Salim reached up and cut the power to the main rotor, then eased the column and grabbed the collective pitch lever with his left hand. In less than a second the Hind had righted herself. Slowly the instruments began coming back as the electrical system recovered from the impact.
"Tail rotor's okay," he reported, checking the panel. "Altimeter reads five hundred meters." He looked up. "What in the name of God happened?"
"Our last Swatter detonated. The question is, why?" Ramirez answered. He was staring angrily out the high-impact plastic of his bubble at the wreckage of the starboard wing.
Dore Peretz, now in the weapons station in the nose, was talking to himself. "I got the bastard."
_He shoved the Walther into his belt and dove into the swell, the cold waters crashing against his face. The _Odyssey II _was reduced to debris. His labor of love, half a year's work, all evaporated in an instant. The Zen masters were right: never get attached to physical things.
He avoided the deadly shards of wood, then seized onto a section of the mast that had blown in his direction. The Hind was banking and turning now, assuming a heading due south. That, he realized, was the direction of Andikythera, site of SatCom's new complex. Was it their next target?
That didn't make any sense. Bill's project was commercial; it had no military value. Or at least none he could imagine.
But now he had only one thing on his mind. He secured his life vest tighter and held on to the mast, the salty Aegean in his face. The current was taking him due south, the same direction the chopper had headed.
"Damn it!" Ramirez looked down at the weapons' readouts. "Did you have the Swatter armed? The system should have been off. If it was on, he could have detonated it by impact."
Peretz stared a second longer at the wreckage of the vessel below, then glanced back at his instruments and paled. "I thought it was . . . it must have malfunctioned. No fucking way--"
"Carelessness. Stupid carelessness." Ramirez bent his head and examined the wing, then checked the status readouts on the weapons system. "We lost the starboard rocket pod, too."
Peretz took one look and realized it was true. The rocket pod had been shorn away, leaving the tangled metal of the wing completely bare. But the Hind did not need its wings for stability; they were merely for armaments.