Return to Atlantis: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

chair, petrified. Eddie leaned into the cockpit. “TD! Are you okay?”
    Maximov had the controls, hunched in the copilot’sposition with a look of laser-beam concentration. Beside him, TD was very pale, her left hand tightly squeezed around her bloodied right bicep. “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 a question,” said Maximov, gripping the controls so hard that the tendons stood out like brake cables on the backs of his hairy hands. “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 rictus look of terror had finally relaxed, and he was hesitantly loosening his seat belt 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 toalert the reception committee that they needed medical help; it turned out that no fewer than three of the waiting Zimbabwean expatriates were doctors, educated professionals being high on the list of targets for the government’s thugs. Two of them took TD to the nearby bush farmhouse for emergency treatment. The third wanted to check Eddie’s injuries, but he had business to attend to first.
    Maximov followed the Englishman from the plane. “That was easy!” he crowed. “Maybe I should become pilot,
da
?”
    Despite TD’s claims, the An-2’s touchdown had been far from feather-light. Eddie tried to crick the stiffness out of his sore neck and spine. “You might need a bit more practice.” Maximov laughed.
    “Mr. Chase?” Waiting for Eddie was Japera Tangwerai, one of those whom he had helped escape from Zimbabwe several years before. Although she was only in her early thirties, the lines of stress and loss on her face made her appear middle-aged, for she had seen nearly her entire family murdered by Zimbabwean militia forces. Her only surviving child, a boy now eight years old, looked up at Eddie nervously from behind her skirts. “What happened? Did you free the prisoners from Fort Helena?”
    “Yeah,” he told her. “Don’t know exactly how many, but a lot, about a hundred. Banga and his people got them out of there.”
    “And what about …” Her voice dropped. “What about Boodu?”
    Even as a whisper, the hated name still caught the attention of others nearby. More people approached Eddie. “Did you catch him?” a man demanded. “Did you bring the Butcher?”
    “Some of him. Here.” Eddie brought something out from behind his back. “Let me give you a hand.”
    Everyone recoiled in instinctive shock and disgust before they realized the significance of the distinctive ring on one stiffening finger. “It … it’s his,” said Japerasoftly. “It’s the Butcher’s hand.” She raised her voice to her companions. “It is the Butcher’s hand!”
    The man who had