Come on, it’s time we took off.’
‘Hang on.’ Emily resisted the tug on her hand. ‘Can I spit, too? For luck?’
Mike’s face lit up as he grinned. ‘Sure.’
Emily gave it her best shot. Luck was good. And spitting on the helicopter was so bizarre it was funny. She actually felt like laughing aloud and she hadn’t felt like that for days and days. Expecting Mike to approve, Emily was surprised to find him shaking his head.
‘You’ve got to do it three times,’ he told her.
‘But I don’t have that much spit!’
‘Well, actually…’ Mike let go of Emily’s hand, pulled the sleeves of his overalls down over his wrist and wiped the blob of saliva off the helicopter’s paintwork. ‘You don’t have to make it wet.’ His tone was injured. ‘It’s more of a token spit.’ The glance was very stern. ‘Especially when it’s my helicopter you’re spitting on.’
Emily was still grinning as she fastened her seat belt and watched the rotors lifting as their speed increased. She couldn’t remember when she had last felt this alive.
Setting off for a medical evacuation always got the adrenaline going because you never knew quite what you were going to find at the other end. Meeting a personal challenge like facing a fear of helicopters at the same time made this experience well out of any comfort zone.
Emily would never have agreed to this if it wasn’t Mike at the controls. Because it was him, and because she was doing this for the first time in her life and they were doing this with just the two of them, gave this mission an edge that could only boost Emily’s adrenaline rush.
Every cell in her body was pumping. Fear kicked in far more feebly than she would have expected when the skids left the tarmac and the helicopter rose swiftly. They were still gaining height rapidly as Mike turned over the cove to head inland, and Emily welcomed the distraction of seeing the people gathered around the bonfire on the beach. A small person waved.
‘There’s CJ!’ Emily shouted. ‘Look—I can even see that weird-looking puppy beside him.’
‘You don’t need to shout, babe. We’ve got an internal intercom system and the earphones and mikes are inside our helmets.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. You weren’t to know.’ Mike looked down at the beach and then turned his head towards Emily. ‘Who needs a party? This is much more fun, isn’t it?’
And Emily had to nod.
Astonishingly, this suddenly promised to become the most enjoyable experience of her life.
HE WAS nothing short of a genius.
If he’d spent a week planning some way of bringing a smile back to Emily Morgan’s face, Mike couldn’t have done better than scooping her up and flying her off in his helicopter. And he hadn’t had to plan it at all. It had just fallen into his lap.
OK, he’d had to do a bit of fast talking to cut the crew numbers for this rescue mission but he could be very persuasive when he wanted to be. He’d taken the line that he and Emily could manage perfectly well. He had advanced paramedic training to go with his considerable experience as a pilot, so they were a perfect team. Why pull anyone else away from the beach party when they deserved the time out after the wringer they’d all been through in the last few days, thanks to the shortage of medical staff and a surplus of major cases?
Charles had known what Mike was up to, of course. He could see that he wanted some time alone with Emily to try and cheer her up. Maybe he even knew some things that Mike had been confident he’d kept very well hidden. There wasn’t much that went on in or around Crocodile Creek base hospital that Charles didn’t know about.
Not that it mattered. Charles had approved, and convincing Emily had been a cinch given that her fear of getting into the chopper outweighed any other concerns.
She’d done it, though, hadn’t she? With a quick glance to his left, Mike stopped feeling proud of himself and felt proud of Emily instead. You’d never think it to look at her—she wouldn’t look out of place behind an information desk in an academic library or some other such serious place—but she was gutsy all right.
Emily had seen him looking, so Mike did what came automatically and smiled at her.
‘OK, babe?’
She nodded but bent her head again quickly to stare through the small Perspex panel near her feet. ‘It’s really different from being in a plane, isn’t it? You can see so much more.’
‘Bird’s-eye view.’ Mike was relieved that Emily had remembered not to shout this time. She was a quick learner as well as gutsy.
Moonlight bathed the outside world and visibility was great—with a ghostly but rather beautiful bleached effect. They were already past the sugar-cane plantations that surrounded the township of Crocodile Creek and over the foothills of rainforest-clad mountains now. The dense vegetation had been cleared in patches, and banana trees added to the tropical appearance of a landscape that Mike had grown up in and still loved with a passion.
Checking his instruments, he banked to follow the main road that snaked towards the pass leading to the arid cattle country on the other side of the mountains. Emily squeaked softly and Mike could see her fingers sinking into the upholstery of her seat as the aircraft banked.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m not planning any aerobatics.’
‘Aren’t we going over the mountains? Like the plane does?’
‘Can if you want to, but the view’s better this way.’
Grey-blue eyes were looking distinctly anxious again. ‘This thing can go high enough to get over the mountains, can’t it? If the weather gets bad or something?’
‘This is an MBB-Kawasaki BK-117,’ Mike informed her with an air of injured pride. ‘State-of-the-art rescue chopper. We’ve got a ceiling of 10,000 feet, a range of 338 miles with standard tankage, maximum speed of 174 miles per hour and a maximum climb rate of over 1700 feet per minute.’
‘Oh.’ Emily looked as though she was trying to do several mathematical calculations simultaneously. Her face brightened. ‘That’s OK, then, isn’t it?’
‘Yep.’ Mike couldn’t resist teasing her just a little. ‘We’ve got a thirty million candle-power nightsun, too. I can turn it on any time so you don’t need to be scared of the dark.’
Emily snorted indignantly. ‘You’re the one who goes round spitting to ward off the evil eye, mate.’ She watched Mike adjust a control on the panel that sat between them. ‘Just out of idle curiosity, did you go round spitting on your helicopters when you were a member of that crack platoon or squadron or whatever you call them in the Special Air Services?’
‘Sure did.’
‘And
