Would the bolt hit faster than the vampire could move out of the way, or tear out the steward’s throat?
“What do you want?” Alex asked.
“That’s the spirit,” the vampire said, flicking his head toward the computer in the bulkhead. “I need you to remove that tablet computer.”
Alex moved a few inches along the wall until he was across from his seat and the bulkhead, so he could see the screen. It was still displaying the spinning image of the stikini.
The computer was a Polidorium tablet set into a wall cradle; it would pop in and out as needed. Except that Alex had no idea how to pop the tablet out.
“It’s a terminal, a practice computer. It doesn’t have anything on it,” Alex said.
“Are you planning on just making things up or are you going to remove it for me?” the vampire growled, drawing a speck of blood from the steward’s neck.
Alex had no idea what was on the computer. As far as he was concerned it contained nothing but the training program. But it didn’t matter now anyway.
“Okay.” He edged toward the computer and stared at it.
“Hurry!” hissed the vampire.
“Okay!”
Alex studied the screen, which was embedded in a plastic frame in the bulkhead. He saw no obvious levers or buttons for dislodging it. “I may need a knife.”
“You will not need a knife, I know that much,” the vampire answered.
“If you know so much, why don’t you get it?”
“Please!” the steward cried.
“Okay,” Alex snapped. He tapped at the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. The words END SESSION? appeared. YES NO.
Yes.
“Ticktock!”
The steward howled again as the vampire dragged him forward so that Alex could see the thin trickle of blood trailing down his neck.
Alex turned back to the screen. The smell of bananas suddenly came to his nose, drifting strangely in and away. A bizarre, momentary olfactory hallucination. Stress and hunger. Alex shook his head to refocus.
A menu system appeared before him below the Polidorium logo.
He saw a button. EJECT DEVICE.
Alex tapped the button and the device popped forward and out, the ten-inch Plexiglas tablet going dark as it came away from its cradle in the wall. He caught it and stood, turning to the vampire and the steward.
The steward looked glassy-eyed and afraid.
The banana smell came to Alex again.
“Give it here!” the vampire demanded, holding out his free hand. “Bjurman! We can go!”
The second vampire emerged instantly from the cockpit.
Alex felt his eyes tracking the trickle of the steward’s blood. It was blackish and strange, and the smell of bananas was stronger.
Alex still held the device and looked at the steward. “So where are you from?”
“Please…”
They were wearing pilots’ uniforms. Alex had seen the pilots when he’d boarded, and though he hadn’t gotten a good look at them, they hadn’t been vampires then. So they had stolen the uniforms and taken the pilots’ places during the layover. But they needed someone to hold hostage aboard a plane of agents. Even a steward couldn’t be trusted to be compliant.
“What’s your name?” Alex asked the steward.
“Give me the device!” ordered the pilot.
“I…,” said the steward.
Bananas. That meant something. Then he thought, Filipino. A Filipino illusion, and a very unusual one.
“What’s two plus two?”
“Please…”
“You can’t do math, can you? Just a couple lines of dialogue, that’s all you can handle.” Alex drew the Polibow from his belt and pointed it at all of them, backing toward the bulkhead. “Get back in the cockpit and fly the plane.”
“Hand it over,” said the vampire, “or this man dies.”
“I don’t think so.” Alex fired the Polibow.
The Aswang vampires of the Philippines could replace people with simple doppelgangers. These doppelgangers were zombie-like in nature and didn’t last long.
And they were made of banana leaves.
Of course an Aswang didn’t look like banana leaves—the glamour that transformed them smoothed over the vegetable matter and gave them the appearance of normal, if sallow, human beings. But there was no disguising the smell and the beginnings of rot.
The bolt struck the steward in the chest and the steward’s eyes burst like banana-filled tomatoes, his body disintegrating into leaves and sweet-smelling mush. Alex fired at the pilot vampire as the steward fell apart, but the vampire pushed the falling mass toward Alex. Alex missed.
The copilot yanked on the emergency exit—something Alex wasn’t expecting—and suddenly wind and papers and the last vestiges of the banana leaf man were flying out the door. Alex drew his Polibow again and the vampire smacked him across the face, sending him flying back.
Alex could now barely hear over the roar of wind. He watched Gunnar Hansen’s body lift with the sudden bucking of the plane and smash to the floor.
Alex felt the plane begin to pitch slightly and then steady, fighting to stay on course. Obviously the autopilot was functioning, or else the plane would surely be diving toward the earth. But as the plane jolted, the tablet computer slipped from his hand, bouncing off the bulkhead near the vampire. About thirty oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling.
As Alex steadied himself against a seat, he saw the pilot had already picked up the computer and attached it to a cord that ran to an iPod-like device on his belt. The pilot vampire studied the connection between the two devices for a second, watching a few lights blinking on his own device. Then, as the blinking slowed, he nodded and tossed the Polidorium tablet aside. “Okay.”
The copilot nodded in agreement, removing his jacket to reveal a parachute attached to his shoulders. He snapped the clasps across his chest and disappeared through the door without another signal.
“Gracias, amigo!” called the pilot, and he bounded past Alex in a blur. The vampire stopped at the door, looking back. “I’ve heard you are always prepared. I’ll bet you weren’t prepared for this!” With that, the vampire leapt out the door.
Alex ran after the vampire and stopped, holding on. He paused for a moment and stared across the entire plane.
Just him and the late Hansen, who absolutely had not expected his last act to be that of searching for a granola bar.
Could he fly the plane?
You can’t fly a plane.
And then something in the cockpit burst with orange and red, and Alex saw flames rising with the smell of burning plastic and black smoke.
Okay. Okay, now you’re in trouble.
Chest flooding. That’s panic. Ask the questions.
In microseconds, questions shot across Alex’s mind like ricocheting bullets.
What’s going on?
I’m alone at 30,000 feet. The cockpit has been destroyed. The door is open.
What do you need to get down?
A parachute.
Do you have one?
No.
Is there one nearby?
Alex saw a small door clasped shut near the cockpit. He tore it open, hoping to find a parachute. No such luck.
Who has one?
No time. The smell of smoke was getting thicker. He looked around for something to protect his eyes from the wind and saw his motorcycle helmet rolling against the bulkhead. He slapped it on his head and slipped his arms through the straps of the go package. He was out of time.
He drew near to the door, looked out, took a deep breath, and leapt.
Alex flipped once in the wind, totally losing control. For a moment he was thankful that he could barely see the ground—just a distant line of tiny lights dotting the landscape like LEDs on a model train set. He could see a train, in fact, far below, a long stream of bright yellow lights pulsing out of the sides of the cars.
He spotted the first vampire farther below, finally, his parachute shimmering in the darkness, barely visible—a brilliant red vinyl canopy.
This is crazy. You’re going to die shot through his head and he shut it down. Breathe. This is your only chance.
He was falling. Without a parachute. He scanned the air some more, Find it find it, and spotted the second vampire. Both seemed about a quarter mile or more away, not far from one another. I pick that one. Alex tilted forward, bringing his arms close to his sides, and began to dive.
The wind smashed against his Plexiglas wind visor and roared, rolling the skin of his face back toward his ears. The vampire he’d chosen seemed to be banking a little, slower than the other, and Alex aimed for him.
Within a hundred yards Alex began to worry. If he struck the parachute he would wrap himself up and fall to the earth in a cloth cocoon. If he struck the vampire’s body with his head, he was pretty sure his neck would break.
He thought about flipping again and striking the vampire with his feet, but for a grisly millisecond he pictured hitting the vampire with such force, all located in his heels, that he would sail clear through the creature’s body and plummet toward the earth, torn to shreds by its jagged ribs as he passed through.
Hug the vampire, body to body. That had to be the way.
Alex had the vampire’s body in sight and prepared to strike. When he could see his face and shining eyes, Alex extended his arms wide, as if he were about to hug a tree.
The vampire looked up in shock just as Alex came rolling in at full speed. Suddenly Alex’s vision went out completely. Static roared in his brain like a lion, and for a moment it was as though he could see systems clicking on, sparks of electricity in his blacked-out vision kicking him awake once more. Alex heard the parachute lurch loudly as the vampire grunted.
His vision returned and he found himself hugging the vampire chest to chest. He grabbed on to the straps, and they began to spin.
The vampire moved quickly from shocked to confused to enraged. “Dudo! Idiot!” he heard the vampire cry as they spun, the parachute tilting this way and that as they swung. The vampire reared back his head and then lunged his teeth for Alex. He felt the press of fangs against the turtleneck and heard the sizzle of flesh and saliva against the silver lining. The pressure smarted, though, and Alex angrily butted the vampire in the head with his helmet. “Stop that!”
“This is my parachute!” the vampire yelled, though Alex could barely hear him over the sound of the wind and through the plastic visor. There was something insane and almost merry in his sparkling eyes.
“I’m joining you, and we can fight when we hit the ground!” Alex yelled.
“No,” the vampire shouted. “It’s too much weight! Which one of us do you think will survive hitting the ground, eh?”
Alex looked down to see a grassy field, barely visible in the moonlight. Even with the parachute, the ground was coming up fast. He understood now. The parachute had been prepared for just the vampire, who probably weighed less than Alex did, even with his muscular frame. Vampires were cat-like, fast and light.
The vampire tried to kick him away, and Alex held on, smashing him in the nose briefly before yanking back from the teeth once more.
They were hurtling toward the ground now. He judged he had another hundred yards to go. Alex loosed one of his hands and reached back to his go package.
“So we die together, no?” The vampire had an insane look in his eye.
“Nope,” Alex yelled.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I have something that you don’t have,” Alex answered, “and it’s going to give me some more time.”
“What’s that?”
Alex brought the Polibow to the vampire’s chest and pulled the trigger, feeling a solid thump as the bolt slammed between the creature’s ribs and into his heart.
“Hot air.”
The vampire roared and Alex dropped his Polibow and wrapped his elbows around the straps. He yanked up and away as far as possible, pressing his face against his forearms as a fireball erupted where the creature had been.
Alex saw the orange flash burst against his wind visor and cringed as the helmet heated up immediately. As he closed his eyes the flash blazed brilliantly for a split second. The wave of fire and hot air pushed in all directions, and Alex was yanked sharply upward as the parachute caught the air and rose a full twenty yards.
Alex opened his eyes and yelped; his leather jacket was on fire, and he started patting it down wildly with his free hand as he spun. For a moment he worried the parachute would catch fire, but like a hot air balloon, it merely expanded and rose with the sudden burst from the vampire.
Alex spun with the straps, hanging on for dear life, his legs churning wildly.
The parachute whipped and lurched as the earth came toward him once more, and Alex hit the soft grass running. Even so, he felt the shock in his knees and ran through it, releasing the straps and tottering forward, flipping end over end until he finally rolled to a stop, singed and bruised but alive.
Near the horizon, a second fireball erupted with a distant boom as the plane slammed to the ground, lighting up the clouds with orange and yellow.
Alex sat for a moment and caught his breath. He then fished a cell phone out of his pocket and punched in some numbers. Within half an hour, the air filled with the sound of rotor blades.