are you crazy?'' The amplified voice roared out of the police helicopter.
``Turn around right now or you'll be in extreme danger!''
``You don't say.'' Scarhand growled.
He pointed at the darkness.
``Go faster!''
``This is your last warning!'' The voice screamed.
``Turn around!''
Nick wanted to say something,
but at that moment a hard hit went through the Cessna as if they had hit a pothole,
and in the same second the first heavy raindrop burst on the windshield.
What followed was the most supernatural thing Andrew had ever experienced.
The storm never started.
From one fraction of a second to the next it was just \textit{there}.
It was as if they had flown over an invisible border between two worlds.
They were just flying through sunshine and nearly still air and in the next moment the weather included wind,
lightning,
and hail with fist-sized raindrops from hell.
The Cessna reared up like an animal that was shot at,
tipped on its side and started corkscrewing.
Scarhand screamed out of fear,
almost letting the knife go,
and his companion actually \textit{dropped} the pistol,
quickly bending over to pick it up.
Under more normal circumstances that would have been the perfect moment for Nick to intervene and stop the wannabe kidnappers,
but instead he was busy trying to get the Cessna back under control.
Andrew was also thrown forward,
and because of all the excitement he had forgotten to buckle in,
he barely had time to throw his hands out in front of him to catch himself before he could dent his head on the metal Instrument Panel.
The result of that haphazard action was a jabbing pain that shot through his wrists and brought tears to his eyes.
The plane swung back and forth so much that it was hard for Andrew to get back up.
Half-stunned and with almost-numb fingers he felt for the safety belt and with some effort he finally got it buckled.
Only then he dared lifting his head to look outside.
He regretted that as soon as he had done it.
All round the Cessna hell was breaking loose.
Andrew took everything back that he had said about the mysterious darkness above the gorge.
It was a storm,
and the worst he had ever seen.
The sky above them was completely black,
but he wasn't even sure it was the sky.
The Cessna jumped around so wildly that he couldn't tell what was up or down,
left or right.
Nick was yelling something Andrew didn't understand.
The guy behind him had picked up his pistol,
waving it around like a madman,
fumbling about with a panicked look on his face.
Every once in a while a blazing streak of lightning tore open the formidable darkness,
allowing Andrew to briefly glimpse the baseball-sized hail and slightly smaller raindrops that were rocketing towards the small machine from all directions.
The cockpit thudded as if invisible giants were beating on it,
and most of the instruments on the dashboard seemed to be either broken or going crazy.
``God dammit,
what's going on?!'' Scarhand bellowed.
``Get this box under control!''
``I'll get it,
don't worry'' answered Nick.
``Keep your nerves under control.''
It took a few more seconds that seemed to Andrew as if they were a string of eternities,
but Nick fought back and won over control of the plane piece by piece.
The Cessna still lurched side to side like a small boat in a hurricane.
The pandemonium continued to make it impossible to communicate other than by yelling,
but at leas Andrew was pretty sure that they weren't flying upside down any more.
Mostly sure.
``What in the devil is going on?'' Screamed Scarhand.
``You didn't say anything about this.
If this is a trick,
you 'll regret it!''
``Its not a trick'' answered Nick.
``The instruments are going completely crazy! I need to go lower so I can orientate myself.''
This time there was no doubt that the fear in his voice was real.
There was sweat on his forehead although the temperatures inside the cockpit were dropping every minute.
He was gripping the control stick as if he were trying to break it.
so Nick lowered the nose of the bucking machine a bit.
Andrew felt them lose height.
He couldn't see it at all.
The darkness that surrounded the machine was still just as opaque as it had been.
The blinding lightning that flashed up irregularly did not assist with Andrews attempts to orientate himself,
but instead seemed to confuse his sense of balance even more than the tumbling of the aircraft already did.
But then,
for only a split second,
he saw something.
An especially large and wide lightning bolt split the heavens into two asymmetrical halves.
In the reflection of the light off the ground,
Andrew realized that the Cessna had lowered threateningly close to the ground.
They were flying maybe eighty to a hundred meters off the ground and that distance was still rapidly decreasing.
Andrew wasn't the only one that started screaming,
but their screams were drowned out by the roar of the storm and the protesting whining of the motor as Nick desperately pulled back hard on the joystick.
Still,
the ground seemed to be coming closer and closer.
Slowly the Cessna started tipping to be parallel with the ground,
and finally started tipping upwards,
climbing away from the certain death of a crash landing.
Andrew had the dreadful feeling that they had gotten so close to the ground during that maneuver that they could have easily touched it with an outstretched hand.
He noticed something else.
Shortly before the blazing lightning threw them back into the thick mass of clouds he thought he recognized why the bizarre formations of rocks that were reaching for the belly of the Cessna seemed to be so symmetrical.
They weren't rocks at all.
They were ruins.
Below them lay the blackened,
burnt out ruins of an enormous city.
The flickering light went out for good and the eerie darkness closed around the Cessna like a gigantic black burial cloth.
Andrew blinked.
When he opened his eyes again,
the darkness below him was just as absolute as the darkness above him.
He must have been imagining things.
A city? This high in the mountains? Impossible.
The Cessna kept shaking more and more,
tipping from one side to the other and back and threatened to tank completely before Nick took back control from the plane.
All of a sudden three rectangular red warning lights lit up near Nick and a green flashing button joined them a split second later.
Nick stretched his hand out to press it,
but pulled it back quickly when the plane bucked against the joystick.
One of the red lights extinguished,
followed by another one.
Andrew didn't know why,
but he seemed to be watching a countdown that would end in something terrible.
It took Nick a bit to get the Cessna back under control.
He was finally able to attempt letting go of the joystick with one hand and stretching out to press the button that was flashing faster now.
A cracking sound rang out and a hand-length orange tongue licked past Nicks shoulder and stamped a smoking hole in the dashboard exactly where the flashing green button used to be.
Nick yelled out as if he were the one that was hit by the bullet,
not the dashboard.
He elbowed the shooter in the face with such force that he dropped his weapon and flew back in his seat.
``You're crazy!'' He yelled.
``I'll kill you for that,
you fucking dog!''
``That isn't necessary any more.'' Replied Nick.
``You just killed us all you blithering idiot.''
He ripped at the joystick so forcefully that Andrew would have impacted the dashboard again had he not been buckled in,
and tore the Cessna in a quickly descending pirouette that cost them most of the height that they had just fought for.
but Andrew didn't have time to analyze it as Nick pulled on the joystick and flew a complete roll,
throwing him into the safety belts and making the head of the kidnapper uncomfortably collide with the canopy of the cockpit.
It was followed by a steep ascent,
and a similarly steep plunge.
Andrew clung to his seat and the two kidnappers behind him who didn't have the chance to buckle themselves in did all they could to brace themselves against the crazy maneuvers Nick was pulling.
They were yelling something that Andrew didn't understand and probably didn't make any sense in the first place.
Nick fought more and more grimly with the joystick,
forcing the Cessna to perform wild maneuvers that pushed the breakable machine to its limits.
He was flying like a fighter pilot desperately trying to avoid enemy fire.
And it ended that way too.
Nick made the plane take a jump to the right and it was pure luck that Andrew was looking over his shoulder at the exact right moment.
It took less than a second.
Something in Andrew didn't believe it at first when he saw it: A salvo of pencil thin,
dazzlingly blue light bolts raced out of the darkness and stamped a perfect line of glowing red holes in the wing before Andrew could even process what was happening.
For a short moment flames shot out of the wing,
extinguishing almost immediately with the airflow,
but Andrew recognized that the wing was perfectly perforated.
Even if the Cessna had flown straight ahead it wouldn't have lasted longer than a few moments.
The cut-throat maneuvers that Nick was putting the plane through made them last until just about\dots
A new flash of lightning ripped open the darkness and showed Andrew a gargantuan brick wall that seemed to climb to the heights of mount Everest as the plane was rushing toward it at a break-neck speed.
The racing carousel ride had ended in the middle of a large,
dirty,
cobblestone court that was surrounded on all sides by many-storied brick buildings.
As far as he could recognize in the flickering glow of the fire they were all ruins,
burnt out hulls of charred brick and warped steel beams.
The empty window holed seemed to stare at him with unseeing eyes.
There was rubble and debris everywhere,
but there were no signs of life to be seen.
Andrew turned around.
The scene on the right was no different than the one on his left.
The plane had left an uneven trail of burning debris,
but somehow the tattered fuselage had somehow not caught fire yet.
Andrew got goosebumps as he realized \textit{how} big the miracle was that they owed their life to: The last impact had torn the gas tank off the airframe which now lay ten to twelve meters away blown open like a metal flower,
spitting fire and white embers in all directions.
In the flickering light Andrew recognized a crooked form that lay motionless on the cobblestone.
Scarhand,
who seemed not to have survived after all.
He heard Nick rummaging around the other side of the wreckage and limped over to him as fast as his bruised knee would allow him.
Just as he rounded the corner,
he saw Nick tuck something under his belt: the chromed pistol that the untalented and unfortunate kidnapper hat let go of.
``Come on'',
Nick called.
``We need to go!''
Andrew assumed that he was still scared that the wreckage could catch fire or explode at any moment,
a fear that was completely based in reality.
The tank lay at what seemed like a safe distance,
but he didn't know enough about aircraft to know for sure that that was the only tank that the Cessna had.
Either way the interior of the plane still had plenty of burnable materials.
Nevertheless he stood where he was and pointed back at Scarhand.
``We need to take care of him.''
Nick did something strange: he put his head back and quickly but thoroughly searched the sky before answering.
The two wannabe kidnappers wouldn't have had a trace of a chance to catch up with them if \textit{he} hadn't given up their head start by driving the Hummer.
It was most definitely his fault.
He spared any corresponding remark.
He heard Nick's answer in his head already: \textit{In the end it was my decision to let you drive.}
the storm had cleared just as quickly as it started.
But the sky was not empty.
Two blinding light points were getting closer with a sickening pace,
and at virtually the same moment Andrew head the muffled sound of a helicopter.
``Well that was fast!'',
he said surprised and very relieved.
He wanted to stand up again,
but Nick held him down again,
this time with slightly less force.
He shook his head.
``What is it?'',
Andrew asked confused.
``Quiet!'',
Nick hissed.
``And don't move!''
Andrew was so perplexed that he didn't move.
But he didn't stay quiet.
``But why?'',
he wondered.
``Isn't that the police? I mean didn't they come to \dots'' \textit{save us?} The last two words didn't leave his mouth when he saw the look on Nick's face.
If he had ever seen fear in his eyes,
it was at this moment.
That up there was not the police or anyone else that had come to \textit{save} them.
With a throbbing heart he looked back at the sky.
The two dots of light rapidly approached and moved independently,
meaning that there were in fact \textit{two} helicopters,
not one machine with two lights.
That was odd.
Almost as odd as that the supposed rescuers were here so quickly.
Even if it seemed like it had just happened,
it had only been about ten minutes since their last contact with the police helicopter,
maybe less.
Actually it was impossible that they would show up so quickly.
``What's going on here?'',
he asked again.
Nick shook his head again.
``Not now.'' There was something similar to panic in his voice.
Andrew saw as he moved his hand along his sweater towards the pistol he had tucked in his belt,
but pulled it back at the last moment.
He looked up again.
The two blinding lights were now close enough that it was impossible to look at them without shielding his eyes from them.
Something wasn't right about the sound of the engines.
He couldn't say exactly what it was,
but it didn't sound like a regular sound a helicopter engine made.
The weirdly dampened flapping increased from one of the two,
and one of the lights turned into the beam of a searchlight that seemed to feel its way around the square,
lingering on the wreckage for a moment and moving on from there.
Nick had also noticed the searchlight and painstakingly righted himself.
His movements seemed weak and especially uncoordinated.
Andrew accepted that he had had less luck than Nick and was wounded pretty badly.
It was a borderline miracle that they were even still alive.
The two light circles ultimately separated.
The searchlight stayed unmoving on Scarhand,
who in the mean time had stood up completely with his left arm in front of his face to shield him from the bright light.
The second light went out suddenly and only a moment later the most special helicopter Andrew had ever seen lowered to the ground.
The machine was gigantic,
streamlined and formed aggressively like a shark.
It was such a deep black that it seemed to suck the light up instead of reflecting anything.
It was also very quiet.
The sound that Andrew had heard earlier was the hiss of the strangely shaped rotor blades cutting through the air.
The turbine itself seemed to be completely silent.
If the helicopter itself was special,
he didn't have any words for the three figures that stepped out of the flying fish of prey moments later.
They were definitely humanoid,
but that was pretty much all he could say about them.
The three men (if they were men) wore black shiny one-piece suits that blended seamlessly into gloves and massive black helmets.
Their faces hid behind the black,
mirrored visors and they carried clunky guns with stumpy barrels in their hands.
``Who is that?'',
Andrew asked.
Nick brought him to silence with an almost frightened expression and Andrew turned back to the courtyard with a pounding heart.
Scarhand still stood in the middle of the searchlight that the second helicopter had pointed at him.
He had turned around halfway to face the landed helicopter.
His left hand was still shielding his eyes while he waved at the men that got out of the helicopter with his right.
