‘Jack?’ he called. ‘Last chance!’
‘Coming!’
While Sky Monster had been squeezing past the nose of the turning Hercules, Jack had been racing up onto the footbridge.
He dashed around a small Italian Tourism Bureau information kiosk on the bridge just as the kiosk was pummelled by gunfire.
Jack then danced up onto the railing at the same moment that the turning Hercules’s left wing came within a few feet of the footbridge . . .
. . . and without missing a step, he leapt off the railing, diving onto the wing of the moving Hercules.
Jack landed with a graceless thump on the wing of the military plane and quickly scrambled to his feet. Then he ran forward, along the roof of the massive plane—just as Sky Monster brought the Piper past the Hercules’s nose—and took three bounding steps over the Hercules’s cockpit and dived full-length off its nose . . .
. . . down onto the roof of the floatplane!
He had run completely over the Hercules.
‘Holy shit . . .’ Sky Monster gasped, looking up.
‘Punch it!’ Jack called, lying flat on the roof of the floatplane.
Sky Monster jammed the thrusters forward.
While Jack had been running over the top of the Hercules, the two Knights of the Golden Eight who had fired at him from the entrance to the museum took off after him.
One leapt into the Hercules via its rear loading ramp while the second Knight was stopped by a Venetian police boat.
‘Tu! Fermare!’ two Italian cops on the boat yelled.
The Knight gunned them down.
Then he stepped into their police boat, tossed their bodies overboard and took off after the Hercules and the Piper.
The Piper shot away down the Grand Canal with the Hercules surging along the surface behind it in hot pursuit.
It was a race now between two wildly different aircraft: the little Piper was nimble, with rapid acceleration but less overall speed; the Hercules was big and bulky, and thus slower to speed up, but once it attained planing speed, it would easily run down the smaller floatplane.
The Piper picked up speed as it careened down the Grand Canal with Jack West Jr on top of its right shoulder, the colourful buildings of Venice rushing by on either side of it.
It was heading for the end of the Grand Canal and the few hundred metres of clear water it needed to take off.
The Hercules roared along behind it—outrageously huge, and gaining.
Behind the Hercules, their lights flashing and sirens wailing, were the Venetian police boats, trying to keep up.
As the Piper skimmed along the surface, the tiny figure of Jack could be seen on top of it—lying on his belly, the wind buffeting him, hanging on for dear life.
Then the floatplane’s pontoons began to skim faster on the surface, lifting ever so slightly.
‘We just hit planing speed!’ Sky Monster called, grinning. ‘We’re gonna make it!’
It was right then that two Italian Army AW129 Mangusta attack helicopters—the Italian equivalent of the Apache—swooped into position in front of the fleeing floatplane, hovering menacingly above the exit to the Grand Canal.
More Knights.
‘Oh, shit . . .’ Jack gasped, seeing them.
The two choppers opened fire with their cannons.
Superhot tracer fire strafed the water all around the speeding Piper. Bullets sliced past Jack’s head, missing him by inches.
Beside him, the Piper’s right wing was shredded. Its tip was blasted apart and suddenly the wing was a metre shorter than it was supposed to be.
The floatplane immediately lost all lift, and with its right wing cactus, it swung wildly to the left.
Sky Monster grappled with the controls.
‘Damn it!’ he yelled. ‘We can’t take off anymore—’
At that moment, an absolutely shocking salvo of tracer fire from one of the attack choppers came roaring in through the little floatplane’s forward windscreen.
The whole windscreen exploded with cracks, instantly annihilated by the sizzling gunfire.
Glass rained into the cockpit.
Alby and Lily ducked as the tracer fire shredded their seat backs.
Sky Monster dropped, too, but not by choice: he was thrown backwards when a high-velocity tracer round slammed into his left shoulder and went right through it. His blood exploded all over the inside of the cockpit.
Now pilotless, the Piper wheeled unchecked to the left.
Alby yanked Sky Monster from his seat, took the controls and gunned the engines.
‘Jack!’ he yelled into his radio. ‘Sky Monster’s hit! What do we do!’
‘Go back!’ Jack’s voice said in his earpiece. ‘Back into the city! Our only chance is to lose them in the canals!’
The scene on the Grand Canal was now one of pure mayhem.
The Piper—trying to outrun the Hercules and the police boats, and with the two Mangusta attack choppers in front of it—turned in a fast banking arc to the left, skimming on its pontoons and kicking up spray.
As it did so, the Hercules turned, too, again trying to block the way with its nose.
But the Piper was too quick and it shot past the Hercules’s bow and zoomed back up the Grand Canal, now heading toward the footbridge in front of the Gallerie dell’Accademia . . . with Jack on its roof, blood all over the insides of its windows, and the two Mangustas in pursuit.
The Hercules finished its turn and powered up angrily.
The big seaplane gained speed quickly and soon it was thundering along behind the wounded Piper, its massive nose edging closer and closer to the little plane’s tail.
The Hercules had a wingspan of about forty metres and the Grand Canal at this point narrowed to a width of about fifty, so the great plane almost filled it entirely as it roared up its length, chasing the fleeing floatplane.
On the roof of the Piper, Jack turned and saw the Hercules, impossibly huge, its engines roaring, right behind them, barely ten feet away.
It was going to run them down.
Jack drew his pistol and fired it back at the cockpit of the Hercules.
His bullets pinged uselessly off the big plane’s metal hide. One round cracked the windshield but that was all.
Alby called, ‘Jack! Hang on! This is gonna be close!’
Jack snapped to look forward in time to see the wooden footbridge in front of the Accademia rushing at him.
Whoosh!
The Piper shot under the soaring wooden bridge, whipping beneath it.
A half-second later, the Hercules smashed right through the footbridge!
The eighty-year-old wooden bridge was blasted into a million splinters as the mighty plane burst through it and kept on coming after the Piper.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Jack’s eyes boggled.
The two amphibious planes banked to the right, following the sweeping curve of the Grand Canal as it headed deeper into Venice, the roars of their engines tearing through the pre-dawn silence.
Then they rounded the long sweeping bend fully and burst out onto a straighter section of the canal and Jack beheld the iconic Rialto Bridge up ahead: the gorgeous 400-year-old single-span white stone bridge with its famous multi-arched portico. There was no way the Hercules could blast through that—it would be way too strong—but at their current speed, they weren’t going to make it there anyway.
‘Alby! We gotta get off this main road! Cut left into that side canal!’
In the blood-smeared cockpit below Jack, Alby drove while Lily yanked open a first-aid kit and got to work on Sky Monster. The big-bearded pilot’s shoulder was a mess of blood and torn fabric and his face was going seriously pale.
Alby looked left and saw several narrow side canals branching off the larger Grand Canal.
On
e seemed a little wider than the others, maybe twenty feet across. But the Piper’s wingspan was—
‘Jack! We’re not gonna fit!’
On the roof of the Piper, Jack was peering fearfully back at the Hercules, rising up behind them, outrageously close.
‘It’s the only way we’ll get clear! Do it!’
‘You asked for it!’
With a grim shake of his head, Alby yanked the little Piper hard to the left, a millisecond before it was going to be hit by the bow of the Hercules, and the Piper skipped across the surface of the Grand Canal and, with its thirty-five-foot wingspan, rocketed into the twenty-foot-wide side canal.
The tips of both wings of the speeding Piper were shorn off in an instant as the little floatplane shot into the side canal at blistering speed.
One second they were there, the next they were not.
Sparks flew, fibreglass shattered and suddenly the plane had two stub-wings instead of real ones.
Jack ducked his head as the Piper zoomed into the deeper darkness of the side canal, still travelling at phenomenal speed, kicking up a churning wake in the narrow confines of the canal.
Behind them, the big Hercules overshot the side canal and rumbled to a halt—
—but the open-topped police boat immediately behind it—the one containing the Knight—didn’t.
It rushed into the tight canal, the Knight at its helm resting his MP-9 on its windshield and blazing away.
Alby steered gamely with the Piper’s rudder, banking and weaving past parked boats and gondolas. This canal had all manner of things jutting out into it: terracotta windowsills with flowers in them, wrought-iron signs and lampposts. Trying to put space between them and their pursuer, he blasted right through one windowsill, smashing it to smithereens.
But it was no use. The police boat was built for exactly this sort of thing: it was both faster and more agile than the half-wrecked Piper, and it stuck to them like glue.
Out on the Grand Canal, entirely unbothered by the lights in the homes and hotels that were coming on all around it, the Hercules rotated once again on the surface of the urban river.
It had gone as far as it could.
But the Mangusta attack choppers hadn’t.
They roared over the Hercules, thundering over the winding maze of side canals into which the Piper had fled, their searchlights blazing.
In the tight confines of the side canal, the police boat zoomed right up behind the Piper’s tailfin.
On the roof of the Piper, with the walls of the canal rushing by on either side of him, Jack took in the situation.
‘Alby, Lily!’ he called into his radio-mike. ‘We need to get out of Venice or disappear into it before the sun fully rises and patch up Sky Monster. Which means getting away from this asshole or at least—’
He cut himself off.
‘At least what, Dad?’ Lily said.
Jack heard the deafening whump-whump-whump of helicopter rotors overhead and glimpsed the shadows of the two Mangusta choppers prowling above the rooftops, peering down into the canals with their searchlights.
It made his decision for him.
‘Or at least taking his boat,’ he said.
And so he did.
Without any further thought, Jack rose into a crouch, took four quick steps down the roof of the Piper and then launched himself off its tail, hurling himself at the police boat rushing down the narrow canal right behind it.
Jack hung in the air for a brief moment before he came smashing down against the windshield of the police boat, leading with his back.
The glass was safety glass, so instead of shattering, it broke out into a spiderweb of cracks, acting like a net, and it caught Jack perfectly.
The Knight driving the police boat couldn’t have been more shocked.
Jack dived over the windshield and crash-tackled him to the floor, parrying his gun away.
The police boat kept on going—its thrusters still pushed forward—shooting down the tight canal, caroming off its concrete walls.
The Knight was a tough bastard and he unleashed a couple of high kicks at Jack, but Jack ducked under them, grabbed him by the lapels and pushed him upward—
—at the exact moment the open-topped boat rushed under a bridge spanning the canal and the Knight struck it and was swept out of sight.
And suddenly the boat was Jack’s.
‘Alby!’ he called into his radio. ‘Slow up! I’ll come alongside. Let’s get everyone onto this boat.’
‘Copy that, Jack.’
Moments later, still hidden from the choppers by the high walls of the canal, Jack pulled his boat alongside the beaten-up Piper.
The two watercraft kept moving, drifting side-by-side up the canal.
Lily kicked open the side door of the floatplane and leapt nimbly across onto the police boat.
‘Pass him over,’ she said to Alby.
Moving awkwardly inside the little plane, Alby pushed the wounded Sky Monster out through its side door and into the waiting arms of Jack and Lily.
Sky Monster groaned.
‘You okay, buddy?’ Jack said as he took his friend’s weight and saw the blood all over his left shoulder.
‘Hate being . . . on the ground . . .’ Sky Monster mumbled.
Jack and Lily gently lowered him into the rear seat of the police boat.
Then Jack turned to Alby, still in the floatplane, and reached out a helping hand. ‘Okay, Alby, come on over—’
A beam of blinding light and a barrage of tracer rounds sliced between them.
It had come from behind them, the bullets carving a withering line up the length of the narrow canal—strafing the water, kicking up spray—a line that sheared right between the Piper and the police boat, almost chopping off Jack’s outstretched hand.
Both Jack and Alby fell back into their respective watercraft. In the police boat, Lily dived on top of Sky Monster, covering him.
One of the enemy choppers had spotted them and had lowered itself into a small intersection a hundred metres behind them—the only space wide enough for it to fit.
It now hovered barely four feet above the water, its rotors roaring, its nose-mounted cannon blazing forth a terrible tongue of fire.
And then its razing gunfire hit the pontoons of the floatplane, blowing them clean off, and with a jerk, the Piper’s cabin dropped into the water, landing with a splash on its belly.
Still inside the Piper, Alby was thrown sideways, and to his horror, the battered floatplane—now both wingless and pontoonless—began sinking into the canal while Jack’s police boat kept drifting onward.
On the police boat, Jack and Lily both raised their heads to see the Piper dead in the water ten metres behind them.
Jack leapt into the driver’s seat. ‘We gotta get back to him—’
More gunfire peppered the water around his boat, strafing its hood.
The second chopper—no doubt called in by the first—had lowered itself into the next major intersection a hundred metres ahead of them.
They were sitting ducks, caught between the two choppers.
‘Jack!’ Alby’s voice exploded in his earpiece. ‘Get out of here! They said they have to take me alive, but they’ll kill you if you stay! Go!’
Jack swapped a look with Lily. He didn’t want to do it, but he knew it was the right choice.
Lily nodded. ‘We have to.’
Jack gunned the engines of the police boat and swung it into a tiny cross-canal, out of the line of fire.
‘Hang in there, Alby,’ he said. ‘We’ll find you.’
He ducked and weaved through several canals before arriving at a covered dock, where with Lily’s help, he carried Sky Monster onto land, through some courtyards and a church, disappearing into the rabbit warren of Venice’s alleyways until they came
to an abandoned, derelict hotel that would suffice as a place to hide.
When they were safely inside the crumbling hotel, Jack fell to the floor, breathless.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Back in the side canal, covered by the two choppers, Alby climbed on top of the now fully sunken, stationary Piper.
There was nowhere he could go: the walls on either side of him were sheer, the next bridge too far away.
A second Venetian police boat approached his immobile plane slowly.
In it were Jaeger Eins and two of his Knights, dressed in their black combat gear. There was fresh blood on their boat’s gunwales.
At the sight of Alby stranded on the remains of the floatplane, Eins smiled.
‘Hello, Albert,’ he said. ‘Have no fear, Captain West and his adopted daughter will be joining you soon. I have seen his weakness and I intend to exploit it. In the meantime, you will come with us. There is someone who would really like to talk with you.’
A short time later, as the first full rays of dawn hit the city of Venice, the Hercules took off from the southern end of the Grand Canal, soaring away into the sky, leaving all manner of death, wreckage and destruction in its wake and carrying Alby Calvin in its belly.
From the rooftop balcony of his abandoned hotel deep inside the dense western sector of the city, Jack watched it go.
Lily stood by his side, gazing anxiously at the plane taking Alby away.
Behind them, Sky Monster lay in a rusty old bed, his eyes closed, his left shoulder bandaged.
Jack stared intently at the departing plane.
‘The Knights of the Golden Eight,’ he said grimly. ‘If we’re going to save Alby, we need to find their base.’
‘How are we going to do that?’ Lily asked.
Jack turned to face her. ‘My mother was right. We’re outmatched information-wise. We need help. Someone who knows the royal world in detail. We need Iolanthe. Hopefully, Mum and Zoe have found her.’
ST MICHAEL’S MOUNT
The Three Secret Cities Page 10